I would like to request the US sanctions all members of the EU parliament asap.
Personally I don’t really have much faith in the ICC; its premise is flawed since great powers will never be deferential to a foreign court system anyways.
The ICC is a step in the right direction in the post-WW2 world, a shame though that repressive countries filled to the brim with war criminals cannot help but see it as an affront and such a threat to them.
The ICC is overwhelmingly popular with most countries and people, most people who oppose it are those from countries which harbor war criminals and try to make their opposition look like it stems from legal issues with international jurisdiction, and not the truth which is to protect their country's ability to commit war crimes unabated.
I mean, they're right. International rules-based order is a threat to war criminals. The real shame is certain countries having the power to enforce rules-based order and not doing so (or failing to do so).
Is it the people that make up the system, or the system that makes the people? In a country with rule of law, any individual in the government should be extraditable (for valid reasons) without it being a threat to the overall system.
Or (not sure if better or worse), they the "great powers" are stupid and they did not hear of the "Streisand effect".
True, neither has China, India, or Russia.
Obviously its power is limited when it comes to prosecuting people currently in power or people that have favorable standing with their current host country. It can only make the live of those people a little less pleasant by issuing arrest warrants that limit their ability to travel internationally. But governments do fall from time to time, and when that happens the ICC provides a solid mechanism for prosecuting them for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in a way that is fair and has rules that were solidly established before the crime was committed
And in a certain sea-side part of a certain country, there's active bulldozing and paving over hard white leftovers of evidence of the misshaps that could later be prosecuted if they weren't so effectively crushed and hidden.
Still, some justice is still justice.
Edit: it looks like Wero requires Google/Apple device attestation [1]. So this is basically a non-starter in terms of "sovereignty" from the US government. Anybody on the wrong side of US sanctions still can't use this since they get their iOS/Google Android devices shut off too.
[1] https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295...
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
> Edit: it looks like Wero requires Google or Apple device attestation. So this is basically a non-starter in terms of "sovereignty" from the US government.
You don't replace the entire stack at once, you replace it piece by piece. Each piece gets you closer to sovereignty. Payment infra, payment rails->tech infra and foundational systems next. If US Big Tech pulls the rug, that Jira ticket goes to the top of the stack. It will take time, but we're headed in the right direction for Europe to decouple from the US. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. Perfect does not exist, nor is there a quick fix, only reasonable efforts to continue to work over time towards success criteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Any revenue and capital that can be retained in the EU versus being sent to the US is capital that can be recycled into further decoupling and domestic EU investment, versus ending up as US shareholder profits and tax revenues.
(think in systems)
Seems a little risky for the seller. The advantage of credit cards is that you can charge the card synchronously during the order flow. I haven't used Wero yet but I imagine it's more similar to the QR code process than the credit card process.
Advantage of a push system is fraud is basically impossible, disadvantage is it takes so many steps. With a pull system you just scan or autocomplete your card and it's done.
Alas, that kind of anonymity runs counter to the very soul of the European bureaucratic ethos. They absolutely want to know in detail where every single cent goes, plus the power to block transactions at will, so they're looking into some magic solution that allows them full purview and full control while perfectly denying the US and its spy apparatus the possibility to also see into it, an impossible combination of requirements.
And I say all that as a fan of the EU. It's one of their many blind spots they need to overcome if they ever want to become a technological superpower.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/...
[1] https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/cnns-elie-honig-points-out...
Murdering people on international waters is not even the latest war crime, IIRC the Hague Invasion Act was created because of the war crimes they were comitting in the Middle East 25 years ago.
Personally I'd love to see Trump on trial at the ICC. Along with Putin and Netanyahu.
The United States doesn't recognize the ICC. So there's nothing for him to be referred to. If the ICC wants to create a legal case against him, all the US has to do is point at Xi Jingping and is ethnic cleansing programs and ask why they haven't brought a legal case against him and tried to extradite him.
Everyday Americans would not tolerate it. Remember that while many don't like Trump and for good reason - me included - it would be viewed as a violation of American sovereignty which would not be tolerated. I would oppose it myself even though I think he belongs in jail over January 6th. But he'd belong in American jail, tried in our courts, under our legal system.
I also have to add it is always interesting to hear the things people proclaim to care about. I don't think everyday Americans even if they know about this alleged[1] double-tap, really care much or even think about it at all. I know I don't. Has anyone brought a case to the ICC? I know that South American countries referred Maduro to the ICC. :)
[1] It seems clear that it happened, and I'm not disputing that. But I say alleged simply because there has been no prosecution that I'm aware of. If there's a better word choice than alleged I'd be happy to use it, it was just the one that I thought fit the sentence best.
