There is no such thing as an unalienable right or as a human right.
Rights are simply the expression of the interests of certain classes at a certain point in time.
That said, I struggle to find "free speech" a compelling inalienable right when it's what has directly led to the disaster befalling the Americas in this very moment. Especially since the American conception of "free speech" isn't just to be able to express oneself, but to actually have one's words be accepted no matter what.
Okay, I think we have a fundamental disagreement in our first principles that won't be reconciled. I hope people who believe as you do live abroad and do not bring those views to America where y'all could vote. Nothing personal but that's not a reconcilable difference.
I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes.
In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won.
EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.
Yes, of course it is. How many search competitors do you see out there? If you ignore resellers like ddg, these is bing, kangi, and country specific ones like Baidu. Email providers are a dime a dozen - Fastmail, Outlook, Protron, .. Google it, it's a long list. Hell. I run my own. I could not even contemplate building a web indexing engine.
Not easy in any absolute sense, but very much easier in a relative sense. You're right that Google still have indirect levers to pull, to mess with independent email providers, but the distance is more and the scale is less. In comparison, Google is literally an absolute gatekeeper on Android (insofar as Google Play is the only app store that the mass market cares about, the mass market would never accept an AOSP repackage without Google Play Services, etc.), and Chrome has become the reference implementation for web standards (insofar as some increasingly large proportion of developers develop against and only ever test in Chrome).
It's really not that hard to achieve a casualty ratio of 1.2:1 if you consider groups like <1-year-old babies and patients on life support as 'active combatants'.
The "sane center" is a dying fantasy only kept on life support by the DNC to justify the same old mummies holding on to their last vestiges of power as everything burns down around them.
There is no compromise that can be made here. The Democrats spent this past election cycle trying to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters by shitting all over their actual base and presenting policies that appealed to about exactly zero people.
Take immigration, for example. There is no way in hell the Democrats could have ever beaten the Regime on this issue. So what did they do? They still tried to compete by hardening their views to appeal to 'undecided' 'independent' voters who then all promptly headed to cast off their votes for the Messiah. All they managed to achieve was to piss off their base and anybody who'd considered voting for them.
What 'moderate' (which is really just an euphemism for cowardly) Democrats don't understand is that you are in the opening stages of a war, and the last thing you ever want to do is purposefully disarm yourself because of 'decorum' and 'acceptability' and other such nonsense.
You can never make compromises with those who want you dead no matter what. Hopefully the Democrats learn that before everyone in the world has to pay the price.
The first rule is still to stop digging. Of course you can't spend four years pushing an extremely unpopular position on an issue and expect it to not matter the next day.
It's always the same thing with you types. Grasping at words like some kind of hyper-logical machine trying to find some magical logical fallacy that will somehow invalidate the speaker's entire argument.
Let's set facts here: you are arguing for a position held by the dictator in charge of the USA today, and it is plenty transparent that you voted for him and you love everything he's doing. Everything else is just misdirection so you can try and confuse any bystanders, abusing the very same 'niceness' and 'non-political' messaging you accuse others of breaking all the time.
Let's not mince words here anymore. Everyone can see through you. If you're doing it deliberately, congratulations.
Frankly, I just don't see how any sort of optimism can survive the moment you step out of the house.
It goes beyond the internet. The real world is an excruciating parade of torture, and no amount of self-platitudes or of positive thoughts will change the reality of the situation.
Sure, you can try and not have anxiety. Live in the moment. But someone is eventually going to take advantage of that and you'll be worse off. That can only happen so many times before you start reevaluating your thoughts, intentions aside.
Personally, the only times I've ever felt good about the world and how everything was going to be okay have been when I'm using opioids, hidden away in a corner of my room.
Just yesterday I went to the shop. A man was carrying an animal to the vet. He said g'day on his way past. Then I had a nice chat with the lady at the post office about her kid's birthday this weekend. I'd overheard her telling the previous customer about it, so I continued the conversation despite being a stranger to her.
Then I tried to buy a slab of beer at a place but it was too expensive. Had a nice chat to the lady there though.
That was about all. A quiet day. But really lovely. Nobody took advantage. Nothing bad happened. No woes or tribulations. Just a nice day with reasonable weather.
> A man was carrying an animal to the vet. He said g'day on his way past. Then I had a nice chat with the lady at the post office about her kid's birthday this weekend.
And these shallow almost-no-effort-required conversations are what convince you that everything is good? For some, people making these polite conversations to hide the awfulness of life itself is maddening.
Not that such interaction is bad, but try to build on them to create any sort of meaningful relationship and see what happens.
> Nobody took advantage. Nothing bad happened. No woes or tribulations.
For you. I bet you many people were taken advantage of, killed, died from lack of food, were verbally abused, neglected emotionally, etc... that day
Today is rainy and windy. I look forward to going outside with the missus for a moment to plant a few trees. That won't change the fact that my knees are hurting, that the economy sucks, or that our eastern neighbor is waging a genocidal war upon another neighboring country. I'll get a bit of excersise though, and get to spend time with my beloved wife. And to plant trees, which brings us closer to realising our dream about having a backyard forest AND being good for the environment.
Neither will offset or do anything about the global inflation, or the famine in Sudan. Sitting inside and worrying about those things won't change it either.
In the end, it's a matter of convincing yourself to do something that goes against your instinctive responses, and then learn from that experience and hopefully re-train said instinctive responses. This is neither easy nor quick, and there will be times when you will feel like an idiot for trying to convince yourself to see something in a positive light. But once you manage, even for a few short moments, it will make you feel better. Losing hope won't.
The old-guard rich people don't, that much is true. But the middle classes sure as hell are.
There's the fact that Chinese companies are basically hoovering up all the talent. In Latin America, Huawei alone eats up entire graduating classes of engineers. Pretty much every 'industry' event in any sector is nearly 100% Chinese. University staff are increasingly forming themselves via Chinese companies, and are thus transmitting that to their students. Chinese scholarships are popping up like mushrooms. Again, Huawei alone has provided more of them in the past year than the US Embassy has done in the past three decades.
People still dream about going to the US, sure. But MAGA is doing their damned best to whittle that lead away.
It is kind of extreme. I personally daily drove the OG Pinephone for about a year-and-a-half, back in 2020. I bought in during the postmarketOS edition.
I'm still dealing with the fallout from the choices I made in order to conform with that phone. And at the end of the day... I got nothing out of it. Nothing but issues, problems and inconveniences.
The modem eventually stopped working for some reason, and I moved to an iPhone 7 that had been abandoned for quite some time.
It felt like I had let out a breath I had been holding in for years.
It mostly boils down to the fact that I can't really face the shame of admitting that pretty much everything I did was a waste of time and effort and returning to using proprietary, hated private solutions.
Read: messaging apps, banking, apps for work, basically everything.
South America is also having its Trump moment currently, even if it's not as extreme.
But with Milei in Argentina, Noboa in Ecuador, Bolsonaro in Brasil and the upheaval in Chile and Colombia, there's plenty of far-right stupidity to go around and keep supporting Trump even if he's not playing nice.
And there's also the elephant in the room that's Venezuela. You see it with Venezuelans all the time. Even though they're being targeted by the Trump administration, they all still love him as if he were some sort of messiah just because he's opposed to Maduro.
Rights are simply the expression of the interests of certain classes at a certain point in time.
That said, I struggle to find "free speech" a compelling inalienable right when it's what has directly led to the disaster befalling the Americas in this very moment. Especially since the American conception of "free speech" isn't just to be able to express oneself, but to actually have one's words be accepted no matter what.