Venezuela is in the eastern hemisphere, just like Cuba, and it seems they want to control that entire part of the world. Iran would be of no concern to the US if not for Israel.
> Iran would be of no concern to the US if not for Israel.
This is only true if you completely ignore the Sunni Shia split and our relationship with literally every other country in the Middle East excluding Israel.
Edit:
This is evidenced by the fact that when Iran was attacked by The US and Israel, they bombed a bunch of neighboring countries with US bases. None of those countries have alliances with Israel. (Although they are certainly less hostile than other countries in the region)
Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.
Lego is branding, curation and quality bar, though. They're the Apple of bricks (weird sentence).
There's tons of lego-knockoffs and of not even such lesser quality that the difference can be perceived by casual inspection. The set-to-set quality bar is really where it is, especially among their set lines not targeted at children or low-end of market.
But none of those sets have any kind of staying power. There's Expert/Creator/Modular sets from 20 years ago that sell for $500-1000 _opened and pre-built/re-disassembled_. That's all brand power.
So they're less about $/brick (though i know people scrutinize it) and more about price point and brand. Phrased differently, having your brick company race to the bottom sounds like a losing strategy.
Yeah I don't know what this person is on about. Lego is obviously premium and ... charges premium prices because ... they're a business. People (consumers) who want premium products ... pay the premium.
I would be much more frustrated if they became cheaper and reduced the quality of the product.
There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at (but not lower or you are dumping.) A Marxist view of economy, if I must.
Whenever I meet one of these people, I ask if they are willing to negotiate a wage reduction with his HR. My logic is simple. If you think it is wrong for a business to sell a product at the maximum price they can demonstrably get away with like Lego does, then why is it right for you, a professional worker selling your labor, to sell your labor at a price higher than what is necessary for subsistence?
> There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at [...] A Marxist view of economy, if I must.
That's actually how competition is supposed to work in capitalism. If you sell your products at much higher than the minimum price, someone else can make a profit by selling slightly cheaper and taking over your market share.
That's contingent on the competition offering a similar experience and quality, at a smaller price point. As a parent comment pointed out, no LEGO knockoff has been able to provide the same experience as LEGO.
I think what the commenter is getting at is that it's not even about competition. People get mad when companies charge more than is necessary to make what they deem a reasonable profit.
Of course, as you mention, in capitalism, a competitor is free to go in and undercut the leading brand, but they have to be able to sell why they're better AND cheaper.
Interestingly that's one of the Marxist critiques. The market simply is not efficient enough to work fully. The effort to get Lego2 off the ground is simply too high and Lego gets an effective monopoly in their market segment (premium blocks).
If Lego was nationalized then the excess earnings that go into the owners' pockets as dividends or asset value would be realized by the people. But that of course leads to different inefficiencies (investors don't invest, etc...).
imo it's not just that other brands are of similar quality but often of way higher quality than lego. you get so much more for less money from other brands, while lego sets are becoming kind of a joke. using stickers everywhere and randomly colored bricks on the internal sides of the set
Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them!
That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!
The risk Lego faces is that they don't actually have a quality moat any longer. You can get non-lego sets with no stickers, plenty of prints, LED lighting, at a cheaper price, and with the exact same piece quality. I purchased this set: https://www.lumibricks.com/collections/steampunk-world/produ... over Christmas, and I paid $105 because it was on sale. The pieces were indistinguishable from Lego in quality, and the lights and lack of stickers was a quality increase from what Lego offers.
What moat Lego has is: brand recognition and licenses. Which aren't nothing, but don't offer much protection.
Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!
> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego
It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks great. The tons of lights are just, really neat.
> when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
The cheap-o ones you get like at the dollar store, absolutely. But Chinese manufacturers have been making good quality knockoffs for a while. A decade at least? I bought my first knock-off technic set around 10 years ago, and it was 90% the quality of Lego at 25% the price. But the quality has only gotten better since, and is now totally on par with Lego. Admittedly, the price has gone up, too.
Interesting. Gotta check those out! Not that my family needs more LEGO... The remains of our Millennium Falcon after my nieces came over glare at me everytime I look at a new LEGO set.
I don't want to sound like a shill, because I don't know them at all, and I still spend enough money on actual Lego. But I am really happy with it. Pieces were great, quality was great, I love the lights, I hate Lego's stickers. And the piece count was 2x or 2.5x what I'd get from Lego at the same price. And I love steampunk, and Lego doesn't have a steampunk line. I'll absolutely buy more from them, so (for me at least) their big Youtuber push last year worked.
A reputation moat is still a moat. It seems to me that Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
It is, absolutely, but it’s a lot more shallow a moat than having a product quality moat.
> Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
I agree, they’ll survive quite well. But the large profit margin they’ve grown accustomed to might disappear, and that probably doesn’t bode well for their management.