Clearly. And I'm sure you're right about US public sentiment.
I was perhaps trying to make the point that powerful authoritarians like Trump always have to consider future threats because, unless they can stay in power forever, the future is where they are most vulnerable. Eventually they no longer have the energy to keep it going, and someone else is in charge - someone who then has more power than they do.
The usual woek-around is dynastic power, but I don't see any signs of that this Trump's case.
> But he'd belong in American jail, tried in our courts, under our legal system.
For January 6th, sure. But the war with Iran, the Venezuela thing - they're international crimes the like of which a non-trivial proportion of the world considers the ICC to have jurisdiction over.
But yeah... if he doesn't die in office he'll realistically be too old to face justice in any court.
In what world do you think Trump even remembers about the double tap on a fishing vessel more than a day ago? He has no worry about anything, he has escaped prosecution for everything he's ever done, and I doubt he believes he might face a tribunal at the Hague, if he even actually knows what the Hague, or a tribunal, or the ICC actually are.
1. the AfD thing was the decision of individual banks, not of the German government. Basically, in a free world companies can decide who they want to do business with.
2. the Canadian trucker "debanking" was quickly resolved because the Canadian justice system did their job and overruled the unlawful "emergency" government order
The preamble is not subtle: "Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law."
Now, legally/philosophically speaking, the Canadian concept of free-speech is laughably weak, as is all Canadian rights. Specifically, section one clearly states that rights are subject to "reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". Effectively, if the government decides that you're "not reasonable," you have no rights.
The American system is quite clear about their rights being absolute and derived from God, where the idea is that the government is to uphold the existing divine rights afforded to all human beings, as opposed to the British system of which Canada (and the rest of the common-wealth is based off of) is a part of, where the government _grants_ the rights.
Another example of this is the British crown, in which authority is given by God. Many of the older cities derive their local authority in the same way. If I recall correctly, I believe that the city of London is so old that they actually mixed it up, and derive theirs from "time immemorial."
No, the legal system is not; there are non-legal documents which claim both of those things, but being subject to “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” is very much how the US elgal system treats them. There is even, in federal Constitutional case law, an established, gradated system of tests (rational basis test, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny) depending on which right is at issue and for whom it is being limited as to whether there is sufficient justification.
Edit: the constitution in my country mentions no religion or god. Neither does the Lisbon Treaty or the Treaty on European Union.
For instance in Germany, the specific words "Bundesregierung" (Federal Government, or just short "government") and "Landesregierungen" (State Governments) explicitly describe the "executive part" of the "political system".
The Federal and State Parliaments are the "legislative part" and the courts are the "judiciary part" (with the "Federal Constitutional Court" at the top). This whole idea of strict separation of power is the most important foundation of the German political system.
When talking about "the government" in Germany, people mean the institutions of the executive (mainly the chancellor and ministries, sometimes also including the president, but never the parliaments and courts).
And tbh, I would also have a hard time describing the US Democratic Party as the "current US government" just because they're sitting in the Congress.
You can see this when people say “[X] is unable to form a government”. They don’t mean unable to form a judiciary.
In the US it’s common to only use it to describe the entire apparatus for holding, administering and enforcing state power.
But it can also be used to mean the current ruling power in a parliamentary system together with the administrative bodies under its direct control. So something more akin to just the executive branch in the US system. And then certain state agencies such as the judiciary are meant to be independent of the government under that meaning of the term. I believe this is the most common understanding of the word outside the US.
Wait ‘til you find out what some of my friends mean when they say “pavement”.
Things were courts with huge power, and consisted of a gathering of all free men and had basically unlimited power, because they were the people. Meanwhile, the government was the person of the king.
I think that's an example of a system where the courts (Thing) is clearly not part of the government.
To what extent this was explicitly coordinated by the government versus people who are merely strongly ideologically aligned with it is unclear; in systems as totalitarian as the UK is becoming it's a distinction without a difference as anyone not so aligned is quickly removed for one plausible reason or another and replaced with someone who is.
> I emailed the chairman, a lackey phoned me to say that it was a commercial decision, which I have to say, I don’t believe for a single moment. So I thought, well, there we are, I’ll have to go and find a different bank. I’ve been to six, no seven banks actually. Ask them all, could I have a personal and a business account? And the answer has been no.
