Just to be clear, I’m pretty sure that they don’t have a no-DRM-across-the-board policy, though, so if you’re going there for DRM-free ebooks, you probably want to pay attention to what you’re buying.

checks

Yeah, they have a specific category for DRM-free ebooks:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

I’ll also add that independent of their store, I rather like their hardware e-readers, have used them in the past, and if I wasn’t trying to put a cap on how many electronic devices I haul around and wanted a dedicated e-reader, the Kobo devices would probably be pretty high on my list. When I used them, I just loaded my own content onto them with Calibre, not stuff from the Kobo store.

I also suspect that a USB-connected DAC is going to have a longer life due to interface longevity.

An old PCI sound card can’t be stuck in a PCIe slot. An old ISA sound card — and I’m pretty sure I was using one of those when USB was around — can’t be stuck in an PCI slot. You can probably find some combination of cards-on-cards that will work, but it’s not a straightforwards “plug it in and use it”.

You can still use original USB devices on current computers. At some point, computers will probably stop having USB-A and you’ll probably need to physically adapt USB-C to it, but the electrical backwards compatibility is still around, and I doubt is going to end any time soon.

Firstly, motherboards for desktop PCs don’t have terrible onboard sound like they might have in the old days.

So, you want to not have electrical noise from your computer spilling into your audio output, true enough. I’ve had that in the past from on-motherboard DACs, true. But USB power is also often dirty as all hell — I remember watching some YouTube video of someone running around with an oscilloscope and showing all the stuff that shows up on USB power. It was appalling. I’ve had noise from USB power spill into external USB DACs that don’t have adequate internal power supplies running the analog circuitry to deal with noise from USB power making it to the analog signal. This inexpensive thing definitely permitted it through, tossed one out the other day (though I’ve also had higher-end USB DACs on the same bus that didn’t have issues).

I have, in the past, kind of wished that people reviewing USB DACs would have some mechanism to induce noise on USB power and measure the degree to which it is permitted to leak through into the analog output.

I think that Congress most likely has involved itself.

No it hasn’t! It didn’t do anything like pass a law to take away powers!

Congress’s first step is not going to be to take any of the sorts of most-extreme moves I listed above. That’d be far down the list of actions to take. What it’s going to do is to go talk to Trump, not in public, and tell him that this is not something that they’re going to go along with. My guess, as I wrote above, is that that has most-likely happened.

Several Republican legislators — Ted Cruz, for one — have said that a recession would produce a bloodbath for Republicans in the midterms. This is going to be them expressing publicly that this isn’t okay with them. Peter Navarro can say that he’s fine with a recession; that doesn’t mean that Congress would be.

They’ve also had the Senate pass a resolution on terminating the public emergency upon which his tariff power rests. The House wasn’t expected to also pass it, and Trump would probably veto it, requiring it reaching a veto-proof majority backing it if Trump chose to veto it. But it’s Congress publicly saying that this isn’t on.

Congress is not going to take the kind of most-extreme actions that I listed because Trump caused the stock market to take a dip.

Well, there are a lot of factors here that I expect would be factors, both increasing and decreasing what he does over the course of the term.

• Right now, the Republican Party has a trifecta, and thus even GOP legislators who are not very happy with aspects of Trump are going to be very loathe to have fights with Trump, because this trifecta lets it pass lots of legislation that the Democrats would otherwise block; getting in a fight with Trump could mess that up. The incentives there will decline over the course of the term, since they’ll have increasingly gotten through the legislation that they want; Trump being happy becomes less-important.

• A major reason for Trump doing well in the presidential election was public unhappiness with inflation under Biden. Major global tariffs would also tend to drive up prices, and Republican legislators are not going to be happy about that, even aside from recession issues. I’ve seen both Republican and Democratic legislators commenting on the fact that this would probably be politically-damaging to the Republican Party; that’s probably a source of pushback.

• One threat that Trump has frequently made is to endorse a primary election competitor to a Republican legislator who doesn’t get along with them. This meaning something is contingent on Trump’s endorsement bearing weight, which requires sufficiently-high public approval of Trump in the district. If Trump takes unpopular actions, that endorsement matters less.

