Supplies chips for defense... why did this get in Chinese hands? Oh... money...
That makes it all rational and well thought out.

On the flip side, I have enjoyed the few Canadian shows that made it to the U.S. (especially during the writer's strike).

Hard to say, but rember that it was because of similar laws in Canada that we got The Great White North with Bob and Doug McKinzie.

>"So a very tiny amount. Europe pays the vast majority..."

Europe is not a country. And not all of Europe is in NATO. Even the concept of "Europe" isn't perfectly well-defined.... some would say Russia is also in Europe. The NATO protection is, primarily, of European nations. Yes, it helps everywhere else, too, to keep NATO's "enemies" in check. But the USA is 1 of 32 members and yet pays more than five times 1/32nd.

On the other hand, If I have an ultralight and realize I need to move over 200 people at once, I know I'd better talk to a domain expert rather than trying to tie 250 ultralights together with kite string.

>"I don't have an issue with Donnie hammering on those, I just wished he would have made clear that this was about overall defense spending."

He is often unclear, unfortunately.

>"Of course by abandoning Ukraine he now gives EU[...]"

I am not aware of him ever vetoing any support legislation, or threatening to do so (I could be wrong on that). He was confident he could work out a deal and quickly. Apparently Putin is not so cooperative.

>"It was Putin who succeeded in getting these countries to up their budgets."

Keep in mind the big invasion didn't occur until 2022, years after Trump left office the first time (which is when he was calling for them to live up to their obligations). Of course, Putin was already hostile before that and had already invaded during Oboma admin, but that apparently didn't motivate them.

Part of the treaty is to keep up their own military/defenses and they were not doing so (and for a long time and getting worse). Member states were expected to pay at least 2% of their GDP into defense/readiness, annually. "Donnie" wanted to make sure that the countries were ready and able to defend themselves and come to the aid of other member states, instead of immediately relying on other member's resources when it is too late. That is not an unreasonable expectation.

There are also direct contributions to NATO, itself, to cover its operating and management costs. "The total budget for these common funds is approximately â4.6 billion for 2025. Contributions are based on a cost-sharing formula that considers each country's gross national income." And the USA covers 16% of that operating budget, more than any other member.

>"And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs."

While simultaneously NOT PAYING THEIR AGREED OBLIGATIONS TO NATO, leaving the USA to absorb that as well. I will now get downvoted by reminding people that it was Trump that demanded they start paying their obligations, and succeeded. https://www.usatoday.com/story...

"Rutte then nodded along as Trump recalled demanding that NATO nations pay up their fair share during his first term as president. [...] very few were paying, and if they were, they weren't paying their fair share, [...] After making it clear that U.S. wouldn't support NATO if member states didn't step up, the money started pouring in, [...] The U.S. contributes 3.4% of its GDP and about 16% of NATO's annual budget. [...] By 2024, all non-U.S. NATO allies spent the 2% target on average for the first time."

The Unix and Linux equivalents just do not have the tools needed to scale the way the Windows active directory tools do. There's no reason why those tools couldn't be built but it's a classic catch-22 where there isn't enough demand so nobody's going to spend the money but there will never be enough demand because the tools aren't there so it can't get anywhere.

I think that if you ever do see Linux on the desktop in Mass it'll be because Europe does it in order to get away from Microsoft because of rising international tensions. Basically you need nation states to step in for national security reasons because businesses aren't going to do it especially with Microsoft's typical antitrust violations hanging over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

You might be able to turn that around if America and other countries would strictly enforce antitrust law but that's just not in the cards. So regular market forces and competition are basically useless here because they have been completely undermined and eliminated

Europe is still dependent on Russian oil and gas especially during winter. This was by design it was supposed to create an interdependency that would moderate Russia's extremism and eventually lead to them becoming a proper Democratic state. It didn't work because dictators go really fucking crazy especially in their old age. Dictators are often extremely incompetent at everything except violence and holding power.

And they implicate Trump in pedophilia and child rape. We learned that from the Epstein file leaks we already have.

We all had a good laugh about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Donald Trump giving Clinton a blowjob but that was obviously just an exaggeration for a fact. The real takeaway is that Jeffrey Epstein knew that Trump had compromat in the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

It's painfully obvious that Epstein didn't kill himself. He had a ton of leverage against the president of the United States and would have been expecting to get a pardon out of that.

I don't think the details are relevant the takeaway here is that the ruling elites fuck kids a lot and we have to decide whether or not that's a problem or not.

Because there's a whole shitload of people who take the attitude of "if there's grass on the field play ball" which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds. And some of those people are probably family members of ours.

Because there is no Central authority for open source software it's basically impossible to get good administrative tools for it.

So for example it becomes really really hard to enforce document labeling for different classes of document at different security levels for your company.

This is before we talk about the mess that is active directory equivalence under linux.

I don't really see any solution. Maybe if Microsoft wasn't able to do all the antitrust violations so that a company could come along and build up Linux into something but every time anyone tries to that all gets shut down by buyouts and mergers and other nasty little tricks.

Xi is absolute dictator of China now. So they can easily quell any social unrest with violence.

That's why you're seeing this now. It's because the elites of China have control of the situation whereas before they didn't

>"Saying Libre Office replaces MS Office like saying a tricycle vending cart replaces a step van."

I never said that LibreOffice can replace all the functionality of MS Office for everyone. You must be thinking of someone else. It can, indeed, replace all of what most people do with MS-Office, and most of what the rest do.

>"For instance, Libre Office has no support for group editing."

It does support tracking, authorship, and also "check in/out" on remote file locations, but not really true group editing. They are thinking on that, though:

https://design.blog.documentfo...
https://bugs.documentfoundatio...