Denied accounts at seven banks, and in the end he was right - the reason Coutts tried to close his account was simply because some woke committee hated him, it was purely political. There are no legal or commercial reasons to deny him an account, yet somehow, every bank does so. With no bank in the UK he cannot make payments and without that ability he cannot live there, so the banks came very close to ensuring that the British people could not vote for him even though Reform is now the most popular party.
The British establishment is entirely homogenous on this, because they claim anyone who supports Farage is insufficiently committed to "diversity and inclusion" (leftism) and thus must be forced out. It's indistinguishable from the banks all being directly controlled by the Labour party. The only reason Farage was able to stay is because Coutts were impatient; it was the dying days of the Conservative administration and they suddenly realized what was about to happen to them if they didn't make changes sharpish, so they stuck the FCA on NatWest and some heads rolled. But if Coutts had waited a bit longer until the next Labour government, there would have been no help coming and British democracy would have become even more sickly and fake than it already is (I say this as a British citizen).
It would be good if you did at least a minimal amount of due diligence before spreading misinformation (but I guess spreading misinformation is the whole point).
The federal government is still stymieing the investigation of the ICE/DHS killings of Minneapolis citizens, violating their own policies requiring investigation.
There's no more federal rule of law until there's a full change in power, and that requires installing a functional DOJ and a new Supreme Court that is more interested in the law than in furthering partisan politics.
For reference as I hadn't heard about it before:
> Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a committee of MPs that up to 210 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the financial measures contained in the Emergencies Act. - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
Hope that curious will find out on their own accord.
The zero-sum mindset that's de rigueur at the moment needs to die soon or the world that we'll inhabit is gonna suck.
I previously thought the same, with Europe and Russia doing lots of trade e.g. Germany buying lots of gas from Russia, and many western companies being present in Russia. It seems obviously true.
But Russia still started a war anyway, so I guess it's not actually true.
Putin or Trump are totally isolated from economical and political consequences so they have no problem severing ties. If there are genuine co-dependencies, including for the leaders, they it's much harder to break peace.
I imagine the ideological aspect is the deeper motivation but it only matters with the right circumstances.
So it's not actually caring about the war and dead people (if we did, we'd do something about what israel is doing in gaza), but "us vs them", and russia is "them" while US was traditionally "us", until daddy Trump came along.
Someone probably told the EU politicians that russia will cave after a month or two of sanctions, there will be some kind of a "revolution" there, someone "pro EU" will be set there, and gas would be even cheaper.... A similar scenario was probably given to Trump for iran (just bomb the government, they'll cave, and you can set up a new pro-US leader there again).
This is why many Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just view monopolies as an economic problem; they viewed it as a direct threat to free and just society.
Though, it's nice to see in this particular case that a near monopoly player gets unseated and creates room for innovation.
That's crazy. There's no way that's the case today though as learning about basic computers+office (which implicitly includes how to run apps) is pretty standard in schools, and is a requirement for relevant positions. And the alternatives have a mostly similar UI, so the only differences people really need to deal with is ribbon vs traditional toolbar and a few other minor items, which can be covered in a couple of meetings for the more dense employees.
I had computer lessons in school, but I don't think those are universal any more, and that part of the curriculum has just been swallowed up by other lessons always using a tablet or Chromebook, meaning the kids never learn the foundation (to the extent there ever was one. It's not like I learned about common UI elements or anything back then. I figured those out by being interested in computers), but just learn what they have to by osmosis. This obviously varies depending on country and curriculum.
windows -> linux mint OR reactOS OR OpenSUSE OR NIXos ( their choice) and many more
excel -> many of them as well as google spread sheet for free
Word -> Gazillion editors on open source; some much much better; and there is free google editor to boot
PowerPoint-> again Gazillion opensource replacements
Paint-> is a joke. Open source stuff is 10 times better
I don't want to advertise these products but you have access to search engines; look it up..
What is it that you think is so special? The only reason people are using the stuff is momentum carried from the past and PC being sold preloaded with windows.
In my opinion that is.
Not at all viable for daily use. Better you said ZorinOS (Linux distro with a very Windows feel; used it myself for a few months during my transition from Windows over 10 years ago).
Here; they replacing windows.. the packages they have listed are open source aka typically free to use https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...
Thankfully what you're describing is a switching cost, not a permanently higher operating cost. Once the monopoly is broken and the state is using open source tools, there's every reason to believe it will be cheaper - no expensive proprietary certifications etc.
