Iirc the USA did investigate making them during the cold war but concluded that the (very real) benefits - such as the ability to recall a missile after launching - weren’t worth cooking US citizens and allies with radiation from an unshielded nuclear reactor flying at mach 3 just above the surface; they planned to fly as low as 150m!

Their initial plans basically were to build a nuclear-ramjet “missile” that could fly for several days straight carrying dozens of nuclear warheads, autonomously dropping them on “enemies”. The big problem was that it’d have to fly over the USA and/or western Europe in order to reach the USSR.

Read up on Project Pluto if you wanna know more!

Actually I’m not from the Americas (though one of my ancestors did decide to leave Florida in the 1830s or 40s cos he had very dark coloured skin).

And I disagree that there’s a need to “pick a side” - both “sides” will stomp on smaller countries no matter what because that’s what authoritarian imperialistic powers do.

Wasn’t Google Photos super racist a few years back?

Treating minorities better than the USA isn’t exactly a high bar.

My country also treats minorities better than the USA, it’s easy to get into uni, celebrates diversity, has an alright social welfare system and socialised healthcare, does the occasional infrastructure project etc.

Thanks for teaching me that I’m actually living in a socialist paradise rather than a poor, neoliberal capitalist, physically isolated island where private corporations are free to wreck the environment for profit!

I’ve legitimately got no idea how they can fix their countries (or if they can even be fixed) as I’m more focused on my own country. I do not want my country to copy either the USA or China, and I resent the close relationship my government maintains with both of those oppressive states.

The USA pressured our government into performing illegal searches/arrests to favour their corporations, and the CCP has repeatedly been caught infiltrating our parliament. Those big authoritarian countries just bully smaller states to get what they want, and we need to stop pretending that it’s morally justified and normal. It’s not okay.

Yeah and? I don’t want to live in an oppressive shithole, doesn’t matter to me if they became oppressive because they were copying China, the USA, Nigeria, the UK or whatever - they’d still be oppressive!

I honestly didn’t think that saying “I don’t like authoritarian capitalism” would be such a controversial statement…

Kodi with a debrid service works great for me, the one I use has had maybe 2-3 days worth of downtime in the 3 and a half years that I’ve been using it!

Yes, exactly. Most people don’t want their governments to copy imperialistic authoritarian capitalist shitholes like China, the USA, or Russia.

The American government being awful doesn’t mean that everybody else should copy them and be as awful as they can.

Can you prove that China isn’t an oppressive authoritarian capitalist state?

A Chinese corporation openly tested those spy balloons over my country a decade ago (allegedly just for monitoring livestock), why is it so unbelievable that they’d use a more polished version on their biggest geopolitical rival?

Eh the authoritarian capitalists who love the CCP generally seem to embrace the fact that China is authoritarian - they see it as a good thing!

Kinda hard to have a stable food system when an imperial power is stealing most of your food in a rather genocidal fashion!

Pretty sure that’s actually just a reference to the film Soylent Green…

Got a bunch of Athom bulbs (and smart plugs) along with a custom-built LED strip that’s attatched to the back of my TV!

Kinda hard to control the brightness and colour temperature on traditional lightbulbs!

Can’t control colour temperature and brightness, and it’s a pain in the ass getting traditional bulbs to automatically turn on with your morning alarm!

That said I personally wouldn’t buy proprietary smart lighting - all my lights are running the FOSS WLED firmware, controlled through self-hosted HomeAssistant and HyperHDR.

Back during WW2 we made some shitty tanks by welding a bit of corrugated iron and some bren guns to tractors cos that was the best we could produce in-country!

Yeah I reckon we need less authoritarian capitalism, not more of it in slightly different flavours!

I just kinda liked beehaw when I was first switching to lemmy - was one of the first few people to join the Te Wai Pounamu community when it initially got started a few months back though!

Since giving waterboarding a go I’ve found myself disgusted by any government that allows the use of waterboarding on anybody - governments that encourage it are even worse, and the way the Americans handled Gitmo is fucking disgraceful.