Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
Indeed, and the IM space is a good example of an unfinished job. IMO it's high time that Brussels stepped in and picked a winning protocol, i.e. Matrix, and mandated that public bodies use it.
I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works reliably when you have millions of concurrent streams on flaky connections.
This stuff was state of the art 15-20 years ago, it's more of a commodity now.
That doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. The moat is more in the installed base of data centers, edge networking, etc. US cloud providers undeniably have a bit of a head start there.
But the EU has a lot of domestic infrastructure as well. And the US outsourced a lot of things as well. E.g. mobile infrastructure and networking is now dominated by Chinese (Huawei) and European companies (Ericson, Nokia). Former telecom giants like Motorola seem to have faded away. Nokia actually owns Bell Labs currently. And of course a lot of the software involved is open source with a very international developer community. The hardware comes from Asia or in some cases Europe. ASML is Dutch, ARM is nominally still headquartered in the UK. Ownership of these companies is of course more complex.
> The moat is more in the installed base of data centers
For Slack and Teams, I'd say not even that is necessary. They're not meant as broadcast tools, even if they could be used as such, they're tools for… well, for teams. Either within a single company or B2B stuff. Given how powerful all the client devices are, the remaining work of the server to coordinate them all should, in 99% of cases, be so low that you can offload it to someone's bluetooth earbuds (as per recent story of Doom being ported and the conversions it led to about the typical modern embedded processor, and what we could do back when servers were that powerful).
It's not like every Slack/Teams instance is also running some clone of Google's Page Rank indexing of the entire internet locally.
That seems like a downside to me, but as a Linux user, I tend to shun Microsoft products.
I do have to use Teams occasionally for work and bizarrely the web client in Firefox works far better than the native Linux Teams client. Not particularly difficult as the Linux Teams client wouldn't do anything except display a blank box (this was on Ubuntu).
Yeah, I did notice an issue with feature parity with their application.
I hadn't heard about PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) before, but it doesn't look like they're commonly used on Linux. At a first glance, they look a bit similar to ActiveX to me.
I would imagine that many EU governments would like to replace MS Office too. EU sponsoring open source development for a mandated replacement would be a huge risk for Microsoft.
The European Economic Area + UK also have a lot of telecoms and networking experience. If they have to pay for improvements to edge networking for a reliable replacement for Teams they could easily bring farm that work out to their telcos.
With enough political motivation barriers will be removed one way or another.
Or so the theory. But what is that specific functionality that I get from this integration? That I can preview an Excel attachment WITHIN Teams instead of starting another Excel instance? The only useful thing is that Teams calendar is the Outlook calendar, definitely not a reason I'd use Teams if not forced to.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
Threats only works if the threatened entity thinks they can avoid them via compliance.
Tariffs come anyway, both Canada and Denmark are under threat of annexation, and ICC suspensions of Microsoft emails show that governments cannot rely on US tech.
Yes, or as Cory Doctorow put it: "So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don’t have to keep following their orders."
The British and the Russians also had a COVID vaccine (and much cheaper), and the French cancelled theirs because they realized it would come too late to be competitive.
So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
The technology and vaccine design comes from BioNTech, a German company. Pfizer did the phase 2/3 clinical trials, worldwide regulatory expertise and manufacturing outside of Germany.
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
One should not overlook the human/emotional aspect. Decision-makers are not immune from it.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.
The UK seems a lost cause though, even under Starmer it has been far more appeasing than any (West-)EU country. And as right-wing as Starmer is, your next PM will inevitably be even moreso and more buddy-buddy with the US. Perhaps even a personal friend of MAGA.
Yes, as an American, I could point out that the side of US politics represented by Biden, Obama and Clinton is very real. It's internationalist, cooperative, and reliably so. Clinton was, in some ways, more willing to intervene in Eastern European crises than the EU was. And Biden came in early and aggressively to support Ukraine (though the EU eventually got there, and we can't decide who's side we're actually on, now).
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
Trump is not the reason for the current disdain for the American state - he is merely the latest excuse that Americans make for the disastrous state of their country.
The rest of the world started being disaffected by America's actions in 2003, when it launched an illegal war based on utter lies, which murdered 5% of Iraqs' population.
This act and the following acts of war and funding of terrorist groups that the American empire decided was 'necessary' for its survival, have been noticed by the rest of the world, even while Americans' themselves do not have the temerity to confront the issue.
Blaming Trump is just another excuse Americans make for the mess that has been being made by their state for decades before he walked down some elevator somewhere.
> Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
> After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
> the party elites are [picking nominees], and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be claiming the rich Republican elites are not happy with Trump's economic policies. But then why did they support him so much during the reelection campaign and continue to support him throughout the Presidency?
> the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age.
They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
His family farmed a few things, including trees. Carter was on the record as a fan of soft-wood lumber tariffs, even though his term had come and gone by the time the softwood lumber dispute arose.
There are democratic presidents who have done worse things to Canada than Carter. I singled out Carter because, today, he seems to be viewed as left-leaning (for a POTUS) and un-Trump-like.
Left leaning in the US has not meant international trade friendly, historically it’s the opposite. The Clinton/Obama branch of the democrats who were pro free trade are really the exception.
That the Republicans sold out their business branch for cronyism and populism with MAGA may end up being the negative outcome of that movement with the longest negative ramifications (my thinking being administrations can change immigration policy easily and Trump is more the final nail in the rules based international order than the initiator of its demise)
Americans elected trump not just one time. They did it twice.
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
Exactly. Trump is just a symptom. If he disappeared tomorrow, the people who elected him are still here, and they still want the same things: Belligerence, Cruelty, Isolationism, and lots of other terrible things. When Trump is no longer in the picture, they'll find a new candidate who offers this.
Well, the isolationism is dubious. Trump and his followers (with a few exceptions, granted) seem happy to throw isolationism to the wind as soon as there's a chance of wielding power over a defeated enemy.
For sure. Isolationism is a far distant third when it comes to what they value. They just want someone who is belligerent and promises to grief people they don't like. Any ol' candidate who fits that pattern can be next in line.
You don't have to convince every Trump voter. The margin who swung from Biden to Trump and elected Trump aren't all those things. They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit. If they removed just those two planks from the DNC platform, (1) Harris would have never been nominated, and (2) Trump couldn't have won.
Who was the moderate candidate? We had Trump and a candidate who wanted to continue the open borders policy and racial quota system in hiring and university admissions.
Moderate/smoderate. There was an insane choice, which people chose to vote to the detriment of most, and a sane candidate, which people rejected due to misinformation and bigotry.
No, they lost because much of the population is bigoted and did fall for misinformation. People started sharing the nonsense about Haitians eating cats and dogs, they fell for the transpanic ads...and many were still not comfortable with a woman in charge. Misinformation and bigotry, and it's not out of touch to recognize that.
The problem is with the people more than the party, and fighting that so we can actually progress the country out of the dark ages is an uphill battle.
No, it seriously was not that. We didn't refuse to vote for Harris because of the idiotic cats nonsense. It was in large part her and the whole DNC's explicit embrace of DEI (note: "i don't like DEI" isn't anti-minority. Plenty of minorities also want to get jobs and admitted to schools because they qualify for and earn those things and not as a free handout because of their skin).
Not 20 years ago, like 90% of Americans would have agreed that it's insane to use racial quotas and different standards of qualification for different groups. Today, the 20% or so who disagree with me on that have dragged the DNC into this unpopular position, abandoning a lot of their previous voters. This has consequences.
And for that you threw the entire country away? Based on mostly fear and misunderstanding? There was another user I saw on here who defended voting for T because, despite apparently having always voted D in the past, he "could not look his white teenage sons in the eye and tell them he voted for people that would make them the enemy" - what absolute nonsense.
DEI may have gone too far in some areas, but that would largely be corporations trying to cash in, not anything planned by the possible Harris administration, and nothing demonstrable by the Biden administration.
DEI went too far the second it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which explicitly bans all discrimination based on race in hiring. It doesn't matter if Biden or Harris or any other democrat leader didn't explicitly initiate any of these policies. Their failure to prosecute for these obvious (and sometimes even publicly bragged about by the companies) violations of civil rights law that is supposed to protect me is more than enough to lose any chance of getting my vote. I am willing to watch quite a lot of things burn if the alternative is a racist regime against me.
The fact that you are white and claiming to be a victim of racism because minorities are getting more opportunities is laughable, but also absolutely means you were part of the problem.
The only way for the US is to progress is to eliminate the electoral college so views such as yours count for as little as they should.
Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do. And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
> Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do.
You obviously don't hate it that much lol, you clearly want white people to keep the unfair advantages they have had for most of modern history.
They wrote a book about people with you views: 'White Fragility' - you should check it out.
> And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
Giving oppressed people equal opportunities isn't racism. We'll get rid of the EC eventually, and the votes of people like you simply won't matter.
Sure, go ahead and keep telling yourself that comforting myth that it was all because of lies and dirty tricks. But according to polls the general public, even during the chaos today, supports the Republicans over the Democrats on most of the major political issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep...
It was absolutely due to lies and dirty tricks at least in part - I'm sure I can find objective analysis of people who said they voted because they believed various lies and disinformation if you like?
But, let's say you're right to an extent, that's just incredibly depressing and shows that the problem ultimately lies with the people.
Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
Now you can claim that Trump is bad, we'd agree with you. We're saying it's VERY dangerous to state why people voted for him because it enables it to happen again!
DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
> Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
I'm not claiming it was all that. For example, some people are single issue voters on abortion, so of course they are going to vote R. But a lot of people bought into the trans panic ads, the xenophobia, etc.
> DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
The voters were misinformed, though. Without a doubt the last election showed the people are much more of a problem than any party.
With the way the current administration is screwing things up, I don't think we'll need luck. Besides, with no cult leader to blindly follow, things will be drastically different.
> They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit.
Except that, none of this is true. Democrats did not run on such policy at all. They heavily tried to appeal to center.
Republicans run on culture war. And won, because it literally did not mattered what democratic party run on - republican lies won. And they will win again with the same tactic.
I don't think we conceptually live in the same universe if you think those things about the democratic 2024 messaging. I just don't understand how you and your opposing commenters can have any meaningful discussion if you're so wildly differing in interpretation of such a public topic.
It is simple, what "opposing commenters" are talking about, is what REPUBLICANS said that democrats are saying. You know, what Trump, Vance and the rest of Fox news were accusing democrats of. I would note that these are not exactly notorious truth tellers.
The person I responded to likely never listened to or cared about what democratic politicians are saying.
But you could say the same thing the other way, that's the point. I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
Even your response is oblivious to the point, and you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars" as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
I am saying what republicans are saying and were saying. You are either not listening to them or just lying about what they said.
> I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
You can do that, but you would be lying.
> you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars"
Yes, republicans lie more. That includes situation around the two murders in Minnesota. That includes claims that European NATO members never helped USA.
> as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
There is one reality and one "side" is lying about it a lot. Starting to lie the same way as they do wont solve the problem, it will make it worst.
It's straight from the horses mouth mate. Plenty of dems were on social media vocal how the issue is many white men.
Here:
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) "I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men."
Krysten Matthews (D-SC, U.S. Senate candidate) "Treat [white people] like sht... I mean, that's the only way we're gonna get concessions out of them... It's like that white woman in that movie 'The Help,' you know, she nice as hell to them white people, but she a btch to that girl."
Adina Weaver (Housing official appointed by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, D) Described homeownership as "a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as 'wealth building public policy'" and called for political action to "impoverish the white middle class."
Point to where she blamed straight white men for all social economic issues in the country (OP's words), or where a similar phrase exists in the Democrat party platform, and I'll take back my comment. There are a small handful of wacky politicians who are indeed on this "straight white man" kick, but it's not even remotely a position accepted by the broader party.
I think that your outlook on US politics and future leadership is naively optimistic (though I very much hope to be wrong).
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.
I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.
I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.
> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt
I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"
I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's wildly imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing the biggest loser of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
It's something of an open question whether MAGA will follow him or not. I would bet against it, for the same reason few of them followed Jeb after George. I would bet on some in-fighting between Don Jr, JD and some of the others, and a new MAGA champion will emerge (maybe not for a decade) who we aren't really paying too much attention to right now.
Neither did Biden, and he won. Neither did Clinton and she didn't, but still got more votes than Trump. And the Republicans are leading on the issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep.... In an election between a boring Republican and a boring Democrat, the Republican probably wins.
Vance will "have the charisma" of being the focus of the palace cult (around a quarter of the country) while Trump's corpse is still warm.
These people aren't people anymore, they're cultist NPCs. They have suspended personal agency and independent reasoning about their interests in favor of the vibes, in favor of the grift, and in favor of arbitrary Strong Executive Leadership. They will say literally anything Fox News et al tells them to say.
Vance's job was always to end democracy by replacing Trump with somebody more subservient to capital who could stay on-script, while seeming less crazy to liberals. He was practically raised for this. MAGA has been trained to water at the mouth when somebody jangles their keys, and will happily transfer their utter loyalty and devotion to somebody else who can jangle keys.
This reads kind of like you see half the population of the country as subhuman. This is often used by radicals as the first step in justifying extreme measures to achieve policy goals that would be considered unthinkable otherwise.
I know you think only the Right could be fascist, but most of the extreme left has become so distraught over their recent losses that they are losing most of their own ethics as well. "These people aren't people" is a shitty look when it's a white-supremacist saying it, and it's an equally shitty look coming from Team Blue.
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.
All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.
Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
Thanks for that excellent link. I suppose I have to remain optimistic here, but I think that you and I disagree on one really important thing and time will prove one of us right (I think we both probably hope I'm right): I think that Trump is too different from the others, even people he's ushering into the administrative state. That's my opinion because Trump seems to govern from:
- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies
- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.
- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.
I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
That sort of corruption is endemic to the American political establishment. They profit from their inside knowledge of congress, wielding their insider knowledge to make themselves wealthy; not all do it, but enough do that it's nigh impossible to pass legislation to deal with it.
What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.
And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
Yes and no. West-Germany was not trusted enough to allow them to make nukes or to make a powerful-enough army. For a long time, Germany has pretty much been a vassal state of the US. I cannot see that happening the other way around (given the relative powers of the militaries).
Besides that, living in a neighboring country, the generation of my parents and grandparents had a deeply-rooted aversion towards Germans. They would communicate with Germans politely, but when no German was around, they would often use not-so-nice names or jokes. Luckily that aversion is gone with later generations.
When I was young (early 90ies), we would often go on holiday to Czechoslovakia (before the split) and the Czech Republic. The staff at restaurants and shops would be cold and distant until they discovered that we were not German, then they would be very warm and kind. At some point, we would always start the conversation in English. At the time most staff would only speak German, but we would use it as a signal that we were not from Germany.
This kind of distrust can stretch many decades. I think we have mostly healed as Europeans, but it took a damn long time.
That is a sound point. I don't think your comment should be grey. In practice, I don't think geopolitics is played in the style of "Yurusenai!" that a lot of online commenters make it sound like. The world wasn't in some benevolent kumbaya between the various players involved here.
