When you take the eurozone as a block it puts it only second to the US in terms of GDP, with much better QOL indicators. I don't know how you can think this doesn't place it very much within the realm of economic superpowers.
Being a superpower doesn't mean much to the americans that live in a town that looks like Gummo. There's a lot of them.
The petrodollar system resolved the 70s inflation crisis after Nixon sent the head of the CIA to Saudi Arabia. The US military backed revolutionaries during the arab spring because the dead dictators wanted to start a pan-african currency with which to trade oil. Iran, Venezuela and Russia were under sanctions and treated as enemies in very big part because they were selling oil for other currencies than the USD.
The US dollar is propped up by constant US dollar liquidity related to the fact that you need it to trade significant quantities of oil with the vast majority of producers. That situation was held up by the US' military might. Starting shit with Iran and being unable to finish it means there's no reason for oil producing countries to keep financing american debt on the cheap. What are they going to do? Restrict their own access to crude?
There's more to it, but the USD for gas scheme is a big structural chunk of the financial house of card. You break that and the rest won't hold up very long. And it's not like other structural parts of what makes the USD the global reserve currency aren't getting eroded either. Fed independence stands there glaringly obvious.
Canada's geopolitical position might be a bit fucked but we're still a very rich country with highly educated and resilient people. An exceptionally poor hand would be trying to govern a place like Haiti.
I'm pretty involved in my local regionals. I'm part of DPW at one and I've operated propane fueled flame effects a couple times. I'm throwing my quinceanera at a small unsanctioned regional close to my birthday.
That whole 'money-less' gifting thing makes for a very nice party. It has nothing to do with real economics. The vast majority of people at burns are able bodied, have above average practical skills and are right in the age group where you'd expect folks to be competent to work.
Gifting drinks, cordoning roads, making sure port-o-potties are functional and clean, making a silly art piece and shirtcocking among a few thousand people for a week or so has little to do with maintaining infrastructure, education, healthcare and the logistics to keep billions of people, including children, the disabled and the elderly, fed and housed all the time.
How do you do that without completely messing up the supply chains that keep us fed and alive for the next 6 months? The wealthiest people (who also happen to be ones that are a bit more sheltered from the climatic crisis) will still be able to afford food. Billions of poor people would just starve without petrochemical fertilizers and the diesel required for industrial farming and transportation of food. We could've had a smooth transition a few decades ago. Now it's super late and the choice is short term catastrophe vs long term catastrophe. Do you know how much fossil fuels it takes to build and maintain a wind farm or an electric truck? How much petroleum coke is burnt making the cement to build the towers that make walkable cities possible?
The alternative to fossil fuels and the climate crisis is basically an incredibly deadly and uncomfortable step out of the industrialized world. No one is making that decision. It's a fancy trolley problem where the amount of people on the tracks has 10 figures on both sides and blurry timelines.
Just the increase of gas prices due to the iran war is going to cause some fucked up harvests in africa, south america and asia. The poorest farmers aren't able to afford fertilizers. I have a coworker who has ties in Guinea-bissau. The farmers there are basically getting spitroasted by the combination of climate changed caused droughts messing up their cash crops followed by increased oil prices due to wars they have nothing to do with increasing the price of their agricultural inputs. Your simplistic view on fossil fuels will not keep them alive long enough to see the even worst effects of climate change that are coming. If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.
Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.
This isn't comparable to the legality issues in particular countries, a comparatively minor threat for FOSS software projects. If the US declares your organization as terrorist, you'll lose banking access globally by leveraging the SWIFT system. The US influence has always been problematic, but this is now blatantly abused for MAGA populism.
All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.
In this example, Signal itself and anyone associated with it, could not have any bank accounts at all. There wouldn't be any receiving end for donations. Being on the OFAC list means any bank connected through SWIFT wouldn't allow you as customer. Current funds would be immediately frozen, which by itself would probably cause fatal disruption. The OFAC list is an extreme measure, which is why the recent abuse is such a big deal.
As mentioned elsewhere, read up on the Rote Hilfe case to see how this kinda thing plays out right now. "Antifa Ost", four people beating up (NOT murdering) Neonazis were declared a designated global terror network by the Trump admin in 2025. Those four "global terrorist" were all already in custody, on trial in Germany at the time, hardly a threat. Rote Hilfe lost their bank account, because of weak association through legal defense support. Mind you, Rote Hilfe is a traditional German political institution being only cancelled once before: 1933. And the GLS bank who cancelled their account proactively fearing SWIFT exclusion, would be considered a socialist endeavor by US standards. That's the reach of OFAC.
So, to evade sanctions, Signal would need to maintain internationally ostracized money laundering networks on the scale of global terror financing, or North Korean operations. They are not some hidden service black market, where any hosting is sufficient. Paying AWS millions for large scale, low-latency CDN infrastructure with highly suspicious finances ain't gonna fly. I assume, due to statistic correlation, considering the necessary volumes moved, it's probably simply impossible to pull off.
And of course, Signal's income is in large parts coming from various nation's registered funds, which obviously wouldn't participate in highly illegal financing. Individual donations won't cut it (and also expose any donor to being flagged for terror financing, losing access to their own accounts). Not to mention, money laundering infrastructure isn't free, so only a fraction of donations would make it anyway...
The problem here is also Signal's centralized nature. If it was built for a decentralized, self-hostable backend, where only the code itself has to escape repression, it wouldn't be as vulnerable. However, as with other decentralized projects, we likely wouldn't talk about it as hypothetical heavy loss due to wide-spread adoption and foundation of common privacy.
Signal's whole mission is to enable e2ee at scale, for the average person. OFAC listing would be the end of Signal and any similar project.
>It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity.
Not really, unless exchanges don't let you withdraw coins into your own wallet? It's trivial for someone to buy another coin like BTC/ETH then use it to purchase Monero via defi.
You don't need to go back to prehistory, you can just go back a few hundred years before the urbanization brought forth by the industrial revolution. We had millennia of written record by then.
Several influential people are deluded into thinking that LLMs will bring forth AGI. A lot of people don't really understand that LLMs are just one type of AI. This creates a paradigm where we're nearly all-in on LLMs and very few people are thinking of the other ways to engineer task-specific artificial intelligence. Stockfish is a great example of a non-LLM AI that is the best at it's task.
Unfortunately, systematically and illegally dismantling the organization responsible for protecting us against diarrhea lettuce is a setback to that goal.
Being a superpower doesn't mean much to the americans that live in a town that looks like Gummo. There's a lot of them.
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