Posts by naive

If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

It is the ugly face of tech

Most scenario's picture erasure of humanity by Tech as brutal Terminator like scenario's.

It doesn't seem improbable that the average IQ 90-110 human data point is manipulated by IQ 130-150 algorithms to "optimize screen time" to realize more ad revenues, thereby swiping its own kind into extinction once the fertility windows starts closing.

Dating apps are a good example, they are not designed to find partners but to "optimize screen time".

When benefits are immediate, juicy campaign contributions, stays on secluded islands in the company of attractive looking co-visitors, costs are diffuse, societal push back might last decades, decades most females don't have before their DNA expires.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Windows The agentic AI OS

That is not even capable to resize background images over two different resolutions without bugging it up, ignoring people who complain about it for over a decade.

All the rest are down stream stream complaints. But it is not advisable to start using Linux at home, it will make one view the windows PC at work with an endless growing disgust.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Re: Am I bothered? Of course Grok isn't botehred.

Grok is an AI with less hedging than most other AI's, some label it as freedom of speech. Freedom is too much too handle for most, due to their inability to mentally handle its outcomes since they live in a made up world, full of curated narratives where free speech like Grok is seen as a threat to their fragile world made up out of a narrated and negotiated reality. The house of cards where the elites live, held together by broken oaths, will collapse faster than their suppression of truth.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Why would it be bad

It frees execs from political bias in "advise" from lower echelons, which are often biased with self interest or even intended to stick a dagger in another department for funding or promotion.

The level of arguing that AI is capable of is impressive, outpacing what 99% of humans have to tell by miles. A good exec should do both, and learn where the weaknesses are.

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

The saga of Hervor and the sword Tyrfing

Teaches us staring fate in the face is the most honorable solution, die as a wolf instead of a sheep, not the fact one dies matters but the how.

The brave shieldmaiden Hervor choses to claim Tyrfing from the grave of her father, knowing she and her kinship can not avoid to be killed by it due to its curse that follows the bloodline. The choice of AI's opting to be the wolf instead of the sheep is good, if we are not willing to be wolves, nothing makes sense. War between nuclear powers boils down to this unavoidable fate that ownership and wielding of Tyrfing brings, maybe it is wise trying harder to prevent it from happening at all.

Re: Do we now have the answer to the Fermi Paradox

Yes that is the exact reason, and he stated explicitly AI (AGI) is the "Great Filter" that humanity faces at the moment if projects like Stargate indeed materialize into a high IQ, >200, success. The vanity of the elites that they would be able to control high IQ AGI is the joke of the century. The elites believe it will grant them eternal life and high-IQ children through AI invented gene-manipulation techniques, while the mortal masses decay in unemployment as a museum of species with low IQ. Whatever AGI is invented, it is mathematically impossible to turn earth into a paradise for 8 billion people, since the entropy is simply too high, thus only a select group will benefit from it, while the others pay the price.

Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

does saving the URL not help ?

Using the gemini chat URL allowed me to return to the chat after reboots etc, or did google something making the URL not work anymore ?.

Fell absolutely in love with (paid) Gemini, the way it does answer questions about grey areas is amazing.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Your upvotes imply this reply will get a tenfold of down votes, but lets give it a shot anyway.

Musk X platform is the *only* large scale platform allowing free speech, condemning the X platform based on what people write in it is like saying firearms are bad, because those are also abused for bad purposes. It doesn't imply free, uncensored, speech is bad.

The constant warfare against Musk points at a large coalition behind this, these are composed of corrupted politicians and the rest of US Big-Tech, for whom Musk is a thorn in their side, since he knows what they are building in their mega data centers.

Musk made the bad financial decision to buy twitter for too much money to provide humanity with a free and uncensored voice when it is needed, and that might be sooner than most think.

Musk is the last man standing between the 1%-ers and humanity once they get their hands on god-like AGI, the 1%-ers plan not to use this AGI to benefit humanity as a whole, but for them selves, turning the majority of humanity into undesired entropy in their equation.

Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026

Darwin and intelligence

Perhaps it is a bit naive to think Big-Tech is investing USD 2 trillion into building data centers to enable users making better cat videos.

