81–90 of 114 posts
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“This year's Eurovision winner: Tommy, Käärijä, and Joost, the Euroboys!” “Huh. Israel hardly got any votes this year.”
I'm getting spam and harassment from accounts promoting Israels eurovision contestant, on IRC, in 2026. It's every year and probably on all newer socials too.
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For some reason the government isn't willing to pay software developer salaries. It would rather pay a company to pay them instead.
That's a logical thing for governments to do. Governments are under pressure on different axes than the companies they contract to do things. Governments switching contracts won't ever make the news, but it's much harder for them to fire people in order to take advantage of increasing efficiencies. Likewise, they cannot short-term employ people easily without this structure.
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The "local" company is already UK owned though, so at most "European", not national or EU. What I find strange is that the Dutch government does have its own datacenters, e.g. ODC-Noord (1), but they're still looking to outsource the hosting even after the current contract ends in 2027. (1) https://www.odc-noord.nl/
I suspect that most government departments see data centers as a liability and are very happy to outsource to the big providers, apart perhaps from the ones hosting stuff they don't really want you to know about. It's always better to be able to blame a supplier for something going wrong if you're a senior leader or politician. For some reason, if it does happen no one has to resign. There is loads of UK Critical Nat…
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Outsourced stuff is late and expensive too, just not directly the responsibility of the minister or secretary of state because of the magic piece of paper in between. IT is hardly something we need to do occasionally, so build up a department that can do it (not just write up huge reports about what it should do and outsource, like Logius) and invest in the people that will work there (retaining them as much as possi…
I agree that the government should do IT in house, ideally, because it's a core business for them. The reality is that it is very hard to attract and retain good IT staff on a government salary. The people who need to manage all that in a cost-effective way are especially hard to find. So we end up with expensive consultants doing the work. Consultants have the wrong incentive. They don't want to stay in one place to…
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When you are interacting with the government for official business, what purpose is there to hide one's identity? You can't exactly not fill in your name in your tax return. For the non-government/private business however, it is indeed a matter of privacy. France rolled out a while ago the requirement to establish the user's age when accessing porn sites. I refuse to do that.
> what purpose is there to hide one's identity? I'm not hiding it. It's on a plastic card that I paid the government to print for me. I'm happy to let them see that anytime they ask in relation to official business or legal concerns. I do not want this ID to be digital, attached to any devices, or available for inspection outside of my control at any point in time. > You can't exactly not fill in your name in your ta…
I'll add "and revocable in an instant".
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> For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy. You're seeing people wake up to the threat now, with the opposition against Kyndryl and the Nexperia thing. Somewhat more controversially, I'm also worried about the French government owning large parts of the Dutch defense industry through Thales and Airbus. (And, to a lesser extent, German and Spanish governments.) Very litt…
The days of nationalized French defense companies and state arsenals have been over for quite a while. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes: GIAT was privatized, then renamed to Nexter, then merged with German KMW to form European KNDS and now it's about to do an IPO. All of the French aerospace industry (including missiles) bar Dassault and Thales is inside Airbus. Arquus was bought by Belgian John Cockerill. I could…
The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"
The situation with Airbus is a little more healthy, with the French government share being much lower (11%), and the German (11%) and Spanish (4%) governments balancing it out a bit. Airbus is also a smaller part of Dutch defense. Still, none of those governments is Dutch.
The fact that the French government owns more of the Dutch defense industry than the Dutch government is a problem.
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The days of nationalized French defense companies and state arsenals have been over for quite a while. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes: GIAT was privatized, then renamed to Nexter, then merged with German KMW to form European KNDS and now it's about to do an IPO. All of the French aerospace industry (including missiles) bar Dassault and Thales is inside Airbus. Arquus was bought by Belgian John Cockerill. I could…
The French state owns a 26.6% of the shares in Thales, with 36.4% of the voting rights. The Dassault family has another 30% of the voting rights. A combined controlling share. The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?" The situation with Airbus is a…
I'll push back on that point.
The FCAS program was originally conceived as a French-German joint political initiative by Macron and Merkel. The NGF plane within it has been dead in the water for years because Airbus and Dassault can't work out their disagreements. It's a conflict between two industrial companies that's blocking forward progress, with the Airbus and Dassault CEOs duking it out across press releases and shareholder meetings.
If Dassault was a French state puppet, Macron would've strong-armed Dassault into working with Airbus on this €100 billion project by now. Yet, the French President seems to know better than to try and do that. One does not get to be basically the only major private independent defense company in a famously nationalized French defense industry during the Cold War without managing to hold the French state at arm's length, especially during the nationalization years of Mitterand's presidency.
Though your concerns about ownership of the Dutch defense industry are certainly valid, I don't see how the European defense industry could have completely avoided consolidation after the end of the Cold War, given the budget cuts to defense. The Americans went much further on that front and nowadays the lack of internal competition is causing them all kinds of problems for them.
Good luck with digital id. Not gonna play along. No matter what.
Why? It’s been around in the netherlands for a while and it’s extremely convenient, basically just functions as SSO for government apps.
What else would the government have to offer? If I move I'll show up at some local entity, get my passport updated and I'll never think about it again until next time I move.