Aceticon

I do that for my own native language - Portuguese - because some words I only learned or mostly used when I was living abroad or from sources in other languages so the word that pops in my mind isn't in Portuguese (generally its in English but sometimes in other languages).

This is especially so for technical words and often used words which are close in both languages but not exactly the same.

So this actually can happen when you're multilingual (and is weird as fuck, IMHO) and I do have the feeling that for some people who don't know me well, me saying "I don't remember this word in Portuguese" can come out as me being pretentious and showing off my language skills (especially if the word I remember is in a language other than English, since around here and for my generation knowing English isn't really unusual) when for me it's almost the opposite and I actually feel that I'm supposed to know it.

Given Trump's relation with reality and mental age, the formalism are irrelevant: in his mind if he has the shinny thing then the prize is his.

My point is that the same mindset that's relaxed about and even excuses some practices that harm some people is also relaxed about and excuse the same and other practices that harm other people.

Notice how the EU just succumbed to lobbying from part of the European Auto Industry and cancelled the whole "ICE car sales ban from 2035" having even before that put extra tariffs on EV cars from China (so, not quite as extreme as the US, but none the less a caving to EU auto makers) to help big auto makers in Europe who refuse to transition to EVs (and this at a time where Diesel polution kills about 10,000 people a year in the EU, so they're literally putting the interests of large auto makers over the lives of people).

You know what they could've done instead?

Subsidies for European auto manufactures with a large percentage of EV car sales relative to ICE cars (which, if high enough would mean lots of money for subsidizing smaller companies to grow and replace the larger ones if the large makers don't increase their EV sales rather than keeping on extracting juicy margings from ICE SUVs).

The problem in Europe is political capture by dinossaur businesses which would rather make believe the next great Tech Revolution - around Renewables - isn't happening and have pretty much bought politicians to make sure Europeans and smaller European companies can't easilly benefit from it.

Europe has the Tech capability to go there but the current political structure (late stage Neoliberal Capitalism) were politicians mainly represent large economic interests (not only above citizens but even above small and mid-size businesses) means that at best politicians simply refuse to send serious money to forward-looking disruptive businesses or forcing the pricing-in of things like Environmental costs in products made by large companies, whilst at worst actually making laws to reduce everybody's options to move away from buying the products of said large companies.

It might look as an economic and progress problem at first sight, but dive any further and you'll see Economic options being shaped by Politics (in some cases simply by Politicians in Europe choosing "not to intervene in Markets" but only for markets dominated by big players, in other cases by making laws which de facto activelly obstruct adoption of improved Tech) and in turn Politics being shaped by Big Money.

I think the previous poster was absolutelly correct in their interpretation of the West's problem in this as broader societal problems.

Mind you, I don't even think that China's political system is all that great - rather I think that in the present day the power structures in the West (more in the US, but also to quiet an extent in Europe) are actually hindering the moving forward even whilst there's plenty of capability to do so (certainly in Europe which mainly has invested massivelly in things like Higher Education).

The US was already been past its peak as an Imperial Power since at least the 2008 Crash (though if you look at things like social mobility in the US, the seeds of it go all the way back to the 70s when the country started becoming ever less a "land of opportunity"), but Trump has definitelly accelerated the decay by a huge factor.

That said, at some point a far-right populist portraying himself as "man of the people" who will "bring back national greatness" like Trump getting power, is historically pretty common in nations which have reached a peak of great power and started decaying from there - in other words, if it wasn't Trump, this stage of the circle of prosperity and decay would in the US have delivered power to some other similar character.

It would be great if they contributed to open source projects like the Heroic Launcher, Lutris and even Wine and DXVK.

IMHO yet another store-exclusive (even worse if closed-source) sales + launcher application for Linux wouldn't really be a step forward for Linux.

I expect that anybody who doesn't have a fanboy relationship towards Steam already does or will if they just think a little bit, see that an open-source store-independent universal games launcher is way more free and open (and hence aligned with the Linux ethos and immune to enshittification) than any store-exclusive sales + launcher app.

As it so happens, given that freedom in gaming is GOGs unique value proposition, business-wise it's IMHO more advantageous for them to (very loudly and very visibly) support open source universal launchers (and maybe even some kind of open games store front protocol and open source implementation) and windows gaming adaptor layers (like Wine) serving a community with a higher awareness of the need for Software Freedom, than pushing yet another proprietary (even if open source) launcher that only works with their store - a seamless universal launcher is far more likely to pull people away from the Steam App than a GOG App.

Under such a strategy some soft marketing of in their store website promoting Linux Gaming Distros for Windows users and of promoting those universal launchers for Linux users, might help pull more people away from the closed-source store-specific application of their biggest competitor.

