What happens instead is that the established parties decide they can win the voters back if they adopt far-right policies. We get extra-shitty governance and they still lose voters. It’s a lose-lose situation but they’re committed.

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.

“Unintuitively, there is more than one employer in the world and I happened to work for a different one previously. I know; I’m as surprised and vaguely terrified as you are. Please let me help you put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon.”

“Certainly! What makes you think that there is more than one employer in the world and you happened to work for a different one previously. You know; you’re as surprised and vaguely terrified as I am. Please let you help me put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon?”

Planes generally don’t go on rails so maybe that’s a factor.

Doesn’t that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?

Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can’t really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can’t even really theme them.

They’re within the European Broadcasting Area like all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea (plus some adjacent ones). Bring in the EBA is more important here than being in Europe is. There’s no reason why Egypt or Iraq can’t participate.

Okay, there is one – most Arab countries refuse to participate while Israel does. But if Israel didn’t participate they’d be perfectly fine with showing up.

Oh, and there’s one big exemption: Australia can participate because they’ve been such big ESC fans for so long that we invited them for the 60th one as a one-off and then decided to keep them in because they’re cool. It’s pretty wholesome, which is very much in tune with the spirit of the ESC.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.