No, your premise is flawed. According to your logic, all international treaties and bodies shouldn't exist either because great powers can ignore them at will just like how they ignore the ICC. The US for instance can ignore the Geneva Conventions willy-nilly and not be punished for it since to the US government, its own laws (which allow for war crimes) will always supersede foreign treaties, does that mean the Geneva Conventions shouldn't exist?

The ICC is a step in the right direction in the post-WW2 world, a shame though that repressive countries filled to the brim with war criminals cannot help but see it as an affront and such a threat to them.

And reducing exposure to US sanctions (for example by investing into alternatives to Windows or Visa/MasterCard) is an appropriate response for the affected countries.

> The United States has never recognized the jurisprudence of ICC anyways.

True, neither has China, India, or Russia.

I do indeed wonder why do they care about ICC considering they did not recognized it. One reason is that in fact that some of this "great powers" are much more "weaker" than they pretend, and that someone exposing something bad that they do will still have some effect on them.

Or (not sure if better or worse), they the "great powers" are stupid and they did not hear of the "Streisand effect".

The idea of foreign entities holding American leaders to account when Americans are unable to do it themselves is a fundamental emotional taboo for many.

Do you mean accelerate the digital euro plans?

What are you referring to? Cashless is terrible so that would be good but I don't know what you mean.

Unfortunately no. The EU loves doing these kinds of sanctions itself and has spent decades withdrawing high value notes from circulation. There are thousands of people sanctioned by the EU:

https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/individuals/

An example of the EU doing similar sanctions would be Jacques Baud, a Swiss general sanctioned for "promoting conspiracy narratives and false claims about the war in Ukraine". The sanctions left him unable to buy anything including food. As he had a wife and family, the EU sanctioned them as well to prevent them helping him.

The same batch of sanctions also added an American citizen to the list, basically for running websites the EU doesn't like and considers fake news, and a French citizen, for "spreading conspiracy theories":

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...

Cash doesn't help because there is no notice and most people don't keep enough cash on them to survive long enough, especially as there is no way to get unsanctioned - the entire process runs outside the judicial system and depends only on the whims of the Commission. The results are utterly brutal:

> Baud spoke in particular about how the sanction restricted his daily life. The measure caught him completely unprepared; from one day to the next, his credit cards, insurance policies, and bank accounts—including those in Switzerland, even though it did not adopt the sanction—were blocked. He could no longer make payments, and even shopping was impossible. "I survived, that's the only way to put it, thanks to my neighbors. They delivered food to me," Baud said.

Under the sanctions regime, the Geneva resident, who lives in Brussels, is entitled to support intended to cover his basic needs. According to him, the Belgian authorities granted his application at the beginning of February, but three months passed before the banks implemented it. Baud is also prohibited from leaving Belgium and therefore cannot travel to his home country.

https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/ich-ueberlebte-dank-meinen-nachba...

The EU doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about sanctions. The ICC judges only lost access to some emails and other nice-to-haves, the US didn't stop them buying food or water.

Europe does have domestic payment infrastructure, that's in some ways more advanced than the US. That doesn't matter because US sanctions don't depend on control of the infrastructure itself. They have a recursive structure: if you don't enforce US sanctions, or you trade with a peer that doesn't, then you yourself become sanctioned. FATCA works the same way, as did the deployment of the global anti-money laundering system (a US invention, largely).

what would be an alternative currently? i know of services like twint but this is a local swiss solution. any more EU wide established solutions??

My new vocabulary word for today: Hormesis is a two-phased dose-response relationship whereby low-dose exposures have a beneficial effect and high-dose amounts are either inhibitory to function or toxic.

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

> If it didn't come with such a high karma risk, I would have mentioned it myself.

What worst case scenario are you envisioning that would somehow justify censoring yourself? The text of one of your comments will turn grey?

They were sanctioned for doing their jobs.

