>Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.
>Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.
Except there's rich parts like Germany or Austria where internet infra is poorly run due to monopolistic telco capture and regulations keeping infra upgrades costs high, and so have slower and more expensive internet than Starlink in some areas. Poorer nations of EU often have faster internet than the richer ones so poverty is not a reason.
So Starlink is definitely still relevant. I've seen several small/medium businesses here in Austria that have a starlink terminal as a backup.
Europeans want to self sacrifice on the altar of the environment so that the rest of the world can have more leeway to increase their own AC usage. Anything but mass-install AC.
This is just boiling the frog slowly. The DSA will first get them to change the algorithm to "protect the kids" and years later it will get them to change the algorithm to push state propaganda and ban all hateful speech, which will be anyone who complains about the state and its rulers.
They're playing the long game. First with the carrot, then with the stick, but the end goal is state tyranny, and control over tech platforms is one of the means.
They saw what China managed to achieve with their internet censorship and ID control, and they want exactly that, but with a blue coat of paint sprinkled with yellow stars, and pushing child safety up front is a easy way for the public to be onboard with this capture.
International rules are meaningless without hard power to enforce them.
Your rules in your country are real because you have judges and police to enforce those rules.
But internationally, there's no planetary police force(other than the US when it wishes to act like one), so solving disputes is dependent to how strong your military is, or on you capability to inflict pain on the offending country through other means like economy or trade.
That why the US walks away unscalved from international conflicts and the EU keeps getting buried further.
normie = normal "average" people; People who aren't terminally online and up to date on tech and politics drama. Exactly the ones oblivious to negative things the EU is doing in the background, because stuff like Eurovision or the World Cup takes up more of their attentions span than complex tech or politics.
>here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative
Only because that's how you choose to see it.
> for anybody who disagrees with your world view
So having a world view where government surveillance state should NOT be OK makes me the bad guy?
Nobody can be guilty of anything without a fair trial. Some bureaucrats power tripping acting as judge jury and executioners without trial is the definition of totalitarian tyranny.
Nobody, even law abiding citizens, wants to be under such an unaccountable legal system. Justifying it because it was used "only" against pro-Russians is insane. Today it's against them, tomorrow it will be against anyone who criticizes the EU leaders. That's how boiling the frog works. That's how fascists always did it.
Jacques Baud (Swiss) and Xavier Moreau (French) citizens, got sanctioned by the EU[1] on the basis of "acting as mouthpieces for pro-Russian propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories". Sanctioning means asset freezes, debanking and travel bans, virtually a slow and painful sentence to homelessness and death since you won't be able to travel, have a bank account, a job, own or rent anything under sanctions.
I don't have a problem with them sanctioning people, I have a problem when it's not done by a judge but a snap decision done by bureaucrats without a public trial/hearing where the individuals get a chance to defend themselves for what they're accused of, especially when it's just for the act of speaking, even if we disagree with what they speak.
Because otherwise the EU is no different than a monarchic or totalitarian dictatorship who has people executed for speaking bad things against it, and there's nothing stopping them from doing the same to you, me and everyone else here for wrong speak against the crown's interests.
Only in some bubbles. But most normies I know are massive EU fanboys and showing them the malicious things the EU is doing, they just shrug at best, or call you a Putin supporter at worst.
They'll only realize this when the jackboot is on their neck. But probably not even then because in some EU countries government obedience is like a religion.
Military spending != military capability and will to use force. For example, Germany spends way more than France on defense but has a less capable military and with no nuclear capability to boot.
From force projection capability, the EU is toothless and lacks the spine to twist some arms in order to see its interests represented on the world stage. It's a pushover despite all that military.
The reality is that you need to be willing to drop some bombs every now and then or at least threaten or blackmail those who threaten your interests and way of life, to be taken seriously and for other countries to never fuck with you. For example the Ukraine virtually admitted to blowing up Nordstream pipeline and sending Germany's manufacturing into the storage, just to disrupt Russia. Now do you think Ukraine or any other country, would ever dare to blow up a US pipeline or piece of their infrastructure? Probably not, because they'd get carpet bombed in retaliation and their leaders shot or kidnapped by delta force.
And since the EU never plays hardball like that it always gets taken advantage of by more ruthless and unscrupulous nations with smaller and weaker militaries because both its citizens and its leaders are too afraid to ever use force.
>That kind of stuff is really weird, even weirder is that such an emergency measure can be activated without countries being in active war or the like.
What's also just as weird is how the EU can just straight up sanction, debank and make European citizens virtually homeless overnight, without even a trial day in court. Absolutely insane.
This is some NAZI/USSR shit, except you don't get executed, you just get deranked and made homeless and maybe die from that on the whims of some bureaucrat in another country.
We gave the EU superpowers to "protect us" but never asked ourselves what happens when they use those powers against us when people vocally don't agree with their agenda.
This. When I need to take my summer vacation, I need to request it to my manager in due time so the team can plan customer deliveries accordingly, and in my last day before leaving I need to do a handover of my open tasks to whoever will do the work in my absence. I can't just spontaneously decide one day that tomorrow I'm leaving for 2-4 weeks on vacation with no notice and no handover to my team.
What's stopping MEPs from having to do that? Do they have literally zero responsibilities and accountabilities? Because their job is pretty critical for our society an security, even if a trained monkey could do it in theory.
That's why the EU is a neutral pushover bowing down to the whims and tantrum of US, China, Iran, India, Turkey, etc. because a lot of their industry, energy, exports/imports are from those countries so any disputes would be devastating to the EU economy.
They're trying to avoid any conflict since they have no energy and hard power to counter any confrontations, so they smile and nod to anything happening worldwide or push some stern words about "monitoring the situation" to social media, depending on the situation.
Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.
>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.
>I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Germany is the EU proof of that. It outpends France at defense spending but its military is massively smaller and less capable, and also non-nuclear to boot. So they're getting a very poor bang for their buck. Mostly because of bureaucracy and corruption are eating most of their money before it gets spent on the troops.
>Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen.
That's why I'm not holding my breath at the whole "German rearmament" propaganda. Most of the money will go to boost the stock of Rheinmetall and friends, not boost the troops.
If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it fails first very slowly then very suddenly.
In fact that's why nothing ever gets done to improve things in the EU/west, because we expect perfect outcome in every new change and we want potential risks to be zero before something new is implemented, so it's easier for leaders to just never do anything, never change anything, just sit and maintain the status quo while we go through managed decline complaining things keep slowly getting worse.
Because you're probably come from a high trust culture where you've been taught reciprocal trust, responsibility and accountability, but there's people coming from low trust environments where exploiting loopholes and scamming everyone outside their inner circle is the norm, and it's the way they learned to get ahead in life, from school all the way to work and business.
They're brazen because they've never been caught or suffered consequences for their actions.
This isn't something you can screen for in a classic job interview.