EU is a giant mess at this point, and it's really not clear to me how it's going to move forward. The EU doesn't appear to have a coherent strategy on how to deal with the US, Russia, or China. It's becoming geopolitically irrelevant, and the economy is going into a recession. The apparatchiks running the project don't seem to have any bright ideas or even basic awareness of the problems EU is facing.
Js is indeed painful. I find the right approach is to simply treat it as a compile target. I've worked with ClojureScript when I had to do front end work, and I find it's a huge improvement because it has sane language semantics. You have things like proper equality, comparison by value, immutable data structures, and so on. It's not perfect because you still have to deal with stuff like source maps to get errors out of minified bundles, and you have to interop when you deal with Js libraries, but it's a huge improvement overall I've found.
The US worked hard since WW2 to ensure that Europe would be politically subservient to the US. The Marshall Plan indebted Europe to the US, and NATO made Europe militarily dependent. Such economic and military dependence necessarily led to Atlanticist politicians rising to the top. Incidentally, the EU makes the whole problem worse because the bureaucracy there is not accountable to the people living in individual European countries.
Hating Russia is basically the sole requirement for advancing in EU politics.
We might just have to wait for China to definitively surpass the west, and act as an example of what could be.
For the same reason Republicans haven't released the Epstien client list. Many of them and their donors are on the list.
the most self aware liberal
Oh thanks, I love me some Red Sails. :)
One huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.
Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they're not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they're forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they've been doing.
This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don't like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.
Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there's an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there's little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It's easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.
I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.
This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It's a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.
Oh yeah, once you start seeing it, you realize that we're swimming in propaganda and people are simply regurgitating it uncritically like chatbots.
Not really, because the main alternative to the neoliberal centre seems to be on the right. I'm really not sure what to expect in Europe in the coming years.