And just to add, the US end goal after WWII was to normalize democracy across the globe. Hoping that as more countries became democratic, more countries and populations would demand the same. We saw this a bit in the 90's after the fall of the Soviet Union.

I know this isn't a quantitative analysis, but if it walks like a duck....

History shows this is not the case.

I'm happy for you to live in a place where the local economy is so vibrant. This is what capitalism should have been. Instead we got WallMart.

Government should represents and advocate for the best interests of the entire population. It should legislate for both people and companies to behave fairly towards each other.

Consider the gym membership. You join and sign a one year contract. The terms are that you can cancel after that period, but if the gym hides or dark-patterns the cancel procedure, are they really offering you the contractually agreed upon ability to cancel? They are not.

We all know what fair is. Just because companies (and sometimes individual people) have outsized power against their customers, it does not give them the moral right to abuse that power.

So, I believe in this case Mamdani is engaging in both good and well-functioning governance. And that to me is morally legitimate.

While this may be a trivial issue, being able to cancel a gym or newspaper subscription, it sends a signal. Companies need to view customers as partners in a business transaction and not objects to be exploited.

The only thing I did know about it was that it was named after the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space". Kinda cool reference.

So when people dunk on the GC, I always just tell myself how lucky I was that my experience was so wonderful.

Not saying that there's not grift in the nonprofit world, but my experience with a lot of people who work in this space is that they're good stewards of the funds and very dedicated to trying to help the world be a better place.

The user interface sucks. Sometimes I go to the actual websites to find articles and then search for them on Apple News. But for $13 USD a month, its a huge bargain and worth the crappy interface.

Another thing that kinda helped me was that Apple News doesn't give you access to the comments sections in these publications. Reading comments in the WSJ was just a huge rage-bait time suck and my life is probably better off not seeing that stuff.