In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.
But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.
You just described Lucent.
Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.
The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.
What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.
This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.
In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.
Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.
Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.
There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.
This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.
Inequality society producea inequal economy (and vice versa) which is the economy of any developing country. Few rich,. miniscule middle class and lots of poor people in slums snd poverty.
China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.
Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).
Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.
But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.
If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?
2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
> Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.
Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)