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.

Muah hahaha!

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.

That's why regulators have to be ever vigilant. Anything (within reason) that companies do which is "inward looking" is OK. The moment they address competitors in any way, that needs to be banned.

Example: A certain evil software vendor offers customers per-seat volume discounts for their product. OK. When the threshold for those discounts is coincidentally set to exactly the number of employees in a customer's facility, not OK.

I don't need self driving. The terrain here is such that autonomous systems smart enough to self stabilize would be outlandishly e pensive. Jus give me a Ferrari.

No longer a problem. What with the increasingly exhorbitant prices for electricity and our states onerous carbon taxes on natural gas, we will all be switching to coal and wood. Many of my neighbors are busy building wood sheds this summer.

All you asthmatic refugees from California ... enjoy.

Just use GMail. Millions of ex-Nigerian finance ministers can't be wrong.

Now they won't have a series in the can to rerun endlessly in 20 years.

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! ;-)

millimeters? Lets have those in freedom units*.

*As defined by our former colonial masters.

US tech is a threat to everyone not of the Epstein class who control it. The US is a business, not a country, and stands for nothing but profit.

That has many practical rewards but no reasons exist to subordinate one's own nation and people to the American kleptarchy which is best kept at a distance.