It would be unbelievable that the US would rather continue facilitating a genocide than retain Microsoft's global enterprise software monopoly, had they not already destroyed the UN, the ICC, and the global economy for that goal.
All they had to do was make keep the other costs lower than the switching costs, and they could've continued setting terms forever.
All your negotiation power across the world, gone, because of one Orange person.
And not because he secretly took power, because you elected him, twice.
I guess you're in the 22%
> Are you seriously suggesting America's influence is increasing?!
I'm not sure. In some ways yes, in other ways no. It's also changing. Negotiation doesn't always look like two countries come together and have a handshake and photo opportunity and declare some thing. But the OP is implying "it's all gone". That's just incorrect. America by virtue of simply being America always has a seat at the table.
If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft has trouble competing when the playing field is even remotely level.
Besides, technically, if you're chosing an OS in 2026, it sounds like a good plan to start with a system that has many reproducibility, correctness properties and separated packages designed in from the start.
Now, I'm not a NixOS user (altering mostly between win,fbsd,osX and some debians), maybe there's some horrible dragons lurking in using it in practice (do share in that case), but from reading about it sounds like a plan for a system used in a future where people don't need to curse too much about legacy decisions?
As for practical use, sure there are some rough corners (this is true for every Linux distro), but I don't think there's any horrible showstoppers. In fact it's particularly well-suited for use by organizations (as opposed to private individual use) because it's great for making highly customized but reproducible setups.
Nix has numerous properties that make it unsuitable for a normal desktop OS:
(1) It has no concept of libraries being backwards compatible, so if a 200kb core library changes in a backwards compatible way e.g. security hotfix, it will rebuild/redownload pretty much everything you have installed. This kills your ability to roll out security fixes quickly and ensures that updates are far more painful for end users than even on Windows.
(2) Nix advertises its main benefit as being that you can easily roll back bad updates, which is just false. It makes this false claim because Nix treats user state as being out of scope. Try upgrading Postgres across major versions with Nix and then rolling it back and see what happens, or really any program that stores stuff in $HOME and doesn't support rollback. It'll just die, make a mess, and Nix will wash its hands of the affair by saying it did the bit it wanted to do (change the binaries on your path) and the rest is just out of scope.
(3) It has no working concept of native plugins, related to point (1). If two plugins depend on slightly different versions of their host program, they'll just load incompatible libraries into the address space and things will crash.
(4) It cannot run binaries shipped for generic Linux without lots of fragile hacks like binary rewrites. But in the real world lots of important domain-specific programs are shipped as binaries, if they support Linux at all.
I'm not sure why they chose nix. But it does make it easier to carry local patches than a lot of other systems. I hope they succeed.
As a positive thing, maybe at least nixos will get a serious security pipeline rather than the current best-effort community approach.
Couldn't have come at a worst time for the US and best for the rest of us. With Omachy (or however you write it), building decent OSes is about to be much easier.
I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems. You can just do things when you want to. You literally have that power. Exercise it for once FFS.
The Dutch government can famously prevent sales of German and Luxembourgish companies yes.
Its probably a good thing they do not have a standard, or at this point it would be Windows and pushing change through at the EU level would not be fast.
Not on defense and national security, that's up to individual EU member states, but the EU does veto corporate mergers and acquisitions on Competition Law (Antitrust). So just find a loophole in that and use it to prevent SUSE be taken over by non-EU nations.
The European Commission could definitely ask governments (the European Council) to agree a new treaty or protocol that grants them veto powers on "federal security grounds", for sure. The European Parliament would likely rubber-stamp it too. Considering the current (and increasing) right-wing majorities across the continent, though, I find such scenario very unlikely.
You can always "just do things" whenever you want by interpreting or changing the laws first to fit your desired goal. And so there, now it's legal, because I just changed the rules to make it so.
Same how the "we'll now have to accept all those migrants illegally crossing our border without asking our voters if its what they want" was done, they decided overnight that its legal. Or how they can just block the right wing from winning elections in order to "just protect democracy".
We're already under tyrannical rule, except the system abuse just acts on the wrong topics.
In the UK it was the right wing Conservative party which introduced same sex marriage. I am pretty sure the Republicans are unlikely to do that.
Of course some things are clear. Privatisation is right wing, nationalisation is left wing, but you never really had the latter in the US!
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/12/02/us-blocks-chi...
Constituent states rightly can choose to make their own decisions in matters like this, it hardly effects anyone else, and they can choose to collaborate.
