I suspect though that there are already a lot of applicants, given that Ireland is the only remaining country in the EU that has English as its main language, so the competition may be especially hard. But that’s not to say it’s impossible.

Generally speaking, the best bet is French due to the large community of speakers (including also Belgium, Luxemburg and Québec), the relative ease of getting French to a usable level, and its usefulness and sought-afterness even outside of francophone countries. Next up would be German with its even larger community of speakers in Europe and economic relevance but higher difficulty. Third I’d say is Spanish, since learning it will also make Italian intelligible to you.

If things get worse in the US, some people who are affected particularly gravely (e.g. trans people) might even be eligible for asylum, which would remove the language requirements (but I’m only speculating here).

Whether language proficiency is needed beforehand depends a lot on the precise European country (and on the profession(s) OP would like to work in, and on what other skills they possess).

This is a huge opportunity. All of us Linux geeks now need to be on mainstream social media platforms and actively seek out and help everyone who expresses an interest in switching from Windows to Linux.

Okay, right, then my comment may be wrong (insofar as companies with >750 million revenue are concerned) or at least it will become wrong once the OECD agreement is implemented. (This government page from 5 November 2024 states 12.5% on revenue from trading.) Good to know, thanks.

Well, that’s nice and all, but the losses that the Irish tax haven model costs the rest of the continent – which by and large is no less willing to provide aid to poorer countries – are orders of magnitude higher.

Zuck and Pinchai right now googling “Ursula von der Leyen inauguration fund”

Well, shit. But at least there’s this:

It’s also far from clear that the tech industry will prove to be as hungry for fossil fuel power as some predict. First, advances in AI technology could drive energy consumption down. Concerns are emerging that the technology may not fully live up to the hype, at least from investors’ standpoints, with Alibaba Group chairman Joe Tsai telling a Hong Kong investment summit in March that data construction may have already reached “the beginning of some kind of bubble.” Plus, the Trump tariffs have injected extraordinary levels of uncertainty into global markets, leaving some experts wondering if the upheaval could derail an AI boom.

I can’t help with personal experience unfortunately. I think some (a lot?) of people are satisfied, but one does need some tech skills to get it up and running.

Instructions are out there in various github repos, some of them also link to volunteer support channels.

Or instructions in German here: https://linux-content.org/so-installierst-du-affinity-photo-designer-und-publisher-unter-linux/

Worth noting: Affinity, while not open-source, can be brought to run under Linux. This may be helpful for people wanting to ditch Windows.

Not having our cash transaction routed through US services is extremely significant in terms of privacy and autonomy.

We really should unironically and systematicaly slap all the Yankee slogans about freedom and democracy and being a beacon and stuff on pictures of EU flags and photos of our parliaments etc.

Ooh, that’s a fascinating point, thank you

Well, to be able to independently launch it: yes. But once the satellites are up, who cares about the car dealers-in-chief?

& There’s already Eutelsat; their satellites already seem to be providing internet much like Starlink: https://www.eutelsat.com/de/satelliten-dienste/satelliten-internet-breitbanddienst.html

People protesting for democracy? Obviously, the USA are behind that.

Oh, wait.

Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.

Source (the colorful graph in the middle of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in “MWh per 15 minutes” (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)

What is this worth, given that spring is approaching?

Andy Yen went on to make an explanatory statement on Reddit, which provides a few insights: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/

For one thing, from the context of the original tweet – which referenced a screenshot of some other person’s statement – “little guys” was quite certainly meant not as consumers but as “little tech” as opposed to “big tech”. One might still consider it irresponsible and shitty to say anything good about the Grand Oligarchic Party, but what he said was not as deranged as it is often taken to be. And indeed, the Democrats do also have a long-standing problem of being in liaison with billionaire donors in particular from the tech industry (remember, Peter Thiel used to be an outsider in Silicon Valley with his pro-Trump stance); it was only rather recently that most of the billionaires decided that their interests are much better served by “Republicans”.

I’m still not using Proton though. When I get around to switching to a paid provider, the top contenders right now are posteo.com or mailbox.org, but everything could change depending on what cloud plans they offer. And! it’s highly plausible that we’re going to see several new attractive offers being made in the next few weeks or months, so it might pay off to delay switching just a little bit.

(For calendars, by the way, teamup.com is really, really awesome. It’s Swiss.)

Yeah, I think at scale what we can do is to provide grassroots political support for this push. So that could in fact become our major task: To figure out collectively what to do next: what to demand or build, and how to gather support for it.

True on the one hand, but on the other hand, at least the EU/its member countries have sharper teeth with regards to antitrust measures and customer protection than the US have.