> would be appropriate to mention what exactly the ICC judges were punished for

I’m personally critical of the notion of the ICC, and I can’t come up with a legitimate reason we’d sanction them. America isn’t party to the Rome Statute. And the ICC has never even remotely threatened to do anything to any American.

They were sanctioned for investigating Israel's genocide of Palestinians.

I think it's true but only in equitable societies.

Putin or Trump are totally isolated from economical and political consequences so they have no problem severing ties. If there are genuine co-dependencies, including for the leaders, they it's much harder to break peace.

I imagine the ideological aspect is the deeper motivation but it only matters with the right circumstances.

You can never rule out irrational acts. Merkel was ignoring the writing on the wall for much too long, it was pretty obvious that russia was on the war path long before she was still happily inking contracts that financed russia's machinery. You can not get a country that is already waging irrational wars to change their way by trading with them. But I'm pretty sure that for instance Trump right now is restrained to some degree by the certain knowledge that the US economy is at the mercy of outsiders.

I mean, we in europe did a a lot of trade with US too, and between other (then and still) EU countries, but the americans (and brits, and a few others) decided to attack Iraq for example ("Iraq has WMDs!"), and there were no sanctions and trade went on. And many other conflicts and bombings all around the world.

So it's not actually caring about the war and dead people (if we did, we'd do something about what israel is doing in gaza), but "us vs them", and russia is "them" while US was traditionally "us", until daddy Trump came along.

Someone probably told the EU politicians that russia will cave after a month or two of sanctions, there will be some kind of a "revolution" there, someone "pro EU" will be set there, and gas would be even cheaper.... A similar scenario was probably given to Trump for iran (just bomb the government, they'll cave, and you can set up a new pro-US leader there again).

But now you are not playing along either...

I do not know in this case, but I led migration and cost benefits analysis beforehand of very large Windows 3.11 to 95 to 2000; at the time there was nothing else that was considered useful and there still pain and massive cost. Later on we had to consider Linux as alternative; it just wasn’t close ; the stability (yep), easy of use etc was just not feasible. Now that Linux is good and easy to configure to basically be exactly like Windows and now that most custom applications of large corporates are web based and specific ones can be ran via Citrix for a few people who need it, I am guessing it finally is cheaper now. And 90% of users won’t even notice the difference; I remember when I was planning my first 3.11 to 95 migration that people were by far most stressed about users unable to open applications as they remember not the name or the icon but 2nd row, 3rd down is Word. Start, 5 up, 1 right, 3 down is internet. Etc. So as long as that’s the same, you are fine. It’s how most our clients still work so we take care never to move functionalities; only add, no delete.

No monthly fees and most software is available on opensource

windows -> linux mint OR reactOS OR OpenSUSE OR NIXos ( their choice) and many more

excel -> many of them as well as google spread sheet for free

Word -> Gazillion editors on open source; some much much better; and there is free google editor to boot

PowerPoint-> again Gazillion opensource replacements

Paint-> is a joke. Open source stuff is 10 times better

I don't want to advertise these products but you have access to search engines; look it up..

What is it that you think is so special? The only reason people are using the stuff is momentum carried from the past and PC being sold preloaded with windows.

In my opinion that is.

Very much. There are a lot of hidden costs in computers. What does IT cost you? If everybody already knows the other program how much productivity is lost before they figure out the slight changes with the new (they will learn but experts will need time to become experts).

There's a strong case to be made that a lot of enterprise licensing is a roach motel model. Easy to get into and seemingly convenient, especially the case for support. Avoiding that trap will reap benefits.

Didn't Schleswig-Holstein switch and make back the migration costs within a year?

Who cares? It shouldn't even have been close. The fact that enough of the country supports him that he could even get within 2.1% of the popular vote in 2016 is enough to show how morally rotten the whole nation is. The US empire deserves to collapse

Are you seriously suggesting America's influence is increasing?!

I guess you're in the 22%