How is that in reverse to what I said? I said the same thing, and explained why this isn't actually happening.
Yeah but when it comes to national sovereignty you can't let your own products get steamrolled by the entrenched monopolies of your adversaries (Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc) just because you're gullible and still think you can play by the rules of idealistic 'free market' and come out on top, while your adversaries protect their monopolies to weaponize them against you on the "free market", suppressing or destroying your domestic industry and making you indefinitely dependent on them (US big-tech, Chinese EV industry, etc).
China has achieved a SW industry superior to the EU with much less money, simply because it has banned US big-tech from its market, preventing its own small domestic players from being crushed by US giants. It's also how countries like Italy, Japan and Korea built strong car industries post-WW2, as they banned superior import cars (often US ones) from their markets, till their own industry could catch up and be competitive internationally. India does the same.
The problem has more to do with the weak sense of belonging to a supranational identity. Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. Change is slow.
You don't need to completely erase and crush ethnic and national identities in order to standardize on technical platform for the common market.
Last time I looked it was a Swedish owned German company. The government of the Netherlands has limited power there. Given its history and performance its quite likely to get sold and might end up in American or Chinese hands or anything really.
I think this has a lot to do with how the case against Putin was built and Trump used his influence to disrupt it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Anyway I don't support ICC grabbing power it does not have over other countries who do not sign on.
If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
I am wondering if every war time leader should expect an ICC indictment.
One can only hope. It may actually reduce the numbers of wars if our "leaders" knew they would have to justify their actions in court.
NAZA
Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute and the court has not officially opened a case against Iranian leaders.
However, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, Commander-in-Chief of Hamas' military wing for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the October 7 attacks.
Neither are Israel or Russia, so the point is moot.
It's the ultimate expression of US corruption. There's not even a pretense of fighting for justice any more, just fighting justice.
The US can't even win a war in the middle east without NATO
What is the US going to do when China starts making their own moves?
That is false. The US could win a war in the middle east without NATO.
The US has consistently chosen not to attempt to do so, but there is every reason to think they could. It is good that the US mostly tries to work with NATO on the middle east (and bad that Trump has not).
The US has also consistently chosen to send minimal ground forces, and when they do send them they are very careful to protect the lives of their soldiers at the expense of winning.
However there remains every reason to think the US could make different decisions and win wars in the middle east alone.
By the way, if it wasn’t for the Russia’s ill fated war, the Chinese would have high-speed rail built out all the way to Europe, and would be making plans to build out all the way to South Africa, the Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and are gonna have Thorium up and running sometime in the early 2030s.
When it comes to Mercantile and Infrastructure China is one step ahead.
I don't know where your US rail system comparison comes from, but the US rail system is not stuck in the 1950s, the US rail system is the best in the world and has innovated. You might be thinking about passenger rail, but that is small subset of rail and not useful for most US needs.
Pan American highway or Pan American - these are feel good ideas of questionable benefit. They would sound good on paper, but they would not be useful for much: flying is faster (and probably cheaper) for things that need speed, while the nearby ocean is much cheaper for things that don't need speed.
Would NATO change the equation?
Russia is currently learning that lesson again. After Afghanistan, in the Ukraine, for the US to have any chance of winning in Iran the US needs at least half a million people on the ground. With a trillion dollar bankroll?
The United States is reaching the end. When it comes to the amount of money needed, let alone the human cost, and to top it off, while we’re slogging around in the sand in Iran at every level, we will be getting weaker in relationship to China and the world.
How well do you think a draft is going to go? forced on an armed populace that might not want to die in iran?
I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.
Oh wait, it is.
But it’s ok because Us President has made it clear the the USA doesn’t need anything Europe has. So, not a problem.
This is an honest question, I'm trying my best to word it to not sound like a troll.
ASML was permitted to acquire Cymer in 2013 during the Obama administration under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government.
The R&D, technology, manufacturing, and all other operations had to remain in the US.
A tiny fraction of the technology itself started as an ineffective "American" invention, copying a Japanese discovery/invention. In fact when ASML acquired the company, specifically because it couldn't do what they wanted and they needed to vastly improve it, a Japanese company had a superior product in the same space, but ASML saw the Japanese company as too much political baggage given how protectionist the Japanese often are.
How funny it all turned out, right?
> [...] the program was aimed at refreshing the technologies used by the Dutch government in such a way that it would no longer be in a situation where it could lose access to critical systems at the whim of a foreign country
How does switching desktop OS help you retain access to email and payment services, neither of which care about your OS?