Hardly. Usually the process goes like this:

African Nation - has natural resource and has no way to get it out of the ground.

Foreign company that does this all the time: Yo, we’ll literally pay you to let us dig up this stuff.

Regime: Yes, I was paid, perfect. Thanks. And we’ll charge you what seems like tons of money also.

10 years later

New Regime: Hm…that’s an awfully nice mine you have there. We’ve increased taxes on it 400 times and you are still not closing. It means there’s too much money to be had! So we will take it and do the mining ourselves! How hard could it be?!

New regime nationalizes mine

3 months later

New Regime: Sadly, we must now close the mine and send everyone with jobs home because my drunk cousin is not a good mine director, and all the things broke and we didn’t know you had to order more spare parts.

New Regime places FOR SALE sign on mine and waits for another foreign company to start the cycle over again.

Also every African despotic regime that has has ever existed.

I reeeeally wish they would just embrace and find open source software as a public good and get it over with. The equally glacial pace of adoption of OSS to avoid vendor lock in with MS is not exactly giving the OSS world the boost it deserves.

Robot is as surprised as I am!

Not at all, this is well established technology already in use all over the place.

When countries use digital IDs, they are able to carve out validating individual aspects of an identity. Just address, just over 18, just class of driver’s license, etc.

So the State has a website/wallet where the user pulls a token from the State, basically a fancy hashed OTP/Login code.

The website, which can’t derive your identity from the code, sends the code to the state API and can’t ask more than “is this hash legit” and the State API doesnt need to say more than “yup.”

Where can things go wrong? The State can ask to know who needs the token. Or even demand to know, and log what sites use it. The state can contract this out to a vendor that logs it all, making data theft far more risky.

It all depends on his the state builds requirements.

Tokenization is the easy solution.

You go onto you state gov website and get a token that just says “this is an adult.” Nothing else. Token lasts 10 minutes.

Cut and paste into the site. They authenticate without saying who theu are, back to the gov site, “yo, this legit?” State says “looks like something we would do.” State keeps no records of WHO validated the token, just that it was a legit token.

Same way that routers connect to VPN services.

Not sure why you’re getting down voted. Porn can absolutely become a behavioral addiction.

I used to work at a place where we had a lobby guard that watched porn on his phone all day (sound off). Not sitting there trying to jerk it, it was a compulsion. He would just be watching it while talking to other people, standing by the door…it was weird. He eventually got fired because he genuinely couldn’t not watch porn.

That being said, I’m a huge privacy advocate, and while there are actually ways to anonymously be on a website and verify age, that’s not how anyone is doing it. Things like signing up for an account on a site and scanning your ID are just abysmally stupid. There’s a zero percent chance that this system as is doesnt lead to data theft and possibly even extortion.

All to try and flood the treasury so he can afford tax cuts he promised to donors.

Turns out running the government is hard and it sucks.

People in general have no idea and just want to get spun up on drama and manufactured outrage.

Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.

A book about this was published last year. “Your Face Belongs to Us” by Kashmir’s Hill

To be fair, everyone has underestimated his incompetence that hoped he would enact their insane dreams. Steve Bannon, Putin, Curtis Yarvin, Kevin Roberts, the Proud Boys and 3Pers, Kanye, etc.

Not at all. All they’ve done is double pinky swear promise about all this investment. I would bet €10 only 2 or 3 things planned already go forward.

The board of every chamber is required to include someone from the embassy…

But I see you need something more…how do we say? Fulfilling. Yes… Something more…yes…

I beseach you to search the interwebs for the Commerce Department Gold Key Service. Wherein a company pays to have government staff from the Commerce Department’s Foreign Commercial Service, to literally shill for anyone that ponies up the cash, and organize a matchmaking service to promote the company in several small meetings.

Not enough for a distinguished gentleperson as yourself? But of course, my friend. But of course. I see you demand more.

I present to you, the most, ah- exquisite match to what you want, the FCS Single Company Promotion. A festive event in which Federal employees host the event of the company’s choosing to “promote awareness” of the company. A conference? Sure. A fun luncheon presentation? Yes, of course. Or, perhaps a delightful cocktail party! Numerous of which I have personally attended.

Seriously though, this happens all the time.

This was already how all this stuff worked. The US government promotes US companies all the time. Always has.

Search for the “American Chamber of Commerce” in any county. Then look through their social media or board.

Not many. The thing about globalization and repealing the 20th century is that its a wobbly 3D Rube Goldberg domino landscape. 1-2 dickheads per continent is all it takes.

Literally a chapter in the Art of War.

Gotcha, sorry I thought you meant in a sort of a more large-scale coordinated way with the authoritarians.

The easiest way for China to take Taiwan back is to wait for something complicated to occupy the military and WH, even only at the very top leadership level. A protracted and undeniable scandal, another major shake-up while the boss is out of town, or the end result of all this internal military use for law enforcement that seems to want to end posse comitatus within I think 80-ish days at this point, are all options. Spin up the machine to catch it’s own tail and the response elsewhere will be too little and too late because of the more hierarchical nature of decison-making now. Steve Bannon’s own “flood the zone with shit” tactic, inspired by Tsun Tzu.

Chip fab won’t matter because nothing else logical has mattered so far. Why jump straight to a trade war with all your largest trading partners without even preparing for it? Foolishness and ego. Same same here as well.

You’re correct, however, keep in mind that authoritarians have fragile egos and are often focused locally, often on how to further subjugate their populations and garner favor. That usually means conflicts like insurgency or cross-border attacks like Russia into Ukraine (x2), Russia into Georgia, US into Mexico/Canada, India and Pakistan fighting over Cashmere, PRC and Taiwan, Serbia and Kosovo, Kenya/Somalia/Somalil and, Uganda and eastern DRC, etc. etc.

Boomer pissing contest fantasies of China and the US duking it out in the Pacific are foolish as neither wants to risk direct conflict with no tangible gains expected. It’s a guarantee of either outright loss or maaaaybe a Pyrrhic victory of you already control your media. No landing party flotilla will land in Los Angeles or Hong Kong. The US only stands to lose.

Not at all.

What we’ll get is not one big World War of Axis vs. Allies, but everyone at war with some kind of small regional pissing contest or insurgency.

Sure, most of the world will be in some form of conflict, but it won’t be a “World War” in the same sense of a 20-on-20 prolonged conflict with well-defined nation-states on each side. Not that this opinion survey can really capture that.

Not surprised at all.