Comment by kergonath
15 hours ago
> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.
The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.
> It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
This I can agree with :) These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
> It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)