• Just because you don’t see a lot of Republican legislators arguing with Trump doesn’t mean that it’s not happening, quietly. The Republican Party has good political reasons to keep disagreements behind closed doors. Mike Johnson has made a number of statements about how he has had an extremely difficult job dealing with people getting along; he’s an interface between the House and the White House.

• What happens at midterms is going to be, I think, consequential. The Republican Party has good political reasons not to jam sticks in Trump’s wheels as long as he at least keeps things within bounds, and certainly not to do so publicly. The Democratic Party has good political reasons to constantly visibly jam sticks in Trump’s wheels. If the Democrats take the House in 2026, they have a lot of room to do things like initiate inquiries and demand information that they just don’t have right now.

• Late in the term, Trump is going to care less about popularity; that’s why Presidents tend to do politically-controversial pardons right at the end. So he might be willing to take some particularly controversial actions at the end.

• Late in the term, Trump is going to have a harder time making changes that last, because it’ll be easier to just reverse them or slow them from having effect. Trump laying off people at the beginning of his term is hard to reverse; said laid-off people probably aren’t going to just stick around for four years hoping to get their job back. If he does so three months before leaving office and his successor doesn’t like that, they’re probably largely just going to be rehired. So he has a hard time making lasting actions at the end.

• Trump’s tariff policy is based on a very weak legal structure. Normally Congress sets tariff policy, not the President, but Congress passed a law some decades back that permits the President to impose tariffs in emergencies. Trump proceeded to declare that fentanyl was an emergency and then started declaring that he’d throw up tariffs left and right. Whether or not the tariffs on even Mexico have any real basis in addressing fentanyl is questionable. Tariffs on Canada on fentanyl grounds are extremely questionable, as very little fentanyl enters the US from Canada, and tariffs on most of the world are even more decoupled from that. There’s a pretty strong argument that he’s got no legal authority there, and the only reason that he’s able to do it is because Congress hasn’t taken action against it. Congress can, if it wants, simply terminate the emergency he declared, at which point his power also evaporates (and has some more-forceful options as well, like taking issue at the Supreme Court with whether-or-not his use of that power is actually in line with even the declared emergency, or, if a supermajority in both the House and Senate want, simply entirely terminating the Presidential authority to impose tariffs at all, and then override a Presidential veto). The Senate already had a bipartisan bill pass about terminating the emergency over the Canada tariffs; last I looked, it was expected to fail in the House — that is, this is a public statement rather than aiming to force an end — but it’s a shot across the bow where the Senate is taking issue with some of his tariff policy. Trump’s ability to take action on tariffs is deeply dependent upon Congress choosing not to involve itself. I’m skeptical that Congress will accept global tariffs, even if Trump wants them, and Congress has pretty straightforward routes to avoid them. My guess is that Congress has probably communicated some things about what it’ll actually accept to Trump.

• Speaking even more-broadly, if it actually comes to some kind of real arm wrestling…the President has very extensive direct control over a large organization with millions of people, the Executive Branch. That’s what makes him powerful. But the reason that he has virtually all of that power is because Congress gave it to him in the past (“we authorize the President to have this much money to create a department and then tell it what to do”). Congress can take it away, and with a supermajority in each house, override Trump’s veto of such legislation. Even in areas where the Constitution very explicitly gives a power to the President, like commanding the military, Congress has written legislation to limit ways in which he can act, like the War Powers Resolution:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution

  The War Powers Resolution requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30-day withdrawal period, without congressional authorization for use of military force (AUMF) or a declaration of war by the United States. The resolution was passed by two-thirds each of the House and Senate, overriding the veto of President Richard Nixon.

  During Trump’s first term, Congress passed legislation that disallowed the President from removing sanctions on Russia without going back to Congress and getting an okay.

  Hypothetically, I imagine that Congress could probably impose a lot of restrictions on Trump, or even shift direct authority over Executive Branch departments to itself; it has, in the past, created a small amount of the bureaucracy that reports directly to Congress.

