A_S_B

Exactly. He will keep doing whatever he wants until he gets arrested or impeached, two things that are super hard to happen. He is in this moment very much above the law.

I mean that the SWIFT is a crucial infrastructure to the banking system all over the world because it allow banks to wire money from country A to country B. SWIFT itself is controlled by the US & EU but even then it was very rare that a country would be disconnected from the system. Until 2023, the only country that did get banned from SWIFT was Iran and it was allowed to come back under the 2016 agreement. In 2023, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia was banned from SWIFT and this prompted many countries that do no have automatic alignment with the US & EU to develop an alternative infrastructure that would allow their banking systems to continue wire money internationally without depending on the SWIFT system. For example, Russia has the SPFS(System for the Transfer of Financial Messages), China has the CIPS(Cross-border Inter-bank Payment System) and the BRICS are developing the BRICS Pay which is to be an decentralized and independent payment messaging mechanism system.

The Microsoft situation is very similar in the sense of that the can do this once and after that many public institutions will change back to non-proprietary office suites. It might take a while but some of these institutions will do it.

At least it is good that now we have some more concrete proof of what these organizations have been doing for decades and never really stopped doing.

Yeah this is bad but this kind of stuff is the thing that can only be done once. Very much like the Unilateral SWIFT BAN on Russia. This prompted all of countries in the world to create an alternative and so they did, this case is the same thing. It might take some time but countries will find a way.

The things is that we arriving at a limit on population growth under the current methods of production. There is a limit on how much cattle, chicken, pigs, etc we can actually raise. Now, if the whole world turned vegetarian, we probably could have much more people on earth. So much land is used to make livestock feed that could instead be used to grown actual food.

In my personal experience it really depend on what you are trying to build but most of the time it ends in the party/collective/space expelling the person from it. What can make this process less dramatic and damaging is the organizational culture you have in the space or the party. For example, in the organization that i´m part of when we reunite, all men are required to help in some domestic(cleaning, cooking or preparing the room for the meeting) and organizing(taking notes on the meeting/discussion, being the mediator of the meeting/discussion[1] and so on) task because we have perceived that this is a way to make the woman in the organization participate more actively in the discussions and we as an organization want them to participate more on these discussions. So we have a culture of doing that and for some time it has been a self-reinforcing thing. So if i stopped doing it, my comrades would call my attention to it and if i really took a stand against it, i would probably be kicked out of the organization. My hypothetical exit would galvanize no one because we have been doing this specific thing for a long time and everybody agrees that we should keep doing it.

In short: I don´t have a definitive answer but a good guess would be organizational culture. We, humans are very social species and take a lot of cues from the people around us and if we are able to create a good organizational culture in a space/party/collective people will mostly follow it. That said,it is hard to create a good organizational culture, people in the org or the space really need to want to make it happen but once it is create it is easier(or less harder) to keep.

[1] Counting and signaling the time that one has to speak, keeping the meeting on track, etc.

I second this opinion, the friend above me said it all.

Invest, live, and if you end up with a surplus of wealth, share it with those who need it, fund liberatory projects (mutual aid, bail funds, etc), and don’t get caught in the consumption cycle.