Trump might be the best thing happening to the EU in a long while after all. That is, if the EU gets its act together and fights this as one. Or he's the final nail in the coffin. Not sure I really want to find out.
SWIFT sits in Belgium, why would anyone in Europe need to switch away from it? Is the US able to handle their (international) financial transactions without access to SWIFT?
The financial market being significantly smaller, sure, but will it stay like that?
> SWIFT’s data centers, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, act as the network’s central hubs, processing and routing messages across the network. The centralization at these data centers is critical for swift (no pun intended) and secure data transmission. These data centers are designed with redundancy and failover capabilities, so if one center is disrupted, the others take over, ensuring no interruptions to the SWIFT service.
To me, this sounds like SWIFT would posibly be split into 3-parts, without any redundancy. A US and a EU datacenter handling "local" business, with Switzerland possibly be able to interact with either?
In a scenario, where the US and China go to an actual shooting war, moving a couple million high-energy-density devices near the most flammable object in a houshold and purposefully setting the device on fire would be an interesting new variety of shock and awe. Not too new actually, thinking about the mossad pager attack.
Because regulation is bad, according to the current executive?
Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.
It is bad. Regulations have been historically hijacked to benefit corporate interests. See Intuit and tax policy for example.
Voters on the right naively thought he'd work to fix it. (Wrong!) But it is very much bad for a very large number of issues. Maybe next executive will fix it? (Wrong!)
This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.
I do see it as the result of policy applied from the top, the policy that resulted in 2x household electricity prices compared to the US (which amounts to 3x difference if you adjust for median household income).
I replied in another thread but I still remember how in my childhood all the ordinary people had to grow potatoes. The state didn't order them to, it just created food shortages that's all. You can say it was voluntary, "not so much a policy applied from the top".
This is assuming people don’t want to go net zero, and people not understanding that going there requires change, which will be costly. I‘d argue there is a majority in Germany supporting the transition to green energy, accepting higher prices as a result.
I don't think that this is comparable. People who struggle with their electricity bills can not afford balcony solar. It has a ROI of a few years with a (low) but comparably large one time upfront cost.
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