America perhaps pioneered the mutual-defense agreement as an expansion of de-facto borders. America can attack you if you attack any of its mutual-defense treaty partners - e.g. Japan or NATO. This places an encirclement on other unaligned world powers: Russia and China. Smart, but they picked up on it, which is why mutual-defense agreements with nations near world powers are now fraught with danger.
But Europe is not an innocent led to her subjugation. Europe has always attempted to extract their side of the deal: they will buy American weaponry and host American bases but they will expect America to pick up the defense bill, including for things like access to the Suez Canal which is primarily (though not exclusively) a European risk and concern in that alliance.
Other powers have always used the push and pull of changing demographics and waxing and waning power to jockey for more control or more trade concessions, or lower spending on defense for higher spending on welfare and so on. The reason that Western Europe vacillated on Ukraine isn't that they were unsure who the good guys were. It's that it wasn't clear where the balance of power was and ensuring they were well aligned was their priority. Likewise, the participants who benefited from NS2 going up in bubbles were Ukraine and the US and one or both of them likely did what they needed to.
It is true. Germany did elect Hitler. It is also true that that Germany committed vastly greater crimes than Trump's America has. And it is true that Germany the country is not a civitas non grata (if you will) though one could argue that this was offered at the end of a gun (the persistent US bases). I think this point (delivered tersely and risking Godwin) is actually very strong.
I think Western bloc leaders are well aware of the strength of the Western coalition of Europe and the US. They are also well aware of their waning will to wage war as their population ages. I don't think Trump has a sound head on his shoulders - Americans will probably carry the memory of the danger of aged leaders at least one generation - but it is clear from the texts he has leaked of the other world leaders that they are pragmatic and intend to preserve the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the resulting prosperity it has endowed its constituents with.
Any pressure will immediately be relieved if no actual irreversible damage (e.g. withdrawal from NATO or Anpo) is done and everyone knows it. But to make sure we get there, everyone has to apply just enough pressure to not break the machine. We can only hope they have the skill at diplomacy.
All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan. People were talking about how they pretend to be Canadian and so on. America was supposedly a pariah then, which makes any threat of "you are now a pariah" not particularly meaningful.
So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.
2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe and Canada are worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.
The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.
* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
Kinda overlooking the fact that Lester B Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in Canada's efforts to lead a neutral force to force peace in the Suez Canal.
> All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan.
Nobody really cared about Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure, it was fashionable to pretend to care, to get on a high horse and tell the USian rabble how immoral they were. But at the same time, people on their high horses also were glad that there was no Saddam Hussein anymore and that the Taliban were beaten (seemingly, back then).
It's different now because the US threatened to invade the Kingdom of Denmark, a supposedly very close ally. Even the threat of doing that is a red line that will be very very hard to uncross after Trump.
Yes, and I'm sure that the next time the US does something against European interests it will again be the case that the last time was just pretense but this time is real. The thing with terminal declarations is that there is no pathway back. If the US was never to be trusted again after the Iraq War, we are never to be trusted again now, so telling us that we are never to be trusted now is not of any significance. We're now post that declaration. That's what the word 'never' means.
The US-Europe military-economic bloc is a strong structure, but of the two Europe is weaker and the participants in Europe stand and fall according to weak ties. Without NATO, it isn't even clear if Poland will have allies. Each of the constituent countries have leaders aware of this. And I'm sure they'll attempt to keep the structure intact. If they fail, they fail but all these dramatic declarations won't have been significant either way. The declarations themselves are just emotional outbursts without even the semblance of even self-interest.
I mean, think about it. If the US has no pathway back to normalcy in relations ("never be trusted") then the cost for all future Presidents to militarily intervene is low. After all, trust is at its minimum value and guaranteed not to rise. If Greenland is core to US interests and Denmark has decided there is no pathway back to normalcy, invasion is on the table for all Presidents, Democratic Party or Republican Party.
Essentially, once you decide that you will never normalize relations, then you're just an adversary: not even a potential future ally. And those who pitch themselves as guaranteed adversaries had better find allies quick.
Just think of the relations the US has with the British. Back in the day, after the independence war, I'm quite sure that there were quite a few people in the US who said something like "never will we have cordial relations with the Kingdom of Britain"...
I guess that's just the usual hyperbole in these kinds of heated talks. I mean, it is basically the same as all those instances of TACO: Propose something outrageous, outlandish and absolute, later compromise to do something lesser.
> So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
Problem is, right now America is the biggest threat to Europe. And there is no way to cement the commitment you talk about with America as is - regardless of whether Trump goes. Without Trump, you still have one major party actively hostile to Europe.
Trumps policies are not some kind of aberration, they are exactly what conservatives worked for. Republican party clapped threats to annex Greenland. Without trump project 2025 will be updated to project 2029 or whatever, with more lobbying and "lessons learned" strategy. The threat of this happening again, but this time causing even more harm will be there for foreseeable future.
Preface: Trump's idiocy with Greenland is inexcusable and nonsensical, with NATO already having access to build bases all over that island with barely more paperwork than building them in Alaska. So don't read this as a defense of that BS.
1. Greenland isn't even in Europe and America has no designs on colonizing actual Europe
2. Even Trump in his syphilis-addled head knows that the moment he rolls tanks into a territory with basically no military and a peaceful non-threatening citizenry, his credibility. And this sure isn't Venezuela, where the Nobel Peace Prize winner thanked him for removing the criminal Maduro from his post. He let his dumb mouth get ahead of him when he didn't rule out force, and he was forced to walk that back, a remarkable thing considering his pride. Now, even if he does want to try to use more dumb tariffs, those will hurt the US as much as it does Europe. I wouldn't say these are any major threat to Europe.
On the other hand, Putin would very much like to expand a couple countries over, and geopolitically anyone will tell you that Russia "needs" that in order to have a defensible frontier. America is not a threat to Europe the place. Trump wants to cosplay as a threat to Europe the technical political entity, mainly because our map projections make Greenland look so big that he thinks it will make him a "hero President" in the history books forever, but even most Republicans know this is a stupid and pointless ambition.
The Republicans who make up a lot of the party are not interested in Greenland being US territory, they don't even give a shit about territories we already have like Puerto Rico. They just hate the DNC, whose idea of campaigning is saying that everyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.
Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.
> I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it.
One can play with bond markets and various ETFs or other derivatives, depending on what you envision. But even if your bet is qualitatively correct (that trust in the US ebbs for decades), it's hard to get the timing right to make an actual bet.
Given that a sizeable percentage of U.S. people seem to still support Trump, I don't think trust is going to be rebuilt. There's also the massive issue of the U.S. political system that has been shown to have a fatal flaw - that would have to be fixed along with the broken two party system.
I liken it to Germany rebuilding trust after WWII.
Trump is just your latest excuse, American, but its not working.
The rest of the world saw what Americans did to Iraq, and it has been downhill since then. You don't get to be the #1 funder of terror around the world and keep demanding glory and respect from the lackey nations you push around with those terror networks...
The US may believe the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe, but that belief is false.
Even with greedy short-term thinking: The economic connections between the US and Europe are a big part of US wealth, and failing to protect your market and your investors is bad for business.
Ukraine… Europe supports Ukraine to keep Europe safe. Ukraine is not in NATO, nor is it covered by the EU treaty's mutual defence article.
But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
Am I missing something when I go to the companies here all of them except SAP are USA companies? So this research is just pointing out that Canada spends all it's software money in the USA?
I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.
As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
It feels like France is actually leading on the infrastructure side of things right now. With Mistral and Hugging Face both in Paris, the open source AI ecosystem is pretty heavily concentrated there.
Having worked extensively with OVH and Scaleway, I find it to be a far cry from what American hyperscalers offers. The cloud offering is just too thin and brittle as of now, though I think they will eventually get there because of the CLOUD Act which in the long term might prove to be a gigantic own-goal on the part of the US.
Europe makes lots of quality software, it just doesn't scale economically. And that's an issue with access to capital and to a lesser extent legal fragmentation, not talent or willingness. That's why there's a constant push for markets reforms in the EU, on top of unified corporate structures (one might even call them "federal") being in the pipeline.
No. You're wrong on all counts. That was not a "huge deal". Canada reduced tariffs on EVs to get reduced tariffs on some agriculture items. This put things back to where they were a few years ago. Canada doesn't have a free trade deal with China like it does with the US and Mexico.
Canada has been extremely closely aligned with US vehicle manufacturing for over a century. I'm not sure if Canada has a bigger lever to shoot american auto manufacturing in the leg. Opening the door to Chinese electric vehicles rattles the very foundations of American manufacturing. If anything, "huge deal" was an understatement.
At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
The reason there is no unringing this bell is not just that we have a capricious, vainglorious president, it's that all of checks and balances that are supposed to restrain the executive have proven worthless so far. Republicans in Congress have completely declared their impotence, having fully relinquished their duties that the Constitution specifically delegates to the legislative branch, like tariff power, war powers, etc.
Absolutely not. History has shown again and again that human memory is short and greed is unbounded. If there isn't an active fire burning under people's asses they'll choose the $0.01 cheaper option even if it ends up being much worse for them in the long run.
That, plus massive influence campaigns from Russia, China, and US oligarchs like Musk and Thiel, are how we came to be living through the current general disaster.
Exactly. Trump is just the messenger. The underlying problem, festering for decades, is that a large enough fraction of the US population thought that Trump was even remotely qualified to lead a country to begin with.
The fact that we didn’t immediately remove him after the Greenland letter just demonstrated to our allies that that same fraction of people also don’t value our relationship with Europe.
The CCP looks thoughtful and stable by comparison. It’s too bad that the result of this will be to force more people to align with them, because they’re just as self-serving as Trump, they just have the good sense and temperament to hide their true intentions.
A terrible potential is that US products may find themselves unable to get footing internationally, due to broken trust and increased competition, so instead they'll try to rely on every-expanding protectionism and corruption to stay dominant in the US market.
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
European pension funds are also slowly getting rid of US bonds. They don't talk about it because they don't want to attract the ire of Trump and they don't want to create panic in the markets as long as they are still invested. But e.g. the Dutch fund ABP sold 1/3rd of their US bonds in 6 months (10 out of 30 billion in US bonds that they have). They reinvested the money in Dutch and German bonds.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
Duplicating things is underrated. It's good for there to be multiple operators doing basically the same thing. Innovation can happen at the margins. It will be easier, not harder, for EU companies to innovate in meaningful ways after they've built their own systems and are no longer just following in the wake of big US companies. (Not to mention that half of what passes for innovation these days is actually bad.)
If you’re assessing things entirely on a strategic basis makes total sense. It’s understandable why they are doing it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s underrated or suggest there are no drawbacks.
Duplicating things without reason is wasteful. With a hobby project sure that’s your own time and is likely more an act of consumption and personal fulfilment. But these are national economic resources being redirected away from other things.
In software in a large codebase where there are coordination costs with reuse due to the organisation structure, there’s a strategic reason not to reuse, but it might highlight a limitation of the organisation structure, but that’s not something someone making the call to reuse code or not can do much about.
Likewise France really can’t do much about the state of the US and dependency is understandably seen as a risk.
I mean there are pros and cons to many things. What I mean by underrated is just that a lot of people say "oh duplication, how wasteful" and don't realize the benefits that may exist in redundancy and diffusion. I think the US would benefit right now if there was more "duplication" in the sense of greater diversity across many industries. More car makers, more film studios, more news organizations, more social media companies, more record labels. Not more stuff --- not more cars, more films, more news, more social media, more records --- but just the same stuff spread over a greater number of entities. The consolidation we've seen over the past several decades is a bad thing.
You know you CAN actually quantify how bad or good these things are in what respect and their second order effects. The trades off are pretty well understood. Increasing returns to scale are a thing, as are natural monopolies where consolidation is more efficient even with the headaches that comes with regulating a monopoly.
Car makers, entertainment companies, news organisations are very different kinds of industries to the ones we’re talking about here. They aren’t natural monopolies and don’t feature increasing to scale (at all output levels). In media, the reasons we’re seeing consolidation is due to entry barriers primarily with how IPs protections work. This is entirely unrelated.
Also you’re talking about this entirely from a consumers point of view. From economy wide point of view, duplication of a product will pull resources away from other industries that might be more profitable for a country. Which is bad for the same reason tariffs are bad. These are real costs that will affect quality of life and crowd out desirable economic activity.
Just circling back to this original article. This is arguably not one of those cases.
But redundancy and duplication purely on principle is dogmatic and shortsighted, and yes wasteful. We don’t have infinite resources in the world.
> It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
Teams won by being good enough and bundled into O365. There's probably some value in making a product so available that people can use it where normally they wouldn't have the opportunity.
I was going to comment that teams doesn't have threads and slack may still win long term, but turns out teams added threads in the last couple of months(1). So yeah.
I'll vouch for this. I moved from Slack to Teams and Teams is clearly an inferior product. That said, I don't think SalesForce owning Slack is really a big improvement.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before:
US: "please increase military spending"
EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries"
EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation"
EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland"
EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato"
EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you"
EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
> Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
It really did not mean that -- it meant to increase spending to the targets set by NATO and to meet realistic defense needs.
A lot of EU weaponry was and is produced in the EU and the US has known that all along, cooperated and fostered it. The Leopard tank, the Eurofighter, the Rafale, the Lynx, the FV432, the Gazelle -- there is a long list of domestic weapons systems. I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines. The US has at various times partnered with Europe on the development of these systems, and Europe has been able to produce almost all major weapons systems continuously since the end of World War 2.
Europe's much weakened defense posture -- and weakened defense industry -- are their own fault and the result of their own choices. At one time, European countries had much, much larger militaries and could sustain manufacturing of their specific weapon systems -- their own tanks, APCs -- but not after the military drawdowns following the end of the Cold War. There are at least 3 major domestic European tank types -- the Leopard, the Challenger and the Leclerc -- but only the Leopard is manufactured anymore. Europe should probably have consolidated on the Leopard a long time ago.
The US weapons are not "overpriced", and certainly not compared to European weapons, beyond the sense in which basically all western weapons are overpriced. One reason we see consolidation on US weapons in Europe is that the US weapons are frequently very good, having received a lot of use, but also because the US still has some scale in its manufacturing capabilities.
> I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines.
Not really. The Polaris and Trident SLBM systems as well as the nukes they carry are US designs that the UK is allowed to use. And while their current PWR2 reactor is a British design, it is lacking. Therefore the next PWR3 design will be based on US S9G reactors.
The Trafalgar class were nuclear attack submarines made at Barrow-in-Furness shipyard in Cumbria. The current Astute class were also made there.
A nuclear submarine is one with nuclear propulsion, not nuclear weapons (just like a diesel-electric submarine is one with a diesel engine and batteries, not diesel weapons).
It never ceases to amaze me the contortions some people put themselves through to make this US administration seem sane or even vaguely interested in the flourishing of Europe, Canada or the wider west.
When the US points out faults with what EU is doing, the EU just digs its heels deeper out of spite, instead of self reflecting that maybe the US might be right.
It's not contortions, it's the truth, since these points have nothing to do with this US administration specifically.
