Several International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have been unable to access their bank accounts or receive routine salary payments and financial transfers due to financial blockages triggered by United States sanctions. In the country where they live
I’m trying to remember the last time an international criminal court judge came to my community and brandished a firearm while shouting slurs at me. It has to have been at least a few weeks now.
Concrete examples to verify such claims please? Also in civilized countries such things are decided by the justice system, not the government (which to the surprise of many simple minded people - like a certain US president and his fanbase - is independent from the government).
In the US it’s common to only use it to describe the entire apparatus for holding, administering and enforcing state power.
But it can also be used to mean the current ruling power in a parliamentary system together with the administrative bodies under its direct control. So something more akin to just the executive branch in the US system. And then certain state agencies such as the judiciary are meant to be independent of the government under that meaning of the term. I believe this is the most common understanding of the word outside the US.
Germany for instance? Google "Bundesverfassungsgericht". I don't think such a checks and balances system is all that unusual in democratic countries. A major task of a "proper" justice system is to keep the government in check.
Are you saying the US government been implementing sanctions to make right wing activists not be able to receive bank transfers? That sounds like friendly fire and backwards, are you sure you understood the "source" correctly?
You mean right-wing terrorists? The ones that forcibly invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and attacked police officers in an effort to distrupt democracy?
But it would seem there’s a certain balancing act. Because that kind of economic integration can also create pressure points for an autocrat to exploit in ways that are contrary to peace and human advancement.
This is why many Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just view monopolies as an economic problem; they viewed it as a direct threat to free and just society.
It is more like self imposed sanction against US made products. There are now tons of open source operating systems and applications that can replace Microsoft products, which are basically some old programs. The replacements cost vastly less for use and support.
Yeah. Trump has been ripping out US infrastructure globally. Trumps administration and vance(GOP finance chair) elon(doge) thiel(owns vance) need to be removed ASAP.
No monthly fees and most software is available on opensource
windows -> linux mint OR reactOS OR OpenSUSE OR many more
excel -> many of them as well as google spread sheet for free
Word -> Gazillion editors on open source; some much much better; and there is free google editor to boot
PowerPoint-> again Gazillion opensource replacements
Paint-> is a joke. Open source stuff is 10 times better
I don't want to advertise these products but you have access to search engines; look it up..
What is it that you think is so special? The only reason people are using the stuff is momentum carried from the past and PC being sold preloaded with windows.
Very much. There are a lot of hidden costs in computers. What does IT cost you? If everybody already knows the other program how much productivity is lost before they figure out the slight changes with the new (they will learn but experts will need time to become experts).
it makes so much sense. a small team of experts maintaining a rock-solid base configuration providing the essentials, which can then be built on top of for agency/department or even personal specifics - all declarative, immutable, cachable, testable. I can't think of a better tool for the job.
Golden image deployments and netboot have been around for ages. If you want an unified system and control the infrastructure, it doesn't really matter which system you use.
I'm not sure why they chose nix. But it does make it easier to carry local patches than a lot of other systems. I hope they succeed.
I still don't get why EU governments and agencies don't standardize around an already existing industry proven OS the EU already has domestically, which is SUSE, and need to each go reinventing the wheel their own way, which leads to higher costs and more fragmentation across the EU.
I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems. You can just do things when you want to. You literally have that power. Exercise it for once FFS.
> I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies
The Dutch government can famously prevent sales of German and Luxembourgish companies yes.
I meant the EU, at EU level, not the Dutch government. Also it's not like the Dutch government can't cooperate with the other EU members like Germany and Luxembourg on such vital topics. Unless of course trust inside the EU is so lackluster that the Dutch government can't be sure where Germany and Luxembourg will stand, in which case it's already over for the EU.
Does the EU have the power to block sales of companies on national security grounds? Or to get member states to standardise on software?
Its probably a good thing they do not have a standard, or at this point it would be Windows and pushing change through at the EU level would not be fast.
>Does the EU have the power to block sales of companies on national security grounds?
Not on defense and national security, that's up to individual EU member states, but the EU does veto corporate mergers and acquisitions on Competition Law (Antitrust). So just find a loophole in that and use it to prevent SUSE be taken over by non-EU nations.
