> serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.
Removable cushions in a couch are pretty rare.
As a counter example, both of my couches still have perfect cushions. One bought for C$800 15 years ago and another for C$1500 5 years ago.
Natuzzi (an Italian brand) has its "Editions" line that's cheaper because it's made in China. From my experience, the quality is good.
Also, brands like CB2 and Crate & Barrel are American and popular in Canada - especially CB2 because of its good designs and quality at cheaper prices (which are even cheaper in the US).
> Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too
Yes, even in Codex and Claude Code.
> Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari... My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more
Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite: I had to finally bite the bullet and migrate to Firefox because Chrome/ium switched to GTK4 which removed key themes support.
(That's OK though, I should've moved off Chrome a long time ago.)
Some would say Russia is very much inside the US and somewhat inside the EU through its proxies (currently govts of Hungary and Slovakia, quite possibly in the future - France and Germany).
> The EU is right now talking about becoming a great military force _to fight Russia_ (emphasis mine)
Correction: to not have to fight Russia. The EU falling apart is Putin's wet dream because he's very afraid of a confrontation with the whole bloc, and wants to subjugate the small European countries piecemeal (and yes, on their own, they would have to submit or face missiles/drones or, even worse, human meatwave attacks by a foe that has been whipping its populace into a death cult for decades for exactly that eventuality).
For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).
Reserve currency status makes increasing money supply easier (the US has run large deficits and monetary expansions with less inflation than peers). "Petrodollars" create persistent demand for USD, independent of US domestic conditions - countries that import oil must earn USD (via exports, borrowing, or reserves) or hold US reserves in advance. Oil exporters, on the other hand, invest surplus dollars into US treasuries. This process absorbs US money creation and lowers US borrowing costs. This is an enormous advantage that the US is likely to lose if it continues on its isolationist course.
> If the U.S. obtained such a special benefit, it should have grown faster than western europe from 1950 to 1990
Not necessarily; the US could have extracted that benefit by staying ahead of the rest of the world in terms of its citizens' wealth, with all the benefits this entails.
We can't know the "what-if" (would the US have become even richer by being an isolationist MAGA dreamland), but we know for a fact that the world order was created and maintained by the US, so it must have had its benefits all this time.
> If you look at the fifth chart, the large european economies also seemed to have grown slightly faster after the war than before it. So I’m not sure how much the U.S. is benefitting from being the hegemon.
Nobody's denying that the US-created world order has been good for its partners but that doesn't mean the benefit was at the US's expense. International trade is not a zero-sum game - the lifting tide and all that.
"European hostility" is not going to matter when there's no EU. No matter how weak, Russia will always be stronger in terms of the number of warm bodies they are ready to throw into the meat grinder than any country in Europe.
UPD: If you don't believe me, look at the European right-wing leaders (including a sitting head of state, Meloni) currently banding up behind Orban, a widely known Putin's shill in Europe.
Dissolution of NATO has been his wet dream for decades.
Next up is dissolution of the EU; the hard-right shift all over Europe (that he gets some credit for by financing right-wing parties and propaganda) will eventually make that dream of his come true, too.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.