Contortions is trying to blame EU's multi decade political faults on Trump.
Germany: Ties its economy to Russia despite warnings from the US
Russia: Invades Ukraine
Germany: Destroys its manufacturing economy after energy prices spike from decoupling from Russian gas
Germany and libs/dems: This is all Trump's fault
Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.
The whole point is the USA has been complaining that the EU was/is reducing itself to a vassal. No matter what the USA said or did before they didn't seem to care that they had no power anymore because the USA was there to take care of them.
The EU can't realign itself with China because that would destroy the last fragile bits of the EU economy that are left. They are already having issues with the excess supply lands on their shores even since the USA started tariffs with China. They can't deal with this long term.
No, the USA does not, in any way, and has never wanted or even accepted EU countries being independent. They wanted the EU to spend more on US weaponry, and maybe on their own - but would have vehemently opposed any attempt by any EU country to buy Russian, Chinese, Iranian or any such weaponry. They want the EU to stop regulating American companies, but they certainly don't want EU companies being too successful in the USA. They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
This is really ridiculous. There are many successful EU vendors of defense technology to the US military. Safran, Schmidt & Bender, Heckler & Koch, Saab, Glock, Fabrique National -- there is a long list. The USA has built real partnerships in these areas.
One amusing example is the C7 and C8. These are AR-15 (M16) variants made by Colt Canada and adopted by the militaries of the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway; and used by special forces in the UK.
Where are you getting your information from, that the US wouldn't allow wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market?
The right play is to maintain relationships (including arms trading) with multiple major powers - as Canada's PM very deftly pointed out at Davos. Getting closer to China doesn't mean exchanging one master for another - it can and should be a way to increase the alternatives available, without going all the way in the other direction.
> The EU would also have opposed it if the US bought Russian, Chinese or Iranian weaponry.
This is such an implausible counter-factual that I can't even begin to imagine what would have actually happened. Still, I doubt any more than some "public letters" would have been issued, whereas I'm sure that the opposite would have resulted in actual economic pressure from the USA against the EU/NATO country that would have dared, under any administration.
I mean, you offered a basically similar, implausible counterfactual. I think we can agree that it is at least parties that the EU would have opposed purchases of Chinese, Russian or Iranian weapons by the USA and vice versa -- but Russia and Iran have been sanctioned for long periods of time (Iran, basically continuously) by both the EU and the USA, and Russia is the main territorial threat to the EU, so maybe only China is really an interesting possibility here.
Arms trading with China is probably not a good idea at all.
I don't see much sign of the EU becoming a Chinese vassal as in relying on it for defence in return for being told what to do. Trading with China is not the same thing.
I'm not sure that's how it is. Sure NATO countries aren't keen on any of the members being reliant on weapons from potential NATO enemies, for example Turkey buying Russian S-400s but it doesn't mean the countries aren't mostly independent.
Likewise NATO countries aren't keen if one of their members gets a leader who rolls out the red carpet to the Russians and threatens to invade other NATO states. It's not like all the members have to do what the US likes.
No. The US wants the EU to be a vassal, this should be obvious. Why would they want an EU that is more capable of acting against US interests?
The US wants EU to be a vassal, but got tired of paying the protection money for that. Now they are trying, and failing, to keep the EU under their control despite bringing less to the table every day.
Or more obviously the US views China as an existential threat that is about to pop.
US has numerous public docs stating China is prepping for war and has WW2 levels of production. US knows it will be out manufactured in this conflict.
So the US needs:
1. Fully focus on China without distractions.
2. Allies able to handle their own security or help in the fight.
3. Weaken the smaller axis forces as much as possible now before the big event occurs.
Through this lens it alls lines up pretty nicely. Every single world event including US poking europe all work towards these goals.
As of now:
1. EU is finally spending on spending
2. Nato has expanded (sweden)
3. Russia is weakened
4. Iran is weakened
5. Oil production is secure (venuzuela, US internal, middle east)
6. East asia is also spending more on military and heavily aligning with the west (more bases in phillipines)
To me this is going about as smoothly as anyone would expect the buildup to WW3 would go. And it's all going pretty well for western forces. The west is now stronger than it has ever been and getting stronger and the axis forces are all weaker and getting weaker.
You really think EU is going to ally with China over japan, south korea, philipines, and Australia?
You really think Russia's current number 1 ally is all of a sudden going to be best friends with EU?
China and North korea are ACTIVELY supporting a war in Europe! China has openly threatened Australia. There are literal north korean troops shooting Europeans right now. Who is north korea's number 1 supporter?
> US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
> US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
It's in both the EU and the US's interest to ensure NATO is the strongest partnership possible and the US's actions over the last few weeks have undermined it almost perfectly.
If you look at actions and results the western alliance is the strongest it has ever been and going to be significantly stronger over the next decade.
Again my point is a theory that either EU and US found a way to make EU citizens get behind military spending or the US found a way to manipulate EU to do it.
You'll know if US and EU are actually not aligned if EU sides with China over USA (which would be suprising to say the least)
Tell me which NATO country came crying, triggered NATO Article 5 and as a consequence a good number of EU NATO (and even non-NATO) soldiers have died for the sole interests of said country?
Why are you moving the goalposts from your parent's point?
Yes, the middle eastern wars were a huge issue form the US, but that doesn't explain EU own goaling itself for 20+ years with terrible policies and choices, with or without helping the US in the middle east.
I am saying that for last 30 years actions of European NATO counterparts was not "undermining the relationship".
Also since 2014 there was a 10 year plan devised to get everyone to strictly follow 2% budget commitment. Which happened before you and I even heard about trump starting a presidential campaign (or even if it was there was nothing about NATO, etc). This happened (better later than never) due to ruzzian attack on eastern Ukraine and with a nudge from Obama administration.
Due to 2022 total war from ruzzia against Ukraine - I believe right now there are talks to commit up to 5% in long run, with at least up to 3.5% in next decade.
I know that Europe doesn't have great PR team, but USA is getting better and better at gaslighting (ruzzia has decades of experience in divide and conquer tactics) that Europeans are allegedly freeloading. Europe has it's problems, but it's solving them democratically, whereas USA needs to see herself in a mirror, before it's too late.
My understanding is that the 2% budget commitment was met or exceeded by all NATO countries only as late as 2025. The Obama administration ended in 2017.
Europeans not taking care of themselves has been "undermining the relationship".
If this is some kind of move, fair play, but its ham fisted because rank and file westerners across the world have lost respect and faith in America, that wont be rebuilt by some other president. Nobody will want fighter jets etc controlled by America. Perhaps USA is fine with it but to me it feels severely damaging.
The western alliance as of today is about as strong as its ever been.
No it is not. Very few people in Europe believe that the US would uphold NATO Article 5. The US did arguably not uphold the Budapest memorandum. Allies have stopped sharing intelligence with the US in many areas because they don't trust the US anymore (Trump would burn allied assets in a Truth Social post). Trump has done a lot of bidding for Putin in the Ukraine-Russian war because he does not care about a good outcome for the rest of the Western alliance, he only cares about some peace prize or whatever.
The Western alliance is almost shattered, NATO is on its lasts legs (well, technically, NATO with the US, I think a new NATO with Canada and Europe would rise from its ashes).
"Shattered" as they have together massively increased military spending and weakened their enemies at every step through heavy cooperation. And added sweden to nato.
If you ignored words actions show a big difference.
No. The US does not want an independent EU.
It wants an EU that lets any US company do here whatever it wants.
It wants the EU to split up so it can force bad trade deals on our countries.
We don't want a trade deal that lets you sell chlorinated chicken or other stuff that is currently banned here.
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff.
Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?
Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.
Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it.
We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.
Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
> I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."
My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
I would like to think US has EU interest at heart, a kind of tough love you would hope. But even if they don't all of their reactions have actively helped the US geopolitical goals.
> You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
The US might or might not have Europe's best interest at heart or the European peoples' best interest at heart. But certainly not the European Union's best interest.
Honestly so often I take my EU consumer and worker rights for granted, only to hear that they simply don't exist for 90+% of Americans. Amd then I wonder how they even live over there.
I looked up to the US as a kid. Then I went to the US about 8-10 times in my teenage years (lost the count) due to my dad's work. We travelled through ~20 states. Only during those trips I realized in what poor life standards most Americans live. My wife lived in the US for a year and had the same experience. She also found that average Americans have real weird believes about the rest of the world (this was in the nineties), like they would ask her whether Hitler is still alive, whether Europe only has US radio stations, and some believed that Europeans don't have fridges.
Another thing that surprised me was the segregation. One time we went out to eat something while crossing some states. Apparently we drove into a black neighborhood, and we walked into a large place with a buffet. And suddenly almost everyone was looking at us completely stunned. Then the other shoe dropped, we were the only white people, and they were probably surprised that white people showed up. They were extremely nice to us, but for me it also uncovered how weird the US is.
Slavery was a major economic drain, it wasnt a boon to the us economy. There is a reason the south remained agricultural and under developed, it was slavery.
They're going to the US for the VC funds and the capital markets, which is America's great competitive advantage globally. In the few industries I went through (PaaS, Health, Finance) what I got was that the regulatory environment in Europe was welcome for being stable and clear, or existing at all in a few cases. There's been one case where I've seen regulation being an issue and preventing business from being fully conducted in Europe, and that was related to banking (in that instance that company had to be set up in Dubai).
Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
>"I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure)."
So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal
Putin will need to die for Russia to change. Change is not possible in Russia until then. A strong EU is required post Russia.
Until then, starve the Russian economy of fossil fuel export revenue (which funds their war efforts). They have liquidated a majority of their gold reserves and have exhausted a majority of their military hardware stockpiles. If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.
lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
> lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
> Under the agreement, the EU will halt Russian liquefied natural gas imports by end-2026 and pipeline gas by September 30, 2027.
> The law allows that deadline to shift to November 1, 2027, at the latest, if a country is struggling to fill its storage caverns with non-Russian gas ahead of winter.
> Russia supplied more than 40% of the EU's gas before 2022. That share dropped to around 13% in 2025, according to the latest available EU data.
> The European Commission plans to also propose legislation in the coming months to phase out Russian pipeline oil, and wean countries off Russian nuclear fuel.
Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022, it's fairly impressive Europe has only needed ~5 years to disconnect entirely from Russian gas supplies. Better late than never. They've proven they have the capacity to achieve these objectives in a timely manner, when motivated.
You also previously asserted, without citations, that Canada could not export natural gas to anyone but the US, so forgive me if I don’t take your opinion in high regard as it relates to global energy trade.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919165 ("This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline." -- tick_tock_tick - November 13th, 2025)
I'm confident you could make more factually accurate and less emotionally driven comments if you tried. Please consider it. Very little of the information I rely on for my comments is paywall gated, they are web searches away for your consumption and mental model enrichment.
I've never argued with you that they can't export any oil of course they can. I'm simply stating they don't have the capacity to shit away from exporting to the USA nor do they plan to build said capacity. Maybe if Alberta's proposal actually gets fast tracked approval and isn't bogged down in a decade of court battles with environmental and indigenous groups and I'll consider changing my view.
lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades
In the local harbor, they built an LNG terminal in 6 months (Eemshaven, NL).
The Russian invasion was on February 24, 2022. They opened an LNG terminal on September 8, 2022.
My primary lessons of previous crises (2008-2010 financial crisis, COVID, 2022 invasion) is that under pressure EU/EU countries can do things very quickly and do things well. The pundits always say the next crisis breaks the EU, but it always ends up with the EU being stronger and more unified than before.
Even starting from scratch with the software, I'd make the opposite bet. Imported energy on the scale of nations a lot of expensive physical hardware. Given the numbers people throw around when talking about upgrading the electrical grid, think trillions*.
Software also has the potential to be made by forking open source projects. That Canonical Ltd. (London) has Ubuntu is already a decent foundation, a wheel that probably doesn't need to be fully re-invented.
* ironically, one of my hobby-hills on green energy is that I have noticed that a genuinely global electrical grid fat enough to get resistance down to 1 Ω the long way around, would only cost a few hundred billion in aluminium. Currently only China makes enough to consider it, but still, the BOM for such a project is much less than the price of all the manpower needed for the last 100 miles.
I think they should (in practice there could be something in the middle). Yes, they may have more bickering with the US, but that's just part of the messy diplomatic process. At the end of the day, we want to see strong allies that share a compatible value system with us. I'm actually more optimistic too: a stronger Europe will earn more respect because of their strength. And that respect will lead to more negotiation instead of more bickering.
> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
Guangdong Province at the moment has about 140,000,000 people. About the same as Russia so it figures. Also it is not the best idea to estimate GDP of Russia in USD and using US criteria.
Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
Is it really though?
We have strong labour laws, consumer laws, antitrust laws, personal information laws and so on because the majority of us want it. We understand that this do not maximize growth, and consider that worth it.
In fact, the most of us sees the current US administration as a very big joke.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
I'm American and sell my software to all 50 states (plus the rest of the world). I don't have a single special market rule for any state, not even my own. My payment providers take care of tax collection for me and my accountant tells me how much to pay the government each tax season.
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
I do feel as why demands reason and I am not sure if you can reason with the unreasonable which is what the Canadian speech was about in Davos and then POTUS threatened 100% tariffs again.
Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
Because Canada has been in trade talks with China and may potentially lower its tariffs on China which gives them a back door into the US. There are some specifics and it's all conditional. It depends on the kinds of deals it settles on.
It's multiple things. Yes, the automotive manufacturers matter not just for business sense, but because manufacturing base is important to be able to leverage in case of a war. Manufacturing lines played key roles in WW2.
In addition to that, since we're on the car angle, Chinese EVs are basically just privacy nightmares. I mean, all cars are at this point, but that's why we definitely don't want Chinese ones coming across the Canadian border and ending up all over the place.
In the end there are in fact legitimate national security concerns that the tariffs address and Canada risks weakening those. So, that is the actual answer to why.
No it is not. Canada did not try to do anything resembling Free Trade with China. It is btw prohibited by NAFTA / CUSMA. Canada pursues reasonable targeted deals like every normal country should. Trump is just getting hysterical because some country does not want to suck his dick. He should learn to be civil when dealing with neighbors, well it might be too late for that.
Because after the US threatened to destroy our economy and/or annex us by force and/or cancel nu-NAFTA and/or impose tariffs on us regardless, we realized that Americans don't actually want us as friends so we started diversifying our trade partnerships and negotiated a mutual tariff relaxation deal with China.
The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Probably bummed because nearly everyone (rightfully) praised Mark Carney's speech in Davos (in contrast to Trumps incoherent ramblings). I am pretty sure he can be that petty.
US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
> Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
I'm on a high horse because I like that the EU tries to regulate big tech? I wish they went further and actually enforced it. Some of you seem to live in a parallel universe.
Elaborate what's so bad about the EU instead of assuming who I am or how I live. I'm criticizing your ideas, not your person. Make some effort and do the same, "bro". Don't be such a stereotype.
building a simple business in south east asia is drastically easier. there are effectively no privacy laws, no class action lawsuits (a big US problem not EU), no gdpr, energy is cheaper, no punitive labour courts, much looser zoning laws. almost no restrictions on international trade, no withholding taxes, no major issues with transfer pricing, no capital gains taxes, relaxed packaging laws. of course, there are different challenges.