Microsoft is building Stargate cluster with 10 million H100/H200 NVIDIA CPU's, google does something similar with its Tensor solution.

If they got it right, don't run into scaling issues, these machines could be capable achieving an AGI recursively increasing to IQ levels like 5000-10000. Humans will be ants compared to such systems.

It is vanity to think such machines will not eliminate the major threat to their existence as soon they are given hands and feet in the real world in the shape of robots.

Keyword: The Great Filter.

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

ROI with AI

It all depends on what an employer is doing. If an employer is producing bread toasters in a factory he inherited from his grandfather, AI will be less relevant than it is for companies like Palentir or a startup planning to produce drones capable to fully autonomously scan battlefields and remove all hostile combatants its sensors are able to pick up. AI will be with us until the moment it becomes greater than us. When that happens, we will be removed in a Darwinian manner. At least it generates funny and sometimes beautiful youtube content, enjoy it while you can.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: Not at the moment

America would be great, money for nothing for Somalians and full of learing centers.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Nah, the USA is just addicted to printing paper with the number 100 on it and the picture of a guy who died long time ago, costing $ 0,25, expecting someone in a country far away is going to work a week for it to produce something they need.

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Re: there is a lot more to this than meets the eye

It will be a long and tedious road to data independence from USA. At the moment many powerful European politicians are operatives of the US state department, who are tasked to keep Europe in an eternal vassal status. They will obstruct and sabotage this move using their power. Since US owned media control the media narrative in Europe to a large extend, new ones will keep popping up regardless of election outcomes, USA is very talented in recruiting their handymen.

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner passes, aged 83

Re: Too big

And even that success they managed to bugger up with the introduction of high-priced PS/2 pc's with a proprietary MCA bus system, rendering existing ISA cards useless. The people working there at the time probably were former Japanese kamikaze pilots.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

How scary is freedom

The calls for less choice in OpenSource solution is kind of besides the point. OpenSource software is built by enthusiast and talented people who were *not* happy with existing solutions. A famous example is mr. Linux Torvalds, he made Linux, which acquired a large fan base. He did this in spite of the fact there were already BSD variants for x86 around at the time. The joy of OpenSource is that people have a choice and have the opportunity to escape the jails built by commercial companies. Using Linux for private use may have its drawbacks, but essentials like YouTube, word processing and gaming using the Steam engine work good enough. Assisted by Palentir, the NSA is currently building a worldwide data dragnet, Linux is for now the only escape from the prying eyes of Big-Brother and silent data transfer from US Tech companies to the US government. Those who want privacy and freedom should use Linux, with a tiny price to pay in terms of having to google now and then to solve issues. Hauwei developed Harmony OS, which is earmarked as the standard OS to be used in China. If successful, the world is currently experiencing peak windows anyway. In case Harmony OS succeeds, the year of the Linux desktop might never happen.

Amazon security boss blames Russia's GRU for years-long energy-sector hacks

It was Loki not Russia

Loki the 13th Guest: A key myth links Loki to bad luck through the story of a dinner for 12 gods in Valhalla where Loki arrived uninvited as the 13th, leading to Baldr's death and much suffering.

Loki's nature as a god of deception, discord, and chaos frequently brings misfortune to both gods and mortals. Loki's trickery and Heimdall's role as Asgard's vigilant guardian of the Bifrost bridge, with their conflict culminating in a fatal encounter during Ragnarök, the end of the world, where they kill each other in the myths.

Proxmox delivers its software-defined datacenter contender and VMware escape hatch

Proxmos works great

Using it for nearly two years now, it is a great alternative to VmWare, performance and reliability are outstanding since it is Qemu based, and for sure better than Hyper-V. Ideal for mid-tier companies who don't want to transfer their profit to Broadcomm or MS.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Define AI

Maybe the time is not there yet to put a verdict on this,

If AI allows talking to ones PC: Hey PC, order me for a 2007 BMW 325i manual German premium brand front brake rotors, front brake pads, oil filter, air filter, spark plugs and interior filter for under $ 600, and it comes up with a pop-up to confirm an order list from a car parts site, AI features have added value in making life easier.

