Fun fact, MBS is a big fan of Age of Empires 2 and plays it in the mornings. Also funny story, I once saw a match being played, around US night time, where one player built a line of houses into the enemy territory so that the opponent was forced to micro their soldiers manually. Think of that what you may.

The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/20/germany-christ...

Second, the trademark will help you against the masqueraders, those copying your tool and the Photopea brandmark. That will help with customers complaining about some other modified product. It will not help in case you find someone copying your codebase and putting it out in the open under a different name. For that, you'll need a copyright.

Doing both of these might be expensive but gives you complete legal standing. Companies will have no choice but to take down the copies.

The French are too myopic around the Middle East and Africa. They don't have any visibility into, say, Russia, even though Russia is asymmetrically embedded into them. That's an example of the problem they, and most others, face - they can't adapt rapidly to changing trends in the global scene.

I still remember the disaster that is January 2022. The US was continually stating that the Russians were planning an invasion, based on CIA intelligence, yet in the lead-up to the war, literally every EU country was calling the US a warmonger. And now with the US becoming increasingly hostile to the EU, the EU countries have been completely blindsided by that too.

And let's not forget, no Western nation has any reasonable intelligence presence in Israel, the culprit here, except for maybe the US and UK. Israel enjoys a disproportionate amount of intelligence asymmetry vs them.