When you go from an open market to EU mode it is insanely stressful having to suddenly deal with these enormous regulatory regimes that simply dont exist anywhere else, and to figure out how to deal with them. this stress is an energy cost, which becomes a capital cost, which makes it much more difficult for small businesses to be created. I also find supranational regulatory regimes difficult to understand, unlike other parts of the world where each country has its own law and thats it. I think its generally a good thing for the people who live there though!
when i am driving around in ASEAN i don't look at my speed. in EU i am anxiously making sure i am 1km/h below the limit to avoid a fine in the mail.
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There
are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
EU market is _very_ regulated comparing to the US one, and also don't dismiss the language barrier in the european countries. Not everyone speaks English.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
India doesn't really have a position on Russia/Ukraine itself but wants peace within the region.
Yes, India does seek russian oil but that's because I feel like India and russian trade deals have been from the start of cold war where America supported pakistan.
If you actually observe our history, we were hesitant about joining any block but it was the fact that America started investing in Pakistan which made us closer to russia.
I feel like the average person is either Ukraine supporting/Neutral for what its worth.
That being said, I feel like India's just looking out for its own interests. (Ahem America's attacking venezuela for oil)
I feel like if this is such an non-starter, then India has made its stance clear that its always willing to co-operate to grow its country and if EU gives a more lucrative deal to India. I feel like India can slowly decrease its dependence on Russian oil as well.
The thing is, EU right now is in this position because it got so reliant on America. We had seen this during cold war and we have always kept our cards open while still maintaining peace. I feel like India should look after its own interests first and foremost and see when objectives align (something canadian's PM said recently too and Trump got so angry on him that he's again talking about raising 100% tariffs)
Honestly full support to Ukraine. I hope a peace deal can be arranged in Ukraine-russia.
That being said, if you feel like EU's gotten a better partner (Americas invading Greenland, China's authoritarian, which other country has the tech innovation close to India?) then sure, I hope EU does whats in best of its incentives as well.
But my honest bet is that India is EU's best bet to move from American techno-dependence given recent Greenland crisis.
I can't wait to see how many indians we are going to be forced to import due to that "free trade deal". They must have looked at how well it went in canada and said among themselves "now that's how you destroy a country we gotta get some of that". [EDIT] Hopefully national politicians get balls, more balls, and tell their MEPs to vote against it like the mercosur deal.
This BS should stop (even if you vote for AfD or National front)
It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde.
When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal
Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix)
So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse.
On the other hand this is encouraging people to apply and get passports. I for one would have never naturalised as German if the residence permit was quick and easy.
In summary, there are encouraging people to migrate.
What little immigration we have from India are highly educated and thus quite productive individuals.
You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.
I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)
For what its worth, I have to mention that India losses more on this deal than Europe because India's actually for the first time iirc imo giving up tariffs or reducing them. India has the highest tariff rates for a developing country from the start (indiscriminant) and is only offering upgrades to EU mostly fwiw in terms of this free trade deal.
I have heard this deal be described as EU beneficiary from EU sources.
Ah yes, I feel like what you want for an EU is a connection with America which has been a very unreliable partner would even be an understatement in today's geopolitical environment.
It's saddening to see if you are from EU who actually believes so. I am more than happy to answer your queries in good faith but this just feels like pushing some of your own agenda or straight up racist.
We come with open arms even though the massacre of jallianwala bagh is still in our memories. There is just no question regarding the fact that EU primarily british forces had extracted immense wealth from India and India had to primarily rebuild it from scratch healing from the scars of its colonial past.
There's actually an internal pushback from some people i feel like who feel like EU is still imperialist & want to shut down this deal from India side given India hasn't lost much after the trump's tariffs compared to EU whose greenland was in some serious sovereign threats.
But I guess the point is that EU India deal is inevitable in this multi polar deal. India wants EU to be the financial hub where EU can then reinvest in India and India can create technological innovation.
I have tried to respond with as much calm as possible but I must admit that your message felt like a must admit,ragebait to me in start but I hope that this detailed message can help clear up on the details.
If you have any reasonable questions man, feel free to ask!
Both may benefit. Some will lose. If benefits overweigh losses then ok.
Well Rapido bike means Auto-wallas are angry. That is reality.
The highest tariffs are holding India back. A decent original nike shoe is about €50 here but why it is Rs5000 there (with lower Purchasing power). Local businesses have too long bribed Indian politicians. Recently I replaced the gate of my house here in EU. It was 20 years old. No rust despite old. I remember the steel supplied by our companies is crap - we repaired our gate every few years. Or it was not properly painted.
Costs of computer etc are too high for any startup etc. and with our talent more cheaper imports from china would be great to build a local giant.
On the other hand our people do
- exploit Digital Ocean T-shirt give away to create stupid pull requests and burden maintainers in GitHub open source project
- curl dev stopped bug bounty due to many sending AI reports
- clone AOSP and IIT Chennai said it have created a independent OS.
Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmai founder) recently said we have become users not creators.
Even Ambani with all his money can't do a good tech company.
All the issues you mention are valid and I guess it all boils down to some aspects of over population and also crowding within the CS market too which impacts passionate people in CS too (something I wrote about as well)
But like I feel like leadership skills in India will go far. It's time to go and build things instead of trying to be consumers. The people who do this in India are gonna get rewarded disproportionately in my opinion.
I will just do my work building new things which isn't work for me but fun which I enjoy. So yeah!
Edit Leadership skills don't mean leading people but rather like I guess I meant Innovative skills in the sense of building new things and everything ykwim tho leadership skills can go far too, I feel like innovation skills are more needed too and the same point goes for both essentially imo.
In most of the West, that I know of, people admit to issues. Brazenly say, yes , German train system is under performing, no investment in the last 10 years from both parties. Then there is chance for change. It is happening.
I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
I wouldn't consider it a rant per se but rather that India's trying to move towards an multi polar deal and EU and India actually has a more net negative and Indians are wary of this deal even more so but on aggregate the deal would be extremely beneficial if seen from both sides with reason.
Also isn't UK trying to pester back into the EU again. It's super complicated to follow even as someone who follows geo-politics.
> I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
When I started writing about jallianwala bagh I probably got distracted because I used to be part of drama club and we had this act when we were young and literally the amount of people dying and everything truly shocks one & genuinely disturbs one.
I think my point which kind of got muddied up is that India wants to cozy up to EU and build things together but not to UK so much. India's extremely sensitive regarding UK given its past and in this deal,is cautious about EU and UK making ties again or any such discussions too.
Judging by the very large Indian community living in the UK, and the extensive community and business links between the two countries, I imagine “very well”.
I really think we (as OCI/NRI) should move on from using Jallianwala or whatever. This doesn't help. Don't use BS to justify.
Every damn guy that get visa refused uses this and in a way insults those sacrifices.
Come to reality. Present or at least last 10 years.
Who did what? You need to fix your own country. Even if British didn't invade - the princely states of India were feuding. Fighting. If it was not one country then TN and Karnataka would have gone to war.
UK were open minded to elect a non- white as PM in UK. Though he was very bad for for UK.
Do some creative things instead of using colonial things. Nobody cares. If some from that family hate UK or west then why come and live a happy life here (being UK/EU citizens). As an OCI holder, I get better treatment at immigration than I was an Indian citizen.
While lots of things exist like ISRO etc there is still abject poverty, pollution, health care issues.
Yes, India sends talents. Myself living about 10 years here.
But note. TCS etc employees gain more coming here than they contribute. Yes, skill shortage etc. at the end while using the fantastic TGV here in France - I am benefiting more than contribute despite working in a high tech scientific industry.
Eventually Bihari in TN will say I did so much work in Coimabatore mills but you guys are treating me shit; and for the non-hindi speaking Tamil in Pune they treat like shit.
If all these are better the internal economy will be great. On path to some self sufficiency. No. Instead you come here to insult current EU UK citizens. It is of no use.
The point is even if Sundar Pichai was in India he would not have built a Google.
You can be cautious but at the end people like Bhavish Aggarwal or biju or l&t CEO etc are the ones you get there. They don't give a shit about people. Until then people will try to move here. Fix that.
Otherwise people will come here to work. Just 9-5. No sat/sunday work. No fking Manager would call you after office hours.
(Again, there will be YouTube videos of NRI telling - it is better life in India than USA/EU. Yes, true. If you are 10%top earner in India or at the
How can you even suggest moving from Jallianwala bagh when so many people were killed in the most gruesome way. I suggest you to watch the documentary once and then go ahead and suggest the same.
> Come to reality. Present or at least last 10 years.
??? No, it is our bloody past that we will never forget what the British did that day.
Even British historians from documentaries mention that people in Britain think that British empire was "the good guys" but in reality, the atrocities committed were equal to nazi germany levels and they really tried to suppress this information getting out.
Would you say to a Jew to come to reality right now? Do you realize how in-sensitive things are you talking about right now??
Heck, Even Germany apologized about the genocide that it took against the jews (holocaust) but Britain has never issued an true sincere apology about it in much capacity.
> Every damn guy that get visa refused uses this and in a way insults those sacrifices.
Those weren't only just sacrifices. Those were cold hearted murders by British people to "fire higher" & a calculated attack to kill.
Now you mention some problems within India.
UK extracted $64.82 trillion from India during colonial rule & we are still improving. I am not kidding when I say that UK left us in freaking shambles and the partition day echos screams too.
You mention Indian states fueding. Well, firstly they are now Indian states but they were sovereign nations comprising the now Indian states. Suppose EU and America are feuding over greenland too, so would your suggestion be for say China to occupy both to create peace? Do you realize the ludicrousness in your comment?
Do you realize that Britain tried the rowlatt act and so many other acts which was the FREAKING reason that Jallianwala bagh massacre took place.
People were humiliated on a street where they had to rub their noses and walk on all fours and crawl. There can be no justification for this.
Do you realize that whole of India voted against any British law that restricted Indian freedom yet they still passed the law iirc?
India has its issues right now some because of its colonial past. I am Indian. I am trying to call a spade a spade and you aren't. If I am wrong, feel free to correct me about anything.
So even if India has its issues and I will admit nobody likes talking about Indian issues than Indian themselves. My point is, we are working on fixing them. We have a multi party system with decentralization & we are seeing growth and India has 0 angel tax, 0 startup tax, insanely good seed funds by GOVT itself and green tech cities and startup cities like bangalore, gurugram etc.
But in no way of form does India having problems try to justify the bloody past and not even Britishers try to justify it now so its crazy to see your wild response (let's admit UK's having problems too, Every country does and that's okay and that's my point)
As I have mentioned repeatedly, I am not against EU but you can absolutely see why some people in India are worryful of the deal given UK was part of EU (pre-brexit) and wants to come back (like tf?)
I am not saying that UK people are all like this. What I am saying is that they take pride in the former british empire from what I can gather when it was established on mass exploitation and blood bath.
Building railways in India would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”, Governor General Lord Hardinge had said in 1843. The fact that it was not Indians that urged the rapid construction of railways in the country, but the Chambers of Commerce of Manchester and Glasgow, and the European Chambers of Commerce at Calcutta and Bombay, underlines why the British built railways in India — to make exploitation of raw material more efficient.
Britain was very much racist during that time (from what I can gather, there are still certain parties and people who are racist towards Indians)
Simply put, Britain extracted 60 trillion $ worth of our wealth, built railways to only exploit us further, killed people in massacres and humiliated them, tried to really really put down the revolutionaries for so long.
This is our past. The scars of our past still haunt India. If you can't show sympathy or have to say things like this is what people say after not getting Visa then that's so disgusting to say.
I hope I have made my stance clear. Out of our respect and sympathy to elders and our nation's sovereignity, India generally suggests to distance ourselves from UK.
India prefers a partner like EU much much over UK. We really don't want to negotiate much with UK from what I can tell. But once again, the question is if UK wants to pester back into EU, we will be questionable about any such free trade agreement.
I have nothing against the genuine normal UK people and businesses tho. I talk with UK vps providers on quite a frequency but just, I want to point out that we are aware of our past. We always will be.
I am just saying that even those UK provider would be/have been more sympathetic than you because literally not even british historians argue anything and the question they ask is if they should apologize or not but I feel like the apologies if insincere would be worth nothing.
It's saddening to see people with such mentality as yours in a forum I enjoy. I have tried to put forth reason first.
Propaganda works man, I don't blame you, When enough things get repeated, we repeat the same.
But I know that you are smart, so use reason not propaganda to answer such query. I highly recommend you to enlighten yourself over what happened in Jallianwala bagh massacre from the youtube documentary that I provided.
I am willing to have a good faith discussion (only after you watch the documentary), have a nice day.
1. This massacre happened 107 years ago. None of the people involved are even alive any more. In some cases even their children or grand-children are no longer with us. Judging children by the sins of their parents leads nowhere.
2. Holding grudges for so long does not seem healthy for the person holding them.
3. Another commenter points out that India is looking for a trade agreement with the UK... I guess the government of India doesn't hold the same view point as you (as an outsider, your viewpoint seems very extreme).
So continuing from my past comment which did get extremely long but I hope that I could capture the nuance.
My point's probably that EU and Indian relations feel the most easy to form out of any major world right now and honestly I do have a bit of bias in here as I wish to create private solutions or open source solutions from India and the EU market and its privacy conscious users feels better connection if EU and India themselves are connected better and I am feeling like the chances of that happening is quite high.
But I guess politics tricky and I can be wrong, I usually am so yeah. But I am just gonna build private (or Open source solutions) and have a bit of focus within EU market as well.
Politics isn't really my best suit because I like to come to agreements and politics in this case is trying to tangle the untangled which feels pretty tricky to do such I guess but I also really like talking about India-EU relation so yeah. Probably sacrifices must be made & looking for hopefully a healthy discussion of politics which I didn't witness in the GP's comments being honest.
See I want to thank you for this comment because we can approach something new on top of it man.
I will try to respond to each of your point but before that I have to say something.
The Jallianwala bagh massacre fundamentally showed to us that we cannot co-exist with British Raj. We have to demand for purna swaraj & such demands were what led us to our independence. So any historical book of ours mentions the massacre starting from 4th grade to all the way to 10th maybe even till college. We learn more and more gruesome details as we progress mentally.
You can go ask any Indian about Jallianwala bagh and we would all know it. I can bet on that.
(IMP): My point of extreme frustration is with people who somehow try to lessen its historical significance or somehow say factually in-accurate words like the OP did & I took my sweet time trying to explain everything. There is just no justification of what happened but you can just observe from the original parent on how some justifications were trying to be given (we gave you trains, you were fighting etc.)
What your 1) and 2) point are is about the fact that its very historically old & that's a valid point on which I will come. But you can just see even today, we have people who somehow are (propagandized?) about it. This is what annoys us as a community & why we still judge children sometimes if they are taught about the glory of british empire (this is what I feel like I have heard from people in UK) & they forget to read about the bengal famine, the jallianwala bagh massacre and all the atrocities committed whether in India or in the colonies of our African friends.