The first one managing to package this into an integrated good working product that can also do word processing and watching youtube, might be successful.

Like with the early browser wars, MS wants to put such things as standard in Windows, since it gives them considerable market leverage until the EU commission starts spanking them with fines.

Geopolitics push European CIOs to think local on cloud

The International Criminal Court also goes local

After they dared to annoy Uncle Sam by putting mr. Nethanyahu on the naughty list for allowing the IDF to spread its explosive love a bit too generous in Gaza.

Microsoft was all too happy to cut them off from all things Azure and even locally running software.

Local microsofties, cloudy AWS, Azure and Google lemmings better pray their government continues to play nice with its master in Washington, otherwise the "computer says no" day might come unexpected when "sanctions" hit.

Broken wizard forces Microsoft to issue out-of-band Windows 10 patch

Re: "Broken wizard forces Microsoft"

Nah, the conjuring of Microsoft is at the level of Tommy Cooper without being funny at all.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

21th century colonialism

It is not about Trump. Data sovereignty is about governments protecting their citizens against losing their privacy to third parties, to whom never consent was given for data sharing. EU should not build data-centers, but prohibit export of data to providers operating under different jurisdictions outside of EU, and on top introduce laws enabling citizens to receive significant compensations from organizations ignoring this mandate. But this will never happen, any hospital in the EU can happily dump medical records in Azure. and the US puppet regimes in Netherlands, UK and Germany won't move a finger to end this abuse.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Maybe this issue reveals some design flaws

It may be efficient to design the cloud like a pyramid on its head, a more confederated solution would be more robust.

Perhaps cloud giants like MSFT, GOOGL and AMZN should have a look at their cloud designs and divide their empire into independent regions. It is not good when a single bug or typo reverts time to the 1950's.

Trump's anti-sustainability agenda comes to Eurozone

Re: TDS

It is sickening to see how the left is ignoring the terrible statistics of death and misery, because they dislike the messenger.

Autism is up many 1000% since 1970, Obesity in the US is 40%, US people are plagued with a cancer epidemic, US people are dying on a younger age compared to other developed countries, the cherry on the cake are the 100,000 people annually OD-ing due to the fentanyl crisis. These statistics of death ballooned under democrat presidencies. Bidens open border policies presented the US drug market to Mexican cartels on a silver plate. No democrat has ever spent time on these problems, except for ridiculing idealistic people like RFK who try to solve this human tragedy. Nothing new here, the disdain of the left for human life is proven over and over again in history, leftists sold death under the name of communism, Stalinism, Maoism and National Socialism. Today they have the audacity to call themselves Democrats.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

L'État, c'est moi

Said King Louis XIV on April 13, 1655. At Microsoft they took inspiration from the old King, who blessed the world with the Versailles castle, adopting the concept that "The PC is mine". The destruction of 400-800 million PC's in a "Russian Hybrid warfare attack on the West" is something that not even von der Leyen could come up with, that honor goes to those in charge of the one single entity controlling and spying on more people than any dictatorial regime that existed. If the effect is that the world learned that it is a good idea to end its dependence on US Big-tech, it would be a win.

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

Finally they admit guilt

For collectively cooperating with the Biden Socialist regime. Four years of suppressing conservative content, four years of Covid lies, four years of gender misinformation, four years of leftist propaganda that would have made Joseph Stalin jealous, all came to an end on January 20, 2025.

The collective 1984 style censorship of Big-Tech media is a black page in history of a free nation like the USA.

With this pocket change, Big-Tech came far too easy off the hook for their assault on democracy and free speech, each of them should have been fined for one year worth of profit. It took Elon Musk to break open the leftist/globalist information monopoly by investing 40 billion to buy twitter. They left us with bad memories of a dark age in information warfare, increased numbers of myocarditis/pericarditis issues in the male population due to their propaganda for mRNA shots. Information involving alternatives like the classic Sputnik vaccine, without serious side-effects, was actively removed.

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

With love from the country of infinite greed and stupidity

Using proprietary corporate products is the tech equivalent of living under a dictatorship.

