Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2
Dictators are pretty much immune to that kind of embarrassment and part of Van Zandt's deal was that they would in fact get to use the new technology through Infinity. The dire consequences of an oops just discourages them from trying to develop it independently rather than dealing with Infinity.
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I have a contrary opinion, they are still depending on popular support, even if in there domain they controll every media, all cops, agents, military are loyal to the boot etc they donīt exist in a vacuum. Look a bit at reality we have today a good deal of countrys where the leaders are de facto dictators and can do more or less everything they want in there domain, still the opinion of other countrys and there better informed population is very important. Because no country today is wholly autark aka can exist completely on his own, this counts even fo very big countrys like USA , Russia or China, a TL 8 society verging into TL 9 needs so many and complex production chains no country can produce everything it needs. That is one reason why trade embargos work even on hardcore fanatics. The other reason is most recent and ancient dictators ruled by a cult of personality, look at communism and all there statues of there leaders, this cult is often necessary to get people in line, you never have enough thugs to enforce your rule onto eversbody, a dictator needs at least some loyal followers, any secret or free information that endangers this is outlawed. Problem is people talk and gossip everywhere, if the secret is dirty enough people work on the outside cheerful, but in there mind hand in there notice to the regime, this leads to less production and development, the regime gets out of money and fails. Here is a look at the former Sowjetunion helpful, if you look for example both at agricultural production on owned/ lend parcels and the big collective farms there, guess who produced more and better goods?