And this is why India and British relations have never really been repaired after the massacre (Quoting a british Historian)
Also, India isn't alone in this of what you consider "extremism".
Like, in China something approximately 100 years ago happened the extremely sad and depressing event we call rpe of nanking by Japan.
China still remembers it & you can see how it still impacts Chinese-Japanese relations even to this day and it impacts the whole region.
As a result of Japanese war crimes during the Second Sino-Japanese War such as the Nanjing massacre, and the Chinese view that Japan has not taken full responsibility for them, the bilateral relationship between China and Japan continues to be a sensitive issue in China.[2]: 24
Coming to American Civil war. You can still observe how even after a 100 year old war. People of color are having issues in America even to this day & the problems still persist to this day.
My biggest issue which you might consider judgement is the fact that I feel like UK still romanticizes this era (and teaching children to romanticize it too), like they treat it as when UK had all colonies and it was all good and everything. And this is why I have an issue to this day. I have only heard that UK people still don't know the gruesome details of all the massacres which took place.
Every country have these sensitive nerves. Time really doesn't have an impact, in fact as more and more time passes on, the impact deepens in my opinion.
I just wanted to say the post to all the people who ever thought that India benefitted from Britian's colonialism. Nil nada, (negative) India was extremely exploited and India would've been better off without colonialism without a doubt of anybody's including historian's minds. I have given sources in the past detailed comment too.
This is an extremely sensitive issue to India and we don't like people who are reductionist in this approach just as China regarding Nanking massacre.
Now regarding 3) the point is that just as how China and Japan's relations have improved over the years and gotten worse as well, India and Britain's official relations are the same as well.
That being said, every Deal somehow reflects back to an average citizen in country. I am not over-exaggerating when I say that people's blood especially nationalist/political people boil over this instance. I wouldn't consider myself much nationalist and I am mostly moderate (Heck I am complimented for my moderacy) but this is literally the one point where whole India went extremist. I seriously can't explain how much sensitive this topic is.
So at some point if UK and India FTA does pass consider a huge resentment from Indian side. Politically I doubt something like this would happen but perhaps, I can be wrong I usually am but I haven't seen any one person who is enthusiastic about having stronger ties with Britain out of all countries.
It's part of our history and no matter how bloody, quite frankly we will not forget it.
I don't know what you want me to say but I will say what my heart feels in the moment. We aren't against the normal genuine people of Britain. But we are simply cautious and have our guards up because of the bloody past regarding our agreements with Britain. Britain came to India out of free trade agreements and slowly started expanding military. Of course, something like this rehappening feels implausible but not exactly off the table given some romanticization of british empire being observed from outside.
Now my point isn't to bring hate towards the normal genuine people of british state and we don't have a grudge towards the normal people. Because even British historians are really apologetic about the whole scenario and provide no single justification ever. I personally continue to have customer relations with British VPS providers etc.
I don't know how to explain this, feels a little contradictory but just as how Chinese trade with Japanese, India trades with Britain & we set aside our differences at the moment and even make friendly relations & in no way as an Individual I am saying that you britishers are responsible for what your grand parents might've done. But i am just simply reporting it on why there is a hard limit on the amount of trust and relations which can be established in the first place given the bloody past.
I really don't think that many are completely anti british but just cautious. We would still somehow prefer more EU (non British) products than say British simply something akin to how EU is now preferring to move over from America in the first place.
Sure one can argue about the events of time here again but I hope that I have done a fair job at explaining how from an Indian context time really isn't part of the equation so much as one is imagining from outside.
I don't think I am doing a great service telling. You just have to be an Indian to really know what I feel like I am talking about.
I can be wrong, I usually am. But I am speaking this comment from the experience I witness around me.
If you ever visit India, Visit Jallianwala bagh. You can say that I am from that state, those were my people & if you really want, I will be more than happy to guide you this one time.
Honestly Britishers were racist [not sure about right now] (during that time, something which British historians point out once again) and hated us and you could see that. I don't intend on answering hate with hate and that never was the intention. But the reasons are so extreme (in details and everything) that it might make the answer feel extremist.
Honestly Idk, India's answer to hate has always been an open arm or peace. We always try the peace route first (tho I feel so obligated to point out that in Jallianwala bagh, They ordered to shoot on peaceful people enjoying some festival WITHOUT any warning, just straight up shooting bullets and killing people)
I think India still runs on Gandhian principles for the most part. And that's honestly how we got our freedom.
Yes, India still has its issues (Overpopulation leading to an extremely hard competition in exams and all the other issues) and there are lots of issues and nobody likes talking about it more than us ourselves.
But overall, I still feel like there's some real optimism and hope for India and Indians kind of feel it.
There are plenty of viable alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
Europe has good software companies. It's just that the US has bigger VC funding which makes European companies unable to compete when US/EU companies are "fighting".
What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.
And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.
There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.
Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.
Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.
If you sell products to all 27 EU members and sell above a certain threshold you will have to work with all 27 tax offices in regard to VAT. There is OSS for B2C but that comes with significant downsides.
Probably there are plenty of regulations related to safety and suitability regarding electricity, water, washing residue on dishes, etc.
Without being more specific, the only thing I can presume is that you were unwilling to follow regulations here.
I furnished and equipped my home a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of options for dishwashers, from multiple brands. Many different models at varied price points.
This tells me that serious companies have little problems to follow regulations to compete here.
Yes, the EU is not a country. Each country has their own government, with regulations of their own.
I am in favor of some sort lf EU federalization for this reason, there's a lot of redundancy.
On the other hand, you could just choose a country to operate, which is a normal thing to do. There are things I could find, for example, in France that I cannot find in the country where I live
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
My point is that you don't achieve that by having the state start developing internal tools (unless it's highly sensitive stuff like for the intelligence services or military) for standard office applications. The French state is already massively oversized...
And that will change in 3 years or even at the end of this year... A lot is blown out of proportion by the EU itself because it serves its own agenda to expand reach and power.
Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
It's also pervasive. The weirdest thing in the world is watching someone I know who works for a big tech company and moved to the States suddenly wanting to get a New Zealand citizenship "just in case".
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
> Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
This is not correct as of 2024. In 2024, Ontario had a GDP of CAD 1.17B. [1] In USD, this is (at .73 exchange rate, which is favorable for these calculations) this comes to US 854B.
In 2024, the following US states had greater GDPs [2]: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and tied with Washington. GDP growth in 2025 was worse for Ontario than these states, and it would be expected Ontarios' position to continue to decline.
The figures I provided are for 2024. You would need to compare USD/CAD ratios for 2024 versus 2025. Annual GDP figures for 2026 are not yet available as 2026 has not yet come to pass, so usage of 2026 data is not accurate in this context. To compare, I would consider USD/CAD on December 31, 2024 which was 1.386 [.72] and USD/CAD on December 31, 2025 which was 1.4359 [.69] which are both less favorable than the .73 given.
As stated above, the usage of more accurate figures would render Ontario with a lower GDP than more states.
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
I have a friend who's a professional translator. No it isn't. She's forever cleaning up after the mess it left people in. In fact business for her is really booming thanks to people who think that is the case.
And I'm not talking about LLMs here but DeepL etc.
AI translates correctly, with a few minor imperfections which don't impede communication. Compare that to waiting a day and paying hundreds of euros for each message.
AI translation is comparable to the telephone or e-mail in how it improves communication.
The end-user costs are slim to none, but for OpenAI alone they're hundreds of billions USD.
LLMs certainly have their use and are here to stay but it remains to be seen how they can be commercially successful without constant injections of venture capital.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
The US capital markets are truly a wonder to behold. There's no way to replace that. For good and ill, you'd only get weird looks in Europe if you asked for €10 billion for an unproven business model in what's somehow also a competitive market.
To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
It's not really a wonder, Americans will simply lose their pensions if the AI business models don't work out. The same way it happened many times in the past.
I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.
Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
Hasn't this also something to do with the cultural dominance that US have had over the EU? We considered US services more valuable just because they where from US. But that cultural dominance might not be as strong anymore, maybe because of social media/TikTok?
>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
I don't know what's the ETA on VLC 4 but it's been entirely usable for me for the past year, and it's pretty cutting edge (internally). Hopefully it's not too long before we'll see beta releases.
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards!
Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
Nah, it's just a basic case of a pivot from a company that previously offered a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go that offer WebRTC-based backbone to build audio and video sharing products upon: https://github.com/livekit/livekit
The AI stuff that the original LiveKit company put on top of it (to pivot to more investor-friendly endeavours) is not that relevant in this case, in my humble opinion.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
He didn't say good. I'd agree with his assessment. It's acceptable.
And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):
* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".
* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.
* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.
Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is much longer, but even so it just about makes it to acceptable.
Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
It falls below the bar of acceptable for me because I can't share videos or images over a certain size because it requires someone in my org to have configured SharePoint correctly which is apparently an impossible task.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
Sure, and right now, a product being owned by a corporation susceptible to direct influence from the US government is a massive negative when people are evaluating products.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
Not to get too much into a debate about Beta vs VHS, but VHS did have longer run times and its cheapness was the main reason it won, It just fit better for the consumer overall desires at the time
Exactly. It's about whose definition of "better" you use. Sony thought that a better picture would win out, and it did where that mattered: TV studios and video-journalists used Betamax until digital formats took over. For consumers, "better" meant cheaper tapes and longer run time.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Technology connections did a video on Betamax vs VHS that debunked this in a practical sense as Betamax had a version II that allowed 2 hour recordings, the quality was slightly better to early VHS instead the significant improvement of beta I (original standard)
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
I'm absolutely against banning usage of computer programs and platforms BUT I would rally for getting Teams banned from the face of the earth and applying a law to prevent Microsoft to attempt to create or acquire any kind of communicator for the next 50 years.
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
> The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.
> If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.
Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.
Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
Yes! We must mandate that all loyal citizens have to use Arch Linux and Vim. Severe punishment and long prison terms for any other distro or text editor.
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
It would take Samsung (or what's left of Nokia) a whole 10 seconds to produce a Google-free phone based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) if there was a market for it. Which it might soon be.
Isn’t that the scenario in this post? Cutting all ties with US companies. So they would stop using code written by Google. Isn’t most of the AOSP code written upstream by Google?
AOSP is mostly licensed Apache and LGPL. The repos have probably been cloned a million times. Although Google has taken large swathes of the project (like the launcher or Settings app) behind closed proprietary doors. But that is not a huge obstacle, there are already plenty of decent open source launchers.
The most important thing would be a (drop-in) alternative for Firebase Cloud Messaging. Without it, you can say bye bye to any decent battery life.
That might be, but with hundreds of millions of paying customers there is a market, and it will be filled. Maybe by some of the tens of thousands of European developers currently working for Google in Europe, or the other American companies.
Continuing a already existing open source OS is far down on the list of challenges.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
I’ll give you that the current US administration isn’t exactly scoring points for subtle diplomatic negotiation, but remember too that most of the United States was purchased from other countries.
It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
> Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style
I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
> aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days
This is what someone would say if they only know Donald Trump from TV.
Everyone who knows Trump from his NYC real estate days knows that he's (and this is possibly the worst insult any New Yorker can hurl at someone) "a bum." There's a reason NYC would never vote for him.
He doesn't pay his contractors, reneges on legal agreements he himself created, and uses legal threats and fights to screw over anyone he pleases, especially if they can't afford the legal fight. It's a lie-cheat-steal mentality, and might makes right.
It's not like, some hard-nosed NYC negotiating strategy. He's a crook. There's really not much more than that.
Yes, but the difference is that Denmark has said it many, many times, that it Does Not want to sell Greenland. The discussion should have ended there. But Trump kept saying "We will get it one way or the other" and did not rule out the use of force, etc. This is just insane and will alienate any allies. The Greenlanders also have said that they do not want to be part of the US. Some americans have joked that you could pay 100k to every greenlander and they would accept you happily, which would be totally stupid.
They would lose the free education and free healthcare that Denmark provides currently. Having to pay for medical insurance or to send your children to university from Greenland would wipe out any of the money the US would pay to bribe the greenlanders. It would be an unbelievably bad deal for them.
You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps... He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?
Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.
Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
This is incredibly mild compared to some things I've heard from family and people that went to my highschool. People here are completely unhinged, unmoored from the reality of the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.
The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
This is all a roundabout way to get Europe to step up and do more for its own defense… the current negotiation style leaves much to be desired, but it’s shaking things up as intended.
The thing is that the cat is out of the bag now. EU alternatives are popping up. Governmental services are moving to national or regional (EU) services/providers.
There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.
Yes, it's clearly all 5d chess to manipulate a retarded ally to do what's best for it against it's will, all going according to plan. /s
Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.
It doesn't have to be the sky is falling, it's reality. In one year Europe went from "can we fight Russia with American help" to "can we fight Russia without American help" to "can we fight America". If Europe doesn't get itself unencumbered with the US they are in a very vulnerable position.
The US is not trustworthy anymore. Your president is switching randomly from on insane idea to something equally insane. Canada doesnt want to the the 51st state. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, which has been the biggest ally for the US and now your president was not ruling out using force to take over greenland.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
Sure the issue was always there for you or people like you. But for a majority of the EU population there was no problem until very recently. And now people like you are starting to have more leverage to influence people who can make the right calls.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
> it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want
That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment.
Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
Even assuming this is true, EU cloud providers no longer have to compete with their American counterparts on an even footing thanks to the insanity coming out of the White House (and American society more generally). There's a very big push to get off of American providers, and many (though not all) customers are willing to make sacrifices to do so.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
Oh I agree. China is clearly outplaying everyone. But EU surely doesn't want to replace one leash (US tech stack) with different leash (Chinese tech stack).
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
There'll be a vacuum filled by non-US brands, China is learning and given they'll push to be independent eventually they'll compete with AMD/Intel/Nvidia, Europe has ARM.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
I think companies should just allocate raw computing and put agnostic stacks on top of it instead of using whatever shinny serverless G-Azurezon Serverless Function Lambda Cloud with NOTREDIS CACHE and LOCAL FLAVOR OF KUBERNETES plus the new OTEL-BUT-INVENTED-HERE monitoring solution.
My fingers always ache when I hear praise for the company that through its incompetence nearly lost me my company's domain name... twice. Shame on me for staying with them.
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
- Tchap is a message app for officials,
- Visio, based on LiveKit
- FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it.
- Fichiers => Drive
- Messagerie => Email
- Docs => A better Google Docs
- Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
It might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.
Until now nobody thought it was a problem.
At least not a big one.
The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
That's the case now, yes. However, EC2 and S3 were started by using idle compute for .com, which they had boatloads of due to their size, and Windows Azure was originally meant to be an app hosting platform for .NET apps running on Windows.
The only other companies I can think of that tried being/are trying to be _just_ cloud provider are Rackspace (which has been barely hanging on as the CSPs are eating their lunch) and Hetzner (who seem to be doing okay), but both of these companies lean more towards "hosting provider" (i.e. renting compute is their business) rather than "cloud provider" (i.e. providing platforms for many use cases).
