But why can’t you have the best of both situations from the publics perspective? You could require companies to disclose financial numbers if above a certain size, even if privately owned. That wouldn’t force the owner(s) to be beholden to anyone, they just have to report the numbers. It’s what we do here.

When you say “the reality is”, do you mean that the existing players are just too powerful to allow it? Or is there something inherint to the system that wouldn’t allow it?

You paid for services rendered. By your logic you should eventually own your neighborhood grocery store because that’s where you buy your bread.

Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, many domains being required probably is annoying / prohibitive enough to stop distributed botnet attacks.

I’m actually not sure how federated lemmy hasn’t already been destroyed. Wouldn’t it just take one bad actor to start spamming all the other instances with nonsence? If you deferate with the instance the bots are coming from they can just open another, right? Like a DDOS attack

Given the amount of his personal wealth he put into Tesla and the financial tricks he pulled to get further funding (if what is said in Elon Musk by Ashley Vance is true), then it seems likely that Tesla would have gone bankrupt without him. Maybe any rich person could have done it, and electric cars would always eventually be on the trajectory they are now, but he was the rich person that actually did it. He should get some credit for that, I think. But it is right that he didn’t create Tesla, and he should definitely stop implying that he did, I agree with that.

That is not “very clear”, no. The Cold war did not end in another world war even though everybody built up their militaries. If the power distributions are about even, then most likely nations will stand around waving their missile dicks around until someone goes bankrupt or everybody collectively finds out that keeping that level of military on standby is fucking expensive and slowly powers down again.

You live in the most peaceful time in our species history (ignoring some flareups lately). The vast, vast majority of humanity lives in peace. Turn of the news and go touch some grass my dude.