You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)

These are the same lazy dolts that call them selves "Software Engineer" yet don't know shit on how software actual works beyond an ID, don't understand software developer ethics, and think the can be sloppy because "computers have a lot of RAM" completely blind to the idea there janky ass software isn't the only thing running on a computer.

Modern IDEs have lead to this industry being full undisciplined half wits.

I literally do. Stop being bad at your job.

"I know it is counter to modern coding practices"
it is not. It's literally best practice. Coders not doing this are bad at their job, and should be fired.

That's the problem with winning. You become The Man.

That isn't just semantics. Your interests change - you become more (small-c) conservative, defensive measures become much more important, etc. because the next incremental customer is worth much less than keeping what you have. And the risk is real - everyone wants to be king.

In Apple's case, there's also that it is now a fully post-Jobs company, and Jobs was uniquely responsible for what Apple was. His remaining influence is in the heads of the graybeards who worked with him and is otherwise ceremonial. And Jobs was "counterculture", to some extent. It was more than PR - it was his personality. It is why for istance they yielded the enterprise market to Windows - he not only didn't give a shit about device management or directory service permissions or stuff like that, he considered that somewhere between distracting from and hostile to making "insanely great" devices. That was all tempered through business demands, but he really did refuse to do a lot of "normal" things that are considered table stakes today. Jobs was a strange CEO.

Cook is not. Cook is very good at his job, but he's not the type to "leave money on the table" by refusing to build something he doesn't personally care about. And at their size, it is harder for them to resist losing focus, especially without Job's unique mix of arrogance, talent, poker face, assholishness, focus and charisma.

I don't think it is possible to have a $trillion+ company that isn't exploitive. As they get bigger, they take the shape and characteristics of the system in which they're embedded.

You want non-shitty companies, grow them somewhere that doesn't reward them for doing shitty things.

Sounds a lot like remote-disable devices for cars, so the repo man has an easier job.

When those first came out, some of them allowed the car to drive, but would honk the horn to shame the driver, but now I think they all just disable the engine. Imagining the Apple version of that is entertaining... it could chose your emoji for you, blast Nickelback when it detects you're in church, or start sending your photos to random contacts until you pay up.

Sell me something and leave me alone is my preferred model.

They only time I can imagine renting something like a phone or computer is for a specific purpose, and only if there's an early out clause that would result in lower costs than a purchase. Like renting a phone for an international vacation to avoid the risk of brownshirts imaging your actual phone at the border. Otherwise it makes more sense to buy it outright and sell it afterwards.

But basically, if there is an option that doesn't result in a monthly payment or emails that I have to pay attention to, I will take that option. I guess I'm not a relationship kinda guy, at least when it comes to legal fictions.

See what Naked Face-Eating Man can do to the interior of a MechaHitlerMobile before it can get cops to respond.

How long before someone leaves an alligator or python in one?

Imagine 10,000 clusters of 20 homes. Each cluster no closer than 5 miles to.. anything. And all of them behind some mountain or in some valley or somewhere else that's really inconvenient. AI tells me you can run copper 5 miles without a booster - so that's what they did - sometime last century when they ran power. Work was cheap, copper was cheap, and someone was running power so they piggybacked. Easy peasy.

You can't run modern stuff nearly that far - except for fiber. But then you're running fiber to 10,000 hubs and each will probably need some kind of a station to do processing and splitting and further wires. I don't suppose any of this is hard - it's just expensive. And for each of these 10,000 hubs you're going to do all this work for 20 customers that only want to pay $10/month because that's their deal. You will *never* recoup those costs.

So I get why they don't wanna. But that's the deal they get for monopoly power and right of way and all that.

Partly true.

Completely correct about court decisions coupled with legislation mean that the US asserts data sovereignty but will not honor it.

But Europe only grumbled about that until the US selected a geriatric grifter for executive and started providing object lessons in why that wasn't just a theoretic risk.

Honestly, so far this is going easier than Europe could have hoped. I'm sure Piggie will notice at some point and start running his yap and throwing around more tariffs, providing more demonstration as to exactly why Europe has to migrate data somewhere safe. But he's incompetent and impulsive enough that they have a window in which to migrate before he takes his last dump and some more competent fascist ends up in charge.

This is not so much about dropping copper service as it is about dropping service. AT&T (or their predecessor) put in the copper and now they just want to drop those customers because they are expensive to maintain. I can't say I blame them - I would want to, too. The thing is they don't want to replace the copper with anything - they just want to ignore those folks.

The state would be more than happy if AT&T put in fiber and dropped copper. After all, they've secured tens of millions in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and Last Mile infrastructure grants

That's not what they signed up for when they were granted right of way and monopoly powers. They just want to weasel out of it.

Free speech includes lying.

Please look up what 3rd world means.

Data centers need to pay for their own energy increase, be closed cooling systems, and not allow withing 5 miles of a residential area, and residence can't be built within 5 miles of a data center.

A contagion tube that slower and vastly more inconvenient. Plus a bigger polluter.
People pushing for everyone to get on the bus have no clue about buses.