Yes I agree there is no pure hosting/cloud company that comes close to the scale of the big 3 who also use their cloud infrastructure expertise and inventory to subsidize all the other parts of their businesses. Maybe it’s only possible to be reach the top if you already have all the money and infrastructure in the world, but just pointing out that for the top two cloud providers these platforms are at the core of their business and are their most profitable units.
The cost to bootstrap a sovereign cloud offering in Europe that can even begin to compare to the big ones in the US would be humongous. There would need to be a solid, multi-year incentive for a company/startup to even want to attempt it. It has to come from the top. Else force the big US clouds operating in Europe to be ready to effectively detach from their US counterparts if shit hits the fan, though this one's probably not realistic.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
The reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
It doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
It's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word.
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
The problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones.
In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less.
But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.
Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU.
Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".
I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.
> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
French report:
The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing.
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.).
The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so.
The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
The EU commission would be in an interesting position to mandate American platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, etc...) to support interoperability in order to avoid "market distortion".
Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.
The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.
The question then becomes "what happens first":
1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)
2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)
Outscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software.
For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).
I love Scaleway, been using it since micro ARM64 bare metal offerings they've now deprecated. Just saw Outscale in one of the announcements thus the reason I've checked them out.
Obviously, Hetzner is also great, as a European example.
I'd put Hetzner in the same bucket as OVH: solid infra company at a more than competitive price, but lacking in managed products. In my experience, they're more reliable than OVH though.
Outscale has the advantage of a huge pile of money behind them, as well as a natural endorsement from gov agencies. They'll lack the niceties, but provide certifications from day one. Different motivations. They're not really meant to be a public cloud in the same sense as the big three. It's kind of the same deal as the Lidl "cloud", which is more of a private cloud managed by someone else meant to run SAP monsters.
France’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.
For all these there are protocols that could allow interoperability in-between offers, EU policy makers seem to be aware of the issue given what was mandated to Whatsapp. Let's hope for the best outcome!
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
I mean the issue here is your arguing on hackernews. The vast majority of people on this site in the USA just don't have these issues. Health care is taken care by the employeer and they are paid more.
Nobody in Europe thinks that healthcare just exists for free, but that it should be available to who need it for free and are happy to pay for that via tax.
I think you're not quite understanding just how bad EU pay is for software. Frankly with the $$ you basically always going to come out ahead with the more comp especially since USA software companies normally offer great healthcare and comparable vacation.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
The bet is that you will earn enough prior to 50 or maybe even 40 so that you won’t have to work, and then you can live off the investments and wherever you want.
High risk, high reward and all that. Although, the previous 20 years of high compensation are obviously no indication of the next 20.
> The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period to care for a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or recover from a serious illness.
There's limitations on that, but the common idea that Americans don't have healthcare is unfounded and appallingly ignorant.
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
"In 2024, the United States spent an estimated $14,885 per person on healthcare - the highest healthcare costs per capita across similar countries. For comparison, Switzerland was the second highest-spending country with $9,963 in healthcare costs per capita, while the average for wealthy OECD countries, excluding the United States, was $7,371 per person."
"Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates for many services in the United States is lower than other wealthy OECD countries."
"In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — approximately five times more than the average of other wealthy countries"
"Despite higher healthcare spending, America’s health outcomes are not any better than those in other developed countries. The United States actually performs worse in some common health metrics like life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes, and safety during childbirth."
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world).
And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
> But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
I don't fear mass shootings any more than I fear terrorist perpetrated subway or event bombings.
> you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition
Medical debt and the discourse around it is interesting. Not having insurance is the fundamental issue, medical debt itself is legally mandated to be negotiable. As in they are legally required to find a negotiable payoff price that will work for your personal financial situation, similar to school debt. I pay $70/month for school debt and will for the next 25 years. Is that a lot? Yes. Does it matter to me? Not so much. I could be wrong about the medical debt, but I don't think i am.
> You can freely walk
This is huge and something that would drastically improve my quality of life in a substantial way. Love Europe for this. Love.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
first, one have to prove he is 24 not 40. taxes can tell 24 and tell you do 40 becauses they decided so.
add social security percentage. while one still need real insurance and pension saving on top. yes, one 6 figure person have to pay two times. once for self and other one unemployed local drunk.
and on top, when one buys anything, all things are taxed 2x compared to usa(but i guess trump tries fo equalize that).
on top. there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all.
and yeah, one is foreigner? does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
> there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all... does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
Mate, I made this exact move ~5 years ago, it's really not that hard to learn a foreign language and navigate a bit of bureaucracy (although I will admit, Spain may be better than most in this regard)
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
I think it was like that some years ago. Now, as you said, it's really useless. 20 months are just the time to find an apartment, furnish it and get used to the place.
Afterwards you have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world....
Dutch people still speak Dutch to each other so if you were going to live there permanently and wanted to properly participate in society you would need to learn Dutch.
However the average level of English ability in NL is extremely good, you won't meet many people who don't have really good English especially for younger generations. Definitely not the case in e.g. France or Italy
As a FOSS advocate, I am quite astonished that this space has no FOSS "product." I mean PBX has things like asterix. We have good servers like ejabberd and prosody for XMPP. There are excellent voice chats like mumble.
Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage.
I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
The US has already employed its technology and financial instruments, including sanctions, to coerce and control its partners. Sanctioning an ICC prosecutor and subsequently restricting Microsoft’s access to his emails and documents are just a few instances of this. They have demonstrated their willingness to use their technology, financial instruments, and sanctions against their partners. It seems almost too late for Europe to achieve its independence in both technological and financial spheres.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
Yeah, I remember reading about an article on France govt adopting element/matrix. Surprised it didn´t go mainstream in other departments/companies/people.
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
Europe must have their own tools created from scratch. Replacing how, with which infrastructure? If you use existing libraries, don´t expect full ownership nor full privacy, same applies to hardware and cables.
It is though a big step finally. It is a start, Viva la France :)
It will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this).
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
You say this like you are unaware of how the US has utilizied cheap manufacturing in China, relied on imported manpower from both developed and developing countries as well as, until recently, been a net importer of energy from other nations.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
Honestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty.
I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.
Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.
Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.
For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
It's fairly obvious that France won't do much if China were to invade Taiwan, but we can at the very least pretend that we care about their fate. It's a much better functioning democracy than ours.
There was never a scenario in which Russian tanks were to get into Paris.
I live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries.
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
Same. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
Well, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
I pulled all my servers from the US months ago. Everyone I talk to is doing the same. Tech giants are going to feel this, especially when the AI bubble is going to burst.
I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The
"Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.
And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.
Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
Oh, I wasn't trying to say you're wrong. Just wanted to share that for me, the bottleneck has been elsewhere, and that I personally found GSuite harder than the compute cloud.
> Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed.
I had the same worries and then we moved to OVH and Hetzner and had no issues.
AWS RDS is about 10x more expensive than bare metal with maybe 1/4th the disk performance.
Regarding operations I simply setup a primary and read replica together with a PGBackRest continuous archiving and backup solution to a S3 compatible storage service.
Has worked like a charm in the last two years and recreating the database is a breeze.
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
Don't take the Canadian market for granted.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
We need the EU to do for software what it did for device charging and require interoperability.
There used to be several 'universal' chat clients, for example Pidgin.
We (Pidgin) are still around.. You may be interested in our state of the bird posts to see what we've been up to. https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird
Indeed, and the IM space is a good example of an unfinished job. IMO it's high time that Brussels stepped in and picked a winning protocol, i.e. Matrix, and mandated that public bodies use it.
Bring back ICQ!
XMPP for all of it faults allowed interoperability.
Will WebRTC be the one needed to be mandated?
Isn't interoperability of messaging one of the goals of the Digital Markets Act?
I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works reliably when you have millions of concurrent streams on flaky connections.
This stuff was state of the art 15-20 years ago, it's more of a commodity now.
That doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. The moat is more in the installed base of data centers, edge networking, etc. US cloud providers undeniably have a bit of a head start there.
But the EU has a lot of domestic infrastructure as well. And the US outsourced a lot of things as well. E.g. mobile infrastructure and networking is now dominated by Chinese (Huawei) and European companies (Ericson, Nokia). Former telecom giants like Motorola seem to have faded away. Nokia actually owns Bell Labs currently. And of course a lot of the software involved is open source with a very international developer community. The hardware comes from Asia or in some cases Europe. ASML is Dutch, ARM is nominally still headquartered in the UK. Ownership of these companies is of course more complex.
> The moat is more in the installed base of data centers
For Slack and Teams, I'd say not even that is necessary. They're not meant as broadcast tools, even if they could be used as such, they're tools for… well, for teams. Either within a single company or B2B stuff. Given how powerful all the client devices are, the remaining work of the server to coordinate them all should, in 99% of cases, be so low that you can offload it to someone's bluetooth earbuds (as per recent story of Doom being ported and the conversions it led to about the typical modern embedded processor, and what we could do back when servers were that powerful).
It's not like every Slack/Teams instance is also running some clone of Google's Page Rank indexing of the entire internet locally.
> The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat.
I disagree
Teams has the upside that is is deeply integrated in Microsoft products.
That seems like a downside to me, but as a Linux user, I tend to shun Microsoft products.
I do have to use Teams occasionally for work and bizarrely the web client in Firefox works far better than the native Linux Teams client. Not particularly difficult as the Linux Teams client wouldn't do anything except display a blank box (this was on Ubuntu).
That's not surprising: https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/the-official-microsoft-teams-...
Yeah, I did notice an issue with feature parity with their application.
I hadn't heard about PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) before, but it doesn't look like they're commonly used on Linux. At a first glance, they look a bit similar to ActiveX to me.
Indeed, even merely as a pinned tab in Firefox it's excellent.
I would imagine that many EU governments would like to replace MS Office too. EU sponsoring open source development for a mandated replacement would be a huge risk for Microsoft.
The European Economic Area + UK also have a lot of telecoms and networking experience. If they have to pay for improvements to edge networking for a reliable replacement for Teams they could easily bring farm that work out to their telcos.
With enough political motivation barriers will be removed one way or another.
Or so the theory. But what is that specific functionality that I get from this integration? That I can preview an Excel attachment WITHIN Teams instead of starting another Excel instance? The only useful thing is that Teams calendar is the Outlook calendar, definitely not a reason I'd use Teams if not forced to.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
Maybe the high sea will become less policed by the Canadian IP police
in the eu i think this is significantly less common
There was also Nortell
Canada is subject to the Monroe doctrine. Forge a link too close and there will be intervention of sorts.
Threats only works if the threatened entity thinks they can avoid them via compliance.
Tariffs come anyway, both Canada and Denmark are under threat of annexation, and ICC suspensions of Microsoft emails show that governments cannot rely on US tech.
Yes, or as Cory Doctorow put it: "So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don’t have to keep following their orders."
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-16...
Not only software. Think back to who supplied the vaccines during COVID.
The British and the Russians also had a COVID vaccine (and much cheaper), and the French cancelled theirs because they realized it would come too late to be competitive.
So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
The technology and vaccine design comes from BioNTech, a German company. Pfizer did the phase 2/3 clinical trials, worldwide regulatory expertise and manufacturing outside of Germany.
> weaponized against us
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
yesterday in an article here on HN i read a wonderful dutch proverb:
“trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback”
seems it’s applicable to this case too. Sad to see decades of work being tore apart in a few months.
Where does money land on that proverb?
Meaning people have very short term memories when some sort of financial incentive is inserted.
Trust is something you can give a price to.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
Well, ask yourself where'd it get the horse
One should not overlook the human/emotional aspect. Decision-makers are not immune from it.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.
It should be your hope rather than your fear.
The UK seems a lost cause though, even under Starmer it has been far more appeasing than any (West-)EU country. And as right-wing as Starmer is, your next PM will inevitably be even moreso and more buddy-buddy with the US. Perhaps even a personal friend of MAGA.
Yes, as an American, I could point out that the side of US politics represented by Biden, Obama and Clinton is very real. It's internationalist, cooperative, and reliably so. Clinton was, in some ways, more willing to intervene in Eastern European crises than the EU was. And Biden came in early and aggressively to support Ukraine (though the EU eventually got there, and we can't decide who's side we're actually on, now).
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
[dead]
Trump is not the reason for the current disdain for the American state - he is merely the latest excuse that Americans make for the disastrous state of their country.
The rest of the world started being disaffected by America's actions in 2003, when it launched an illegal war based on utter lies, which murdered 5% of Iraqs' population.
This act and the following acts of war and funding of terrorist groups that the American empire decided was 'necessary' for its survival, have been noticed by the rest of the world, even while Americans' themselves do not have the temerity to confront the issue.
Blaming Trump is just another excuse Americans make for the mess that has been being made by their state for decades before he walked down some elevator somewhere.
> Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
For those who haven't looked at the results, I find them more depressing:
>What emotion best describes how you feel about Donald Trump’s presidency so far?
Of Republicans:
40% Satisfaction
24% Enthusiasm/pride
6% Hope
5% Relief
They are loving this.
Of course they are, they haven't seen or thought through any consequences yet. Wait and see how they feel in 2 ½ more years.
It does not work like that. Look at countries with similar leaders, past or present: they remain popular. The masses don't experience an epiphany.
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
I suspect if what has transpired doesn't make them concerned, they will only be emboldened.
Would you enlighten us about how we are supposed to feel in 2.5 years?
Very, very happy, or else
The killings will continue until morale improves?
> After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
I don't know, one might argue the US primary system is closer to the circus.
> the party elites are [picking nominees], and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be claiming the rich Republican elites are not happy with Trump's economic policies. But then why did they support him so much during the reelection campaign and continue to support him throughout the Presidency?
This ignores the career of Rush Limbaugh
> the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age.
They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
trump disappearing isnt going to restore trust now the world has seen how broken american politics is.
MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
Wasn't Carter a peanut farmer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
His family farmed a few things, including trees. Carter was on the record as a fan of soft-wood lumber tariffs, even though his term had come and gone by the time the softwood lumber dispute arose.
There are democratic presidents who have done worse things to Canada than Carter. I singled out Carter because, today, he seems to be viewed as left-leaning (for a POTUS) and un-Trump-like.
Left leaning in the US has not meant international trade friendly, historically it’s the opposite. The Clinton/Obama branch of the democrats who were pro free trade are really the exception.
That the Republicans sold out their business branch for cronyism and populism with MAGA may end up being the negative outcome of that movement with the longest negative ramifications (my thinking being administrations can change immigration policy easily and Trump is more the final nail in the rules based international order than the initiator of its demise)
Americans elected trump not just one time. They did it twice.
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
Exactly. Trump is just a symptom. If he disappeared tomorrow, the people who elected him are still here, and they still want the same things: Belligerence, Cruelty, Isolationism, and lots of other terrible things. When Trump is no longer in the picture, they'll find a new candidate who offers this.
Well, the isolationism is dubious. Trump and his followers (with a few exceptions, granted) seem happy to throw isolationism to the wind as soon as there's a chance of wielding power over a defeated enemy.
For sure. Isolationism is a far distant third when it comes to what they value. They just want someone who is belligerent and promises to grief people they don't like. Any ol' candidate who fits that pattern can be next in line.
