> The problem with these is always who pays for fraud.

I'm curious how India's UPI handles fraud/refunds, as the system seems to have garnered near-universal praise.

Surely the EU could pull off something similar to what India did with their instant payments program? That system seems to have garnered near-universal praise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

What a uselessly pedantic response.

Are they solved, in practice, in the real world? For users in general? No? Then what's the point of discussing it right now?

For the average user, multiple clients is more a weakness than a strength.

People don't hate decentralization itself, they hate the poor UX (and sometimes lack of features) that decentralization usually entails.

This isn't news, they've always acknowledged that they have remote navigators that tell the cars what to do when they get stuck or confused. It's just that they don't directly drive the car.

There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.

What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.

* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.

Yup. Culturally, the EU has favored more regulations over supporting more tech growth to an absurd degree.

Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.

But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.

If you prevent monopolies, and your neighbour doesn't, and your neighbour bullies you when you try to prevent their monopolies... it's not an easy situation.

That's really not the issue. EU tech companies aren't getting big enough to the point where "potentially a monopoly" is even a problem, other than maybe Spotify.

They are not, but EU tech companies have to compete against US monopolies. And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

This blog post starts off with a long-winded, meandering rant. Do you have something more succinct and less rant-y to back up your assertion of

> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

?

This blog is written by Cory Doctorow. Whether you agree with it or not, I think it's worth going to the end :-).

It's a long transcript, I would recommend watching/listening to the video.

> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.

Better explained by Cory Doctorow, see link above.

The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.

The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.

Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.

It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.

Rider seems neat, and I'd be happy to purchase a license, but subscription only? No thank you.

Visual studio 2026 offers a one time perpetual license for $500. It's not advertised at all and the hyperlink to it seems to shift constantly. I think if more people knew about this option, VS would have a significantly better reputation around here. $500 isn't cheap but it's a one time deal. If I hadn't discovered this I'd probably be looking for other options too.

I'm confused, does that help me with Rider?