Probably goryllions as your friends nicely put it :-) why are you asking instead providing a number? Whatever I say, somebody will say that this answer is US propaganda, since it will be way to low to support idea that US is baddest of the bad guys.

That’s true

I agree with your sentiment, but this thread is about communism. As someone who actually lives in post-communist country I can assure you that net effect is not what you’re looking for.

Right now my life is significantly better than someone who decides to live on government welfare.

30 something years ago, when we had socialism in my country it didn’t matter if you worked, got drunk or slept at work. Everybody had the same shitty flat and the same shitty products (assuming there were products at all).

This system has a lot of problems, but socialism sucked indefinitely more.

How is it different from having extra two kilograms of medical equipment in your bag?

I’ve no problem improving society just for the sake of it, given that everybody else also does. Sadly any bigger group of people will start getting freeloaders and I’m allergic for such BS.

I guess my grandparents who were “liberated” by Stalin’s army were also paid off by US propaganda?

Good thing you mentioned nazi Germany, because it’s actually known figure - 17 milion. That’s third place amongst dictatorship countries. Stalin did 23 million, Mao did 74 milion. During colonization actually Belgium was most bloodthirsty with 15 million attributed to Leopold II. From older history Genghis Khan was responsible for about 40 milion.

Recent war on Ukraine is couple hundred thousand in most grave estimates. Afganistan where both US and Russia waged wars lost in total similar number of people. To put things into perspective entire population of Iraq and Afghanistan combined is 83 million.

Then there’s case of native Americans which is very hard to assess ranging between 3 and 100 million. But that happened 100 years before USA was established so you have to decide if you want to associate these with USA or European countries.

Considering as anti US stance as possible - about 300 years of US history may more or less equal to 50 years of reign of Mao(though in reality it’s probably much lower number). So while they definitely have their sins your original statement doesn’t check out from math perspective.

Man that was a few weird paragraphs to write :-/

In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it’s hard to escape for you.

In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.

Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn’t work in some cases.

I don’t believe in ethical companies. Microsoft was cool once, then Google was cool, now some people seem to think that Apple is cool.

Best way to not get burnt is not to get vendor locked with one of them. Android allows me to install Firefox(real one, not Safari re-skin), replace launcher or even entire OS with Graphene. Google sucks in many ways, but if I’m not happy with them I just install software from another vendor. With ios I have to throw away half of the hardware I own.

I never wrote they are objectively inferior. I even admitted they can be marginally better in some areas. My point is they’ll vendor lock the hell out of you and the trade off isn’t worth it.

Meanwhile you wrote two walls of text to defend company that uses your children and technology worse than ICQ (released in 1996) to make you buy their products. You’re free to do so, but I’m not sure which one of us is salty :-)

Leaked emails indicate, they use iMessage to actively lock down users in their walled garden. This is area with literally zero innovation (or even regression) for past decade. At least.

Giving money to Apple basically equals to strangling innovation in exchange for getting (sometimes or even rarely) marginally better UX in boring, well explored areas.

Also once you are bought into their ecosystem you are stuck with some mediocre products like iPhone, because if you want alternative, you have to throw away watch, tv and speakers and then redo entire home automation due to lack of elementary interoperability.