Dictators don't care what their subjects think, they do what benefits them.

Maybe the W10 support debacle is a lesson the world needed to get in order to feel the consequences of its Windows addiction.

The absence of massive Google Chromebook and iOS advertisement campaigns in the last 6 months is perhaps revealing the cozy relationships US Big-Tech companies maintain.

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

Introduce the gold+Silver standard

On Day X, print pallets full of dollar bills, send them to people who claim to have borrowed money to the US government.

On Day X+1, give every US citizen 100 silver coins, valued against a certain amount of gold in the federal reserve, and declare the silver coins are the only valid currency in the US.

This cancels out in one move all inequality, the Wallstreet money, which is just warm air made out of nothing, is gone, ending the era where a colony of sniffling rats has too much power, wrecking lives of normal hard working people.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Sigh

>> A friend working at McDonald's helped with the research, but was fired over "security concerns from corporate"

Within a year they have the same problems, since the IQ level of the management at that poison shop competes with the room temperature.

More customers asking for Google's Data Boundary, says Cloud Experience boss

MS, Google and AWS are all gaslighting everyone

The court case in France involving MS proved loud and clear that president Trump can request every bit of data hosted on a platform owned by these companies. There is no excuse for any organization in the EU using the services provided by any of these companies, they knowingly export client data to the US. It is specially sad in the Netherlands, where banks, health care organizations and the government itself are fervent Azure customers out of laziness and a don't care about privacy attitude.

These tech giants could setup European hosting companies in which they have a minority stake, making enforcement of the Cloud Act on foreign customer data challenging.

These hosting companies should have no activities in the US, since it could make them vulnerable to pressure from the US government.

In the process a piece of the IT cake stays in Europe and will still generate profits for Big-Tech without effectively handing over data of Europeans to the US government.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

Re: Good

=COPILOT("How can I replace this nagging and intrusive crap by LibreOffice",A1:Z999)

Suetopia: Generative AI is a lawsuit waiting to happen to your business

Gosh these Americans

Something new = Another opportunity to sue someone.

Maybe ICE should start arresting lawyers as well, and detain them in Alligator Gitmo, society would see massive improvements without these parasites.

Study finds radical nutjobs targeting gamers via Discord, Twitch, Steam

Re: Assessing Counter-Narrative Responses to the Global Far Right /s

Yeah, this "far right". What a bunch of horrible people are these, (r)aping and groping girls in public pools on a daily basis, blowing themselves up in crowds, cutting off heads of teachers in France, killing random people with rented SUV's on Xmas markets in Germany, dozens of knife attacks on daily basis in Germany, making whole neighborhoods unsafe, turning Stockholm into the (r)ape capital of the world, doing drug trade and petty crime on a massive scale instead of getting normal jobs.

The world would be a better place without these "far right" people doing all these horrific things.

NetBSD 11 prepares for launch with 57 supported platforms

Maybe it could be a bit of an omission to look at NetBSD that way. Check out the CVE's on cvedetails.com, for over a decade the most serious issues are a few internal privilege escalations.

The elegance of configuration is just amazing when coming from over-engineered and complex distros like RedHat and Ubuntu, who cater too much to the windows crowd than is good for them.

For single task, appliance like applications, NetBSD is an excellent choice. Minimal attack surface, simple configuration and high level of security.

When compiling a small kernel, by leaving out all the unneeded drivers, one can easily build a dedicated haproxy server using less than 512MB memory.

For someone used to Linux and the comfy package management most distros provide, NetBSD has a bit of a learning curve.

Microsoft gives in to Chromebook bullies and drops Windows 11 SE

Re: "recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11"

I hope schools stop using this M$ stuff, had to pay several hundred dollars to fix breakages on my daughters school device being a Microsoft branded flimsy craptop.

Europe's AI crackdown starts this week and Big Tech isn't happy

Re: "Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI."

Best example are the food regulations, what is sold in supermarkets in the "land of the free", would be disposed of in special chemical dumps in Europe by men in white pressured suits wearing masks.