  My guess is that the Republican Party does not want to see any kind of an arm-wrestling scenario like that, though, as it’d be really politically bad. It’d instead warn behind closed doors that it might be willing to do that, and ward off things reaching that point. Hell, the Democratic Party doesn’t want things reaching that kind of point either. But my point is, Trump’s got real constraints on what he can do. He cannot just go ignore Congress.

That’s mostly talking about constraints on Trump’s power. So, there’s a broader question here: will Trump continue to say outrageous things? My guess is almost certainly yes. He’s shown no interest in stopping doing so for either of his terms, and kept doing so right through his first term, so I doubt that that’s going to go anywhere.

EDIT: Looking at the executive orders and correcting an error above, the emergency that Trump declared to justify the global tariffs was a separate emergency from the one that he declared over fentanyl.

much of American nazi ideology

I don’t know about “much of”, but the Manson family had something along those lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helter_Skelter_(scenario)

The Helter Skelter scenario is an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his so-called Family. At the trial of Manson and three others for the Tate–LaBianca murders, the prosecution presented it as motivating the crimes and as an aspect of the case for conspiracy.[1] Via interviews and autobiographies, former Family members related what they had witnessed and experienced of it.

In both the trial and his subsequent (1974) book, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi presented evidence that, in a period that preceded the murders, Manson prophesied what he called Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war that would arise from racial tensions between black and white people. [2]: 311  The prophecy involved reference to the New Testament’s Book of Revelation[2]: 238–44  and to the Beatles’ music, particularly songs from their 1968 White Album.

I think I’ve used one once or twice, but haven’t delved into the system. I haven’t spent time comparing snaps and flatpaks, either.

I’ve been meaning to try Flux.

My own main irritation with Flux is that it’s more-limited in terms of generating pornographic material, which is one thing that I’d like to be able to do. Pony Diffusion has been trained on danbooru tags, and so Pony-based models can recognize prompt terms like this, for which there is a vast library of tagged pornographic material (including some pretty exotic tags) about which knowledge has been trained into Pony models.

https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/tag_groups

There are Flux-based derived models that have been trained on pornographic material, but they don’t really have the scope of knowledge that Pony models do.

If one isn’t generating pornography, that’s not really a concern, though.

Flux also doesn’t use negative prompts, which is something to get used to.

It doesn’t have numeric prompt term weighting (though as best I can tell, some adjectives, like “very”, have a limited, somewhat-similar effect).

However, Flux can do some stuff that left me kinda slack-jawed the first time I saw it, like sticking objects in scenes that are casting soft shadows or have faint reflections. I still don’t know how all of this happens internally, assume that there has to be at least some limited degree of computer vision pre-processing on the training corpus to detect light sources at a bare minimum. Like, here’s an image I generated a while back around when I started using Flux:

https://lemmy.today/post/18453614

Like, when that first popped out, I’m just sitting there staring at it trying to figure out how the hell the software was able to do that, to incorporate light sources in the scene with backlighting and reflections and such. The only way you can do that that I can think of — and I’ve written at least a little computer vision software before, so I’m not competely out of the loop on this — is to try to pre-process your training corpus, identify light sources, and then separate their contributions from the image. And just to forestall one suggestion — no, this isn’t simply me happening to generate something very close to a particular image that the thing was trained on. I’ve generated plenty of other images that have placed light sources that affect nearby objects.

Here’s a (NSFW) image from a Tarot deck I generated, with the The Devil trump containing light sources. Same thing.

Another example of an image (Progression) I created using only the prompt in Flux: an image containing a series of panels with a boy transforming into a girl:

https://lemmy.today/post/18460312

Unlike the Turn of the Seasons image that I generated also linked to in another comment here, I did not explicitly specify the content in each panel. I know how to accomplish a somewhat-similar effect with a Stable Diffusion model and with plugins, where basically you divide the image into regions and have prompt weighting that is procedurally-altered in each frame, and I assume that somehow, Flux must be doing something akin to that internally…but Flux figured out how to do all this from a simple natural-language description in the prompt alone, which left me pretty boggled.

