Well, its a nice opportunity to get insight into a war with near peer adversaries, especially for a country like China who hasn’t fought in a bigger conflict in the last decades. And i bet its also nice for China having a good look into the russian tactics…

Ten years ago i would have agreed with your assesment of the situation, but today? I am pretty sure they were aware what they were doing.

Well… my apprentice and me, we are rolling the show! And how we manage this contraption? 90s style sneaker-admin!

Well, its not overly complicated:

On most of the clients we are now running OpenSUSE Leap, but for now we still need to run a few Windows boxes for our ERP system. Luckily, the next update of this system will make it browser based, so the clock for those system is ticking. Another thing that will keep two machines on Windows is the goddamn Datev…

For other tools we are now settled in on this solutions:

• Paperless-NGX as document management solution
• Seafile as cloud storage
• Libreoffice as office suite
• Thunderbird + Firefox as email / browser combo
• Etherpad-lite and Ethercalc for collaborative editing needs

Everything is locally hosted.

As a german, working in the IT sector for a bit over 25 years I say: The alternatives are there, but the pain isn’t hurting enough to finally force us out of the walled gardens.

It took me years to convince the company I work for to ditch big tech, and we are just a small (<50 employees) company.

At the moment i think China is the lesser of two evils. Yeah, its not a democracy and China does things that benefits China, but it has one thing that the OTHER evil has lost recently: Predictability.

I - as my personal opinion - think he is more a case for the 2nd amendment…

In the beginning, even after the “Machtergreifung”, it was fairly ok to insult Hitler and make fun of the Nazis. They thought, its a form of venting for the population, preventing REAL resistance. Though, this changed later. There is a good ARTE documentary about this “Humor unterm Hakenkreuz”.

So, regarding the US… just wait a while…

Why should Europe leave the influence of the US just to bow to another hegemon? Why shouldn’t we do our own thing?

Of course he does.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Well, perhaps something good comes out of this… a world where there is no hegemon, no tech-giants and way less populism… one may dream…

The real, and quiet fast acting “bazooka” (of the “Davy Crockett” type) could come from the european population itself:

• Do not buy american goods
• Do not visit the US
• Do not invest in the US

Well… you may be not, Mr. Šefčovič, but i, for once, am absolutely in the business for “BURN IT ALL DOWN”…

Just my two €-cent

Well, I sincerely hope the EUs answer to it will be “get lost”. We should not, we can not let us extort by a wannabe Mafia boss.

I think we are now finally at a point where the individual choices either make you a part of the solution… or of the problem. A neutral, “I don’t care” stance puts a person in the later of the two categories.

That is not what i meant, what i wanted to say is: “Would you trust software from Russia without having completely audited the code?”.

I don’t think that this is a good idea… after the LHC was activated in 2008 we somehow broke the universe and ended up in THIS timeline, i don’t want to think about the possibilities if they activate an even bigger particle collider!

The thing is… would you trust a software that is developed in russia (without a full code audit)? I think at the moment its the same with anything coming from the US.

Well, in reality its only a step back into the 80s when the Bundeswehr was quiet well armed, and one shouldn’t forget that the conscription was only put on hold in 2010 and never really abolished.

Honestly, I think this is a good thing. I am old enough to have witnessed the last time we Europeans were pissed at the US during the time of George W. Bush. Back then I hoped the EU would break free from their dependency of the US… perhaps this time it finally happens.