The shops staying empty is one problem. The call for bailing out or helping in any way the creditors that took loans in bad faith by relying on that kind of help (to prop them up along the way) is another problem. I very much want to address the first problem, but not by enacting perverse incentive inducing rules. A better solution (in my view), which I think was mentioned in other comments, was to disallow tax reductions for unused spaces, and maybe even rise them above the tax level for what that space is when rented. In this case the landlord may be incentivized to find ways to make their spaces (at least) look busy (if not be busy with something of real value), which may be what the cities and community think of as an improvement.

"and isn't investing into a property that they then fail to rent out in a profitable manner also already a failure to act within their own limits?"

Yes, it is "already a failure", and it was the reason behind my initial objection. The bad decisions should meet their bad consequences. A "remedy" "to find ways to change the conditions of the loan so that building owners can continue to pay off their loan" sounds to me like a measure to shield decision makers from facing their failures. It is also, in the context of imminent failure, a call for someone else to hold the bag, which is in itself unfair.

Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy then? If the terms of a deal are not reflecting the reality of the moment (i.e. the office rent market demand quotes) but some figure people come up with on their own, then let's call it what it is -- gambling (in which case it should be treated as such).

There was and still is a lot of hazard (and lack of control) in anyone's life. It gets either mitigated (somehow, when possible), or assumed & ignored. So, no need for parables, as this just sounds like life, as it always been, no more and no less.

The Christendom ceased to be unified a whole lot earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism

¹ Today's amount of water spread all over an Earth with no relief gives you a kilometers-depth ocean. Even with only some modest amount of relief (as it should have been at the beginning), if it didn't reached the water surface to produce shallow waters, then that's a non-starter for life. The life should have waited a lot of time for the Earth to cool down, for the crust get ticker and thus for a more prominent relief to appear in order for it to finally get any chance to emerge. Therefore, it was very important for life to encounter an environment with just modest amount of water.

Well, our planet has magnetosphere and it also had life for a long time already. Although the magnetosphere reduces the influx of Hydrogen in form of solar wind proton bombardment, it also prevents the loss of Hydrogen that managed to get captured on Earth by not letting it be blown away from the upper layers of atmosphere. Life at one point, almost two and a half billion years ago, caused the Great Oxygenation Event, in which the entire atmosphere got Oxygen rich. This very special atmosphere (for all that time) made it possible for the incoming Hydrogen (be it from the Sun, other stars, or just as the most common form of dust in the universe blown in here from whatever direction and cause) to ultimately be collected as water. Two and a half billion years, that's a lot of time to accrue water. It ought to show, at some point. So it's at least one pair of factors that could have led to a surplus of water we see today, besides what might have existed from very beginning.

Because it's easy money as taxation goes. Facing growing fiscal deficit and worsening credit score, the first thing the government in Romania did last summer was to rise the (general) VAT quota and cut on some VAT exceptions. It works quicker and more reliably than other means for securing the budget needs.

The VAT related fraudulent schemes are a problem in EU as many other things are, but they are investigated, often prosecuted, and written about. For anyone interested, more can be found at the European Public Prosecutor's Office's site: https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news

I've touched this idea before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26575155

The most shocking aspect here is the mindset of these people that come to value this access, and the fact that they have to have their own self-perceived worth at some lower (i.e. improvable) level in comparison. It has to be, otherwise the value of that access can't make much sense, otherwise that association to a brand (as chosen not chooser) can't be perceived as something of value. The only (sane) question worth asking, knowing that about the people falling into this game is - do I want to count myself as one of them?

They do, but that's not the (full) story here. Companies tend to easily migrate upwards, to a higher volume and/or higher profit margin market, and hardly (if ever) in the opposite direction. The painful restructuring necessary to enable this kind of reverse change is also damaging to the company brand, culture, and self-perception. If they ever get in such position, they may of course recover, but I wouldn't bet money on that.

"Then you have a very limited imagination."

This is not about imagination. Given the space of possibilities to act or evolve, if mentioned expansion cannot somehow be ruled out, then it makes sense for it to be assumed (with enough time, for whatever time can mean in this context) as a certainty, even for non-organic "life".

That look and feel is the easy part. That can be addressed if it's really an issue. The hard part is the compatibility (that is given by many still missing parts) and stability (the still defective parts). The targeted kernel matters, of course, but that is not set in stone. In fact, there is Windows Vista+ functionality added and written about, here: https://reactos.org/blogs/investigating-wddm although doing it properly would mean rewriting the kernel, bumping it to NT version 6.0

I'm sure there will indeed be many users that will find various ReactOS aspects jarring for as long as there are still defects, lack of polish, or dysfunction on application and kernel (drivers) level. However, considering the vast pool of Windows desktop users, it's reasonable to expect ReactOS to cover the limited needs for enough users at some point, which should turn attention into testing, polish, and funding to address anything still lacking, which then should further feed the adoption and improvement loop.

"No, people will never be switching to ReactOS. For some of the same reasons they don't switch to Linux, but stronger."

To me, this makes sense maybe for corporate world. The reasons that made them stick with Windows has less to do with familiarity or with application compatibility (given the fact that a lot of corporate infrastructure is in web applications). Yes, there must be something else that governs corporate decisions, something to do with the way corporations function, and that will most likely prevent a switch to ReactOS just as it did to Linux based distributions. But, this is exactly why I intentionally specified "for individual use" when I said "switching to a stable and functional ReactOS, at least for individual use, becomes a no-brainer". For individual use, the reason that prevented people to switch to Linux is well known, and ReactOS's reason to be was aimed exactly at that.

And ReactOS uses GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/8516

There's also such thing as being responsible (for an outcome), which in case of litigation means being culpable. Microsoft here is the sole actor that has any control on the GitHub Copilot, on what it was fed with, and thus - on its output (which would be the base of their accusation if they sue). How do you imagine such a case could be made to look like it would have any legal standing?