Did you need to come to that conclusion?

Marketing has always been a significant part of new technology adoption. Whether it's for cloud adoption, for new programming languages, for new software development techniques, etc...

It is not that Japan has fallen to their level, it’s that they have experienced an economic boom in the last decades, and are not that far behind western Europe now.

Because it always is that.

People advocating for boring languages always advocate for their boring language. For instance, if you tell a gopher that you agree with the point, and therefore the project is going to use java, they won’t be happy about it.

Customers don't really have a choice either way. Good luck finding quality clothing, services with decent customer support, etc.

Supply chains supporting quality work are destroyed when an industry gets commoditized, and whenever a company doing quality stuff emerges, it eventually gets bought out and the product gets watered down in order to milk its reputation with inferior product.

That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1].

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU

There is no such thing as a monopoly of violence. Weber's work, which you reference, talks about states claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence.

However, legitimacy and law are two different things: while every state claims they are the only ones allowed to use violence legitimately, not every state codifies their functioning in laws ; and fewer structure themselves in such a way that these laws are sovereign.

My point is that merely codifying the state's actions in laws isn't enough to get functioning rule of law. You also need functioning government oversight (and a few other things, but that's not the current topic). When government's action is not overseen, respect of the law happens at the whim of government agents.

Any government body with no oversight program indicates that rule of law is optional.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T

...the value of having others buy the idea of space computing. I don't think he himself believes in what he says.

Everyone's threat model is different, but some are better than others, and maybe we shouldn't equate taking time to explain why with throwing stones.

I'm split on the datacenter-in-space stuff. I don't know whether I should disbelieve it because there is, obviously, no good way to evacuate heat in space, or because Musk talked about it, and he has an uncanny track record of not upholding his promises.

While we're at it, the "exponentials are actually sigmoïds" meme is not necessarily true. While exponentials are never exponentials, sigmoids are not guaranteed. Overshoot-and-collapse examples also happen in tech, e.g. the dotcom bubble, or the successive AI winters.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inaccessible_Island

Yes, people know we live in a globalized world, and yes, people know the US has ways to pressure Europe. The point of Europe's moves to host in Europe isn't to get immune from foreign influence ; it is to make interference a bit more costly and a bit less effective, in a way that doesn't cripple our society.

Why use any programming language, if we’re going to be maximalists?