The Linux kernel already has the infrastructure required for that. Heck, Android itself, including its permission system, is built atop the Linux kernel.

Making sandboxing the default instead of having to restrict programs.

What’s missing for that is work on userspace software and app packaging. The kernel can’t automatically know what a program should and shouldn’t be allowed to do.

Some of that work has happened, like moving from X11, which really wasn’t designed around sandboxing, to Wayland.

But a lot of it requires making a permission system the norm and creating a system such that software is normally distributed with restricted permissions and developers develop around that. Like, I can use firejail and disallow write access to parts of the filesystem or network access to a program, but there isn’t a broad system of appropriate pre-created profiles that applications are distributed with and way to view this. We don’t have a convention for an application-private space on disk and lack of access to most of the filesystem, which Android does and apps need to be written around.

IMHO, one of the largest jumps would be Valve doing this for Steam games — a lot of games are going to be amenable to being sandboxed, don’t need broad access to the system, and are closed source. There are some issues there; for Windows binaries run under Proton, WINE wasn’t originally written around being isolated, and the game developers writing the software are writing to a Windows API that aren’t under the control of people on the Linux side of things.

I haven’t poked at snaps much or their technical underpinnings, but my understanding is that the snap packages distribute apps in a sandboxed form, so that might be the closest Linux-native approach. I don’t recall seeing an obvious set of permissions required a la Android package managers, though.

Will read about firejail.

It’s a single frontend to using a variety of the tools that permit for running software in isolation on a single machine. Like, you can expose only limited parts of the filesystem, have them be read-only, disallow network access, run software under Xephyr or Xnest for X11, disallow sound access, stuff like that. You set up a profile for an application, and it’ll run it with those restrictions. It comes with a very limited set of application profiles made, so it’s not just an “install it with one command and then run everything maximally sandboxed” piece of software – you gotta set up a profile for an application to choose what you want restricted.

No, I’m not. I’m talking about providing access to more physical DRAM than a motherboard is capable of handling.

Swap would involve taking infreqently-used stuff in a still-bounded amount of DRAM and sticking it in slower, cheaper nonvolatile storage.

because ram drives are easy to accomplish the same thing in software for applications that need it

I don’t know if this is what OP is going for, but I’ve wanted to do something similar to what he’s talking about myself to exceed the maximum amount of memory that a motherboard supported. Basically, I wanted to stick more memory on a system – and I was fine with access to it being slower than to the on-motherboard memory – to act as a very large read cache.

A RAM drive will let you use memory that your motherboard supports as a drive. But it won’t let you stick even more physical DRAM into a system, above-and-beyond what the motherboard can handle.

I don’t know. I have, in the past, been vaguely interested in getting a physical RAM drive to throw more memory on a system than a motherboard supports for use as a read cache for slower storage, and I only ran into things from years back.

My guess is that there just isn’t enough stuff out there where one really benefits all that much from that much more memory, so not a huge amount of demand. It might also be that the idea is to segregate desktop computing from some other environments, and Intel and similar want to put a cap on how much memory is accessible to desktop systems so that they can charge higher prices for specialized systems. I don’t know how they’d prevent someone from throwing a ton of DRAM chips in a drive, but I can imagine them having an incentive for it.

RAM drives aren’t persistent.

I don’t do video generation.

I’m mostly moved away from Automatic1111 to ComfyUI. If you’ve ever used an image processing program that uses a flowchart-style of operations to modify images, it looks kinda like that. Comfy’s more work to learn — you need to learn and understand some things that Automatic1111 is doing internally — but:

• It’s much more capable at building up complex images and series of dependent processes that are re-generated when you make a change in a workflow.

