avidamoeba

That's what I meant - slower delivery over longer period. It's why I said we didn't give more from the get go. Which is likely resulting in more total weapons expended, along with the people firing them.

Oh and this is not just a European phenomenon which is why I'm not singling out the EU.

Yes. The way things ate going, at some point it may become less harmful and easier to deal with unwanted Chinese tech than American. Pay much lower profit margins as a bonus.

If we gave them more than a knife from the get go, they may have done significantly better. But then the war would have stopped quickly and a lot less shells would have been made and sold overall.

Europe probably has more raw capacity for power in terms of labour and technology but it's much less capable of marshalling it towards a goal. The fact that you have to go through the market economy makes all the resources needed to exercise power more expensive. Russian shells cost 4x less than Europe's. More centrally managed economies tend to outcompete at this. Having to go through the 27 countries democracies to direct it is another challenge. All Russia has to do is get several Orbans in domestic governments to keep the power level low. In effect Europe is less strong than Russia even though it could be much stronger. And this doesn't stop with milirary power. Even simple stuff like tackling internal security from sabotage, economic security etc.

There's also other structural blockers to projecting power, like the external energy dependence. Europe was critically dependdnt on Russian fossil fuels. Now a significant portion has been shifted to the US. As a result, uncle Donnie has a significant say in EU's ability to exercise power over entities he likes.

This is why Kallas'es statements look more like stern finger wagging than anything real to anyone aware of these issues. Or Germany's stern warnings to the Russian ambassador. Kaja gives good strong vibes to the EU citizenry but it's not changing the material reality. Eventually it would stop working. My guess is that's gonna happen quickly once uncle Donnie decides to go through with taking Russia's reserve money under her nose and giving it to his corporations to invest in Russia, like they're planning to.

It must mean that they don't want to have potentially Western oriented republics on their land border.

I think a more material iterpretation is they can't afford the loss of resource supply Russia provides them in the face of military threat from the US. Western oriented republics is an unlikely scenario to follow a power vaccuum left by a Russian power withrawal. Instead it's more likely that local oligarchies take power. Conflicts could break out too. All that is a more challenging environment for keeping the resources flowing into China, especially during an armed confrontation that's cut off supplies by sea.

At some point we'd have to start importing TVs from the other side of the Great Chinese Firewall to avoid unwanted US tech. It's getting ridiculous.

Oh that looks like a nice resource.

I mean I wouldn't say no if it comes down to that and I'd probably sign up to work for the technical effort.

Ban American corporate social media altogether? 🍁 Fedecan 🍁 take over with Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Friendica?

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Nevermind, we'll get invaded for that.

Yes and my point is that even if the corpo pays, which it absolutely should, that's not the end of the economic effect when that resource is used to the limit at the moment. We will end up paying too.

The demand for construction workers? If so, it could, if there's enough unemployment. Otherwise workers from some other industry would have to shift to construction. Creating a shortage in that industry. Switching industries is a more difficult process than getting an unemployed worker to work in construction though. But if there's already a labour shortage in the construction industry, then that answers the question. There isn't enough unemployment or shifting from other industries to fill the demand. And there seems to be one.

If there's underemployment in construction or higher unemployment, then yeah, the construction labour market would likely expand without much effect in housing and infrastructure.

Age-restricting corporate social media isn't "kicking teens offline." That's a funny straw man.

We need age restriction and regulations on moderation and algorithms. The latter alone won't solve the problems social media poses for developing brains. Age restrictions aren't bulletproof and that's alright. It's much easier to stop my child from smoking at the age of 10 when there's a smoming ban in place than when there isn't. I want it to be easier to raise them without developing prepubescent brain rot than not. And I think my neighbours would appreciate bringing up another Canadian that has their marbles intact.

E: Plenty parents outside of the terminally-online circles don't even realize they should restrict social media use at an early age.

E2: Tha fact that the Australian ban doesn't deal with the ID problem is a problem that I definitely would not want us to emulate. A problem in that it does not forbid ID collection by private corporations and it does not provide a privacy-preserving public service for proving age. Besides, Meta already knows the age of most of its users. A reasonable compliance criteria could be established that isn't 100% that would also be good enough, subject to regulatory audits.