Essentially, united on foreign policy but not domestic (barring stuff like human rights)? Superficially it seems sensible enough.

Yeah, because they’ve been doing so for decades. Most of what’s happening today would likely not have been accepted 30-40 years ago, but people have been desensitized by constant, subtle and not so subtle influencing.

Who do you think influences the masses to vote this way, and who put people like trump in the position to be elected?

Doesn’t sound like it failed at its purpose in that case

I love my Cayman S! The biggest risk from what I’ve read is bore scoring, which can end up fairly serious. If that doesn’t happen, it seems most issues are minor. Mine just passed 100k, bought it in 2023 at 70k. Enjoying every minute I spend behind that wheel!

From afar, you get the impression that suits are in charge and if there isn’t already some “proof of popularity” of some sort, it won’t get greenlit

I don’t remember, sorry.
But that is exactly how it should be. Why are we throwing our money collectively after institutions that provide zero benefit outside of the solution they deliver? I don’t imagine service providers will go away, there’s no reason for some municipality of 5000 in a remote region to have their own full IT team, but if everything is open source every improvement that happens in one place can benefit somewhere else.

Fair enough, thanks for the response

I’ve been arguing this for a few years. Create a solid, open source ecosystem for all the things we use for-profit providers for currently. It’d be a massive gain for European governments, and governments/businesses globally to have open enterprise solutions that are maintained with significant budgets (less than what we’re all paying the US now)

I’m curious, since you’re already on Protonmail, why not use their VPN too?

I feel like this is unfortunately pretty likely to be misunderstood, like the original comment did

No mainstream alternative to Android/iOS exists. Same goes for Visa/Mastercard. All of them are US products.

Essentially shutting down all smartphones and most consumer payments would be pretty crippling.

I hope this whole thing is enough of a wake-up call for the EU to put (more) effort into a lasting solution.