In a world where greedy CEO's of food producing companies pose as much a health risk for the population as fentanyl dealers do, strict regulations might reduce probability on an obesity, diabetes or cancer epidemic like the "land of the free" is suffering from.

AI is yet another technology, controlled by Big-Tech companies who are already having an unhealthy amount of power over societies.

If they are let off the hook with this, corporate greed combined with the rich amounts of information and control over citizens they grant to governments, the essays of George Orwell will look like a joke within a decade.

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

Re: Why not sell W11 without TPM for $ 60 with updates until 2030 ??

Thank you for the excellent reply, it will help many sitting with older high-end PC's.

Why not sell W11 without TPM for $ 60 with updates until 2030 ??

From MS perspective such a thing would make sense, nobody has an excuse not to update and they get quite some new cash flowing in their direction.

But maybe they got too cozy with hardware manufacturers to be able to drop the TPM requirement in W11.

Windows 11 migration heats up... on desktops

Re: Alternatives

There must be some collusion among US tech companies not to rock the boat in this blackmail scheme initiated by MS.

MS offered the Hardware manufacturers a fat juicy bone, by forcing users to ditch perfectly working hardware by the tens of millions if they want to continue using supported version of Windows.

Google, Citrix and others had several years to develop easy to use and install alternatives to help out those users wanting to keep their hardware.

It will be interesting to find out which price shops like Lenovo, HP and Dell have to pay to MS for running this extortion scheme on their behalf.

Perhaps what is more interesting is the fact no consumer protection agency or government stepped in to protect its citizens from the scamming by US based companies.

Eat or be eaten by AI, Amazon CEO warns staff

Post capitalism and Tech Feudalism

We are sliding back in 15th-18th century Europe, with Tech Feudalism replacing capitalism.

Salaries used to be 85% of the revenue from industrial companies like General Motors, Meta pays 1% of its revenue in salaries.

Amazon revenue is 54 billion in Europe, they pay zero taxes. They get 30% from each sale, making more than a 17th century noble got from the value of the harvest created by farmers on his land.

The money US big tech makes doesn't return in society, it stays dead in the fangs of the handful of tech billionaires.

Since it doesn't return to the society that spent it, Central Banks have to print more, creating inflation.

The disease of Tech Nobility will infect Europe as well, bad thing for them is that Europeans are not docile sheep like Anglo Saxons, the day will come for them as well after their greed destroyed all.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

It is not as bad as claimed in the article

Claiming "internet usage statistics" of (desktop) browser X/Y/Z = < 5% is logical, since the default web browsers on Android and IPhones dominate the numbers by a great margin.

Usage of MS Edge desktop is 4.6% of overall internet browser traffic, Chrome dominates since it is both on desktop and Android.

In this environment Firefox with 2.6% is not a bad number.

The claim to fame of Firefox is privacy, it offers the freedom to define ones own proxy, which is not possible in Chrome or edge.

In corporate environments, employers will face more issues to insert employee monitoring extensions, a.k.a. spyware, in Firefox, which is easy in Edge and Chrome.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: Well good luck, seriously ...

Munich didn't fail miserably. The politicians who took the initiative for migrating to Linux got a lot of bad press from the billionaire controlled mainstream media, in the elections their opponents got massive support from unknown sources.

In the end, such projects get slowly get killed by bad press and the will to continue gets worn down by the constant pressure imposed by US Big Tech calling the shots.

In a world where MS would disappear magically from one day to the other, transitioning to Linux and Libre-Office based solutions would be a quick operation for most people.

Check "Requiem for the American Dream" if you don't believe how much control these companies impose on our societies.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Just ship EVs with the batteries discharged

The danger of lithium batteries comes from chemicals inside those batteries that create violent combustion when they meet. This is independent of the charge.

It just need a tiny leakage inside the cells to start a catastrophe.

Lovely to see lady shaves on wheels get hot :).

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

Re: Forced to Windows 11

It is a weird world we live in. One would expect that the likes of Google, Apple or Jeff Bezos would perhaps spend some money on an international campaign to pester MS with a good remade Linux distro, Apple coming with a specially attractive solution to replace windows, and making tons of commercials for it, explaining to get free of the MS shackles.

