In that case why do we have so many good examples of regulation in capitalist systems, the most effective being the "Scandinavian model" countries which effectively blended large amounts of socialism into a capitalist system and enjoy the best health and happiness rates in the world?

Indeed there is no such thing as an unregulated capitalist economy anywhere in the world. They all have staggering amounts of regulation.

It's a good point. One that is true to some extent for communism as well. If we were operating in a system that was less efficient as extracting resources and using them for production, we would conceivably get more out of the resources we have and avoid the pointless cycles you point out.

Unfortunately in practice it didn't work that well because the resources under communism were just used less efficiently and in a more polluting way which negated a lot of the gains. The net result was just less benefit getting to the end user. Though you could argue that people were freed from the capitalist treadmill of overwork to feed largely meaningless consumption that you mention. They just had to pay in quality of life, occasional hunger and genocides, and personal freedoms.

The other issue is that if one country is operating inefficiently and there is another country operating efficiently, inevitably the other country will overtake the first, as we saw in the Cold War. So such a system would need to be enforced pretty strictly on a worldwide level least it get beaten by a system more streamlined for production and militaristic endeavors.

For anarchy, enforcement isn't strong enough to not get taken over by another system (or at least the requirement for personal buy in of all in the system is too high to be practical)

I'm definitely on board on the small scale. Unfortunately when faced with issues like health care, education, global warming, and curbing the excesses of capitalism, only a government can solve those issues. At least it's the only mechanism we've found so far.

But yes, government should always be the tool of last resort for things that can be done no other way.

No, I'm more of a social democrat. I'm a believer that the best we've come up with is to have a government who's job is to fill in the holes (economic externalities) of capitalism, while curbing it's worst instincts (monopolies, tragedy of the commons issues like global warming).

Indeed this is the system the most successful and happy countries use. Go too far to the capitalist side or too far to the socialist side and things deteriorate quickly, as history shows over and over.

Right now, especially in the USA, we are experiencing what happens when things go too far to the capitalist side.

Unfortunately it seems that this combined with misinformation leads to fascism which will destroy even capitalism and likely leave us only with war and authoritarianism. Which is what you get at both extremes of the political spectrum.

When it comes to personal liberties, I am more of a libertarian though. I am against the war on drugs or most wars, proxy or otherwise, unless they are in defense. The non aggression principle in libertarianism is something that appeals to me.

How about you? Full blown socialist I'm guessing?

Mine isn't any slower than the AppleTV I used before. No issues there either. My only wishes would be for it to have parental controls and let me change the screensaver.

Maybe I got lucky with my Philips oled running Android TV, but it's pretty quick, no ads other than recommended shows from networks, and I can choose which ones. I don't recall it asking about data collection, but whatever the streaming services are doing it already. I like having all the streaming apps built in, then I don't have to manage another device for this. Overall I'm surprisingly happy with it.

What 180? Wasn't this exactly what everyone expected based on his rhetoric?

I'm kind of open-worlded out TBH. I still enjoy a corridor shooter with some nice graphics and good plot line.

While the soviets did ostensibly appear to have democratic structures, the reality was that the democracy was a fascade at best.

Well it depends on how you define "socialism" which is used to mean anything from a socialist policy to a fully socialist society. For some socialist policies, you can simply vote in some socialists into a parliamentary system and get them to pass some.

But there's never been enough socialists peacefully voted into power to make a fully socialist/communist society, so those attempts have always come at the barrel of a gun, which so far has always resulted in an authoritarian regime.

I'd love to see one actually get voted into power someday, but I have a feeling I will be waiting for a very long time.

Very unfortunate, but are we really meant to monitor every rape in the world as world news?

The graph itself's utter lack of proportion is more infuriating than the content.