That's a huge misreading. Hiding comments in the UI empirically does not suppress discussion, if anything it actually attracts engagement. Lots of people are seeking the "wrong" to "correct" it.
Suppressed debate is almost universally due to biased/captured moderation teams aggressively using bans.
It's not "richer countries", unless none exist in Europe or Asia. SMS has only kept its primacy for text communication in North America. Also note the RoW has never had to pay to receive SMS.
But NB even where messaging apps are defacto norms, most of the confirmation and verification for businesses remains via SMS.
I don't want KDE but I would much prefer gnome to macos desktop, I think it's both prettier and more functional, and that's not a tahoe thing. I hate finder too, and don't see any way to properly use an alternative.
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
(regardless of the fact Google is included in the suit;) Youtube is a different model I think. Yes you can burn time with it forever if you are bored, but it's not the relentless dopamine machine gun that IG and Tiktok deliver. (which is why YT tried to get in on that with shorts, but failed).
I think this is totally wrong. When you have both parties speaking multiple languages this happens all the time. You see this more with English being the loaner more often than it is the borrower, due to the reach that the language has. Listen to an Indian or Filipino speak for a while, it's interspersed with English words ALL the time. It happens less in English as there is not the universal knowledge base of one specific other language, but it does happen sometimes when searching for a certain, je ne sais pas.
US would lose out significantly if this were applied by everyone worldwide. The whole of Europe + Anglosphere have surrendered their whole tech related sectors to US companies, an enormous wealth transfer.
Your introductory paragraph comes across very much like "people who want to change the status quo are political and people who want to maintain it are not"; which is clearly nonsense. "how things are is how they should be" is as much of an ideology, just a less conspicuous one given the existing norms.
>Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political?
I am much closer to agreeing with your take here, but as you recognise, there are lots of political aspects to your actions, even if they are not conscious. Not intentionally being political doesn't mean you are not making political choices; there are many more that your AI choice touches upon; privacy issues, wealth distribution, centralisation, etc etc. Of course these choices become limited by practicalities but they still exist.