copacetic

I missed that news: official UN news and also the Guardian.

The decision was a "closed-door vote among the 125-member Assembly of States Parties". So we don't know how EU members voted there.

If they store their goods in Poland, it means some company in Poland is importing the goods and we can hold this company accountable for safety standards. The problem is only the packages which go directly to consumers, I think.

They say the plan to follow the Deepseek approach, which would be "open-weight", not "open source".

This makes it easier for many to try Mistral because many already use MS Foundry and you can easily switch models. In contrast, getting through the bureaucracy of negotiating a contract with yet another provider, Mistral, is harder.

However, Mistral via MS is not as sovereign as Mistral directly even though Microsoft wants you to believe that:

In a joint interview with Reuters, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said the partnership aimed to deliver ​such sovereignty while allowing access to US software and security features.

Europe is certainly behind the Frontier Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. China is close behind and we should be happy that they publish their models. Mistral does not seem to have the ambition/budget to challenge the state of the art.

We do have some nice specialist model in Europe. We guess we have the data centers although they are unfortunately owned by US companies mostly.

So, I'd say no we can not hold our own. We are second class. That is not catastrophic but also nothing to be proud of.

I assume Germany will veto this hard. We are very afraid of debt.

Germany being especially bureaucratic is a myth. It is roughly the same as in US and France in this study, for example. Germany is just average bureaucratically.

Still, that myth may indeed scare off immigrants.

Georgia Meloni is her name. Two quotes from Wikipedia about her party:

Meloni's tenure has been described as the "most right-wing" government in Italy since World War II, whilst her time in government is variously described as a shift towards the far-right in Italian politics.

Academics and observers have variously described it as conservative, national-conservative, social-conservative, right-wing populist, nationalist, neo-fascist, post-fascist, and nativist.

It's too early, but EuroMoMo does not show an abnormal peak so far:

Well, it mostly shows that flu season is more deadly than a heat.

The previous government also tried to fix it and the one before as well. They all failed. So I don't expect the Merz gang to achieve anything.

The €500 billion special fund for military spending had a big impact. For example, mortgage interest rates immediately jumped by 0,5%.

You cannot fix the German economy by fiddling with income taxes a little. There is also lots of things the German government cannot do (e.g., ECB interests rates, Volkswagen business strategy).

I believe the biggest lever they have is to build residential areas to reduce housing costs. That shows up in the reform package but only in vague terms:

18. Wohnungsbau: Es wird eine Wohnungsbaugesellschaft für bezahlbares Wohnen (WBG) errichtet. Ziel ist es, vermehrt Wohnungen im bezahlbaren Preissegment zu bauen, wo der Wohnungsmarkt auf Dauer nicht ausreichend bezahlbaren Wohnraum bereitstellt. Die WBG soll den sozialen Wohnungsbau sowie den industriellen Hochlauf seriellen Bauens unterstützen und insbesondere in Regionen mit nachgewiesenem Wohnungsmangel tätig werden.

So they want to create some kind of association to build cheap housing. No timeline, no budget, no goals.

For example, they plan to reduce taxes by 10 billion. Their example is "family of four with 60k income gets a reduction of 600 in 2028".

Germany's GDP is 4470 billion. These 10 billion do not make any significant difference on the grand scale.

On the personal scale, for this family of four, its +50€ per month or +12,50€ per person per month. Also not much of a difference.

Inflation makes a bigger difference than that by 2028. Also, here I just account for the tax aspect. This family will face increased costs to pay for pensions and stuff and it might well be a net negative for them. I'll wait for some professionals, like the DIW, to calculate that.