Glory to you… and to your house.

Data: Captain, due to a highly improbable fluctuation of subspace, it appears that all Christmas presents for the neighborhood have quantum tunneled underneath our Christmas tree.

Geordi: if we reverse the polarity of the warp coils and emit precisely positioned nadion bursts from the phaser arrays we could reverse the tunnels and send the gifts back to their original locations.

Riker: We could save Christmas?

Picard: Mr. Laforge, Mr. Worf, make it ho ho ho.

Worf: Sir, I object. I am not a merry man.

Exactly… the next 3 presidents (Cyprus, Ireland, Lithuania) all support the legislation, and the three afterward (Greece, Italy, Latvia) are undecided, but their indecision doesn’t seem to come from a moral standpoint. This puts us in 2029 before the leadership (Luxembourg then Netherlands) actually rejects broad privacy invasion on principle.

This assessment assumes no sentiment changes on the national levels, which is of course a wrong assumption. It’s important to keep respect for private life on the minds of politicians to prevent delay another attempt. 🫩

Absolutely! I also love access to small, cheap electronic bits for my projects, and at the same time I’m all for protecting our postal services. A 2€ per package surcharge doesn’t practically change anything on the economy side. Temu already expects a minimum purchase of something like 20€.

My small concern with this is how it will be applied/processed by the carriers. I hope it doesn’t end up like the customs/VAT on larger packages, where they charge 10-20€ for customs clearance. But now that I write it down, for me, even that isn’t a complete blocking factor. I’d probably spend more time comparing the value of ordering direct vs from a local reseller, which is exactly the goal.