• It can run Flux. Last I looked, Automatic1111 could not. I understand that Forge can, and is a little more like Automatic1111, but I haven’t spent time with it. I’d say that Flux and derived models are quite impressive from a natural language standpoint. My experience on SD and Pony-based models meant that most of the prompts I wrote were basically sequences of keywords. With Flux, it’s far more natural-language looking, and it can do some particularly neat stuff just from the prompt (“The image is a blended composite with a progression from left to right showing winter to spring to summer to autumn.”).

• It has queuing. It may be that Automatic1111 has since picked it up, but I found it to be a serious lack back when I was using it.

• ComfyUI scales up better if you’re using a lot of plugins. In Automatic1111, a plugin adds buttons and UI elements into each page. In Comfy, a plugin almost always just adds more nodes to the node library, doesn’t go fiddling with the existing UI.

That being said, I’m out-of-date on Automatic1111. But last I looked, the major selling point for me was the SD Ultimate Upscale plugin, and that’s been subsequently ported to ComfyUI.

For me, one major early selling point was that a workflow that I frequently wanted was to (a) generate an image and then (b) perform an SD Ultimate Upscale. In Automatic1111, that required setting up txt2img and SD Ultimate Upscale in img2img, then running a txt2img operation to generate an image, waiting until it finished, manually clicking the button to send the image to img2img, and then manually running the upscale operation. If I change the prompt, I need to go through all that again, sitting and watching progress bars and clicking appropriate buttons. With ComfyUI, I just save a workflow that does all that, and Comfy will rerun everything necessary based on any changes that I make (and won’t rerun things that aren’t). I can just disable the upscale portion of the workflow if I don’t need that bit. ComfyUI was a higher barrier to entry, but it made more-complex tasks much less time-consuming and require less manual nursemaiding from me.

Automatic1111 felt to me like a good, simple first pass to get a prompt to an image and to permit for some level of extensibility. I think that it (and maybe Forge, haven’t poked at that) may be a better introduction to local AI image generation, because the barrier to entry is lower. But ComfyUI feels a lot more like a serious image-manipulation program, something that you’d use to construct elaborate projects.

EDIT: Not exactly what you asked, but since you say that you’re trying to come up to speed again, I’d mention !imageai@sh.itjust.works, which this community does not have in the sidebar. I haven’t been very active there recently, but you can see what at least what sorts of images the small community of users on the Threadiverse are generating, though it’s not specific to local generation. A maybe bigger-picture view would be to look at new stuff on civitai.com. I originally used that to see what prompts and plugins and such were used to generate images that I thought were impressive. By default, ComfyUI saves the entire JSON workflow used to generate an image in the EXIF metadata, and ComfyUI will recreate a workflow from that EXIF data — IIRC can also auto-download missing nodes — if you drop an image on there. I believe that you can just grab an image that you’re impressed with on civitai.com and start working from the point the artist was at.

Oh, yeah, my concern isn’t really that Florida is planning to go after instance admins — I’m just being sardonic — so much as to point out that any practical enforceability of this is going to have a lot of issues.

I mean, do you mandate that Lemmy disallow third party clients? Try to force them to detect and block encrypted messages? What happens if I start dumping big PGP messages steganographically in images and simply send those? What happens if the image I’m sending is just a link to isn’t even uploaded to pict-rs on a Lemmy instance?

I don’t need to move a whole lot of bits to send messages, and it’s really hard to block people who can send any data at all from having software send data that cannot be read by intermediaries, use the existing social media channel to agree upon out-of-band communications channels that social media operators have no control over, and so forth. Like, okay. Say I am a child-molesting terrorist drug running money launderer or whatever. I know someone who uses Facebook.

Let’s even say that Facebook does a fantastic job of detecting and blocking any E2E-encrypted communications like PGP messages of the sort I mentioned in the above comment.

Okay. Now let’s say that there is some other non-social-media system that uses OTR. I use Facebook to send someone my identity on that OTR system, as well as – which doesn’t need to be in any kind of standardized format — the shared secret OTR uses to bootstrap trust between two parties. That shared secret becomes useless after the initial handshake completes. Is Florida going to figure out everything that I’m saying, manage to break into whatever other channel I’m using, and MITM the thing? Probably not, since even if they supoena Facebook and Facebook gives them that shared secret, it doesn’t let them later MITM the OTR communications.

