If Trump backed candidates win then Europe is going to have to do something but if they lose even if it's Republicans winning Europe will see that as a signal that they can back down.

The basic question is will America return to some semblance of sanity with the economy crashing and gas prices skyrocketing or will they just keep doubling down on more Trump. There have been several primary elections where Trump backed candidates won though. So it's not looking good. The basic problem is American voters either are obsessed with voting Republican even when it hurts them economically and a lot of Americans aren't allowed to vote because we do heavy duty voters suppression.

So the country is really going off the deep end here.

The thing is Europe can't really ignore a mentally unstable United States because we still have this massive military. I know it looks like we got our asses kicked in Iran but the only reason Trump had the back down even a little is that a draft and boots on the ground is still a bridge just a little bit too far.

All it takes to change that is one middle-sized terrorist attack and the American public will freak the fuck out and send their kids off to die in the desert again. Hell the last time when 9/11 hit we didn't even have to do a draft because so many people signed up. Now mind you Iran is a much bigger country and taking Greenland is a bigger deal so yeah we would need a draft, but you can get away with pretty much anything when people think that they are under attack

You need to look up what a mother fucking chesterton's fences.

Deregulating isn't going to create some magical world of competition and wonder and beauty. All it's going to do is what a handful of psychopaths abuse people's privacy and civil rights. Basically the exact same problem the United States has right now where finance Bros have used technology to do all sorts of fucked up shit and get us to where we are right now.

All Europe has to do if it wants to compete with Microsoft is take government money and dump it into software. That's it. Most of the software they need is already 60 to 80% of the way there. After that all you have to do is mandate the use of that software to interoperate with the government and with government contracts and everyone has to follow along because government contracts are worth way too much money to blow them off. It really is that simple and it's only corruption that prevents it from happening.

Every few years Europe threatens to dump Microsoft and Microsoft comes in and gives them tens of millions of dollars worth of free software and free support. This is been going on for at least as long as I've been paying attention and that's going on 30 years.

The reason we are here talking about this shit is because this doesn't look like another cycle of Europe pressuring Microsoft for free support, free software and discounts but instead they are legitimately trying to decouple themselves from America because America has gone bad shit crazy with right-wing extremism and the kind of laissez-faire bullshit that you're talking about when it comes to quote unquote deregulation.

What you're suggesting is basically Europe traveling the exact same road that the United States did which is the exact reason Europe doesn't want to buy software from the United States anymore. Counterproductive doesn't even begin to cover it. That would be batshit insanity.

Did you seriously write that comment or are you just a AI chatbot? Honestly can't tell the difference anymore.

You might want to look up where most telecommunications hardware comes from regardless of what the rules and regs say. Or fuck where do you think phones are made? Yeah some of them are made in India not anywhere close to all of them.

People will buy from dictators all day long as long as those dictators are predictable.

So this isn't about tech sovereignty per se this is because America has gone so far off the rails that we can no longer be trusted.

You will note that Europe isn't busy doing the same thing with Chinese electronics and software. That's because as brutal a regime as China is they are at least predictable. As long as the money flows they're not going to do anything too crazy.

In the era of a second term of trump that is no longer true for america. All bets are off and God only knows what's going to happen.

I don't think people really can process just how crazy it is that the president of the United States threatened to seize Greenland by force and that the only reason he stopped is that Congress told him no. And to be clear not all of Congress just enough of it that he had to listen on that one issue...

At a certain point crazy is so fucking crazy that while intellectually you know it's there emotionally you can't really process it. It's what I call the Dick Cheney effect.

So anyone Facebook really wants and needs will get an exemption and anyone else gets tossed into the grinder. That's how these sort of exemptions work. Same thing they do with remote work.

Every company is going to have a handful of genuinely irreplaceable workers and those are the ones that this policy will be available to and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

And if the other workers refused to work for Facebook they couldn't be more happy about that because the administration will just let them bring in cheap H-1B labor after they claim they can't find Americans willing to work. Because America first and all that.

Sure you can. Just like how some people get a pass on work from home. This is a way to deal with employees you need who credibly threaten to leave while using the process to fire anyone else without severance.

