I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind.
Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).
> Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency.
It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.
Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no?
Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints.
The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is.
And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat.
As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010.
What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
> It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
Resources are not infinite. European deficits are ballooning, and europe's ability to invest in anything (go further into debt) is constrained by peoples willingness to lend money to European governments at reasonable rates (the bond market)....a willingness which is rapidly collapsing for France, Germany, UK, etc due to lack of growth and underwater social entitlements.
As of right now, there's about 1000X more people working on Microsoft Office than on Frontier AI in Europe. Hence why Europe isn't even near being able to compete with the US and China on the frontier.
Cool that we're re-creating 1990s Microsoft Software in 2026 (why not an EU-native fax machine too? those are still used heavily in 80% of German orgs).
But what will you do if OpenAI/Anthropic/Kimi/GLM cut off your access? The frontier is only going to continue advancing and the openness of the Chinese models will not last forever.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon?
> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees
I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much.
People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees.
I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places.
> Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.
This shows a profound ignorance for how much of modern life, especially within a bureaucracy, is powered by banal software like office suites.
If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.
I get it, for a forum of people who build software for a living, it's upsetting to confront the idea that the stuff you make doesn't actually matter that much, especially in a post-AI world. Hell, even pre-AI you can just install LibreOffice and it will functionally be the same.
But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life.
You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
Given how fragile unreliable those processes are, you probably can without doing much damage. Its not like replacing good quality software with something vibe coded.
> You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine.
Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.
It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.
> Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success
I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.
Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous. It fails to address many other reasons why we are experiencing fires and creates an easy to blame enemy and a sensation that there's nothing we can do.
We should really go way deeper than just blaming everything on an increase of temperatures, which nevertheless is actually happening.
We, locals, have been warning already for decades of the increase of fires due to an accumulation of reasons, which I have actually described already in another message down below but I can summarize here.
* Forest mass has actually increased a lot during the last decades, Spain has now around 50% more forest mass than in the 1970s.
* Part of the increased mass has to do with reforestation efforts done by governments happening since last half of last century, which basically planted many forests using pine varieties which grow very quickly but also burn quickly (Pines are biologically design to burn with their flammable design and dried needles, that's their feature).
* Historical local forest were composed of many varieties of trees, including oaks, holm oaks, poplar, which grow slowly, are way less prone to burn, and regrow again after a fire. Those varieties were never used in any reforestation efforts, which has resulted in many new forests being extremely prone to burn quickly
* Population has shifted enormously towards big cities, abandoning little villages where forests were part of their style of life. Lumber was part of their economical income, which resulted in continuous care of those forests and efforts in preservation. There are still some communities like that in some areas of Spain, and their forests have the lowest rate of wildfires in the whole country.
* Many techniques like firebreaks, counter-fires, low intensity burning to clear crop stubble, dry brush, and old vegetation to regenerate fresh grass for livestock and prepare fields are now forbidden, again increasing the risk and extension of wildfires
* Forest Grazing is also nowadays completely forbidden. Sheep used to roam everywhere in the country, consuming many burning-prone vegetation, reducing also the risk of wildfires.
But even despite all of that, countries like Spain for example, have nowadays the lowest proportion of burnt forest since the last 50 years.
> Blaming everything on global warming is extremely dangerous
I don't think it's blaming on global warming. Global warming is just making those problems a lot worse.
It is just the beginning, on average it will get worse every year. Every kilogram of CO2 we emit makes it worse, so it won't stop worsening until we reach zero emissions.
> a sensation that there's nothing we can do.
On the contrary, I think there too much we must do because of global warming. There is so much that we certainly won't be able to do it all, meaning that the situation will get "more complicated" anyway. The more we do, the more we preserve.
To make a comparison that stays in the theme: saying "we won't stop it so there is nothing we can do" is like saying "this burning tree is dead anyway, so there is no need to save the rest of the forest". The tree is dead, it won't come back. And we know for sure that many other trees will die. But we should fight to preserve as much as we can from the forest. The less we do, the more we lose. But we will lose a lot anyway, maybe just not everything (depending on how well we fight).
While I think this is mostly correct, I don't think it's OK to downplay climate change as just a "blame target". These current and extreme wildfires result from hotter and drier conditions, too. That is a major reason. And yes, we can do something about it.
Also, I know that controlled burns, grazing and firebreaks are widely used today in Spain, they are not universally forbidden.
