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574 points gausswho | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.257s | source
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pjmlp ◴[] No.44507998[source]
The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of Atlantic.

Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months.

If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one.

Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.

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b00ty4breakfast ◴[] No.44508075[source]
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
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scrubs ◴[] No.44508254[source]
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.

The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.

It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.

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idiotsecant ◴[] No.44508576[source]
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
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DaSHacka ◴[] No.44508667[source]
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
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sneak ◴[] No.44508902[source]
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.

Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.

The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.

Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?

China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)

It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.

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bluGill ◴[] No.44509427[source]
It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
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bitcurious ◴[] No.44509806[source]
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US.

Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.

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1. rdm_blackhole ◴[] No.44513135[source]
> The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.

Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.

Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.

De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.