> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.
Sure, everyone else is also acting based on childish emotions now, not just the US president. It's not about retaliation at all, it's about reducing suddenly very imminent risks.
The difference is emotionally based retaliation vs. reassessing risk. And it's about money, so it's for sure not about emotions. The financial world isn't run on anger and emotions, like the White House.
The current government can still claim to have a democratic mandate. At least for the moment, it relies on the goodwill (even of its opponents) to at least pretend that elections matter.
If it loses a large number of supporters, and is forced to suspend even the illusion of democracy, a lot of things would change. It's hard to predict exactly what, but it would be ugly.
That's not to say that they won't. As you observe, they will do what they think they can get away with. But shutting down the entire Internet might be something that they can't get away with.
My biggest issue is the lack of really good cases. There are all those fancy peripherals you can buy, but it's really hard to find simple case that works without overheating and no cables sticking out on all four sides.
Analog pictures are really easy to keep in good shape. I have a family album that is more than 100 years old now, those pictures are still fine. The first color pictures from the 60s got a weird tint though. But nobody knows how good the colors were in the first place.
I think I have some bitrot in my photo collection, there are a few pictures that seem to be broken, but it's far less than 1%. I'm fine with it. I could probably restore most of those images if I tried.
After I got my server going I transferred all my photos over and ran a utility overnight to check them for corruption, the name escapes me but it was an open source cli program. A small number of images were corrupted and the majority were replaced with thankfully pristine backup copies. The rest were restored with minor visual glitches.
The digital photos are not my issue. Especially in the early 2000s the files were really small, super easy to copy. I've always moved them to a new laptop, I guess I have at least 8 copies lying around in different places.
More problematic are the first analog videos from the 80s, the magnetic tape now starts to rot, and it's not that easy to copy those.
I also have film from the 60s and 70s, this is slowly becoming an issue too. But honestly I don't care that much about those past memories from my parents and grandparents.
Last time I tried to use it for an appliance, we weren't able to buy licenses. Microsoft gave us the contact to the only reseller in our country, and they couldn't find anyone in the company who knew how to sell Windows IoT licenses.
Edit: We only wanted to buy around 20 licenses, so their motivation was also not that big to figure it out.
Open your history book and read about what happened in 1991.
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