Sheep and slow growing trees of course don't get along well, you have to choose one or the other at least while the trees establish, which for oaks is measured in decades.
In Wales and Ireland we have the opposite problem, the sheep strip everything bare, the old trees die and the forests cannot regenerate.
> The problem is that species that grow slow are not being used and they would be less flammable
> The problem is that sheep are not allowed to graze
Choose one. Slow growing saplings, or sheep grazing on slow growing saplings.
> The problem is that many techniques to regenerate fresh grass for livestock are forbidden.
Because is a forest, not a meadow. The goal shouldn't be to breed sheep here. Farmers are always pressing to remove just a few trees, to make space, to burn bush for "regenerating grass". In the current situation, their short term interests aren't compatible with our middle and long term survival.
I come from the Mediterranean region and locally we know many explanations for that.
Many of those pine forests are relatively new. Pine trees burn frequently, around every 20-30 years. In the past they used to be mixed with many other original trees, but during the recent century reforestation, pines were planted as the single tree species, making fires more prone to happen and more easily to spread.
In the past, way more population lived next to the forests, where lumber used to be part of their income, so trees were frequently cut, forests maintained and shepherds would bring their sheep to feed from forest lower plants. All of that is gone.
In the past, locals used to be able to build firewalls, clean forests and fight fire with fire (provoking small controlled wildfires to stop the big ones). Green policies forbid those actions nowadays.
Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%.
> Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
This was the hottest year on record. 10 of the last 15 years have been the hottest year on record, consecutively. What makes you believe this fake information about the middle ages?
Someone heard about the Medieval Warm Period, looked at the Wikipedia page, saw the temperature data for the Greenland ice sheets and misinterpreted it to mean global temperature. It fits in well with the 'well, the Jurassic was warmer than today and there were no humans then, so you can't be sure that we're responsible for any climate change that may be happening' argument.
None of what you are writing is applicable to Landes. Outside of scandinavia Landes region is some of the most intensely managed forest in Europe.
From planting to cutting is only around 30-50 years. With multiple thinnings in between. Also none of that forest existed 200 years ago and there never was anything other than pine planted there for those 200 years, in the beginning for resin, now for pulp.
And so none of it burned in the middle ages or was affected by any higher temperatures because it didn't exist back then.
It does seem that the area burnt p/year by wildfires hasn't grown in the last 40 years in Europe, and even decreased slightly. This is somewhat odd to me. The evacuation and disruption of settlements seems to have increased in severity in the last few years, or at least the media gives that perception. If I'm looking at the wrong data and this could be misleading, then apologies.
I love how four comments down there is someone posting:
"You’re both right.
However OPs post is more useful than yours.
By now, everyone knows about climate change. But I assume most didn’t know the fact about the pine trees in this area.
Nowadays it’s much more about how we deal with climate change and not so much about the fact that there is human made climate change"
Thank you for proving that there are, in fact, still climate change deniers even here on hacker news.
I'm assuming you're a climate change denier. You don't say so outright, but "Green policies forbid those actions nowadays" is a bit of a dogwhistle that you oppose environmental protection regulations broadly (not merely overzealous ones that have side-effects that make combating certain types of wildfires harder in certain situations), and:
"Also, if we talk about past centuries, temperatures used to be higher during early middle age and before. These high temperatures are nothing new in terms of historical forest.
Also, looking at the statistics, we’re probably at the bottom number of wildfires per area in the last 70-80 years, while total forest mass has probably increased around 40-50%."
Well... that's pretty close to just coming out and saying you don't believe in climate science.
These factual corrections are warranted. But IMO the accusations of dog-whistling and wrongthink are unnecessary and counterproductive. Again: I agree with you on the substance! And this probably is a climate denier. But (1) that's not very interesting in itself, and (2) by adopting an accusatory tone we're just going to push them and their sympathizers into a posture of defensiveness and victimhood which will only worsen the polarization and make the whole problem even harder to solve than it already is. IMO, on this issue it's best just to stick doggedly to factual correction and avoid the temptation to police people's inner minds.
On the one hand I agree with you, on the other hand I think this is highly idealistic:
Most people would have a hard time debating a flat-earther since it's their hobby and they master all the talking points whereas you spent maximum one hour even thinking about it in the last 10 years. They will get you in a dark forest of details you don't know how to navigate and win the argument.