That sounds complicated, but from a user standpoint it’s “Let’s talk on <program X>. I’m <user>, and here’s <string>.” The other person fires up their program, pastes string in, and unless Florida have already supoenaed and MITMed that channel, at that point, the deed is done – out-of-band E2E-encrypted communications are bootstrapped, and Mark Zuckerberg can’t read them or let anyone else read them even if he wants to do so.

I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes.

I don’t know what these manuals said, but you can run an X11 software package in Xnest or Xeyphr to functionally sandbox X11. Both of those have been around for a long time. I use firejail, which will use either to isolate software if being used in an X11 environment. That might permit for clipboard snooping, have to check, but avoids the keylogging and display-dumping issues.

It is true that X11 — not to mention most traditional desktop operating systems – were not really designed to sandbox software packages. Local stuff is trusted. Wayland improves on that a lot. But even so, Linux desktop apps in general still don’t normally run isolated. Steam games are not isolated in 2025, which is something that I’d kind of like to see.

But I’m more optimistic than I think your comment is, think that things have generally gotten better, not worse.

Go back a quarter century and nearly all Internet traffic was unencrypted; most is encrypted today. I’d trust Web browsers to reliably sandbox things today more than I did then. We have containers and VMs, which are a big improvement over chroot jails. My software updates are mostly cryptographically-verified. If you want a cryptographic filesystem, it’s not a big deal to set up these days. We don’t have operating systems automatically invoking binaries because they happened to live on something that looks like a CD drive that was connected. We’re using more programming languages that are more-resistant to some common memory management bugs that historically led to a lot of our security problems.

I agree that it’s important not to falsely believe that security is present when it’s not. But I don’t think that everything is dismal, either.

Why would Zelenskyy even contemplate a deal with the US with the current fascist administration?

• Zelenskyy has no reason to care about domestic politics in the US. It’s not his job to produce domestic change in the US.

• Any kind of arrangement that the US makes with Ukraine that aligns future US interests with Ukraine’s future is probably a good move from Ukraine’s standpoint, at least in the short term, for Ukraine. If there’s no Ukraine down the line, then there’s nothing the US gets. If you’re in the middle of an existential war, it is a good move to borrow money from other countries, since now they have a considerable interest in your future well-being.

• A lot of what Trump does is actually political theater for his domestic political base, with a lot of rather misleading bark and little bite. I find it very distasteful, but often what he’s doing is to take an action that sounds very substantial, and then amounts to rather little, like his claims during Term 1 that he would “tear up” NAFTA that mostly came down to renaming it and some small tweaks, or Term 2 having his (highly objectionable, threatened) global tariffs increasingly look like they’re turning into negotiating trade agreements. Trump has thrown around enormous dollar values that have little to do with the value of any kind of proven mineral reserves in Ukraine, and I’ve read a bit of expert commentary pointing out that it’s absolutely unclear where he’s gotten any kind of valuation that looks anything like the large numbers he’s mentioned. However, it’s a pretty good bet that his base has no idea what the value of anything in Ukraine is, so he can go back to them and say that he’s just made a huge financial gain for the US in Ukraine. If you’ve paid much attention to how he runs domestic politics, a lot of what he does involves making highly-misleading statements to people in the US who are not terribly-well-educated to gain their support for policies that often don’t wind up looking a whole lot like the impression that he’s giving them. I’m not going to excuse that. I find it abhorrently dishonest, personally. But it does rather suggest taking a rather large grain of salt on a lot of statements that Trump makes.

• Assuming that any such deal actually happens, and depending upon how this is structured, future administrations that are not Trump may have the option to just terminate any agreement and obligations. I’m very dubious that even the majority of the Republican Party is concerned about this, much less the Democrats.

• Ukraine could probably find various ways to terminate it as well, de jure or de facto — they’re a sovereign state, which creates a lot of room for pulling levers. For example, maybe they impose a tax on the mineral extraction industry that just happens to eat up all the profit it makes or something like that. What really matters, I think, is what expectations would be down the line — does the US actually expect some kind of payment? It’s not something that would come up for some time, not until after the war.

