2025-11-06 Bye bye USA
======================

I haven't travelled to the US in many years. I made an exception in
2012 because my wife wanted to see Hawaii again. Before that, I
already hadn't travelled to the US in many years. Remember the Snowden
years? The Homeland Security years? The Patriot Act years? Remember?
They never ended.

These day's it's even worse.

A friend wanted some advice about moving customer data from on-premise
in Switzerland to a US cloud compute provider, nominally in
Switzerland. We had a long chat about political pressure and
authoritarian governments. I think she challenged her team that is in
charge of the long project (you know those projects where you need to
answer hundreds of questions in huge Excel sheets) with the question:
Would you move this data to a Chinese cloud hosting provider? Of
course not, that's different, they said. And the two of us wondered
for how long.

We talked about Microsoft saying in Paris that the US government would
get access to customer data on Microsoft hosts if it really wanted to,
even if hosted in Europe; about the International Criminal Court (ICC)
ditching Microsoft Office because Microsoft had locked them out of all
their services, because the credit card institutes had locked them all
out of their services, all at the behest of the US president.

We talked about the Swiss army chief opposing the current move of the
federal administration to the Microsoft cloud; the Swiss federal court
in Lausanne not using Microsoft as far as possible; the canton of
Lucerne suddenly realising what they are are about to give up with a
move to Microsoft; about people saying that Switzerland should stop
paying for the F-35 after one billion spent since it may or may not
arrive if we pay the remaining six billion, and if it does, we don't
know if it'll work, and if it works, we don't know if the US president
won't disable them just to make a point.

We talked about Trump and how people are no longer trusting that the
US is an ally, a friend, a partner to rely on.

Each example is a small event on the global scale, but together they
start building up. If you're a C-level executive, do you want to be
the person that decided handing the company keys to a company in the
US, where IT leaders make $1,000,000 presents and kiss the president's
arse at a dinner, on camera? Will they stand up for you? Of course
not. Will the heads of the local branches stand up for you? Of course
not.

If people can avoid dealing with authoritarian strongmen, they do it.
If people start dealing with organised crime, their woes never end.

Switzerland has an app-based electronic payment system called TWINT. I
prefer it over Visa and Mastercard. I also want to get back to using a
lot of cash. I stopped that with the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
But I'm doing my part voting with my wallet.

We distrust China because they're authoritarians. We distrust Russia
because they're authoritarians. Why should we trust the USA since
they're slowly turning into authoritarians.

#USA

2025-11-09. Full on nazis. @aphyr@woof.group writes:

> I am flooded with stories. There are so many I cannot remember them
> all; cannot keep straight who was gassed, beaten, abducted, or shot.
> I write to leave a record, to stare at the track of the tornado. I
> write to leave a warning. I write to call for help.
>
> I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the
> historical danger of a secret police. What happens when a militia is
> deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left
> unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable
> identity and speech will shrink. I want you to think about elections
> in this future. I want you to understand that every issue you care
> about—any hope of participatory democracy—is downstream of this.
>
> – I Want You to Understand Chicago, by Kyle Kingsbury