I am so sorry for the one in a million crackpot-sounding genius that will get hurt in the process but social shunning is just so so much more effective. No wonder the crackpots and grifters are back and running the show nowadays
I think a better approach is to ask people who have contrarian/non-consensual opinions to show that they know that they are crackpots out and to distance themselves from them:
"I know some people come up with conspiracy theories that says climate is a hoax designed to control populations because they don't want to change anything in their way of life but that's not what I am. I just care about the science and I think I found a real flaw in the leading explanation of climate change. I'd love for someone with knowledge about to discuss it with me to see if they took X into account" etc.
This above is what I expect but if you quack like a quack, you're probably a quack and you'll get the social shunning treatment
The dark ages and the plague saw a lot of belief in religion and rejection of science that lead to excessive deaths all over europe. Medicine was studied and practiced in the arab world and jewish doctors were the only ones allowed to bring some of those practices to Europe. Religion was preventing tested and verified approaches to treatment. Today Europe needs to stop repeating that practice. Believing in human caused climate change doesn’t stop you from learning proper tested mitigation strategies against wildfires, cooling of people in cities, nuclear energy or anything else that allows you to mitigate the effects of your climate religion. Because you can mitigate death in your area way before you can stop china or any other high emitter from emitting CO2 on the other side of the planet from you and contributing to global warming.
There is no dichotomy between preparing for the inevitable and preventing the preventable.
Painting the actions of people on the other side of the planet as "out of anybody's control" is hubris though. Humanity very well is capable of organizing on that scale and has done so regularly for a long time already.
The actual problem is the disconnect between the interests of those in charge of such organization and the well-being of the public.
Villages all over the world since ancient times would have houses with some form of a summer kitchen. During hot days the temps in the house are already uncomfortable and cooking there would make things worse, so they built basic kitchen facilities away from the main house to keep heat and smoke and smells out (that also reduced some fire risks).
Many western countries now summer-kitchen most of their uncomfortable output to corrupt poorer countries where the leadership doesn’t mind taking cash for poisoning their citizens. The naïveté is then claiming that those poorer countries are then the main polluters. Recyclables in the US and a lot of Europe are shipped off to southeast asia thus 80% of plastics in the ocean are found there. A train of plastic to be burned was even shipped to Bulgaria (a EU member) by the mafia a few years ago.
In the mean time “carbon credit” companies have their offices in Hong Kong and are guilting Disney and Adidas and Apple and any Western public brands into paying for “carbon laundering”. Forests that would have been planted anyway for lumber collect carbon credits as extra income right before selling said lumber for consumption. It takes real faith to keep believing any of the activity actually removes carbon legitimately, but the money movement in that movement is very real.
While anyone can target the source of the warming with any resource they want to dedicate, and should be free to do so. Governments need to focus on mitigating the risks to human life and that involves real fire prevention (trimming, controlled burns - maybe smart tech the smoke so it gets captured instead of irritating the noses of non-summer-kitchen citizens), clean energy generation, and installing damn air conditioning units into old European capitals so Europeans don’t end up dying in droves from preventable basic climate change consequences.
"but "Green policies forbid those actions nowadays" is a bit of a dogwhistle that you oppose environmental protection regulations broadly (not merely overzealous ones that have side-effects that make combating certain types of wildfires harder in certain situations)"
thats a bit of a "dogwhistle" that you're not actually convinced that green policies can ever be deranged and counterproductive. On the contrary. I don't know if you're a a brainwashed virtue signaler, but I'm assuming it. You don't say so outright, but the mental gymnastics of calling someone a climate changer denier who just said climate change is widely recognised are staggering.
This truly is the least intelligent timeline. Please check with Dunning and Kruger if you're part of the problem.
You ask me what I think. So far deepseek has been very consistently trying to advance state of the art research in a transplant and public way by writing papers and publishing working code. They are also not at the mercy of the stock market in the same way many Americans companies are. Before anyone assumes too much, I live in Europe.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally.
So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.
Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.
I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.
> Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.
Capitalism provides a set of incentives that shape how people make decisions. Anyone can be selfish, but selfishness in capitalist society has a particular shape. To ignore the external incentives when looking at human behavior is horribly naive and shortsighted, but is frequently done by capitalism-apologists who seek to disregard any criticism of their favorite incentive system.
Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).