The governments "just" doing this or that, are typically the tyrannical or unhinged variety you don't want to live under. If your law is written decently and you have a functioning judiciary, chances of a loopholes surviving scrutiny will be very low.
The European Commission could definitely ask governments (the European Council) to agree a new treaty or protocol that grants them veto powers on "federal security grounds", for sure. The European Parliament would likely rubber-stamp it too. Considering the current (and increasing) right-wing majorities across the continent, though, I find such scenario very unlikely.
As an American, EU politics is such a fascinating bizarro world. Imagine the right wingers being a bulwark against unhinged expansion of executive authority on grounds of national security! It would be like statehouse Republicans blocking the Patriot Act. Unthinkable.
For context, the US once prevented that a German company AIXTRON was sold to a Chinese investor in 2016 (perhaps for good reasons). To me it would sound like a good deal for the Netherlands and Luxembourg/Germany if Netherlands would uses SUSE and the Luxembourg/Germany would step in to keep in in the EU.
Yeah well that's why the EU federal idea is and will be a failure. It wishes to be the challenger to the US and China hegemony in theory, but then every individual country wants to be its own special mini-boss in its own playground hoping they'll be at the top of the helm, that develops and uses its own separate things that will hopefully get adopted by the other EU members.
Is that why US failed while building CP/m, Unix a few, Dos, Windows, MacOs, OS/2,…? A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.
> A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.
Yeah but when it comes to national sovereignty you can't let your own products get steamrolled by the entrenched monopolies of your adversaries (Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc) just because you want the idealistic 'free market' while your adversary protects their monopolies to weaponize them against you making you indefinitely dependent on them.
Cooperation and competition can be partial. Google and Microsoft compete internally and then cooperate when fighting external forces. There is no reason why this cannot work for European companies too.
The problem has more to do with the weak sense of belonging to a supranational identity. Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. Change is slow.
When the market is as huge as US, there's lots of space for competition. Sadly in how EU is currently structured it would most likely be just german "Microsoft", spanish "Microsoft", french "Microsoft" etc.
You have it in reverse. A federal EU enables EU countries to pool sovereignty and strength to protect itself from the US and China. It neither needs to or wants to challenge anyone. A federal system allows EU wide decisions to be made quickly and without petty parochial concerns.
Constituent states rightly can choose to make their own decisions in matters like this, it hardly effects anyone else, and they can choose to collaborate.
> but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems
Last time I looked it was a Swedish owned German company. The government of the Netherlands has limited power there. Given its history and performance its quite likely to get sold and might end up in American or Chinese hands or anything really.
The year the ICC was established, Congress passed a law providing enduring authorization for a full scale military invasion of the Netherlands should the ICC imprison any US service member, government employee, or those of allied nations (including Israel).[1] It even prevents any level of the US government (local, state, or federal) from working to assist the ICC. Americans do not want to be beholden to a foreign court.
I'm probably wrong but I could have sworn there was an article that came out when Trump was elected something happened with data on microsoft accounts/server huh. I guess it's ungoogable right now. Might have just been hosted by US gov. Must have been funding related.
Anyway I don't support ICC grabbing power it does not have over other countries who do not sign on.
If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
> If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute and the court has not opened an official case against Iranian officials.
However, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, Commander-in-Chief of Hamas's military wing for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the October 7 attacks.
The tricky thing these days is trying to figure out whether messages like this are coming from Russian or MAGA bots ;) In any case, good work comrade! Here's your potato / Trumpcoin. Now back into your troll cave.
No problem. After the next election in the Netherlands, Microsoft only needs to promise to build a local headquarters there and the future government will roll back to Windows at twice the previous cost, which is exactly what happened in Munich.
People make it sound as if Munich flip-flopped on Linux. The then ruling social-democrats and the greens started the LiMux project in 2003! The social-democrats and the conservative christians ruling in 2020 switched back to MS Windows. The current administration is mandating open source but not specifically Linux.
I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.
The US government already exerts extensive control over ASML's business. The Netherlands can't leverage it in any kind of strategic way because a large part of the technology itself is American and it's very hard to untangle. It's the true definition of a "multi national" company.
