I think the GP is relating to MS services and accounts as utilities that should not be possible to be taken away easily, not about Wireguard.

Even if they somehow were so expensive, that it would no longer scale to their size, that is still not our problem and if anything, a sign that either they need to improve their systems, or simply cannot be as big as they are. Shit happens, scale down, I won't cry for them.

I have a feeling, that the resolve to do something about it is waning in the EU, because of the plans to soften up the GDPR.

About the work being more enjoyable when seeing it as a craft: I think it only is more enjoyable, if you can somehow bring part of your craftsmanship into it, and are not overly limited by other people or the sprint or management or any of the other many factors that ruin the fun, like time available, terrible inherited codebase that would take weeks or months to fix, and so on.

Well, sure, there are aspects of the work that can suck the joy out of it, but that's part of it. :) Even in personal projects I can create a codebase that's difficult to work with, or depend on third party code and tools that I don't particularly enjoy. The tricky task is navigating in and around these hurdles, knowing how and when to address them, and ultimately, simply accepting them. If your expectation is constant enjoyment, you'll be disappointed not just at work, but at life in general.

That said, I struggle with this as well, so I'm speaking more aspirationally than from a place of wisdom. :)

As a first step they could give back some of their illegal settlements. Then over time give back more, until they are back in UN recognized borders. That would be a start. They could also start to persecute violent mobs that chased people out of their own homes and the people in the military covering them. They could also release unjustifiably imprisoned people.

You know, things that basic human decency would demand of them.

And yet that laptop stand is not even the slightest bit slanted, one of the crucial details. I could simply take a book and put the laptop on top of that, to get the same ergonomic features. I am aware that ergonomic use is not the main point, but it would certainly not have hurt to consider that angle at least a little bit.

That would have destroyed the brutalist cred.

Use a random cement brick instead of a book, then.

No, gotta use concrete.

Why would this matter? If you were typing on it, that would be helpful, but this is for a laptop that sits on the side, while the user types on a separate (and likely much better) keyboard.

Haha, consider that angle. (I'll show myself out.)

I found your comment funny and I only realized this pun when I read my own comment after posting it. I hope you keep your humor, despite being downvoted. You are probably downvoted, because people think it doesn't add much to the topic, and not because it isn't funny. (I hope so, at least.)

I am guessing these companies were not big enough to make enough of a fuss and have a good legal team? Google likes making money, and if there is the slightest reason to not have to pay someone, then they are gonna make use of that reason. Might even make it onto someone's KPI list of "prevented fraud".

Would be good to not depend on the US that much any longer, since they have proven to be such an unreliable "partner". Even in a non-Trump future one cannot rely upon some future election not resulting in some similar disaster. Better to pull out, before some hothead gets weird ideas about that gold.

Maybe the fact that US soldiers and military bases exist inside Germany's borders is slightly more important than where the gold is. First regain your sovereignty, I'd say.

Yes, close Ramstein and close Landstuhl, which were used for every US war in the Middle East in the last 30 years.

Nothing wrong with going for the low hanging fruit first.

The USA is threatening to pull out of NATO anyway, so those might go away.

I am guessing that these bases are one of the last things to go. Would be a major diplomatic incident. But then again Trump creates those for breakfast, so who knows when we finally have had enough.

On the other hand it is always convenient to hide behind the "We big, careless, silly org, we no knows how to handle data.". If we apply too many razors, then they are just gonna cut our freedom away. At some size of organizations negligence becomes malicious, since they ought to have people knowing how stuff should be handled and they most likely ignore it.

What is more likely? Everyone at an organization's IT, sales and data protection department is incapable of doing their job, or someone doesn't give a damn, calculating, that preventing such things from happening costs too much?

Working in sales but not being able to handle customer data responsibly (for whatever reason). Not a good look.

You say this like it’s unusual. In my experience, sales is incentivized to only really care about closing deals. Everything else is often just a speed bump to them.