FTA: "Origin-Based Sovereignty Criteria Will Hurt Europe's Competitiveness".

The truth: "Origin-Based Sovereignty Criteria Will Hurt Over-reaching American Tech Companies".

Background: Wikipedia says that "BSA members include Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Atlassian, Autodesk, Cloudflare, Cisco, Dropbox, IBM, Microsoft, Nikon, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Siemens and Zoom". At least ten of these thirteen high-profile companies are American giants.

The takeaway: The smart money is ditching US digital services, software, and infrastructure in order to frustrate and undermine America's desire to own the entire world. Any cost reductions are a bonus, and any cost increases are an investment in sovereignty and long-term survival. Any BSA warnings such as those pointed out in TFS are in fact BS warnings - the "A" is optional.

Thanks for the chuckle!

True. But it is a necessary-if-not-sufficient condition for turning wealth inequality around. As I see it the primary advantages of closing all the tax loopholes are:
1) It sets the precedent and expectation that the uber-rich will be reigned in - not just on taxes, but on all the other kleptocratic abuses we endure.
2) It places limits on the amount of money they have available for buying politicians, trampling on the commons, and the rest of the anti-social shit they get up to.
3) It reduces the perception that the oligarchs are somehow better than the rest of us, resulting in stronger push-back from the general populace.

Agreed! But up until Windows 7 was obsoleted, Windows wasn't shit according to the majority of users. Then there's the period of denial in which users figured that Microsoft would fix all the crappiness.

Techno-peasants and MS apologists hadn't yet figured out that enshittification to the max was Redmond's ultimate game plan. So although Win 11 shouldn't have been a surprise, it was a nasty one to a huge portion of the user base.

I'll humour you for a moment and pretend that your fantasy is based in fact. Given that - and speaking as a Canadian - I'm not entirely sure that living in a "poor, tyrannical Islamic hell hole" is worse than living in the "poor, tyrannical Christian hell hole" that my country would become if American conquerors imported millions of themselves into Canada. And that's what der Trumpenfuhrer keeps threatening to do.

Europe had a business partner - the US - who had been (relatively) stable, predictable, reasonable, and trustworthy for many decades. Why would they duplicate the dev effort and take on the expense of creating software which would then make it more difficult to interoperate with their American business / trade partner?

I agree with you that they should have taken the hit in the name of redundancy, resilience, and independence. That's easy to see in hindsight; but when a situation evolves slowly, the need to differentiate yourself and become fully autonomous may not be obvious until a sharp break occurs. Trump's second term was that sharp break.

Billionaires in the US only invest there because they pay next to no income tax. The consequence of that is that the middle class gradually disappears. The remaining non-one-percenters work two or more jobs to stay afloat and are only one paycheque, health crisis, or vehicle failure away from financial ruin.

So tell me again how "investing in the US doesn't mean fucking over anyone".

And will the phone be euPhonious? I guess it must, by definition! ;-)

That's because we "same people" have zero trust in Agent Orange as he threatens his country's own allies and invades other countries just for fun, while he simultaneously shits the bed over and over and over and over again.

We do, however, have at least some trust in the inspectors who, until the Great Trumpster Fire came along, were ensuring that Iran wasn't building nukes.

That would depend on which agency you're talking about, and how well Microsoft managed to curry favour with Trump.

I hear that money, flattery, and spurious ersatz medals can go a long way toward making der Trumpenfuhrer look the other way. And if the agency in question was NOAA or CDC, Trump might actually hand out a medal.

US is a danger to everyone.

FYFFY
(fixed your fix for you)

Here in Canada - at least among us average citizens - NATO is a very iffy thing just now. NATO's supposed leader has threatened the sovereignty of other NATO members, and launched trade wars with some of them. Ambassador to Canada Pete Huckster is an insulting arrogant bully, and he and American politicians are supporting Alberta separatists in a not-so-clandestine fifth column operation aimed at breaking my country apart.

So while the US spying on other NATO members is reprehensible, it's not really extraordinary. Throughout NATO, dealing with that kind of shit from America is just business as usual now.

And if they don't have the scale on their own, they can combine forces with other like-minded countries.

That's probably not ideal, but it would be WAY better than trusting ANY private-sector cloud services provider - never mind an American one - with all that sensitive data.

The Illinois legislation targets the LLMs themselves. I would like to see companion legislation targeting the server farm goldrush as well, since rapid growth in that sector seems to be driven - or at least excused - largely by AI demand.

By far the most prominent news stories deal with the psycho-social and job-market damages caused by LLM use. Equally important are the serious environmental and physical health consequences resulting from the server farms whose growth has exploded since the tech bros started pushing AI as though it's ShamWow.

And then there are Fascist Jews such as Netanyahu, almost everyone in his government and - so it would seem - a very large portion of Israelis. They are the ones who either support or actively participate in genocide, the killing of journalists, and the beating and imprisonment of people who try to give humanitarian aid to starving, dying Palestinians.

As far as I can tell, there are both liberal and conservative Jews among the Fascists. Thankfully, there are also both liberal and conservative Jews among those who denounce the genocide.

The Venn diagram of liberal Jews, conservative Jews, Israelis, Zionists, genocide supporters / deniers, and genocide opponents is one which I would not even attempt to draw. The thought of that makes my head hurt - never mind my heart.