Since classicly left/right (“poor vs wealthy”) and liberal/illiberal (“personal freedom vs external control”) are separate political axes my thoughts are “made by an angry person without much underpinning analysis”.

Hunger/Thirst, Undertreatment, Undereducation.

It’s a step, but trying to limit how money itself is spent will always create loopholes your opponent has better lawyers than you to exploit. Imho the better way to discipline billionaires would be to change tax code such that borrowing money against securities or anything like it (such as stock) is counted as realizing their value, which would trigger capital gains tax obligations.

It’d have somewhat similar effects to a wealth tax with way less administrative load for the state. The only exception I would grant is when you’re buying a single-person/single-family residential property you’re going to be living in yourself.

I’m not talking about British exceptionalism in any way. Clearly lots of people in this thread don’t like the UK. Fine. That doesn’t mean you should twist my words though.

Your words are not being twisted as I’ll lay out below.

Multiple EU countries haven’t adopted the euro and don’t show signs of adopting it. So clearly the EU already practises “flexibility” on the euro, to some degree.

These countries enjoy the things the UK decided to reject when leaving: Special privileges for joining early enough.

New countries joining do not receive any such privileges anymore and neither should the UK. That is being treated fairly. Any position that wants the UK to be treated better than other new countries wanting to join is what I called British Exceptionalism.

If EU citizens decide they don’t want the UK in the EU, okay. I would like good UK-EU relations, but I can’t control what EU citizens think of the UK.

I’m fine with them joining on the same terms as every other new country. If they don’t want to join, there are plenty of ways to cooperate without that. Finally: I generally don’t tend to think of the UK at all (neither negatively or positively), unless it comes up in political topics.

But if the EU just wants to punish the UK for Brexit then that is going to go down badly with many Brits, so closer relations will become less likely.

Being treated like every other new country wanting to join isn’t a punishment. The “British exceptionalism” mentality imho causing these thoughts is one root of the problem.

A punishment would be if the EU were to demand reparations for the economic damages the UK inflicted on it. Which, you’ll note, nobody is asking for.

Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.

People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.

The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.

Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.

Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.

Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.

True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.

My two cents:

Creating a monetary union without a fiscal union was a grievous macroeconomic mistake. For example, it allowed countries like mine (Germany) to abuse the shared currency to artifically lower the cost of exported goods, with the downstream effect of allowing it to “move” parts of its state debt to others, like e.g. France.

There really are only two ways towards eventual stability: Create a fiscal union (which for all intents and purposes means turning the EU from a confederation into a sovereign state), or breaking up the monetary union.

The latter, however, would destroy large parts of the export-dependent German economy almost overnight. It would almost certainly lead to economic suffering not seen since the Great Depression in the short-term. To steelman the argument for a moment, it could theoretically be a (state-)controlled burn to purge all those ailing German big corporations almost exclusively dependent on fossil fuels that have been refusing to innovate for more than 30 years now and be the catalyst for a rapid green transition. But there’s 0% chance of any far-right party desiring this, let alone being able to pull it of.

So that means either we create a fiscal union, or we’re screwed with a monetary system that will continue to amplify existing problems, instead of being a tool capable of addressing them equitably.

The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It’s strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country’s workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.

Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

The Budapest Memoranda do not contain “If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you”, which would be the requirement for the “the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes” claim.

I’m not a fan of the USA’s foreign policy, but there’s no need to claim they promised something they did not.

So the US agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia of they gave up their nukes

No, the USA never agreed to protect Ukraine - it was an atrocious deal for the latter.

This not being in a nuclear umbrella is the reason why Russia was willing to risk invading them.

I don’t get why people are saying there should be a punishment.

Being treated exactly like every other country outside the EU is not a punishment. A punishment would be demanding reparations for the damages the UK inflicted with Brexit, which you’ll note neither me nor anybody else here I could see asked for.

[…] Why not just let them leave and then realise it’s wrong when it happens and come back?

This is what that looks like: Accept the same terms as anybody else or don’t join. There are plenty of ways to have constructive cooperations without the UK joining the EU.

Like if a family member that I know and love hurts me and leaves, I’d eventually welcome them back and let bygones be bygones, because we are a team. But if it’s some coworker I don’t care about, I’d want to be made right for the troubles.

“We” are not a family. The EU is a confederation. If we were a family, I would require both contrition and some form of reparations, because breaking such a much closer bond has more severe consequences.

It’s good to let the leavers feel a taste of how bad it is to do it, but joining should always be a good thing and not a punishment.

If the UK thinks joining on the same terms as anybody else is a punishment they are free to not join. We have way too many grandfathered-in friction-causing privileges already.

I’m all for constructive cooperation moving forward, as long as the UK never gets its special privileges back.

We don’t.

Here in Germany one of the few good things that came out of our previous federal government was the SBGG, which - among other things - allows you to delete the entry. And before anyone points it out: I’m aware it isn’t perfect.

In the USA (which was the focus of OP) I would argue there is virtually no left in the first place. Outliers excluded even their left-most people are still centrists, at best. Note that nowhere I said people should stop voting, it’s kind of crazy how that’s always a knee-jerk assumption. Obviously you still ought to choose the lesser evil - but that must come with doing the other parts. Otherwise, again, you’re just choosing evil.

That being said: If you live in the USA and you want that to happen, you need to step up. Not say “nobody else is doing it”. You need to do it. If you already are: Congrats! Next you need to accept that you can do everything right and still lose. That’s just life.

False dichotomy. There are many things to do between “do nothing but vote for evil” and “revolution”.

I don’t want to write the whole thing again, so I’ll just leave this here.

Prejudice is much too generic imho.

“Races” in racism are (socially constructed, as you said) classes assigned from conception/birth, which racists believe to have class-specific inherited (often behavioural) traits.

The only functional difference between (classical) racism and the (star) racism of astrology is that one claims inheritance via genetics, the other inheritance via “vibes” from star formations.

Star racism is still racism. I don’t make fun of it, I simply reject it as esoteric bigotry.