Most US tech CEOs have strong antipathy to anything like the EU. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Ellison, Zuckerberg... they all hate the idea of voters and government actually having a say in anything that doesn't align with their financial interests.

I don't use anything from Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram or Apple. No Amazon, Netflix, Paypal or eBay accounts. I do have an Android phone, alas, but I'm not really dependent on Google for anything. I have a few offline games and other than that, it's just texting and calls. My next phone will be an open-source one.

As for email and calendar, I am de-Googled. Basically, all the big American tech firms could disappear tomorrow and my personal computing environment wouldn't notice. (There'd be worldwide chaos, of course... but my little corner of the Internet would be just fine.)

Also, ASML could just stop selling to US chipmakers... that'd get some attention.

The US government has made its position clear. It's absolute folly for non-US organizations to rely on US tech products or services.

The US lead in destroying public transit.

And that's to memorize the info. I don't think they can yet scan your brain for retained info.

Of course, the bandwidth of this method is low, depending on how much you can memorize at a time.

Pretty sure captions are not shown unless you enable them. The only way to unconditionally get them shown is to bake them right into the video itself.

I was really, really worried for a second that there'd be some piece of software out there that didn't jump on the AI bandwagon. I AM SO RELIEVED!

I would say: Tariffs are almost always automatically bad. The only IMO valid use of tariffs is when a foreign country is dumping goods or services on you below cost in order to destroy your domestic industry. Which is actually the business model of a lot of Internet companies, actually... get the people hooked on cheap or free producs/services and then when there's no competition, raise prices.

Reminds me of this French commercial. You don't need to understand French to get it.

Libertarian tech bros justify xenophobia. Film at 11.

I still send and receive lots of emails from friends and family. Could be my demographic as a late-50s Gen-X type.

The other main use is, as you say, as an identifier for logging on to various online services. My spam software blocks close to 100% of spams, which average about 5 per day... (241 spams in the period from 2025-12-05 through 2026-01-20) which is certainly nothing overwhelming.

Yep. If the US continues on its current trajectory, it would not surprise me if most/all European countries boycotted the FIFA World Cup.

My guess is greed. Hosting email today is not any more difficult or expensive than it was 5 years ago. I know this because I've hosted my own email since about 2002.

Anti-spam isn't more complex today than it ever was. I know this because I ran an email security company from 1999 through 2018 and I still use our anti-spam product, and it still works very well.

So yes. Greed.

No.

Email is great. Everyone bitches about it, but nothing has come along to replace it and nothing will, because it has a unique set of features that no other messaging platform has.