Dutch Spy Services Have Restricted Intelligence-Sharing with the United States

10 guys in Northern VA are making those calls, not the forward deployed engineers and not your infra.

palantir dials home at some point to verify a license, right?

Also, if you think the US was a proper democracy, I have news for you - it wasn't. It has been an alternating two-party system that prevents the system from evolving beyond its current state. In a real democracy, information from the voter would be maximized, the first result of which would be to transform it beyond a rigid two-party system. The voting system would not be first-past-the-post. Superior forms of voting such as Ranked Choice and Range Voting would not be banned as they are in numerous red states; they would be welcomed. People would not be denied the right to vote. Gerrymandering wouldn't be a thing.

Wake up and see the truth for the darkness it is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Source: I was inside one of their offices for a few Azure trainings.

Then as we grew the finance team, they found that Google Docs couldn't handle the spreadsheets they needed, and even Excel on Mac wasn't compatible.

So, the Finance team started running VM's where they could run Windows and native Excel. Then as they grew (in size and power) they found themselves using the VM so much that they started moving from Mac to Windows laptops. Then as our windows footprint grew, more and more departments started requesting Windows.

When I left around 25% of the ~1000 person company was on Windows (almost all on the corporate admin side, engineering remained overwhelmingly on Mac), and the Windows support team was twice as large as the team that managed the Mac infrastructure.

But even knowledge that your department must support non-Microsoft way is good, as it helps getting at least some parts vendor-neutral.

Same as security -- there's no perfect security, but the grade matters a lot.

But even knowledge that your department must support non-Microsoft way is good, as it helps getting at least some parts vendor-neutral.

Same as security -- there's no perfect security, but the grade matters.

That this is the strategy being deployed is so far without meaningful evidence as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

It appears far more scattergun, corrupted, ignorant, incompetent and focused on the aggrandisement of US leadership than really at any time in US history.

I've lived in the US and in Europe and the UK. Shared culture is still very significant. If anything, maybe even closer now than in the 90s.

There's probably other reasons to think about the why and how of alliances than these.

Which European countries would you consider to be socialist? Or perhaps a better question is what makes a country socialist?

Which personal freedoms are different in the US vs Europe?

I've lived in both US and Europe, and have an opinion on this, but really would like your take.

  > socialism vs capitalism

What is different is that there is more opposition and cultural resistance to hyper capitalism. Think monopolies, corporatism, live-to-work, hustle-culture.

With regards to any messaging about "freedom" in the USA, be vigilant, I do think people will be unpleasantly surprised about what has been transacted away. Personal freedoms are indeed extremely important, so zero Schadenfreude here. And yes, those lobby groups in the EU fail to get their stupid anti-encryption laws passed, but they keep trying, so it is frightening. Citizens and visitors of the Five Eyes have lost any privacy already, but we need all of us to fight back.

TLDR: it is better to cooperate around common causes than to fight imaginary opponents. We are in the same boat.

In other words, you mean there isn't any country that you think could be an ally to the US?

Can you name any?

Or what does that even mean to you. Is socialism when state exists? You are not first American to say that, and every time it happens, I'm genuinely surprised. (I mean, rhetorical question. I suppose that's what socialism is to you. And you are a part of a problem too, because you are growing up internally people who genuinely believe that socialism is good because it means healthcare and higher education. Words no longer have meaning to you in America.)