I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.

Is actually have a good answer but in my case it’d be “I wanted to know what that one plant I saw was”. AI-based pattern matching to identify plant or animal species is pretty handy.

It’s also way more sensible than trying to use text generation for anything useful.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.

The CxU’s idea of “outgoverning” the AfD:

• Further limit infrastructure spending because limiting state debt must surely be the number one topic for everyone by a wide margin and everyone must want to see it achieved at all costs.
• Take a harder stance on immigrants, asylum seekers, and other foreign-looking people because adopting AfD policies must surely lead to their voters bleeding over.
• Keep talking about how the intended means of defending the country against extremist parties are not valid means of defending the country against extremist parties.
• Continue fully collaborating on the regional level.

USB condoms are a thing. I should get one in USB-C; mine only do A.

These protests don’t really affect Trump directly but they do signal to the local governments that this is something people feel strongly about – and thus something that might cost them votes if they mishandle it. And that might affect how the EU deals with him.

Certain things can’t reasonably be accelerated. Factories have a maximum output and building new ones (with all the infrastructure they need) isn’t instantaneous. Armies need to be trained to different standards. And all of that stuff costs money.

For example: Germany just took on half a trillion Euros in debt to raise “special assets”, that’s equal to 1/9 of our GDP. Those special assets will be used to overhaul our infrastructure (which has been rotting away during two decades of austerity politics) and to get our armed forces into fighting shape. Both of that is required for effective defense production.

But we can’t just tell KDNS to deliver 1000 Leopard 2A8s by the end of the week. Those need to be built. If we want them to be built faster we have to build or refit factories – which we’re actually doing; there are plans to use a Volkswagen plant to build tanks instead of cars. But even if we can build more tanks that won’t do us any good if we can’t manufacture enough shells, have enough tank crews, have the infrastructure to move everything around etc. etc. etc.

The pax americana has always been built on the premise that the USA provide military capabilities to their allies specifically so that the allies won’t compete with them on that stage. Going from that to having to be able to potentially defend against the States in a very short time is a logistical nightmare. In the case of Germany, this comes on top of our infrastructure being shit because the conservatives have spent two decades demonstrating the full depth of their economic ineptitude.

For the time being, the best we have is the fact that the EU is also a military alliance and that France has enough nukes to glass all American metropolitan areas.

Vereinheitlichtes Betriebssystem für den Öffentlichen Dienst, also known as VereinhBetrSfdÖD. Rolls right off the tongue.

So far Article 7 hasn’t been used because Poland had Hungary’s back. Given that Poland is no longer ruled by the right-populist PiS, that might no longer hold, though.