Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

I have no idea how the fact that there are more companies in China, or that others might exist outside China makes anything moot. That is like saying putting in a filtration system to avoid a single contaminant is moot because it also filters other potential contaminants. That being said I may not have been clear. We are mostly in agreement, and I agree with you that this is really about Trump trying to pretend he is a 5D Chess Grandmaster; of course he is posturing to play to his ignorant base. I was explaining the reasoning used, not saying I believe them. I would add though, saying that factory inspections are meaningless doesn't make any sense either. If you have ever worked in manufacturing then you know that they burn/load the firmware on site. Sampling products from shelves is useful, but that doesn't mean that the additional pressure that they could be audited at any time, especially if they actually perform the audits, is of no use. To recap, we agree that this is much ado about nothing, but from a purely security conscious standpoint it *does* make sense to be able to have manufacturing in the US if only because the factories have to follow all US laws and need to comply with all lawful inspections, which can be more easily facilitated due to geographic convenience.

If you were qualified to be an editor you would know it is "would have" not "would of."

As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

That does not follow. Germany especially is an export-oriented economy that relies on cheap energy to be profitable. It competes directly with asian countries that have far lower costs. You might not grasp the magnitude: Gas was 2.5 cents per kWh a decade ago. It jumped to 30 and more after Ukraine, USA or a combination of both blew up North Stream 2. Granted, it came down again, but it's still over 6 cents today. (exact numbers depend on your market, location, yada yada )

Russia is suffering a slow-burning blow to its compound growth. I honestly don't think that the damage to Russia is worse than the damage to Europe.

Russia's army also took a beating AND would be needed to keep control of Ukraine, half of which (the western parts) are intensely anti-russian. Controlling an occupied territory can be as demanding if not more than conquering it.

It's not just you.

I've lived most of my life in Germany and definitely got its best years. It's been going downhill for the past 20 years or so. And a lot of the why are very similar to the ones you list, and while I saw them early and left the country for that, it's only been coming to a head in the past decade.

True, but there's a saying that capitalism won the competition because communism failed first. Meaning capitalism will fail 2nd and we might be seing that.

Yes, but by what measurement? Being able to destroy the competition might mean you are better, or it might mean you aren't playing fair. Microsoft dominates the OS market, but not by offering the best OS.

And your example of Kuwait is more spot on than you think. The USA also was handed a cheat code - it was the big winner of WW2, with no damage to its infrastructure while Europe was in ruin, Russia had lost 10% of its population and insane amounts of infrastructure, etc. - and while everyone else involved was busy rebuilding basics for a few year, the US could pivot its wartime industry to productive industry and jump ahead.

Worse than that, it's an entire circle-jerk. Many of these people were at consulting companies, then were placed into their positions, while still being loyal to their consulting company. The biggest one whose entire modus operandi is placing their people into positions where they can give the company future business is McKinsey. This isn't even news.

Yeah, but that's not how that works.

The CEO these days is one of the bad apples, and his real-world experience consists of a cozy upper-class childhood, a business school that exchanges money for degrees, a few years at McKinsey or such and a placement as CEO somewhere. He has barely even MET a working class man in his life. His primary concern are quarterly numbers and getting his bonus. The fact that quarters are very short periods in the business world alone doesn't allow him to focus on anything else, unless he wants to explain to the wife why they can't buy that nice mountain chalet she wanted this year.

Buffet is exceptional in many ways, he's not a good example here.

He didn't, though. He gave an officer a couple numbers. This action did not destroy any data. The phone could still sit in an evidence locker, all data intact, even after this action.

The officer entering that number into the phone is what destroyed the data. You could argue that he aided in the destruction of evidence. But in that case you need to put the officer on trial as well for destruction of evidence.

Now the officer will claim "I didn't know". In which case you'd ask "then what the fuck were you doing there, not knowing? Does procedure not require you to handle evidence with care? If you didn't know what you were doing, how does that constitute care?"

But, of course, this isn't what's happening. Considering the actual facts, I mean. What's happening is that the government wants the right to spy on you and this dude defended his privacy. And we can't have that, can we? So my money is on the court siding with the police, because they're all part of the same system whose primary purpose is to keep itself intact.

And you aren't. There's the problem. This is why they pretend that it's a friendly interaction when actually it's a hostile one.

We need a right to not just remain silent, but to lie just as much as the cops do. This would also get rid of the whole "anything you say can and will be used against you" bullshit, you'd just say "I lied" when they bring it up.

I understand that a society needs police. I don't think we need THIS police, the amount of fails it has is dramatic.

Actually his comment was perfect because you just proved his point and are clearly too dmb to figure it out.

I see a lot of comments from people here who already know exactly how well it works and why it is "yet another thing nobody asked for", etc. What is quite obviously absent is comments from anyone who felt the need to actually try it before already knowing how well it works. Welcome to Slashot circa 2026, where there are mostly "experts" commenting who don't need to even know what the questions are to already have all of the answers.