With the amount of resources that are spent every year on anything from building schools to distributing clean water and vaccines, saying “we don’t give a shit” is a bit of a stretch.

Then look a bit closer.

Who do you think drills the holes? European contractors.

Who pays for the staff working in the schools? Not Europe.

There is a ton of money being poured into development aid, absolutely. But that money is mostly wasted on administration and vanity projects.

At the same time, Africans get hardly any working visa for Europe. It would help dramatically to have a few million Africans working legally and safely in Europe and sending back billions in remissions. Instead, poor bastards have to risk their lives on overcrowded dingies and get sunk by the Greek coastguard (not an exaggeration, there’s video evidence).

Another point: coffee. The real value add in coffee is roasting. But roasted coffee has very high tariffs, so african countries only export cheap, unroasted coffee. There’s no reason for that - except that this might lead to cheaper coffee and could undercut European roasters.

Of course it is true for the rest too.

You think I’m writing this from a US perspective? I’ve never been even on that continent. I’m in Germany and this is 100% what is happening here.

I think you still didn’t understand.

Yes, our lives are better, but the many Danish books are bought by (figuratively) having less arabic books. Denmark has next to nothing, just like Germany or Austria. But with cheap energy from the global south and cheap manufacturing in third countries they could get ahead quite a lot.

Yes, Spain got rid of its dictatorship, but that’s been 50 years ago and Franco’s grave is still a place of worship.

The EU is only inwardly inclusive. It doesn’t give a shit about Africa for example. Ukraine also only became relevant when the EU proper was threatened.

Actually, I think your reasoning is part of the problem.

For decades the “it gets better” and “best of bad systems” narratives kind of worked, but if we’re being honest, our wealth and freedom was always bought by oppression somewhere else.

We don’t have serfs or slaves domestically anymore, we have them abroad in Vietnam or import them semi-legally for a few months or so.

We uphold international law, but only if it suits us. Our wars are all justified.

This hypocrisy is what’s fueling the current downfall. The economic disaster alienated the population, it’s not getting better for them, they’re worse off. Liberal democracy didn’t deliver.

Every petty dictator can invade somewhere else and can (rightly!) claim that we didn’t do anything about Iraq, or Kosovo, or Israel, or Yemen.

Maybe we used to be somewhat free, but we’re not anymore. And we’re actively destroying freedom elsewhere.

So in that thinking, Wikipedia is not open source, if the editor used a proprietary browser?

Maybe you should try not to act like a complete asshole. You’re pedantic in all the wrong places and extremely arrogant. I know, living in your lonely world makes a bitter person, but you’re still wrong and you’re still an asshole.

The model is MIT licensed.

Of course you’re free to go full Stallman, but that’s an open source license.

Even if they greatly underreported costs and their services are banned: the models are out there, open source and way more efficient than anything Meta and OpenAI could produce.

So it’s pretty obvious that the tech giants are burning money for mediocre output.

If you look deep enough, pretty much every city’s name is actually some banale description of the location or some guy who was relevant to it’s founding.