A tiny fraction of the technology itself started as an ineffective "American" invention, copying a Japanese discovery/invention. In fact when ASML acquired the company, specifically because it couldn't do what they wanted and they needed to vastly improve it, a Japanese company had a superior product in the same space, but ASML saw the Japanese company as too much political baggage given how protectionist the Japanese often are.
There is a lot of noise for public consumption but the reality is that the US control the Netherlands and most European countries, and in fact while this noise has become louder in recent years so has the dependency of Europe on the US...
In the US it’s common to only use it to describe the entire apparatus for holding, administering and enforcing state power.
But it can also be used to mean the current ruling power in a parliamentary system together with the administrative bodies under its direct control. So something more akin to just the executive branch in the US system. And then certain state agencies such as the judiciary are meant to be independent of the government under that meaning of the term. I believe this is the most common understanding of the word outside the US.
The zero-sum mindset that's de rigueur at the moment needs to die soon or the world that we'll inhabit is gonna suck.
This is why many Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just view monopolies as an economic problem; they viewed it as a direct threat to free and just society.
windows -> linux mint OR reactOS OR OpenSUSE OR many more
excel -> many of them as well as google spread sheet for free
Word -> Gazillion editors on open source; some much much better; and there is free google editor to boot
PowerPoint-> again Gazillion opensource replacements
Paint-> is a joke. Open source stuff is 10 times better
I don't want to advertise these products but you have access to search engines; look it up..
What is it that you think is so special? The only reason people are using the stuff is momentum carried from the past and PC being sold preloaded with windows.
In my opinion that is.
Why did those not work out? Why do they think things will be different with NixOS?
I'm not sure why they chose nix. But it does make it easier to carry local patches than a lot of other systems. I hope they succeed.
I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems. You can just do things when you want to. You literally have that power. Exercise it for once FFS.
The Dutch government can famously prevent sales of German and Luxembourgish companies yes.
Its probably a good thing they do not have a standard, or at this point it would be Windows and pushing change through at the EU level would not be fast.
Not on defense and national security, that's up to individual EU member states, but the EU does veto corporate mergers and acquisitions on Competition Law (Antitrust). So just find a loophole in that and use it to prevent SUSE be taken over by non-EU nations.
The European Commission could definitely ask governments (the European Council) to agree a new treaty or protocol that grants them veto powers on "federal security grounds", for sure. The European Parliament would likely rubber-stamp it too. Considering the current (and increasing) right-wing majorities across the continent, though, I find such scenario very unlikely.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/12/02/us-blocks-chi...
Yeah but when it comes to national sovereignty you can't let your own products get steamrolled by the entrenched monopolies of your adversaries (Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc) just because you want the idealistic 'free market' while your adversary protects their monopolies to weaponize them against you making you indefinitely dependent on them.
The problem has more to do with the weak sense of belonging to a supranational identity. Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. Change is slow.
Constituent states rightly can choose to make their own decisions in matters like this, it hardly effects anyone else, and they can choose to collaborate.
Last time I looked it was a Swedish owned German company. The government of the Netherlands has limited power there. Given its history and performance its quite likely to get sold and might end up in American or Chinese hands or anything really.
I think this has a lot to do with how the case against Putin was built and Trump used his influence to disrupt it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Anyway I don't support ICC grabbing power it does not have over other countries who do not sign on.
If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute and the court has not opened an official case against Iranian officials.
However, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, Commander-in-Chief of Hamas's military wing for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the October 7 attacks.
It's the ultimate expression of US corruption. There's not even a pretense of fighting for justice any more, just fighting justice.
The US can't even win a war in the middle east without NATO
What is the US going to do when China starts making their own moves?
Would NATO change the equation?
I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.
Oh wait, it is.
But it’s ok because Us President has made it clear the the USA doesn’t need anything Europe has. So, not a problem.
A tiny fraction of the technology itself started as an ineffective "American" invention, copying a Japanese discovery/invention. In fact when ASML acquired the company, specifically because it couldn't do what they wanted and they needed to vastly improve it, a Japanese company had a superior product in the same space, but ASML saw the Japanese company as too much political baggage given how protectionist the Japanese often are.
How funny it all turned out, right?