They have nothing to lose in doing so.

At worst "conversations" delay an American invasion giving more time for Denmark to prepare.

Any half-competent diplomat will ignore "pride" as a consideration for a chance and stopping a war or giving their own side's military more time to prepare, with no actual downside (i.e. the exact same outcome as if they didn't engage in "conversations" if that fails).

Also no doubt a lot of "out of the spotlight" work is going into convicing the members of that Administration who are actually intelligent types putting on a show for Trump and the public that such a move will indirectly be bad for them personally because of the downsides for the people who own them - big American businesses - of turning Europe into an Enemy rather than merely a trade competitor.

The immediatelly obvious reason is that you can't really have resource extraction operations in a nuclear wasteland, so Greenland (which is what I assume you were trying to spell) would become useless for them.

The next big reason is the same as why Russia isn't doing it in Ukraine - any nation that agressivelly uses nukes will be turned on by everybody else and end up nuked themselves, because if nuclear aggression is not severely punished, other countries will go nuclear ASAP with more and more countries actually using nukes in war, incentivising even more countries to go nuclear and use nukes, a vicious cycle which is guaranteed to end with all life on planet Earth dead. Specifically in the case of Greenland, it would be an attack on Europe which not only already has 2 nuclear armed nations but also is the region in the World with the most non-nuclear countries with the knowhow and technology to go nuclear very fast if they feel threathened, so the delay between America attacking European territory with nukes and ending up a nuclear wasteland itself would be a lot smaller than if America had attacked with nukes, say, countries in Latin America (and even that would end up with America turned into glass, it would just take longer).

Obviously the highest levels of the American Military know this (its not as if they haven't run countless scenarios on it) and would be far more likely to choose to assassinate Trump if he ever gave such an order (which would be even easier to do than the whole "Kidnap Maduro" thing) than to nuke an European nation and start a cycle that would end up with cockroaches being the dominant species of this planet.

America totally sucks at actually annexing territory (so, not merely conquering, but actually all the way to making it part of its own territory), with the last successful instance of doing it being Puerto Rico during the Spainish-American War back at the end of the 19th Century.

So of those you listed, maybe Greenland would be possible to actually annex due to its tiny population - Americans could literally just kick everybody else out, by which point the place is just empty land which can be treated like some kind of North Atlantic oil platform that just happens not to be floating, which is fine if all you want to do there is exploit mineral resources that don't require much manpower to extract - as well as the small european occupied islands like Azores (though what would be the point of getting Azores since it has zero mineral resources and the only real value of its economic exclusive area is for Fishing which is a low economic value activity that requires quiet a lot more manpower than oil extraction).

Certainly actually annexing a South American country would almost certainly turn into a quagmire for America in the same style as Vietnam.

I mean, if you currently look at Venezuela, for all of Trump's strutting like a rooster on it, it's not actually occupied by America (zero boots on the ground) and any real American gains extracted from it (which in reality are far less than Trump's proclamations would make it seem) come from literally blackmailing the individuals in leadership there with "if you don't do what I demand I'll do to you personally the same I did to Maduro" - that situation is not at all one where America owns Venezuela.

I'm doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.

It's not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think "I want me some of that" - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.

Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn't at all about money - open source - isn't about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.

It's kinda like 20 or 30 years ago when Banks looked at cash payments and thought that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they got with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments so that relentless push for controlling and getting a cut of every single trade has worked in those countries (and people in those places, such as Sweden, having traded a small hidden increase in price - due to banks now getting comissions in everything - and huge loss of privacy for a tiny bit of convenience genuinelly think they're better of).

So yeah, these software fatcats will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the "trusted" in "trusted platform" (aka TPM) isn't about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it's about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.

I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn't actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft, whilst as we see here other companies are trying to created closed platforms by having everything run in their servers, like Google tried almost a decade ago for games with Stadia and was also tried 2 or 3 decades ago by the likes of Sun Microsystems with the push for Thin Clients.

Personally at this point I'm looking at it even more generally: anybody whose Morality is such that they're OK with the mass murdering of children in Gaza by Zionist for the "crime" of being Palestinian (the list of just babies 1 year old or younger killed by the Israelis just in the first 3 months of the Genocide is 17 pages long) isn't going to Morally be above "merelly" using little children for sexual pleasure or more broadly the use of violence to force other human beings to do what you want that's the core of Fascist thinking, especially the Nazi kind.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that somebody who justifies and supports any one form of extreme Evil is going to at the very least be uncaring in the face of other forms of extreme Evil.