Well, there’s fairphone. And farmers markets.

Honestly, most of the things people buy are things they don’t even need… housing, cars, and insurance excluded.

Bottled Water by Nestle? ❌

Learning to love the taste of your local tap water? ✅

The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”

It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.

We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:

Fumbled the shield

I think most of us are on-board with police body cameras. The fundamental difference is that they are recording things in the presence of the police, and that they have the measurable benefit of holding the police accountable to their actions (sometimes).

Rats are good people

Steamboat Willie is an example of Copyright. Twitter is an example of a Trademark. A Copyright is much much much easier to defend than a Trademark.

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/trademark-patent-copyright

It’s stupid

Definitely.

they’ll lose in court

I’m not sure they will, genuinely. They intentionally abandoned the domain name for the website… and they’re no longer using the logo or name anywhere on their product, or corporate documentation.

The case that it’s up for grabs is actually decently strong.

Why be condescending now?

You already fucked up the point you were making. By all means, insult people’s intelligence at the start of the conversation, before you fuck up. Doing it at the same time as fucking up looks bad… but insults after you fuck up looks even worse.

Similar: having characteristics in common.

Looking similar does mean that two things are similar. You could have tried to make your point in a variety of ways, but you chose the way that can be countered by simply understanding English.

0/10

I struggle to rationalize this for countries not already in armed conflict.

Legally, practically, or morally?

Practically, armed conflict is way more expensive, and it’s riskier. If you had two strategies for changing someone’s behavior: 1) Punch them until they agree to change, 2) Tell them they can’t borrow any more money from you until they agree to change… you would probably prefer number two because it’s less risky.

Legally… we only have 80 years of precedent for the USD being the world’s reserve currency, amd 50 years of weaponizing that power with the IEEPA. Rules for armed conflicts, on the other hand, are ancient. We have a lot of examples for acts of war in armed conflicts, and we can quickly define them and recognize them. For defining and regulating financial “attacks”… we have basically nothing.

Morally… you and I have different moral systems from the people in charge. People can rationalize some truly heinous shit.

Not absolutely sure… but I’ll take “Probably wouldn’t” over “Definitely already does.”

We would need a LOT of new international guidelines for this.

It’s not clear to me where we would draw the line, since there’s not really an enforceable difference between, “Allowing you to use our financial system is causing us harm, so you can’t do that anymore,” and “You can’t use our financial system until you <insert demands here>.”

While a blockade is recognized as an act of war, an embargo is not. The US sanctions usually operate like a specific, services-based embargo, so there’s no interpretation of CURRENT international law rendering it an act of war. Again, we would need new guidelines to meet your goal.

I think shared ownership goes against human nature

I think the vast majority of things are shared. Air, water, soil… roads, schools… your education… the bathrooms at the supermarket… the murals/sculptures that make your town look less like a shithole…

It’s perfectly in line with human nature, actually, to share things. People who amass hoards of wealth and fight for power and control… those are the weirdos.

But China isn’t going to sell my data to Uncle Sam to help deport my family (who are legal citizens). So there’s that.

Yeah, I straight up don’t respond until they’ve asked/said the thing that they’re contacting me for.

Usually they finish their thought without me ever needing to respond. I did have one coworker who just… never said anything else. That’s also a win.

9th amendment.

It’s the best amendment, despite being, legally, the most useless.

I would argue that it was meant to cover the kind of situation where a private company is given government permission to gather surveillance data from the citizenry, in exchange for access to said data.