• From what limited attention I’ve been paying, I believe that part of the proposed arrangement involved the US committing capital. Depending upon the terms of that and any extraction, it could potentially amount to effectively transferring wealth from the US to Ukraine.

• What Trump was grousing about — and I have no idea if that’s his real concern or not — is that past US aid was in the form of a grant, whereas a large portion of the EU aid to Ukraine was a loan, where Ukraine needs to pay it back, and that it’s a poor arrangement for the US to be gifting and the EU just lending. Now, Trump’s also glossing over the fact that the EU loans are on reasonably-favorable terms. He’s not mentioning that last I checked, the EU was ahead in total aid. And he’s not mentioning that you could probably challenge the dollar value of some of the US (well, and EU) aid in military form, since some of the military hardware was designed to fight Soviet hardware and would probably have limited use elsewhere. But he does have a point. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the EU offering loans rather than grants when that went through — I mean, Ukraine’s in a pretty tight place — but I wasn’t out calling the EU extortionate either.

  Not to mention, I’d add, that Ukraine isn’t planning on joining the US in any sense other than maybe the limited benefits of being in NATO; Ukraine would join the EU, not the US, so there’s a considerably more-limited US economic return. Ukraine would like to join the EU and the European Single Market, giving the European Single Market benefits in terms of scale and resource access, whereas the US wouldn’t see any sort of direct economic benefits from that, as there’s no US-EU free trade agreement.

  Now, I should make the very significant point that in World War II, US Lend-Lease aid was initially presented as being a loan to help assuage US voters upset about all this stuff being given away, then later essentially forgiven. The same happened with the Marshall Plan. I have wondered whether it’s possible that the EU intends basically a repeat of this political strategy, or at least to do no more than to use the loan as political leverage WRT the Ukrainian government down the line during EU accession or something like that. But Trump’s got a very real point, that the form of US and EU aid has not taken the same form. If you’re angry at Trump for asking for some level of repayment of that grant in some form, you should probably also maybe ask whether the EU should consider converting its aid to the form of a grant.

Now, I personally don’t think that Trump’s ask is justified, especially after the fact. I’ve got no interest in having us ask for some sort of mineral rights in Ukraine. But I think that there’s a fair bit of context to take into account.

If an agreement is signed and made public, then I’m sure that there will be legal and economic analysis and we can see what it actually amounts to. My own take is that I’d rather not have the US involved in it in the first place. But I think I’d see what’s actually in it before I got too upset.

This way Lithuania wants to have a mechanism for economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus in case the EU fails to extend its own.

I don’t see how this would work in practical terms.

So, okay, right, at the moment a unanimous decision by the EU is required to impose any sanctions.

However, the reason the EU requires a decision to be made at the EU level to impose trade sanctions isn’t just some arbitrary call. It’s because one requires practical enforcement of those at the European Union Customs Union border. If you’re going to say “buying Russian vodka is not allowed”, then that’s where you catch that Russian vodka.

Inside a customs union, there’s no customs checking. If, say, Hungary is letting Russian vodka roll in, then that vodka can pass into other EU members from there.

I could maybe see some system where a unanimous vote isn’t required, but the whole EUCU enforces the sanctions. Say a supermajority of two-thirds of EU members voting for sanctions mean that the whole of the EUCU is obliged to enforce sanctions. Or maybe a system of incentives and disincentives by other members could be used to get Hungary to go along with the sanctions.

But I think that any point where part of the EUCU is enforcing sanctions would require doing customs checking at internal EU borders, and that seems like it’d dick things up economically in the EUCU.

Maybe it’d be possible to do some kind of best-effort checking, like just pass a law in Lithuania and then randomly check retail stores to try to find stores breaking it, have some huge fine if someone’s caught?

I mean, you aren’t the one breaking the law unless you’re running a social media platform. The obligation is on the operators, not on the users.