Who is this serving at this point?

To Putin to stay in power

There are a lot of reasons that wouldn’t fly in the US:

I don’t think that Dacia target market are the US

Bold of him to think to be still in power in 14/16 years…

Yes, they are willing to do it but probably only up to a point, I don’t see them to accept so easily to lose their biggest market basically overnight.

And once lost, I don’t really think they can get back

Good luck to them, it’s easier for them to make demands since they don’t make the decisions.

We don’t need to sanction US, we just need to close the loopholes that allow the US tech to not pay taxes in EU. As simple as that.

As Italian, I can say the most of us like to hate EU for the Lira/Euro exchange because it is easier to blame someone else than admitting that most of us tried to fuck up their connationals.

A lot of people would be convinced to be against it by the same people who supported Trump: his billionaire friends. Do you really think that if this joke of a president start a war against EU (and, as sidenote, against NATO) services from Meta, MS and all the other American tech companies would continue as is ? Who do you think will be hit in the pocket ?

Back at the time I used Mailman, it have a web interface and it should be easy enough to install on every distro. For example, KDE’s mailing lists are handled with it

Start with a email list and then try to get together in a pub or somthing like this on a regular basis.

If the LUG gains ground begin to look to some place where you can get together and eventually keep some hardware.
If possible, once the LUG has some regulars, look into joning some events, maybe as guest at a booth

Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine

Yeah, me too. But home automation has its usercase: just think about an holiday home where you want to turn on the heating and the boiler the day before you arrive.
Sure, you can ask a local friend to do it for you but being able to do it remotely is nice.

Millions of flats that are private properties, and people could do whatever they want with them.

But the assumption is that once AirBnb and the likes are regulated and somehow people could not short rent all these houses, they will be available in the long rent market. And that assumption is all but true.

Italy has about 30% of empty houses (and by empty I mean they are not even on the short term rental market) even with AirBnb around. And the reason is that is hard to get rid of a bad tenant once you rented the house, so people prefer to put houses on AirBnb or just keep them emply and take the temporary loss.

Sure, AirBnb let you make more money but the untold truth is that if you put an house on AirBnb you can have it back as soon as you decide it by just stop listing it. On a long term rent you need to wait months, if not years, and only if you have a good tenants, if you have bad tenants good luck.

They will clampdown on short terms rental only to end with a lot of empty houses. AirBnb and the like are only the wrong answer to a problem, not the problem themself

And just out of plain stupidity they’ve decided to reject the overwhelming consensus of US foreign policy for decades?

Obviously. They are stupid, they cannot understand, or don’t care about, the consequences of their actions.

Colour me sceptical. Where do the stupid people get those ideas from?

These ideas were always there, they think they are special. It is just that this time they elected the worst people possible.

I don’t think they come from where you think, it is just plain stupidity from people thinking that US could go better alone.

But imo simply talking about " the real issues " will not help us,

Probably it will not help to solve the problem, but at least it is a start. True, you need then to act on the issues…

and most solutions the (more) rightwinged parties offer are just false.

… and you are right here. The rightwinged often offer solutions that are doomed to fail but at least they try.

More importantly, if you talk and act on these, you don’t leave the scene to just one side.

The worries people have are real but comsider that this fear is also used for fear mongering and are often fed by propaganda.

That’s the point, but let’s be honest: if we ignore the extremists on both sides, the right began to win exactly when the left decide to commit suicide following ideas and objectives which, while obviously deserving, are not what people were asking to act about.

Nah, just make them pay the taxes in EU without any loophole to avoid them. And it could be done simply even without they collaboration.

How about falling to fascism

That would stop in the moment the other party (parties) would start to be a responsible party and not a driven_by_the_ideology_of_ the_day party.

What you call fascist in reality is mostly the right that started to talk about real problems that the left choose to ignore (if not making them worst) and then get elected.
True, there are some real fascists here and there and they are extremist but overall they are a minority of the right (and, tbh, these extremist are present also on the left and everything in between).

So what tech should we build in europe to counter all that crap?

A “google+facebook”? An AWS Amazon?

No new tech, just start to cut ties with US services.
There are alternatives to Github, for clouds and socials, eventually a Facebook-like site can be build is just some months.
It would be another problem to see an adoption if I should point out to a problem.

Last time we decided to create a cool new thing with came out with the World Wide Web after all.

I think that we, as EU, should just not care about it. They want, good, they follow our rules. They don’t want, still good, the still have to follow out rules to sell something in EU. I don’t see the problem here