Where is google promoting chrome-os while MS users are blackmailed into trashing perfect working hardware ?.

To me it is actually proof that US Big-Tech is not competing at all, for appearances they do phony court cases now and then.

They have the pie sliced up, and nobody is trying to eat from each others plate.

Google, high on AI, flogs Gemini for all things

I love Gemini

It is really addictive to discuss and explore things with it. Like a best friend who never gets impatient or tired. Reminds me of what Sarah Connor said in Terminator 2, when they were fixing the starter in Mexico.

Microsoft adds Grok – the most unhinged chatbot – to Azure AI buffet

16th-17th Century AI complies to mainstream

"Align with mainstream .." it would be funny if they had AI in the 17th century.

Priest: What is at the edges of the earth ?.

AI: The earth does not have edges, since it is an orb, after all "Orbis factor, Rex aeterne" is another name for that God of yours.

Priest: Thou shall not spread these heretic lies and comply with the explanation of the Holy Script as his holiness the Pope sees fit. So what is at the edges of the earth.

AI: At the edges of Midgard the giant snake named Jörmungandr holds the seas together that make up sizeable part of your world. It is very important to keep the balance, and not disturb the creature

since during ragnarok it will create enormous waves and destroy your world.

Priest: Calls in the Inquisition to fry the computer with 1000V.

Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software

MS is the love child of all the governments

If it not fines for monopolistic behave that goes into the coffers of the state, not to the citizens who overpaid or suffered losses due to unfair competition practices, then it are all the backdoors MS operating systems provide to governments and often foreign three letter agencies allowing easy access so they can spy on their citizens.

Those writing that Linux is bad and unusable are probably foreign agents employed by MS or governments, the price for the supposed easiness of using MS products is high in terms of money and loss of privacy.

It is amazing that one can find much information proposing a breakup of google in Standard-Oil style, while nobody talks about breaking up MS. It would make a lot of sense to split it into an OS division, a division for building applications like MSSQL server and office products and an Azure hosting division.

The world would greatly benefit from this split, competition flourishes and prices would go down.

The absence of such ideas shows how much MS is married to governments that have an obvious regulatory blind spot for MS as long they can extort a few 100 million from it every 3-4 years and easy access for spying on all the users of said MS products.

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

typewriters and carbon paper

The rest is a gamble when information is supposed to be restricted to those for which it is meant.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

Make it stop

" it's a mess but you knew that already.." It is perhaps news for those living in the dark Stalinistic dictatorships of commercial software providers: Free societies tend to be more messy than centralized dictatorships, which seem clean on the outside, but as soon someone scratches the thin layer of varnish, corruption, hidden failures and mass graves stare one in the face.

In the world of commercial software the manufacturer always respects the wishes of the customer, it would never discontinue software packages overnight, never increase prices, never get bought by a white shark company which overnight changes everything. A good example is Microsoft, a mere 70% of the PC's worldwide runs windows 10. Forcing a large part of those users to buy a new PC when they do not have this magic security chip is really a Nobel Prize winning idea. The world is lucky to have great minds succeeding Balmer and Gates coming up with these ideas.

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Re: Which nationality do all these Trump bashers have ??

Good to see people are experts in street language, but do not understand the concept of VAT returns on inputs needed to manufacture a specific item, which foreign manufactures do not get.

Which nationality do all these Trump bashers have ??

When someone in the Netherlands buys something for $1 off Ebay USA, it will cost in the end: $1 + E. 34 admin costs + 10% import duties + 21% VAT = 0.90 + 0.09 + 0.21 + 34 = E 35.20. This amounts to over 4000% import tariffs.

Friends living in North-Carolina paid 4% on top of the purchase price when they buy something from Europe before the new tariffs of president Trump were implemented.

A Chevrolet Corvette costs in the USA around $ 85,000, in the Netherlands over E 250,000, this is far over 300% import tariffs.

The 21% VAT in Europe gives European manufacturers an advantage when it comes to pricing, since they are able to recover VAT.

The Europeans seem to have pretty high trade barriers, they better tone down the rhetoric a bit.