(The USA, I am fine with the continent of America).

And it's for a reason: I am from one of those countries where US-american meddling buttressed a dictatorship that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Maybe I picked like 4 meaningless nits as in: US politicians respect so much democracy that they constantly reweight "one person, one vote" to suit the interest of the incumbent, they do not have their outrageously expensive campaigns financed (legally) by private interest groups, the popular vote is represented, and elections are uncontested (unless the wrong candidate wins, where the Supreme Court promptly fixes the issue), and it has room for more than two (quite similar I may say) viewpoints in representation.

Maybe.

But please don't call “Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.” an argument.

Where were you when ... everything happened? Keywords: Snowden, five eyes, FISA, PRISM, ...

Laws in the US are irrelevant. And Google has much more sensitive data to cross with any inputs you give them than Chinese companies. Also the extraterritorial executions, coups, etc. are the US specialty. So yes, you're wrong, and it comes across as xenophobic (fear of the strange or foreign).

There is an implicit social contract, and for many it might work out well:

We use your data to improve the model. You get to use the improved model for affordable prices and (the important part): you get _the model_.

Where do we start...

It plays this way: you're behind, you ignore IP rules. You're ahead: you create them to defend your newly-gained status.

Also please no moralizing here on IP when the entire OpenAI/Anthropic playbook has been "massive straight up IP theft". The irony.

Also, we could talk about current colonialism: arms trade, mining, mercenary armies.

Sure enough, if you close your eyes hard enough you can pretend your wealth is well earned and unrelated the ills of the world.

It's rarely the case.

    "markdown_preview_font_family": "Fira Sans Condensed",
    "markdown_preview_theme": "Ayu Dark",

edit: clarity

Celebrating batch-mode typesetting in 2026 feels like some weird cyberpunk fixation.

Programmable like Emacs (but via Scheme), interfaced with major Computer Algebra Systems, tree-structured documents that are live-queryable and modifiable, and typesetting that rivals TeX without using TeX - TeXmacs provides all that, and much more (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html)

Rename to Greedware.

I don't think it can get much more clear that the US lost this war, along with dignity, decorum and the respect of the world.

Do you not see that the next (or previous) logical step would be a "commercial ban" of frontier models, all "distilled" from an enormous amount of copyrighted material?

Proof: things mostly work now without all the surveillance state shenanigans.

More proof: humans have lived full and fulfilling lives without "proving identity or age or citizenship to someone hundreds of kilometers away"

I am wondering what you mean. Top-tier universities full of foreign nationals doing excellent research and funded by exorbitant fees? Sure.

But what about pre-college education?

Reading this thread, with people variously claiming things about Israel as if the country had sprung up from nothing with divine rights on the 7th october, or about Iran, as if the regime had suddenly appeared in 1979, without any US involvement in its suffering before (1953) or after (1984), makes me willing to question that education in the US is promoting critical thinking. Maybe the time spent singing the anthem would be better used actually reading history?

Essentially, a MESA movement, “Make the Earth Shit Again”.

The obvious implication is that the rest of the world is at war with the US (by various means), and should act accordingly, starting with a wide-ranging consumer boycott of all US products.