They aren't waiting for America anymore because they can't trust America anymore. They have green lit billions and billions of dollars in additional War funding for Ukraine. They have of course been dicks about it and turned it into loans but they will leverage later on but it means that Ukraine has the resources to keep fighting.

I would like to see the Democrats to get back in charge and deal with russia. I will never understand why Biden didn't do more. Then again the Republican party is pretty close with Russia and Biden was probably trading Ukraine for some domestic policy. He never gets enough votes in the Senate and House to really do much of anything because of the filibuster but it's always too risky to eliminate the filibuster because the Republicans have repeatedly said they will eliminate all voting rights if they didn't have the filibuster stopping them.

So one of the ways to pad your resume is to contribute to open source projects and this is been one of the drivers for open source.

So what we are seeing now is AI slop submissions flooding open source projects from people trying to get a credit without actually doing any work. It's no skin off their backs if you waste the reviewer's time and if your AI slop happens to be legit because you did three or four 500 submissions then that's just fine. Because all you were really after is getting your name on the project for when you apply for a job.

With how hyper competitive life is now because we're all Fighting for our lives out here I suppose I can't blame them but it's fucking things up. It's just another twisted distortion you get when you tie somebody's ability to access food and shelter to their job performance.

Even if the company has a crap product as long as they have a product they can keep taking money from investors and the CEOs can keep paying themselves out of that money. Maybe someday they will have a working product maybe they won't but either way the CEOs didn't have to have real jobs for quite some time.

What the article seems to be trying to say is that adafruit criticized flux ai's low quality product so flux AI is abusing a law to go after them.

The important thing is that all of the solar power remains in control of the same people who currently control our energy supply.

That's really what this is about. Power. Not electric power the power to tell you what to do by controlling whether you have electricity or not. Whether you can drive into work.

The cause is that we are in a deep deep recession that is being masked by ridiculous amounts of AI spending and a news media that is dedicated to propping up this administration at least through the midterms.

There isn't a single serious economist who will tell you that we aren't in a recession if you take out AI spending and AI spending doesn't create jobs. The work is almost entirely automated except for a handful of highly specialized construction jobs that don't last very long and the typically are done by people brought in from out of state because they require specific skills that your average electrician or Carpenter doesn't have. Companies could of course train but fuck that give me give me give me that cheap labor.

You have not been able to get ahead in a company by schmoozing in a very long time. The way you get ahead and the way you have gotten ahead for the last two decades is you go to another company that pays you more than you come back to your old company with a higher salary and you keep bouncing from company to company. That's because companies stopped promoting from within and stopped training ages ago. They will only train you and give you new skills for a brief period of time during your new hire period so to move up that's what you need to do. That's exactly what my kid had to do in order to move up and it's why their income kept going up.

Networking doesn't work when companies randomly bring the ax down or hell the motherfucking chainsaw every few years when there's a blip in the stock price. You don't know who did not work with because you never know who is going to survive the next round of layoffs.

I like the idea of supporting creators to whatever extent I can. As an anime nerd I know that Blu-ray sales are the main metric whether a show gets another season or not. That and merchandise sales but I don't really have space to set up merch and I don't like buying it just to put it in a corner of a closet. Plus buying blu-rays gets me high quality video on a pressed disc that will more than likely outlive me.

I have no illusions though about how the people who make anime get treated. I know only a tiny fraction of the money I spend ever makes it into their pockets and more often than not they are run out of business repeatedly by rapacious corporations. So at the same time I don't really begrudge anyone who doesn't want to buy into that literally.

I think the correct solution is to buy the official release to support the creators but also change how you vote so that workers stop getting exploited. Worker exploitation is a political problem after all not an economic one.

Of course I have to live in the world the way it is now not the way I wanted to be so again if you're not buying blu-rays I don't be grudge you in the slightest. Although it's an anime fan like I said without the blue ray sales and the merch sales you're not going to get more of that show you like... And it really is the Blu-ray sales the drive the next season even more so than the merch a lot of times.

Dell can't match Apple because Win 11 wants 16 GB RAM to boot to desktop and 32 to be useable.

MicroSlop designed the os before the AI boom. They can't fix that without giving up their spyware and they're not gonna do that.

Mind you Apple really need 16 GB but that's still half Windows