How will that help?

And how long did it stay around even though there was a better option? And how much more penetration into everyday life does WhatsApp have today? Right.

There is no other version. An electron app is a browser app.

That fails to acknowledge the force of the argument which is that tariffs affect innocent people.

Point is, it’s too important. If you fight back when you’re invaded, innocent people (like your own soldiers) will be killed. Consequences will be worse if you just roll over though.

Maximum pressure needs to be exerted on the US, through retaliatory tariffs, ceasing to recognise American intellectual property, and sanctions.

Competition and markets authorities are empowered to block acquisitions and it’s often high profile when it’s done due to an unfriendly power like china trying to do it. The USA is now a more aggressive power than china so acquisitions by US companies ought to be blocked by default.

This may mean less money flows from the US into the European acquired companies, but tough shit, this is too important.

We need to realise that the status quo is not what we had two years ago, because Trump changed it. He’s making the whole world poorer, and we can choose whether that poverty affects us monetarily (because we need to put money into replacing US tech) or more fundamentally - e.g. if he uses dependence on US tech to exert political control over European nations.

Is that on the 17% joke rate?

Right that’s why no other country had dreams of home ownership.

American exceptionalism really did a number on you guys!

Ok but this is a joke, not an instruction on how to behave in real life.

And if the us government were lending someone money to buy Nvidia, that may be relevant.

There was a puzzle at an online puzzle hunt recently that was about this phrase. It was annoyingly ambiguous due to languages that have more than one phrase.

Dumb thermostats last for multiple decades.

is a hot dog a sandwich

no

is cereal soup

no

is a foo a thing-which-obviously-is-not-a-foo

no

The UK is becoming more automatic now, and we also have a lot of EVs. I learnt on a manual but didn’t get a car until last year, which is electric. It’s much better.

Nobody thinks they’re incapable of working this out; we think theyre deliberately advertising something dumb that lay people won’t necessarily understand is dumb. Replying that they have smart engineers is stupid because no-one denied it - we just don’t think they used those engineers to come up with the idea.

You seem to be in a weird state where every hostile act that both China and the US carry out is a reason to stop doing business with the US but not with China - unless you want to reassess the starting point where you said the Netherlands needs to leave itself open to pressure from China in this instance, every though that won’t cause dependence on the US, only a shift in balance.

Even with the hostile trump regime, China is still more hostile towards EU states than the US is.

New cold war

Litmus test: who bears responsibility for the war in Ukraine?

I dunno about that, but I do know Reeses cups taste bad. Too much sweet and salty.

Europeans don’t eat peanuts? Or chocolate?

Do you think they will completely stop doing business with someone that steals* their shit

*as much as this can be called theft, something which took place in specific non-arbitrary circumstances, rather than the Dutch government just thinking “I quite fancy that”

The UK undertook a similar action earlier this year when British Steel was threatened with going defunct by its Chinese owners. Business between the UK and China did not collapse as a result.

By realistic: China is continually carrying out low-level hostile actions against other nations - cyberattacks, IP theft, currency manipulation, and also this kind of attempt at industrial subordination. It’s realpolitik, which means that if it gets detected and a credible negative response, their reaction won’t be to cut off all trade; it will be to stop doing deals which they only wanted to do as a way of carrying out this kind of manipulation. If it were to cut off all trade, what you’re saying is that Western countries should roll over and accept abusive practices by China so as to avoid being dependent on the abusive USA. It makes no sense.

If you think that China is not actually doing anything that even deserves a response, then feel free to say so, of course.

I’m not sure he was thrilled about peanut butter choice, he basically had a breakdown

What is causing “complete dependence on the US” here? Taking over one single Chinese company doesn’t do that.

And chipmaking is dominated by the US, China and Taiwan (which is not immune to influence from the other two parties, lol) so how exactly can one avoid dependency on or the other, except by balancing dependency between the two?

If you really think this means “complete dependence” then explain how.