And heck, maybe they’ll stop shipping stickers on expensive sets, too. That would be nice.
I've seen enough reviews of recent Lego sets to doubt this. Sets with a brick or two where the color is off, sets where the final model falls apart if you look at it wrong, and when there's fan designed alternatives which are more solid and better looking it's clear it wasn't a physical limitation.
Not to mention sets that indeed just feel like a ripoff, like the pyramid of giza which costs $130 and is actually just half of a pyramid, but the backside of the model has slots that let you connect it with another half if you buy two of them. And they even admit in the marketing it's an incomplete product with "Complete the pyramid - This model comes with clear instructions and can be connected to a second model (sold separately) to create a full pyramid", of course only visible after scrolling or looking at more product pictures.
They are. I should have added that Lego’s designers are a bit better still. You can get botanical sets from a lot of manufacturers, but the Lego ones are just nicer.
Anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is cheaper today than it was 50 years ago relative to people's incomes, which is the relevant definition of "cheaper".
Not sure exactly how Lego prices have evolved but, as others have said, Lego is a brand and is unique. Their sale prices have little to do with their costs.
For most people anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is more expense today than it was 50 years ago because wages have stagnated while prices have soared.
For instance, the median household income in the United States in 1976 was $12,686. That's $72,857.55 today based on inflation (Google/Census Bureau Data + online inflation calculator).
However, Google's AI overview says "As of early 2026, the median household income in the United States is estimated to be approximately $84,000."
So the the median household income in the US today is about $11,000 ahead of inflation since 1976. People in the US are richer now that they were then.
Ok, but, what about median household size? Shouldn't we calculate the "richness" based not on how much each household makes but how much each member of a household gets from it? My guess is that households are smaller these days, but don't know.
I'd be curious to know if in '76, most households were dual income or single. My intuition is that many families could afford to have a parent stay at home with the kids back then.
Additionally, let's not ignore the fact that housing appears to have gotten more expensive disproportionately to income rising. And if two parents are working they often have to pay $1000+ for daycare
Most replies don't like my comment because it hurts the narrative that people want to believe even after I quoted hard data. Especially since the 70s in the US were rife with economic and social issues. Very interesting how the mind works.
I wouldn't say people didn't like your comment. You don't seem to have been downvoted as far as I can tell. You did cite hard data but multiple other commenters explained why the data you provided doesn't tell the whole story. Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they don't like your comment. They're just trying to understand more.
I remember reading in a personal finance book, it's not about what you earn, it's about what you keep. I think the concept applies here too, even if the context is slightly different.
I never heard of the above, but I also have my own method that I discovered one night on some tinnitus forum:
1. Straight body, drop your head all the way down, chin to your chest.
2. Place the palm of your hands on your ears, blocking them, with the fingers to where the back of your neck touches your scalp.
3. Tap your fingers on your stretched, rigid neck muscles.
Just sharing it here since it has helped me and it doesn't help to have many techniques to battle this.
Cloudflare could refuse to host illegal material or make it available in Spain. If they cannot or will not, this was the best solution the courts arrived at. Other Cloudflare clients could also decide to host elsewhere for Spanish traffic if they cared.
No — it's not and I've just verified that. The RT website is accessible: people can visit it, create accounts, log in, and use all its features without restrictions.
What’s changed about the RT is public perception. It’s widely recognized and labeled as a Kremlin propaganda outlet — which is precisely what it is — so audiences can approach its content with appropriate awareness.
If someone can't access the page, it's likely caused by a particular ISP and not by "European censorship".
No it isn't. For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com. I can also say/post whatever I want in social media except stalk and harass individual people. There is no "censorship" at all compared to virtually anywhere else in the world, US included.
You link to a comment which lists a number of russian-paid propaganda actors spreading lies and hate. They have not been censored by a government but by courts which based on evidence identified breaches of law. It's something very different from censorship.
Blocking someone who's sole purpose is to destabilise your region is wrong? You are an idiot if you think that one should let them spread their lies and anti EU propaganda freely.
Imagine what the Russian government tells its citizens about (blocked) European and American foreign news, and then you will see why this is a terrible argument. The mark of a free country is that nothing is blocked, because the citizens can be trusted to think.
And y64 can see where that th5n25ng br64ght the us.
Rampant Russian disinfo helped push them into the mess they are in.
No thanks, I still stand by that some things needs to be banned, be it foreign disinformation campaigns or nazis eg.
> all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
Well apparently there are, because huge swaths of CDN PoP IPs are getting banned/blocked in Europe especially during La Liga matches. How are we explaining this?
They explain it by plugging their ears, chanting "LA LA LA LA", rocking back and forth, and telling themselves (and everyone else) that the US is worse.
