flanflan

Probably, and the EU was talking a big game about that a few years ago. But between Nordstream 2 and the Ukraine war the EU seems to have shown how willing it actually is to decouple...

> What is the US going to offer in return.

Nothing, it's a hostage situation.

Again this is 5% _of deaths_ not 5% of the population. So it's roughly in line with the number of people who die from random accidents in a given year.

How does "valuing human life" help people who would be deaths of despair under a program like this? That just sounds like idealism.

oh my god

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

i dont think people revolt because they feel bad when they compare themselves to the 1%. People revolt because they have nothing to lose. Their material conditions are the most important thing in this equation. I'm sure that a populace can tolerate inequality to a point (look at the inequality in the US and Europe, for example) but once a large enough slice of the population has nothing to lose then it's choppy boy time.

is this a serious comment? Rupert murdoch is a global media baron, he literally owns news outlets that encourage people to vote in one way or another. Do you think those news outlets are free of his ideology? do you think the washington post is free of Bezos' ideology?

Even billionaires and millionaires who dont own media companies have outsized influence. They can fund politicians they prefer to an extent that a rival might not be able to match. They can pay for lobbyists. There are a myriad of ways that dollars turn into votes without a mustachioed man walking around with a bag of money being involved. Mass movements aside the working class isnt out there propping up politicians.

I'm not going to keep going back and forth with you but since you insist on me addressing the subs thing it's worth pointing out that the ships mentioned in the article were just present in the days ahead of the leaks and there is no concrete evidence they were the attackers.

> The PR disaster that would ensue if the US were caught doing this

Why would the US care about a PR disaster? It's not like Europe has any choice in the matter at this point.

> Whereas: we have Vladmir Putin who is looking at would be assassins who have a nice, ready-made source of cash if they take him out simply by turning the pipeline back on. And Putin will suffer neither PR nor diplomatic repercussions for blowing up the pipeline.

What?

If the pipeline was shut off it could presumably be turned back on. If the pipeline was blown up that changes things. At a time when much of the world is looking toward China and Russia instead of the US, Europe has been forced to be more dependent on the US.

> But the lawsuit isn't arguing that "companies need to consider the downstream impacts of the things they do."

It seems like it is though? From the text of the article:

> These activities pose risks to political stability, public health, and rule of law, threatening the intrinsic value of the global economy and thus the value of diversified portfolios.

The argument they seem to be going after is that we live in a highly connected society and powerful companies with outsized influence can disrupt the global economy which therefore hurts their investments. Whether or not Meta has _actually_ done that is another question, but I think that this line of thinking is interesting.

> now that there actually is a free market

???

I'm just a two-bit software engineer and not a lawyer but I'll go against the general flow of the rest of the posts here and say "this is interesting." Whether or not it will work is another question, but it seems like they are trying to establish some precedent that companies need to consider the downstream impacts of the things they do.

I see posters here brushing off talk about mental health and political impacts from decisions corporate directors make. Well if there is a measurable harm that can be traced back to a given company why shouldn't they be sued?

It's a meme, but we live in a society. Companies don't exist in isolation, neither do profits.