Checks and balances mean nothing when the same party controls house, senate, president, and supreme court.

And the military. Who the majority of soldiers supports matters a lot since they have the final say when leaders cannot agree. Trump does a lot to gain favor with the military, democrats doesn't do much for them.

People like to do this because it's simple, but it's so unrealistic that it's basically a fairy story in terms of explanatory power.

You have to take account of warring internal factions.

Well, that's the brexit outcome.

The IRA situation was really an unresolved conflict from much longer ago, either Irish independence or the Cromwell era.

The US has a problem with right-wing political violence; it's a long way off having a Baader-Meinhof.

The Troubles had a lower per capita body count than Detroit during the 80s. Part of their doctrine was "bomb with warning", usually to maximize property damage without random civilian casualties.

(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)

That creates a far worse problem down the line because they will just do it again, more publicly.

Really the rot set in with the pardons of Nixon and Oliver North.

Can you justify that assertion? How would they do it again, more publicly?

It's not like a blackmail ring is that easy to set up, it seems to have taken a lot of heavy lifting to get this one going.

When people see what others have gotten away with, they become emboldened themselves.

The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.

> a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan

And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.

I mention this because:

1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.

2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)

3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.

It’s done some pretty decent ones as well. Western Europe including West Germany, Japan, arguably South Korea although they went through a period of dictatorship, but all are staunch US allies. There have been failures too for sure. Over all of I was going to be invaded by somebody, with America at least there’s a chance it might be a least worst option.

The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...

> True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years

You'd think that, but (I am shopping at the moment) it is routine to see last year's EVs on Autotrader, at 30-50% off list price. That does make me a little suspicious (is this being got rid of because it's a lemon?), but they're there.

I think we can narrow the statement to "if you are buying a new or nearly-new car, or leasing, and you can charge at home or work, you should seriously consider an EV". Fleet and business use should definitely be thinking very hard about it.

> Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance.

The naive model of capitalism says that the benefit of market competition is that it's possible for failing companies to get out-competed by non-failing ones. In practice, there's enough of a combination of "natural monopoly", lock-in effects, and anti-competitive practices that the software landscape is covered in companies that are too big to avoid, let alone too big to fail.

That's what I've been trying to impart on folks for a decade, now. The lack of regulations has let apex predators capture the environment, and short of an environmental collapse (as in, the sudden and permanent destruction of compute in general that makes their business unrecoverable), the only solution is hunting the hunters - i.e., government regulations, monopoly breakups, market penalties, etc.

There is no feasible way for someone to out-compete Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Oracle. None. They have to fail in some capacity to a significant, global-economy-harming degree to even provide an opening to competition in the marketplace. Even if AI turned out to be a huge nothingburger tomorrow, they'd still be unassailable.

That is the problem.