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Actually, local Chinese companies already dominate the EV market; informative article in link below.

http://www.eiu.com/industry/ar...

Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?

Don't you realise there's no other functioning democracy other than the USA? The existence of guns is the only thing that keeps the country in check! /sarcasm.

That is really funny! You have a great career as a comedian ahead of you (or as a politician, but I sincerely hope you will choose the former)

The one thing I'll grant you is that at the time of founding, the US did pretty well on the democratic front - although it was nowhere near as exceptional as a lot of people might think: the vast majority of the population had no voting rights (excluding in no particular order slaves, indians, women, and people without property), which makes the system less radically different from (proto-)parliaments such as the British Parliament, the French Estates-General, or the institutions of the 17th century Dutch republic. All of these systems ranged somewhere between monarchy, aristocracy, and "real" democracy. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Currently, there are plenty of "real" democracies, with political processes that are each flawed in their own way but that more or less succeed in translating popular preferences into policy and protecting the rights of its citizens. On the Economist's democracy index, the US has 20th place (after most of northwestern Europe) and is only just above the level of "flawed democracy", scoring especially bad on functioning of government and political participation. http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/i...

Freedom house similarly places the US on a downward trajectory and below almost all (north)Western European countries. (https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf). From their report: "[American] elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests. Racial and ethnic divisions have seemingly widened, and the past year brought greater attention to police violence and impunity, de facto residential and school segregation, and economic inequality, adding to fears that class mobility, a linchpin of America’s self-image and global reputation, is in jeopardy."

A nation without a functioning political process, but where everybody has guns - I believe we call that a "failed state". See also Somalia, Iraq, or South Sudan.

The fact is that every empire and every dictatorship which became decadent and tyrannical (that is, all of them) has collapsed. It is an inherently unstable form. It is self-defeating. No free nation would ever collapse. It has to become tyrannical first. Then and only then can it collapse.

The process you describe could just as easily be that tyranny is the end stage of all free societies. After all, the same point could be made that all free societies eventually end in collapse too. Just because some haven't collapsed yet doesn't disprove that claim. Look at North Korea or Ethopia - that later considered an authoritarian regime with the rulers claiming lineage back to king solomon, not-withstanding temporary bouts of turmoil in the interim though.

1. Finland
2. Iceland
3. Belgium
4. Denmark
5. Norway
6. Sweden

Incidently, you find a similar pattern when browsing The Economist's Index of Democracy with Sweden in top.

I actually had to google to find your source; if you're actually at the site you may as well paste the url in

Where is the source, then? I can't find may way around that website http://www.eiu.com/.

researchers at the University of Karlsruhe are developing Quaero's voice-recognition and translation technology, with funding from the European Commission. [...] In addition, speaker-identification software will allow users (via computer microphones) to search the internet for audio clips recorded in their own voices, or those of other speakers.