I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.
You can easily sail with a fleet of several hundred longships across smaller bodies of water like the North Sea and concentrate enough power to threaten existing kingdoms on the other side. This is a journey of ~ 3 days, and under optimal conditions, they could make it across in a day and a half.
Sending even a tenth of that force across the Northern Atlantic, with its different weather patterns, longer distances, icebergs and very few places to replenish your resources (Iceland yes, Greenland maybe - they lived fairly on the edge as it was, with not much of a food surplus), was not feasible. A few ships could do it, but a few ships means a few people, and in the Americas, which were settled by other people already, it meant that you were a somewhat weak guest to someone else's territory, and you could always be thrown out or made to leave.
Is going to your doctor or eating better food "navel gazing"? Predispositions to some diseases can be read from your DNA. Remember Angelina Jolie undergoing preventive mastectomy because she had a high genetic risk for breast cancer? Well, so do many non-celebrities.
Then there is the specific case of people who may suspect that their bio-parents are someone else, and there is nothing weird about wanting to know where you actually come from.
"The Great Patriotic War" is a label intended to divert attention from the fact that Stalin was Hitler's peer in almost all attributes, except that his system of concentration camps used hunger and frost instead of gas to exterminate unwanted people by the millions.
Sure, you are right, but that does not mean that the EU as such is totally innocent in this.
Most liberal constitutions of Europe operate on the principle that their governments cannot be fully trusted in execution of their power and need a lot of oversight from the people. This is a result of hundreds of years of bad experience with politicans who had too much power.
The EU is somewhat more idealistically built and thus easier to abuse as a loophole for pushing things that would domestically hit a lot of counter-wind - by the same governments that are domestically limited by their constitutional order, but nevertheless still full of power-hungry people who are seeking ways to increase their power.
Frankly, for me that means that the EU should be reformed to make that less easy, but a colossus of 28, soon-to-be-more countries is approximately as amendable as the US Constitution - theoretically, yes, practically, the hurdles are extremely high.
I don't think we can fundamentally solve the problem that politics attracts psychopaths. We can only limit their power, and that, as of now, works better on the national level than on the continental one.
I remember my colleague from MFF UK, Robert Babilon, producing his first real-time map of Czech trains in 2004.
The page, called Babitron, still exists and still keeps that delightful 2004 look. I visited it a few days ago. Unfortunately today there is a message "We are moving Babitron to a different server", so the link isn't working.
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
"If not for the EU, a much worse version of this would already be law in the nation states."
In some, in some not. Not everyone is the UK. Many nations which had a totalitarian government in the 20th century are more wary about this sort of sweeping surveillance power.
The "charm" of pushing this through the circuitous path via Brussels is that few people and even few media outlets are paying attention to what happens in Brussels. Everyone is still obsessed with their national politics.
Not if you follow in the steps of Ukrainian "Operation Spider Web", which concealed the explosive drones into a double roof of a truck and when the truck got into the proximity of the target, the roof opened and everything flew out at once.
Granted, in the case of an embassy in London, you probably couldn't get a semi there, maximally a modest truck, but that should be enough for some damage.
Yes, worsened inspection is a non-trivial problem. Very high quality sleepers (I wouldn't expect any other kind in Switzerland) mitigate this, but copying such approach in other countries could spell trouble.
In late 2022, I moved into a new semi-detached house in a small project of 33 such houses total. Back then, there was precisely 1 EV here, parked openly.
This has grown to 6 in the meantime. It seems that the segment was growing even before Hormuz, propaganda or no.
If you are OK with US isolationism, then your fun fact is very salient.
If you'd like to keep the US-led coalition of mostly free countries intact, then your concept of the US military needs must include a lot more activity that just "defending from a hypothetical invasion of North America by Old World powers". Defense of allies elsewhere, keeping trade routes on the ocean open and safe.
I think the fiascos around tariffs demonstrated quite nicely why glorious autarky is no longer an option. Too much stuff is produced elsewhere, from resources to highly specialized products like icebreakers.
How big is the market of supersonic private jets for the superwealthy?
Can someone like Boeing or Airbus live off that indefinitely, instead of ye olde passenger jet production?
"With normal steerage air travel becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average person"
I am 47 and during my lifetime, air travel has moved from the "quite a luxury, plenty of people never experience this" to "you may pay more for the taxi to the airport, a poke bowl at the airport and the taxi in your destination than for the ticket as such" category. Capacity of airports has become a significant bottleneck, because everyone flies.
That's Europe, though, we have a lot of budget airlines there such as Ryanair.
Scale matters, and there are aftereffects on the society as a whole.
Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism.
To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I would be a strict opponent of producing as many Egyptologists as aerospace engineers. Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.
Technically, it would be kachní ocásek, not kachnuv.
Yeah, the US has been flirting with similar approaches quite heavily, but I don't believe that Trump will get 15 or more years in power out of it like Xi managed to.