Yeah, but if you don't have any assets in the EU for them to seize, and if you're not present in the bloc yourself it doesn't matter for shit. They have no jurisdiction or ability to enforce unless you really, really want to operate inside of their market at scale.

NC is a "Free City" in terms of it's status within the structure of NUSA. Essentially, a territory they claim is theirs, but which they don't actually have the means to exercise control over. So it just functions more or less autonomously.

But it essentially functions as a Japanese Treaty Port in terms of military influence and is the point where East Asian and NUSA criminal and corporate organizations use to bring goods cheaply into and out of the NUSA market with both international and domestic corporations using Night City as a corporate tax haven and tariff-free port of entry. Smuggling is king as everyone seeks to skim their share off the goods as they move inland, each government agency or smuggler serving as competing "taxes" for entry into markets.

NUSA has largely reunited in 2070, but NC is still one of the last holdouts, backed as it is with all the might of Arasaka and the threat of igniting a new Corporate War if NUSA were to try to annex it and actually attempt to assert influence over the city.

As someone who tried to use Tidal for nearly a year because it paid better rates, it's literally just 2 things: Artist Discovery and Algorithm Degradation towards a mass consumer mean.

Spotify actually feeds me tons of great indie artists I've never heard before. Tidal was a constant struggle to purge mass produced giant record label pop from constantly infiltrating every single station and it almost never gave me some little artist who maybe has 5k listens total. I get those literally every single day from Spotify though.

Void is gonna do real well this year, I'd imagine.

It's the great divider. The smartest bears get to eat the garbage and the dumber bears get to eat the dumb people who can't figure out how to throw their garbage away and keep it in their tent instead.

It was a CSX train, which is literally their direct competitor in their duopoly so that both of them can cry about how they're not a monopoly because they have a competitor. It's just entirely coincidental that they both behave in exactly the same manner in terms of complete reckless disregard for safety and employee health.

Yeah, because the shitheads lied about the job.

"Oh, yeah, you have to go to remote sites, but the average is only about a 20 minute commute."

And then once they gave me the job, they assigned me nothing but clients that were all 60+ minutes out of town. I interviewed with other companies on the clock and then quit with no notice.

Fucking assholes.

Awwww shit son, a Lemon-Egg! Fucking wild! Top tier shit, A+ lad. Well done.

It's because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.

It doesn't much matter whether it's controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn't even matter that much if they're smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it's pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.

The forum Something Awful has had public ban notices for age, with a page listing banned or suspended users, the post they were banned for and usually a snarky joke from one of the mods. It actually ends up creating a fun atmosphere where people can get essentially "Go touch grass" moments that everyone can giggle about when it's not that bad and it's always hilarious watching some cesspit of a human being get absolutely fucking dumpstered in very public fashion.

That said, I don't think it would work nearly as well without their registration fee creating a barrier to entry.

Bingo.

When you stop treating negative externalities as though they don't exist, you can start to properly account for their cost in economic models. A lot of industries exist that wouldn't if they were to have to actually pay to remediate the problems they cause rather than getting to offload the problem onto the greater community.

It's the digital equivalent of never changing your oil or filters and then wondering why your engine is acting up.