It’s Le to chime in and say I’m really happy with mine too. It’s less portable than my old MacBook Air, but it is just a dream machine with Debian 13!

You’ll get crickets.

These people don’t want a state of citizens, they want a kingdom of serfs because they think they’ll make it into tiny aristo élite.

It's already looking good:

https://www.mothership.blog/

There were Eurobooks and they were pretty well bought out by Facebook. Hyves and so on. The online CV networks were bought by LinkedIn.

It’s not just the Internet. It’s politicians and businesspeople and more generally, shameless citizens.

There’s a lot to dislike about shame as an enforcement mechanism but I’m starting to miss some of the upside it delivered.

Could you expand on the other problems with Europe other than hiring and firing laws?

Senior/staff type engineers are not a union position so great people refuse promotions and responsibility because they don't want to leave the union. Thus they won't mentor juniors, and other things that you need great engineers for. (At least that is how the union people I work with in Europe are, there are other unions with different rules)

There is probably more.

Like siblings comments, I would be really interested to know to which country and union you are referring to. In France it's certainly not true (I have a very senior engineering role and I am in a union and it never was an issue, and anyway, the percentage of unionized engineers here is so low that even if that was true, it would hardly be noticeable)

Which country is that in? Can you not offer them better conditions than the union? Are they forced to leave the union or just no longer required to be in it?

Never heard of that, and I've worked in about 7 EU countries...

Never heard of that, nor of a union in tech. What part of Europe?

What union ? In which country ?

Me too. I've seen that horror too :-)

This might be the new location:

https://gistdeck.github.io/

Because obscurity works against insider threats and OSint /s

I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general.

I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.