You don't have to convince every Trump voter. The margin who swung from Biden to Trump and elected Trump aren't all those things. They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit. If they removed just those two planks from the DNC platform, (1) Harris would have never been nominated, and (2) Trump couldn't have won.
I think immigration was the killer for Dems in 2024.
This is the logic of running to the middle. And yet moderate candidates do poorly these days.
Worth noting who gives this advice and to whom.
Who was the moderate candidate? We had Trump and a candidate who wanted to continue the open borders policy and racial quota system in hiring and university admissions.
Moderate/smoderate. There was an insane choice, which people chose to vote to the detriment of most, and a sane candidate, which people rejected due to misinformation and bigotry.
>misinformation and bigotry
Please don't keep repeating this, this is why Democrats lost. Being out of touch.
No, they lost because much of the population is bigoted and did fall for misinformation. People started sharing the nonsense about Haitians eating cats and dogs, they fell for the transpanic ads...and many were still not comfortable with a woman in charge. Misinformation and bigotry, and it's not out of touch to recognize that.
The problem is with the people more than the party, and fighting that so we can actually progress the country out of the dark ages is an uphill battle.
No, it seriously was not that. We didn't refuse to vote for Harris because of the idiotic cats nonsense. It was in large part her and the whole DNC's explicit embrace of DEI (note: "i don't like DEI" isn't anti-minority. Plenty of minorities also want to get jobs and admitted to schools because they qualify for and earn those things and not as a free handout because of their skin).
Not 20 years ago, like 90% of Americans would have agreed that it's insane to use racial quotas and different standards of qualification for different groups. Today, the 20% or so who disagree with me on that have dragged the DNC into this unpopular position, abandoning a lot of their previous voters. This has consequences.
And for that you threw the entire country away? Based on mostly fear and misunderstanding? There was another user I saw on here who defended voting for T because, despite apparently having always voted D in the past, he "could not look his white teenage sons in the eye and tell them he voted for people that would make them the enemy" - what absolute nonsense.
DEI may have gone too far in some areas, but that would largely be corporations trying to cash in, not anything planned by the possible Harris administration, and nothing demonstrable by the Biden administration.
DEI went too far the second it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which explicitly bans all discrimination based on race in hiring. It doesn't matter if Biden or Harris or any other democrat leader didn't explicitly initiate any of these policies. Their failure to prosecute for these obvious (and sometimes even publicly bragged about by the companies) violations of civil rights law that is supposed to protect me is more than enough to lose any chance of getting my vote. I am willing to watch quite a lot of things burn if the alternative is a racist regime against me.
The fact that you are white and claiming to be a victim of racism because minorities are getting more opportunities is laughable, but also absolutely means you were part of the problem.
The only way for the US is to progress is to eliminate the electoral college so views such as yours count for as little as they should.
Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do. And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
> Yeah you're right, I'm gonna be a big problem for you because I'm going to keep voting for Republicans no matter how much I hate some of the stuff they do.
You obviously don't hate it that much lol, you clearly want white people to keep the unfair advantages they have had for most of modern history.
They wrote a book about people with you views: 'White Fragility' - you should check it out.
> And the more cruelty towards progressives the better because I have nothing but contempt and malice for the people who want to institute racism against.
Giving oppressed people equal opportunities isn't racism. We'll get rid of the EC eventually, and the votes of people like you simply won't matter.
Sure, go ahead and keep telling yourself that comforting myth that it was all because of lies and dirty tricks. But according to polls the general public, even during the chaos today, supports the Republicans over the Democrats on most of the major political issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep...
It was absolutely due to lies and dirty tricks at least in part - I'm sure I can find objective analysis of people who said they voted because they believed various lies and disinformation if you like?
But, let's say you're right to an extent, that's just incredibly depressing and shows that the problem ultimately lies with the people.
Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
Now you can claim that Trump is bad, we'd agree with you. We're saying it's VERY dangerous to state why people voted for him because it enables it to happen again!
DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
> Listen, Trump won almost every single demographic. His numbers increased % wise among them vs 2016. To claim it was all lies, racism and sexism is just wrong.
I'm not claiming it was all that. For example, some people are single issue voters on abortion, so of course they are going to vote R. But a lot of people bought into the trans panic ads, the xenophobia, etc.
> DO not double down on the mistakes of the Harris campaign again and then put fingers in your ears and blame the voters for being misinformed, please.
The voters were misinformed, though. Without a doubt the last election showed the people are much more of a problem than any party.
I don't know what to say then, just calling others misinformed isn't going to change anything.
Better luck next time then?
With the way the current administration is screwing things up, I don't think we'll need luck. Besides, with no cult leader to blindly follow, things will be drastically different.
> They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit.
Except that, none of this is true. Democrats did not run on such policy at all. They heavily tried to appeal to center.
Republicans run on culture war. And won, because it literally did not mattered what democratic party run on - republican lies won. And they will win again with the same tactic.
I don't think we conceptually live in the same universe if you think those things about the democratic 2024 messaging. I just don't understand how you and your opposing commenters can have any meaningful discussion if you're so wildly differing in interpretation of such a public topic.
It is simple, what "opposing commenters" are talking about, is what REPUBLICANS said that democrats are saying. You know, what Trump, Vance and the rest of Fox news were accusing democrats of. I would note that these are not exactly notorious truth tellers.
The person I responded to likely never listened to or cared about what democratic politicians are saying.
But you could say the same thing the other way, that's the point. I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
Even your response is oblivious to the point, and you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars" as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
I am saying what republicans are saying and were saying. You are either not listening to them or just lying about what they said.
> I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.
You can do that, but you would be lying.
> you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars"
Yes, republicans lie more. That includes situation around the two murders in Minnesota. That includes claims that European NATO members never helped USA.
> as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.
There is one reality and one "side" is lying about it a lot. Starting to lie the same way as they do wont solve the problem, it will make it worst.
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This is what you were told the Democrats ran on, not what they ran on. You got all your information from partisans who lied about the other party.
>This is what you were told the Democrats ran on
It's straight from the horses mouth mate. Plenty of dems were on social media vocal how the issue is many white men.
Here:
Good thing the internet never forgets.None of those people were running for president, and none of that is part of the Democrat party platform.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/03/us-news/harris-has-long-histor... Was this one running for President?
Point to where she blamed straight white men for all social economic issues in the country (OP's words), or where a similar phrase exists in the Democrat party platform, and I'll take back my comment. There are a small handful of wacky politicians who are indeed on this "straight white man" kick, but it's not even remotely a position accepted by the broader party.
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Trump already left the stage once. This is something deeply wrong with the US that can't be explained away as a phase.
Exactly, Trump is the brainchild of American mindset. Not the cause, but the result.
And now that even the Americans see it themselves, it's too late. They will _never_ gain the same trust again.
I think that your outlook on US politics and future leadership is naively optimistic (though I very much hope to be wrong).
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.
I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.
I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.
> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt
I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"
I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's wildly imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing the biggest loser of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
You're missing the point: she was a woman.
It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
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It's something of an open question whether MAGA will follow him or not. I would bet against it, for the same reason few of them followed Jeb after George. I would bet on some in-fighting between Don Jr, JD and some of the others, and a new MAGA champion will emerge (maybe not for a decade) who we aren't really paying too much attention to right now.
Vance has zero of the charisma that Trump has for his voters.
I can’t explain the charisma. I can’t even really describe it, but it’s real. Others have tried to replicate it with no luck.
Neither did Biden, and he won. Neither did Clinton and she didn't, but still got more votes than Trump. And the Republicans are leading on the issues: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-americans-trust-rep.... In an election between a boring Republican and a boring Democrat, the Republican probably wins.
Vance will "have the charisma" of being the focus of the palace cult (around a quarter of the country) while Trump's corpse is still warm.
These people aren't people anymore, they're cultist NPCs. They have suspended personal agency and independent reasoning about their interests in favor of the vibes, in favor of the grift, and in favor of arbitrary Strong Executive Leadership. They will say literally anything Fox News et al tells them to say.
Vance's job was always to end democracy by replacing Trump with somebody more subservient to capital who could stay on-script, while seeming less crazy to liberals. He was practically raised for this. MAGA has been trained to water at the mouth when somebody jangles their keys, and will happily transfer their utter loyalty and devotion to somebody else who can jangle keys.
> These people aren't people anymore
This reads kind of like you see half the population of the country as subhuman. This is often used by radicals as the first step in justifying extreme measures to achieve policy goals that would be considered unthinkable otherwise.
I know you think only the Right could be fascist, but most of the extreme left has become so distraught over their recent losses that they are losing most of their own ethics as well. "These people aren't people" is a shitty look when it's a white-supremacist saying it, and it's an equally shitty look coming from Team Blue.
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.
All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.
Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
0: https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...
Thanks for that excellent link. I suppose I have to remain optimistic here, but I think that you and I disagree on one really important thing and time will prove one of us right (I think we both probably hope I'm right): I think that Trump is too different from the others, even people he's ushering into the administrative state. That's my opinion because Trump seems to govern from:
- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies
- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.
- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.
I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
There is a pessimistic take on that too though. What if the next guy gives you all the corruption and cruelty, without the vanity and stupidity?
That sort of corruption is endemic to the American political establishment. They profit from their inside knowledge of congress, wielding their insider knowledge to make themselves wealthy; not all do it, but enough do that it's nigh impossible to pass legislation to deal with it.
What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.
And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
Germany elected Hitler and we pretty much trusted them again in less than 20 years.
Yes and no. West-Germany was not trusted enough to allow them to make nukes or to make a powerful-enough army. For a long time, Germany has pretty much been a vassal state of the US. I cannot see that happening the other way around (given the relative powers of the militaries).
Besides that, living in a neighboring country, the generation of my parents and grandparents had a deeply-rooted aversion towards Germans. They would communicate with Germans politely, but when no German was around, they would often use not-so-nice names or jokes. Luckily that aversion is gone with later generations.
When I was young (early 90ies), we would often go on holiday to Czechoslovakia (before the split) and the Czech Republic. The staff at restaurants and shops would be cold and distant until they discovered that we were not German, then they would be very warm and kind. At some point, we would always start the conversation in English. At the time most staff would only speak German, but we would use it as a signal that we were not from Germany.
This kind of distrust can stretch many decades. I think we have mostly healed as Europeans, but it took a damn long time.
After blasting them to their knees, completely disbanding their society and writing their constitution for them. You up for that?
Yes. After having flattened it and occupied / denazified it for a bunch of years. The Germany after WW I was not trusted.
The EU was meant to pacify Germany. Also a lot of effort was done to denazify the country.
Germany is now allowed to remilitarise again, and that’s going to be interesting. I believe we should never underestimate a remilitarised Germany.
That is a sound point. I don't think your comment should be grey. In practice, I don't think geopolitics is played in the style of "Yurusenai!" that a lot of online commenters make it sound like. The world wasn't in some benevolent kumbaya between the various players involved here.
America perhaps pioneered the mutual-defense agreement as an expansion of de-facto borders. America can attack you if you attack any of its mutual-defense treaty partners - e.g. Japan or NATO. This places an encirclement on other unaligned world powers: Russia and China. Smart, but they picked up on it, which is why mutual-defense agreements with nations near world powers are now fraught with danger.
But Europe is not an innocent led to her subjugation. Europe has always attempted to extract their side of the deal: they will buy American weaponry and host American bases but they will expect America to pick up the defense bill, including for things like access to the Suez Canal which is primarily (though not exclusively) a European risk and concern in that alliance.
Other powers have always used the push and pull of changing demographics and waxing and waning power to jockey for more control or more trade concessions, or lower spending on defense for higher spending on welfare and so on. The reason that Western Europe vacillated on Ukraine isn't that they were unsure who the good guys were. It's that it wasn't clear where the balance of power was and ensuring they were well aligned was their priority. Likewise, the participants who benefited from NS2 going up in bubbles were Ukraine and the US and one or both of them likely did what they needed to.
It is true. Germany did elect Hitler. It is also true that that Germany committed vastly greater crimes than Trump's America has. And it is true that Germany the country is not a civitas non grata (if you will) though one could argue that this was offered at the end of a gun (the persistent US bases). I think this point (delivered tersely and risking Godwin) is actually very strong.
I think Western bloc leaders are well aware of the strength of the Western coalition of Europe and the US. They are also well aware of their waning will to wage war as their population ages. I don't think Trump has a sound head on his shoulders - Americans will probably carry the memory of the danger of aged leaders at least one generation - but it is clear from the texts he has leaked of the other world leaders that they are pragmatic and intend to preserve the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen, and the resulting prosperity it has endowed its constituents with.
Any pressure will immediately be relieved if no actual irreversible damage (e.g. withdrawal from NATO or Anpo) is done and everyone knows it. But to make sure we get there, everyone has to apply just enough pressure to not break the machine. We can only hope they have the skill at diplomacy.
All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan. People were talking about how they pretend to be Canadian and so on. America was supposedly a pariah then, which makes any threat of "you are now a pariah" not particularly meaningful.
So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
Generally agree, but two thinks strike me:
1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe and Canada are worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.
The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.
* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
Kinda overlooking the fact that Lester B Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in Canada's efforts to lead a neutral force to force peace in the Suez Canal.
> All this "Americans must realize you are now PARIAHS and will NEVER BE TRUSTED AGAIN" business will seem novel to people today, but this was true when I was younger and America had just invaded Iraq right after Afghanistan.
Nobody really cared about Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure, it was fashionable to pretend to care, to get on a high horse and tell the USian rabble how immoral they were. But at the same time, people on their high horses also were glad that there was no Saddam Hussein anymore and that the Taliban were beaten (seemingly, back then).
It's different now because the US threatened to invade the Kingdom of Denmark, a supposedly very close ally. Even the threat of doing that is a red line that will be very very hard to uncross after Trump.
Yes, and I'm sure that the next time the US does something against European interests it will again be the case that the last time was just pretense but this time is real. The thing with terminal declarations is that there is no pathway back. If the US was never to be trusted again after the Iraq War, we are never to be trusted again now, so telling us that we are never to be trusted now is not of any significance. We're now post that declaration. That's what the word 'never' means.
The US-Europe military-economic bloc is a strong structure, but of the two Europe is weaker and the participants in Europe stand and fall according to weak ties. Without NATO, it isn't even clear if Poland will have allies. Each of the constituent countries have leaders aware of this. And I'm sure they'll attempt to keep the structure intact. If they fail, they fail but all these dramatic declarations won't have been significant either way. The declarations themselves are just emotional outbursts without even the semblance of even self-interest.
I mean, think about it. If the US has no pathway back to normalcy in relations ("never be trusted") then the cost for all future Presidents to militarily intervene is low. After all, trust is at its minimum value and guaranteed not to rise. If Greenland is core to US interests and Denmark has decided there is no pathway back to normalcy, invasion is on the table for all Presidents, Democratic Party or Republican Party.
Essentially, once you decide that you will never normalize relations, then you're just an adversary: not even a potential future ally. And those who pitch themselves as guaranteed adversaries had better find allies quick.
