Things are very different with software. For starters we don’t know which influence the US government currently wields over Microsoft. We don’t know if the software used in the European data centers has deliberate backdoors, kill switches or the like. We don’t know if the datacenters are requiring specific hardware from US manufacturers that could be compromised. Unless the software used in the data centers is also entirely developed, owned and maintained by the European entities so that these can be held accountable, it does not matter whose address is on the paper.

This is completely different to McDonalds, where the business model revolves around selling food that is sourced locally or could be sourced locally.

The only way to protect from US governmental influence is to provide European alternatives that are developed, owned and maintained by companies here and not dependent on any software subject to US governmental influence.

People were very outspoken about the whole supporting genocide thing. The party made sure to shut them out. People were also very outspoken about Biden being too senile to run again and the party instead gaslighted everyone with claiming that pointing out the most evident and obvious truth would in fact be a malicious scheme to help Trump. Only when it became impossible to lie about it for them, they quickly switched Harris in.

And when people pointed at the party loosing to Trump again, they came up with all sorts of reasonings including hating on the minorities that felt betrayed by the party for not being blindly loyal to them.

And now we are seeing them still supporting Trump in various ways and fighting teeth and nails to keep any progressives out of power in the party.

As long as you say you are willing to vote for them, they will not listen. They take your vote for granted and they rather help to turn the US into full fascism than listen to normal folks who don’t want their life to become worse and worse every year to make some billionaires richer.

The headquarters are in the US. The company is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US. If the US government is putting a gun to the head of Microsoft management, the company will comply and mess with things in places outside the US.

Just treat capital income as income. That people pay less tax on doing nothing just owning stocks is absurd to begin with.

And if we take the Quandts for example (large owners of BMW and major profiteers of BMW supplying the Nazi war machine) they usually make in excess of 1,000,000,000 € every year on their BMW stocks.

Since the standard social security benefit is considered to be the minimum that is necessary to live a life in basic dignity, the lower rate for asylum seekers is a whole problem to begin with. Even more so as asylum seekers for the most part are prevented from seeking legal employment.

Well that one was invented by the likely new Chancellor Friedrich Merz claiming it first about African and Arab refugees and migrants.

It was only a matter of time until the sentiment would be expanded towards Ukrainians. This goes to show that Merz & co. maybe care about Ukraine as a state buffering between Russia and NATO, but they don’t care about Ukrainians as people, like they don’t really care about any humans that aren’t “useful” to them.

Russia is shipping a lot of its oil and gas through the Baltic sea. Otherwise most pipelines go to EU countries, so the capacity for Russia to sell its gas somewhere else is physically limited and it would take decades to change that. It is well known that India and Turkiye are involved in laundering Russian Oil products to sell to EU countries at a premium.

It is a lack of willingness to enforce sanctions, including accepting to buy the laundered oil and gas.

The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.

That still has a wide range. If you are camping on a camping ground you will have sanitary rooms, dish washing places, likely a hot shower, maybe a kitchen and official fire place.

You wrote “camping in the mountains”. That could include official resting spaces where you just have some benches and maybe an outdoor toilet, or well just pitching your tents somewhere and figuring out the rest yourself.

I’d like to add that French nuclear plants mostly run on fuel rods bought in Russia. So France shielding its nuclear industry from renewables is also helping Russia to finance its invasion of Ukraine. Maybe keep that in mind when Macron is making the next big statements regarding Ukraine without them being backed up by actions.

Blinken tried to organize for other countries to allow Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza and those countries to take in the Palestinians in Nov 2023. Then the other countries said “No”. The Trump plans of this year arent fundamentally different. They are the same plans as the Democrats under Biden had. Just that Trump is louder about it.

I hope this serves as a warning sign to everyone who wants to go for fully digital everything, with no analog backup ready in place, be it payments, postal services and government interactions. It is nice to have digital options, but there always must be analog backups.

Lammy, speaking to the Lords international relations select committee, said the UK wanted to take the step when it would have an impact on the ground and not at a symbolic moment, adding that it was his sad conclusion that some European countries’ recognition of Palestine recently had not had any effect.

Yeah no shit. You are providing Israel with arms and you run spy flights for them to help bomb Gaza faster. How about you stop this you war criminal twats? Maybe then the recognition would also have an effect.

The CDU didn’t decide to phase out nuclear reactors. It had prolonged the running time of the nuclear reactors just a year or two prior. It then backtracked on that move, getting back to the original plans. Also the CDU did not legalize gay marriage. They put it up to vote with the “Fraktionszwang” - the group coercion that is an informal principle of federal parliamentary groups - being lifted. Merkel herself voted against legalizing gay marriage. It was only that most of the opposition and governing SPD at the time and some of the CDU voted in favor.

Furthermore it is fundamentally different that now the CDU is helping to create the demand for more deportations and violation of the human rights of people by spreading lies and hate themselves, while blocking policies that could solve some of the problems that they blame migrants for (cost of housing and utilities, infrastructure and education investments, access to healthcare…)

The SPD hasn’t left out any chance to strengthen the far right and move to the right herself. The party has a long history of betraying working class people and left principals like human rights and anti racism, when she can get some power instead.

Lidl is owned by the Schwarz Group who are heavily invested with a Israeli “cybersecurity” company called “xm cyber” run by a former Mossad director. If you don’t want your data with foreign intelligence including American intelligence i would steer clear of any of the digital services of the Schwarz Group.

Switzerland has a program where they specifically give clean heroin to addicts. This is different from consumption spaces, where addicts can bring their own drugs, have access to clean use material like syringes and medical staff is present to help in an emergency. IIRC. Switzerland also spearheaded such consumption spaces.

“Cocaine trafficking and the associated money laundering in Germany can only function on a large scale through corruption of public officials and other facilitators. But the focus of investigators is only on the perpetrators within the criminal networks,” said Robin Hofmann, a specialist in organised crime at Maastricht University. Instead, Hofmann said, as has been done in the Netherlands, the search for the infiltration of cocaine money must be widened further “to the facilitators, the lawyers, local politicians and financial advisers who enable organised crime and profit from it”.

Germany is still a haven for money laundering. Other European countries accuse Germany of deliberately staying inactive in order to make tax money off of it. Until 2023 it was still legal to buy properties in cash.

I think you overestimate the necessity to move long distances in an apocalyptic setting once things have settled. 10miles is actually quite a long distance to move yourself and all your stuff in a day. And since you aren’t expected in the office at 9am, it does not really matter if it takes you 1 hour or 10 days to move somewhere.

A government source said: “It has been routine under successive governments for AGO to help embassies get in contact with the relevant authorities purely for purposes of sharing information that could be relevant to a case

Which information would a foreign embassy provide to a domestic investigator about a domestic criminal suspicion? The only plausible explanation that comes to mind would be to give the domestic investigator access to information by the foreign intelligence that it acquired by clandestine and illegal work in the country. I would be surprised if such information would be considered as evidence in any court of a state of law. It also asks the question if the investigators and the people facilitating the contact have committed acts of treason by enabling such influence.