This was not the point of GP's comment. The point was that your reductive take on the military-industrial complex as "a few dozen psychopaths" is simplistic and won't help you understand your opposition.
Also, please refrain from making personal allegations.
I think it's a mistake to assume that speaking the local language wouldn't be a good investment of time. It absolutely does change the way people see and treat you, even if you're not aware.
If natives choose to converse with you mostly in English, it's because it's (in many situations) obviously less friction for both - but to be recognised as having put in some effort changes your status (caveats notwithstanding).
Have you ever been on vacation where you could speak the native language (assuming you do speak any second language besides English)? It's a night and day difference, my friend.
If you restrict yourself to those areas of life where this effect isn't noticeable (e.g. an english speaking workplace and communities), that's okay, but you are effectively limiting your participation in the host society in a broader sense. I understand that can be a reasonable decision for any individual, but one should be under no illusions.
What I'm missing is the leisure, energy and attention span I had in my teens to care about customizing a program as an end in itself. Back then, Winamp was something you just spent a lot of time with anyway, hearing your newest mp3s and playing with plugins, showing off your cool stuff to your buddies... it was a thing.
That's one way to see it, if you squint hard enough.
As I see it, a company unlawfully gained billions by breaking the law while doing business in our jurisdiction.
There's nothing "vaguely defined" about european privacy laws. Google just chose to ignore them best they could, and thought they'd get away with it because they're so big.
The fact that it took years to build a solid case against their myriad of corporate lawyer weasels isn't the gotcha you think it is.
PT's theory is full of strawmen, subtle leaps of logic, unproven postulates, and plain self-serving lies.
It seems he basically posits to have single-handedly reinvented monopoly theory. But such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which I'm not quite seeing. Some cherry-picked examples (like that old MS antitrust case) just don't cut it. And the mere existence of these monopolies in our time is not at all sufficient proof of a positive outcome (for whom, anyway?) in the end (what end, has anybody seen it yet?). In fact, I'd argue that it takes some quite rose-tinted glasses or a billionaire's mile-high distance to the ground to not see the huge problems they're posing to society right now.
The fact that this is coming from his position of great power, and that he himself is benefitting immensely from the theory he advocates, should be enough to make you pause and think really hard about what philosophy he's trying to sell you there, and why.
The puppet master wants you to cheer for our tech overlords and accept them as benevolent dictators because trust me bro. But do you really think what's driving this man's reasoning is the good of mankind - of you and me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
Legislation for a ban will take years anyway, and will have sunrise/sundown provisions. This will provide ample time to build the infrastructure. But infra won't happen without mandating the transition, since market incentives will always pull against it.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.