andrew0

It’s a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in these countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

Here is a quote from the actual “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership” PDF:

Needed reforms

[…]

Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

[…]

They are engineering most of these situations that we’ve seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: “This is going to be great television” - the guy is not even hiding it.

On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won’t abandon them. However, this sort of “theatrics” is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defense, specifically to prepare them in a fight to destabilize China.

It’s truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.

Precisely. The only enemy that the US conservative party sees is China. Everyone else is a business partner that they must strong arm into favourable deals for the US.

I also had to upload 2000 photos. The issue was that they had to encrypt each, which took me like 2 days with it running in the background 😅 It could have also been due to my phone being quite old. I don’t rely on it that much, other than using it as an off-site back-up for my most important documents.

I do agree that the best choice is a self-hosted solution with proper security, but sadly not everyone has the time or the skills to manage that. The Proton CEO thing also annoyed me, but the Proton Foundation as a whole has good opinions about privacy (e.g., against chat control proposal in the EU). However, next time a slip like this happens from them, I’ll probably have had enough time to move my stuff to a local deployment.

Proton offers a Drive, and they’re based in Switzerland. I don’t see them being strong-armed like this by the UK government any time soon.

It’s amazing that Linux gaming is becoming a thing that’s better sometimes than Windows gaming (minus the getting banned part in some games). I also like that AMD is making some big pushes on open source drivers, plus their ROCm open-source alternative to CUDA.

This is a great time for Linux users! :)