Anyone doing academic writing, from students at university to scientists, nurses, doctors, engineers, math teachers, vets, all need to read and reference many, many of these academic texts to do any sort of research.
Now imagine every time you want to cite anything, you can only read the synopsis at best because every source wants you to spend $50.
It's normal to need like 50 references for a research paper by the way (although students can get away with 10-20)
I'm sure locking the culmination of human knowledge behind a paywall and limiting the amount of people that can contribute to that knowledge will end well for the species.
I think Nordstream was the medium term plan. Did they put the cart before the horse a bit - yeah.
I don't think they ever expected the US or it's proxies to blow up the main energy line to Germany / EU. It was a work around from problematic Ukraine so I can see the win-win from that deal. Why they didn't see the fascists cooking under their nose idk. They misjudged their own so called friends. And they still won't call out the US for what they did - a deliberate act of eco terrorism, and now demanding they drain their coffers to blow up Ukraine to become complicit in a proxy war that isn't theirs.
Genuinely I don’t understand how all of Europe is so fucking cucked that they won’t call out their biggest “ally” for actually completely destroying their fucking energy markets.
Like hey guys you might want to make that a big incident and publicly align more with Russia. Between the United States and Russia, which one has bombed your infrastructure? Like, it should’ve been considered an act of war by the EU, it should’ve been a “shoot any American soldier you see on this continent or in our waters to make sure this doesn’t happen again” situation.
The EU is completely dependent on America and is under the NATO umbrella. It will not rebel against the US until the US becomes too weak to keep the Europeans in line.