Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.

Source (the colorful graph in the middle of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in “MWh per 15 minutes” (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)

What is this worth, given that spring is approaching?

Please let us recall the Capitol attack. It was much, much worse, targeting not cars, but people and democracy itself.

(As for Elon, it is important to recall that back then, neither he nor any other liberal magnate had free access to the oval office and his own-or-technically-maybe-not-his-own government agency. His status is wholly unprecedented.)

I would even go so far as to say let’s hope that China steps in, too.

(Disclaimer: I’m not American.)

Not to argue for vandalism, but with the US government illegally detaining and deporting people for saying things that right wingers don’t like, I don’t think the MAGA crowd retains significant reservations about engaging in vandalism themselves – it’s just that so far they haven’t spotted a target where it would serve their cause to do so, and because, with the federal government in their hands, Republicans have much more effective and ostensibly legal methods at their disposal. (Should Republicans be voted out of power eventually, there will most certainly be vandalism from the right, conceivably even widespread violence against people, but this will probably be the case irrespective of whether Teslas keep exploding due to vandalism or only due to bad engineering.)

At this point, a perspective might be that it’s no longer about “a political goal”, but about preventing permanent loss of the ability of the people to achieve anything at all through democratic means.

Still, though: Even with this in mind, it’s utterly true that one should be careful about cheering for any such actions.

Andy Yen went on to make an explanatory statement on Reddit, which provides a few insights: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/

For one thing, from the context of the original tweet – which referenced a screenshot of some other person’s statement – “little guys” was quite certainly meant not as consumers but as “little tech” as opposed to “big tech”. One might still consider it irresponsible and shitty to say anything good about the Grand Oligarchic Party, but what he said was not as deranged as it is often taken to be. And indeed, the Democrats do also have a long-standing problem of being in liaison with billionaire donors in particular from the tech industry (remember, Peter Thiel used to be an outsider in Silicon Valley with his pro-Trump stance); it was only rather recently that most of the billionaires decided that their interests are much better served by “Republicans”.

I’m still not using Proton though. When I get around to switching to a paid provider, the favourites right now are posteo or mailbox.org, but everything could change depending on what cloud plans they offer. And! it’s highly plausible that we’re going to see several new attractive offers being made in the next few weeks or months, so it might pay off to delay switching just a little bit.

(For calendars, by the way, teamup.com is really, really awesome. It’s Swiss.)

Yeah, I think at scale what we can do is to provide grassroots political support for this push. So that could in fact become our major task: To figure out collectively what to do next: what to demand or build, and how to gather support for it.

True on the one hand, but on the other hand, at least the EU/its member countries have sharper teeth with regards to antitrust measures and customer protection than the US have.

To be fair, though, iirc a lot of IT corporations have their German headquarters in Munich.