There's only so much hydro, especially with the drought and everything coming online is already spoken for, by industries that produce stuff including jobs.

As recently as the 1910's, the Russian nobility was trading peasants amongst them selves. Sure there was a movement of westernization as far back as Peter the Great, it was slow with side tracks like inventing the first secret police.
And yes, Lenin and especially Stalin were monsters, making it all the more amazing they did as well as they did. The Socialist revolution was fucked when Germany sent Lenin to Russia. And Stalinist's have fucked up many a country, fucking authoritarians, which in a way are the opposite of socialists even if they do wear the same label, they sure don't believe in democracy, even though the USSR had Soviet in its name, Lenin wiped out the Soviet's independence.
Which is the problem with many an ism, in certain countries with no tradition of rights or democracy, usually poor countries, the authoritarians take over. Shit it is happening in much of the west with America as usual leading with masked government men on the street grabbing people and denying them due process and a corrupt high court saying it is all legal.

Have you observed what is happening in America when it comes to the environment lately? And many of your examples are satellite countries, might as well compare how well capitalism has worked in Central America and points south where America has interfered.
You are right that some of the countries did manage to pull themselves up, Taiwan was a hellhole comparable to China for a long time. Seems to me S. Korea was to a lesser extend. Today countries such as Hungary are very ill democracies and Russia is definitely not a great place to live even after they threw off State Socialism and embraced capitalism. Same with various SE Asian countries. I'm not too knowledgeable on Africa but it does not seem to have many free countries even though many are capitalist.
OTOH, we have examples like the Nordic countries that embraced a hybrid system and have done well. Parts of Italy and Spain that have embraced non-state socialism and done well. I'd argue the problem is not socialism but authoritarian State socialism that is the problem. At that Authoritarianism is a problem in any economic system. I embrace socialist stuff like Credit Unions and Co-op's as I think that a member owned Credit Union is better then a bank, etc.

The problem is the cops only have so many resources to enforce laws and have to pick and choose which laws they enforce. Think of all the driving infractions that happen, all the cops can do is pick the worst and enforce. Today I was listening to the radio talking about kids getting injured on electric scooters. Many of these scooters are illegal (over powered, not speed limited, etc), as well as being driven in an illegal manner. The cops admit they simply do not have the resources to enforce these laws. And so on and on, there are a lot of laws on the books and cops have to decide which to enforce.

From Canada, I get,

Similar from https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffactcheck.afp.com%2F Following the errors.edgesuite.net link, I get,

Weird

I learned a lot of French from things like reading the cereal boxes at breakfast when very young. Bi-lingual country, namely Canada, so lots of packaging with both English and French.

Here in BC, or at least on the coast, French immersion elementary schools are quite popular. Basically one school where French is all that is spoken. Generally, it is like where you are, French classes start in grade 8.
There's also the question of which dialect. I was taught Parisian French which is very different then Canadian French, which is all I've had need to communicate in. I'd assume that different Spanish speaking countries likewise have somewhat different dialects. Shit even in the mother countries, there are lots of dialects. Travel around England, there will be places where you have a bitch of a time understanding the local speech.

The thing with speaking is, which dialect? Here in BC, I was taught Parisian French, then I found myself working with a bunch of Quebecois who couldn't understand me even good enough to play cards, simple numbers were pronounced quite differently then I was taught.

The "Socialist countries" terrible environmental record was in the name of progress and pulling up most of the population in a short time frame.
The USSR pulled a feudal population up to the space age in 40 odd years, with a break in there making huge sacrifices in a world war. Of course progress like that is going to concentrate environmental errors.
China likewise has pulled a huge population out of extreme poverty, across most quintuples, in a relatively short time, even with disasters like the leap forward.
The west has had its share of environmental disasters over the couple of hundred years that they advanced. Burning rivers, air that you could barely breathe in, huge mining disaster areas and so on and its only been the last half century that the west cleaned up its act.
And much of that progress in all systems came with human rights violations. America had slavery and genocide against the owners of the land for example. Lots of other human rights violations over the years by various other western powers while progressing. Shit one western country progressed to industrial scale genocide.
Anyways, rapid progress means environmental disasters, which was the point of the over parent.

IIRC, by '97 or maybe slightly later, work on StarOffice had basically halted. Once open sourced, using the Windows format might have been a good idea. I do wonder if MS has/had any IP claims to the format.

Err, Word formats aren't even compatible with each other. Which Word format should they have followed? Staroffice was big on OS/2, should they have used Word (PM Version) for OS/2's file format? A format that was incompatible with Word (text version) for OS/2 and DOS and also incompatible with Word for Win 3.x?
The problem with the Word format is that it's main purpose is to stop others from inter-operating with others including other versions of Word and whatever version they chose, MS would have broke. MS is or at least was, very good at breaking compatibility.

Seems to me that the American Constitution doesn't really say whether a State can leave the voluntary union, so that part depends on the Supreme Court, with this one quite willing to interpret the Constitution any which way. If nothing else, your Constitution does allow amendments such as Amendment XX, the State of California is no longer part of the USA. Does mean a large majority of the country has to agree.
You're right about the economic consequences, though could go like Quebec where every time they talk of leaving, they assume an economic union would take its place and have their referendums based on that premise. Canada also now has the Clarity Act, has to be a super majority to leave, none of this 51% voting leave being enough for such a major decision. The UK should have had similar with the Brexit referendum.

Or maybe it is a thing like "A Machine should not take away my fun".

For example: I want an open source OS/2 kernel alternative that requires to have back level compatibility with OS/2 Warp. If parts of it are AI generated I don't care, because I don't have the people to do that and it is something that developers does not want to do for fun or free. But when you have the people, willing to work for fun and free in a project they like, it seems they feel alienated that machine is doing their job. Life is a contradiction.

The part you're missing is that gasoline that is exported is made from imported oil. Trade stops, no more oil imports to refine into gasoline in a certain part of the country, namely the mid-west. Eventually, I guess pipelines can be constructed, which takes time and steel that is no longer being imported.