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A clip from a comedic fiction TV series? So much for a "strong case to be made"...

Could you elaborate regarding how exactly were eastern bloc countries "tricked" into joining by the UK? And what prevents them from leaving now that the tricksters from UK have long since left themselves?

> This is the other part: if associate membership is a thing then won't half of the EU start thinking that's their future?

Presumably by "half of the EU" you mean (sometimes) euro-sceptic states like Hungary or Poland? Well, these are not in EU because some illuminati/lizard people tricked them into joining and now won't allow them to leave, like some of their politicians would like you to believe, but because they enjoy billions of subsidies per year.

> They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.

If it is "not obvious to you how they extract the value", you can just look for NET (their ticker) earning reports and SEC fillings since they are a publicly traded company instead of spreading conspiracy theories...

> When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.

> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:

- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).

- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.

- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.

> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.

You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

I agree with your message overall, but this kind of, I dunno, martyrdom posturing ("But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.", "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy") is funny to see on HN. This is not Xitter or Reddit, no one is going to ban or attempt to dox you and get you fired for saying "We should seriously consider injecting reflective stuff into stratosphere" here. In fact, your message will likely even have a positive rating overall.

> Imagine 8 years of Bernie

As a person who was born in the Soviet Union I can easily imagine that...

For oldschool shooter experience you can just install Quake Live from Steam. You won't have trouble finding active servers in it.

> Is Gemini really that bad?

It still produce full-blown hallucinations for me sometimes, even in 2026. The kinds ChatGPT stopped generating by 2025. It is cheap and fast though.

> Highlights on my smartphone are Fennec (Firefox), Termux, Cromite, Element, Syncthing, various videogames and other utilities.

What is even their motivation to not be backed up?

Yes, they may just be laying the groundwork for introducing compliance requirements for VPN providers while the concept of VPN itself as a tool will always remain lawful by itself. Same as a messaging apps - they are completely lawful but France would arrest CEOs of businesses around them if they are not cooperative enough with "law enforcement".

I would assume that the problem with California aquifer is (mostly) a consequence of its Democratic state government decisions and it is highly unlikely that electing Hilary or Kamala would have prevented it.