Good lord. Your response only proved his statement. Blocking rt.com glaringly showcases the eye-rolling, ridiculous and "moving to dangerous-territory" censorship that the EU is performing - my opinion as a citizen of an Asian nation.
How much dangerous censorship does your Asian nation carry out? India, for example, blocks thousands of websites - no sex work for them - and regularly shuts down the Internet entirely.
Ah yes, there is a foreign government sponsored campaign to deligitimise and spread lies about your country and government. And because you are a democracy you should just accept it and let lies and propaganda flood your country? Can't even make these entities follow the law as they operate outside your legal framework. So let them lie and manipulate people while claiming to be "news.l".
This is how democracy dies - when we stop caring about truth. This is how fox ruined the US, when lies becomes fine just because they are "opinion" or "entertainment".
Hate to break it to you, but European countries have equivalent foreign news propaganda services: Deutsche Welle & France24, for example. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If European countries weren't such nanny states, they would trust in their populations' critical thinking skills.
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
Blocking a propaganda outlet by a hostile foreign government is not censorship and certainly not "general censorship that is normalised."
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
Let's be real, this is just protectionism. The most popular prediction market in the world is DNS-blocked, in the hopes of redirecting you to some crappy online casinos instead.
Not true. Going to assume you are from Spain. Try posting a recording of the police. Try posting something praising terrorism. Try a joke about victims of terrorism. A humour magazine called Mongolia has been fined with 40,000€ for publishing a joke about Ortega Cano. Try offending religion publicly. All of that is allowed in the US.
Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
US is infinitely worse than EU but selectively based on what ruling party wants you to both see and post. try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you. EU, China… are at least up front about what they want to censor and why, US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are…”
I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
Another lie. The government has the same right to politely request sites to remove disinformation as you and I do. No one "made sure" of any such thing.
Eh. Asking sites to remove information while concurrently litigating against them is very "nice site you have there, shame if something were to happen to it."
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
The problem is any mechanism you put into place to fight "disinformation" will be used to suppress information the government doesn't like.
Covid is a great example, since most of the disinformation was coming from public health authorities, and people who were skeptical about vaccine safety and effectiveness were ruthlessly suppressed online. People who turned out to be right.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You're confidently calling Ivermectin, a drug that's been used in human medicine for decades, "horse paste". You're just ingesting propaganda without putting any thought into it.
If you're not in the US, you probably don't understand how our system of federalism works. We have 50 different states, some of which are basically run by the Christian equivalent of the Taliban or the Shiite mullahs of Iran. These state governments often come up with goofy, performative laws such as age verification that are normally set aside by higher courts as First Amendment violations.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
What are you smoking? Access to porn has been legally restricted in every state to 18+ for decades. Adding the Internet only made things easier because nobody enforced it the same way they were already enforcing brick and mortar stores that had the exact same materials.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
I AM in the USA. And yes, we are heavily censored, but not simply in content. Its a financial censorship, or cut off from banking, or payment processing. And being the "Home of the (everything costs so damned much) Free", starves all initiatives that threaten companies or government.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
It is hard to discuss these things with people that post such comments as the one you replying to... off the deep ledge where there is no coming back from
(Shrug) If you're not already posting from some Eastern European or Russian hellhole, you need to spend some time in places such as those to gain some perspective.
Or, in general, any other country that people die trying to get out of, as opposed to trying to get into.
keep shrugging but your mind has been totally polluted to think you live in some "free" society where you have "rights and shit" and oh other countries don't have that. but this is good training you went through, you have been told these lies all your life and you believe in them strongly - and that is fine, it is what it is.
the truth of course is much harsher and hopefully you'll never run into it but you absolutely do not live in a free society, the censorship is all around you (if you care to look deeper), the freedoms you think you have are daily being taken away, you can't carry a bottle of water or a f'ing toothpaste onto the airplane (and apparently we have 4th amendment?)... - this is all normalized in the US but we still think we are "free" and your best is "see how many people are flocking to come here, we must be great..."!!!! :) quite something...
You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.
Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
Sounds like you're in agreement with the parent - outside the US, people see content that reflects poorly on the US, and which is blocked for US citizens
> The painful to answer question is whether the intention is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of truth?
What it should be about is preventing someone else from blocking the spreading of truth.
"Block the spreading of lies" is something authoritarians say when they want to declare any criticism of themselves to be a lie and censor it. You can't block the spreading of "lies" without ordaining someone as the decider of truth and there is nobody you can trust to have that power.
But if we were actually doing what we should then what we would be doing is developing censorship-resistant uncentralized systems rather than fighting over the keys to the censorship apparatus.
When you have a personality disorder like NPD, you'll believe to your core that every criticism of you is a lie.
When you're in an abusive relationship they say intentions don't matter, only impact does. Because victims often focus on the intentions of their abuser and stay in the cycle of abuse.
Let me repeat it, intentions don't matter, only impact does.
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