I didn't say "never", just "very very hard".
Just think of the relations the US has with the British. Back in the day, after the independence war, I'm quite sure that there were quite a few people in the US who said something like "never will we have cordial relations with the Kingdom of Britain"...
No, you did not say that, but that was the context of the conversation.
> I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> > "We will never fucking trust you again."
I guess that's just the usual hyperbole in these kinds of heated talks. I mean, it is basically the same as all those instances of TACO: Propose something outrageous, outlandish and absolute, later compromise to do something lesser.
> So long as Europe benefits from America and America benefits from Europe and both can put in changes that cement such commitment in the future, I think we will return to a powerful Western bloc - which I (personally) think is good for all humanity.
Problem is, right now America is the biggest threat to Europe. And there is no way to cement the commitment you talk about with America as is - regardless of whether Trump goes. Without Trump, you still have one major party actively hostile to Europe.
Trumps policies are not some kind of aberration, they are exactly what conservatives worked for. Republican party clapped threats to annex Greenland. Without trump project 2025 will be updated to project 2029 or whatever, with more lobbying and "lessons learned" strategy. The threat of this happening again, but this time causing even more harm will be there for foreseeable future.
> America is the biggest threat to Europe
Preface: Trump's idiocy with Greenland is inexcusable and nonsensical, with NATO already having access to build bases all over that island with barely more paperwork than building them in Alaska. So don't read this as a defense of that BS.
1. Greenland isn't even in Europe and America has no designs on colonizing actual Europe
2. Even Trump in his syphilis-addled head knows that the moment he rolls tanks into a territory with basically no military and a peaceful non-threatening citizenry, his credibility. And this sure isn't Venezuela, where the Nobel Peace Prize winner thanked him for removing the criminal Maduro from his post. He let his dumb mouth get ahead of him when he didn't rule out force, and he was forced to walk that back, a remarkable thing considering his pride. Now, even if he does want to try to use more dumb tariffs, those will hurt the US as much as it does Europe. I wouldn't say these are any major threat to Europe.
On the other hand, Putin would very much like to expand a couple countries over, and geopolitically anyone will tell you that Russia "needs" that in order to have a defensible frontier. America is not a threat to Europe the place. Trump wants to cosplay as a threat to Europe the technical political entity, mainly because our map projections make Greenland look so big that he thinks it will make him a "hero President" in the history books forever, but even most Republicans know this is a stupid and pointless ambition.
The Republicans who make up a lot of the party are not interested in Greenland being US territory, they don't even give a shit about territories we already have like Puerto Rico. They just hate the DNC, whose idea of campaigning is saying that everyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.
Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.
Rebuild? Never Failing empires rarely peak twice...
> It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone
I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it. But it would be difficult in 10 years to say cause and effect.
People have short term memories unless harmed very specifically / directly. Not indirectly affected.
> I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it.
One can play with bond markets and various ETFs or other derivatives, depending on what you envision. But even if your bet is qualitatively correct (that trust in the US ebbs for decades), it's hard to get the timing right to make an actual bet.
Given that a sizeable percentage of U.S. people seem to still support Trump, I don't think trust is going to be rebuilt. There's also the massive issue of the U.S. political system that has been shown to have a fatal flaw - that would have to be fixed along with the broken two party system.
I liken it to Germany rebuilding trust after WWII.
Trump is just your latest excuse, American, but its not working.
The rest of the world saw what Americans did to Iraq, and it has been downhill since then. You don't get to be the #1 funder of terror around the world and keep demanding glory and respect from the lackey nations you push around with those terror networks...
The damage Trump has done to international relations will last much longer than the three years that he has left in office.
It was an open secret that the USA was a transactional unreliable ally, now it's just common knowledge.
Even the most ardent "look West" politicians have stopped talking about avoiding China.
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The real thing that's changed here is that the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe
European politicians need to wake up NATO was really an exercise in helping the US with its proxy wars their support will not be reciprocated
Not with trump and not with his successor
The US may believe the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe, but that belief is false.
Even with greedy short-term thinking: The economic connections between the US and Europe are a big part of US wealth, and failing to protect your market and your investors is bad for business.
Ukraine… Europe supports Ukraine to keep Europe safe. Ukraine is not in NATO, nor is it covered by the EU treaty's mutual defence article.
But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
Canada's software market was $73B in 2024.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-m...
Am I missing something when I go to the companies here all of them except SAP are USA companies? So this research is just pointing out that Canada spends all it's software money in the USA?
I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.
As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
Mostly because it's easier to get a Canadian visa and pay less. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in hiring panels.
The EU doesn't make any software? Really now..
It feels like France is actually leading on the infrastructure side of things right now. With Mistral and Hugging Face both in Paris, the open source AI ecosystem is pretty heavily concentrated there.
And OVH and Scaleway. Also Gandi.
And Murena, one of the best shots at an alternative mobile OS ecosystem in Europe (preferably on Fairphone, which is Dutch).
Though Germany has a lot of light and heavyweights as well, SAP, SUSE, NextCloud, Hetzner, etc.
Having worked extensively with OVH and Scaleway, I find it to be a far cry from what American hyperscalers offers. The cloud offering is just too thin and brittle as of now, though I think they will eventually get there because of the CLOUD Act which in the long term might prove to be a gigantic own-goal on the part of the US.
Lol Gandi is a joke now that they have entered the desperately milking any remaining customers that haven't moved off yet phase.
Europe makes lots of quality software, it just doesn't scale economically. And that's an issue with access to capital and to a lesser extent legal fragmentation, not talent or willingness. That's why there's a constant push for markets reforms in the EU, on top of unified corporate structures (one might even call them "federal") being in the pipeline.
Canada just announced a huge deal with China last week. You're wrong on all counts.
No. You're wrong on all counts. That was not a "huge deal". Canada reduced tariffs on EVs to get reduced tariffs on some agriculture items. This put things back to where they were a few years ago. Canada doesn't have a free trade deal with China like it does with the US and Mexico.
Canada has been extremely closely aligned with US vehicle manufacturing for over a century. I'm not sure if Canada has a bigger lever to shoot american auto manufacturing in the leg. Opening the door to Chinese electric vehicles rattles the very foundations of American manufacturing. If anything, "huge deal" was an understatement.
No, the "huge deal" was when the US crippled the entire North American vehicle manufacturing industry.
At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
100%
The reason there is no unringing this bell is not just that we have a capricious, vainglorious president, it's that all of checks and balances that are supposed to restrain the executive have proven worthless so far. Republicans in Congress have completely declared their impotence, having fully relinquished their duties that the Constitution specifically delegates to the legislative branch, like tariff power, war powers, etc.
Absolutely not. History has shown again and again that human memory is short and greed is unbounded. If there isn't an active fire burning under people's asses they'll choose the $0.01 cheaper option even if it ends up being much worse for them in the long run.
That, plus massive influence campaigns from Russia, China, and US oligarchs like Musk and Thiel, are how we came to be living through the current general disaster.
Exactly. Trump is just the messenger. The underlying problem, festering for decades, is that a large enough fraction of the US population thought that Trump was even remotely qualified to lead a country to begin with.
The fact that we didn’t immediately remove him after the Greenland letter just demonstrated to our allies that that same fraction of people also don’t value our relationship with Europe.
The CCP looks thoughtful and stable by comparison. It’s too bad that the result of this will be to force more people to align with them, because they’re just as self-serving as Trump, they just have the good sense and temperament to hide their true intentions.
The fact that we didn't jail/banish him after leading an insurrection against the US Capitol was the "too far gone" moment.
Anything after that, is just Yet Another millimeter along the same trajectory:
Well, if we let him get away with J6, then I don't see how this is too much worse.
To tie this to your point, I honestly don't see why the Greenland letter should suddenly be the straw that shatters this particular dromedary's spine.
A terrible potential is that US products may find themselves unable to get footing internationally, due to broken trust and increased competition, so instead they'll try to rely on every-expanding protectionism and corruption to stay dominant in the US market.
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
The day I heard trump wants to fire Powell and manage the fed « his own way », I emptied all my trading accounts and bought gold.
I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
And silver, even more so, for whatever reason.
European pension funds are also slowly getting rid of US bonds. They don't talk about it because they don't want to attract the ire of Trump and they don't want to create panic in the markets as long as they are still invested. But e.g. the Dutch fund ABP sold 1/3rd of their US bonds in 6 months (10 out of 30 billion in US bonds that they have). They reinvested the money in Dutch and German bonds.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
Duplicating things is underrated. It's good for there to be multiple operators doing basically the same thing. Innovation can happen at the margins. It will be easier, not harder, for EU companies to innovate in meaningful ways after they've built their own systems and are no longer just following in the wake of big US companies. (Not to mention that half of what passes for innovation these days is actually bad.)
If you’re assessing things entirely on a strategic basis makes total sense. It’s understandable why they are doing it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s underrated or suggest there are no drawbacks.
Duplicating things without reason is wasteful. With a hobby project sure that’s your own time and is likely more an act of consumption and personal fulfilment. But these are national economic resources being redirected away from other things.
In software in a large codebase where there are coordination costs with reuse due to the organisation structure, there’s a strategic reason not to reuse, but it might highlight a limitation of the organisation structure, but that’s not something someone making the call to reuse code or not can do much about.
Likewise France really can’t do much about the state of the US and dependency is understandably seen as a risk.
I mean there are pros and cons to many things. What I mean by underrated is just that a lot of people say "oh duplication, how wasteful" and don't realize the benefits that may exist in redundancy and diffusion. I think the US would benefit right now if there was more "duplication" in the sense of greater diversity across many industries. More car makers, more film studios, more news organizations, more social media companies, more record labels. Not more stuff --- not more cars, more films, more news, more social media, more records --- but just the same stuff spread over a greater number of entities. The consolidation we've seen over the past several decades is a bad thing.
You know you CAN actually quantify how bad or good these things are in what respect and their second order effects. The trades off are pretty well understood. Increasing returns to scale are a thing, as are natural monopolies where consolidation is more efficient even with the headaches that comes with regulating a monopoly.
Car makers, entertainment companies, news organisations are very different kinds of industries to the ones we’re talking about here. They aren’t natural monopolies and don’t feature increasing to scale (at all output levels). In media, the reasons we’re seeing consolidation is due to entry barriers primarily with how IPs protections work. This is entirely unrelated.
Also you’re talking about this entirely from a consumers point of view. From economy wide point of view, duplication of a product will pull resources away from other industries that might be more profitable for a country. Which is bad for the same reason tariffs are bad. These are real costs that will affect quality of life and crowd out desirable economic activity.
Just circling back to this original article. This is arguably not one of those cases.
But redundancy and duplication purely on principle is dogmatic and shortsighted, and yes wasteful. We don’t have infinite resources in the world.
It's even better if they end up not doing exactly the same thing. For example we could use some tech companies that aren't so user hostile.
Right, and we can't get that if the only players are huge companies that face no competition.
> It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win. Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
Teams won by being good enough and bundled into O365. There's probably some value in making a product so available that people can use it where normally they wouldn't have the opportunity.
Teams won by being bundled with the rest of the Microsoft stack and shoved down captive (corporate) users throats.
I was going to comment that teams doesn't have threads and slack may still win long term, but turns out teams added threads in the last couple of months(1). So yeah.
1: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftteamsblog/...
I'll vouch for this. I moved from Slack to Teams and Teams is clearly an inferior product. That said, I don't think SalesForce owning Slack is really a big improvement.
Sometimes rebuilding a tool makes it better. You hopefully learn from the past.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries" EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you" EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
> Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
It really did not mean that -- it meant to increase spending to the targets set by NATO and to meet realistic defense needs.
A lot of EU weaponry was and is produced in the EU and the US has known that all along, cooperated and fostered it. The Leopard tank, the Eurofighter, the Rafale, the Lynx, the FV432, the Gazelle -- there is a long list of domestic weapons systems. I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines. The US has at various times partnered with Europe on the development of these systems, and Europe has been able to produce almost all major weapons systems continuously since the end of World War 2.
Europe's much weakened defense posture -- and weakened defense industry -- are their own fault and the result of their own choices. At one time, European countries had much, much larger militaries and could sustain manufacturing of their specific weapon systems -- their own tanks, APCs -- but not after the military drawdowns following the end of the Cold War. There are at least 3 major domestic European tank types -- the Leopard, the Challenger and the Leclerc -- but only the Leopard is manufactured anymore. Europe should probably have consolidated on the Leopard a long time ago.
The US weapons are not "overpriced", and certainly not compared to European weapons, beyond the sense in which basically all western weapons are overpriced. One reason we see consolidation on US weapons in Europe is that the US weapons are frequently very good, having received a lot of use, but also because the US still has some scale in its manufacturing capabilities.
> I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines.
Not really. The Polaris and Trident SLBM systems as well as the nukes they carry are US designs that the UK is allowed to use. And while their current PWR2 reactor is a British design, it is lacking. Therefore the next PWR3 design will be based on US S9G reactors.
The Trafalgar class were nuclear attack submarines made at Barrow-in-Furness shipyard in Cumbria. The current Astute class were also made there.
A nuclear submarine is one with nuclear propulsion, not nuclear weapons (just like a diesel-electric submarine is one with a diesel engine and batteries, not diesel weapons).
Don‘t forget the kill switches
It never ceases to amaze me the contortions some people put themselves through to make this US administration seem sane or even vaguely interested in the flourishing of Europe, Canada or the wider west.
Watch Trump's meetings with NATO from 2016-2019 on Youtube. He's saying exactly the same things about Europe, but nicer.
Nice didn't work. Even Russia invading a European county didn't work. Europe's head has been firmly planted in the sand for too long.
When the US points out faults with what EU is doing, the EU just digs its heels deeper out of spite, instead of self reflecting that maybe the US might be right.
yea even the Europeans are susceptible to TDS it seems
It's not contortions, it's the truth, since these points have nothing to do with this US administration specifically.
Contortions is trying to blame EU's multi decade political faults on Trump.
Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.
If the EU can find a path to a balanced deal with China, great -- but becoming a Chinese vassal would not improve the situation.
The whole point is the USA has been complaining that the EU was/is reducing itself to a vassal. No matter what the USA said or did before they didn't seem to care that they had no power anymore because the USA was there to take care of them.
The EU can't realign itself with China because that would destroy the last fragile bits of the EU economy that are left. They are already having issues with the excess supply lands on their shores even since the USA started tariffs with China. They can't deal with this long term.
No, the USA does not, in any way, and has never wanted or even accepted EU countries being independent. They wanted the EU to spend more on US weaponry, and maybe on their own - but would have vehemently opposed any attempt by any EU country to buy Russian, Chinese, Iranian or any such weaponry. They want the EU to stop regulating American companies, but they certainly don't want EU companies being too successful in the USA. They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
This is really ridiculous. There are many successful EU vendors of defense technology to the US military. Safran, Schmidt & Bender, Heckler & Koch, Saab, Glock, Fabrique National -- there is a long list. The USA has built real partnerships in these areas.
One amusing example is the C7 and C8. These are AR-15 (M16) variants made by Colt Canada and adopted by the militaries of the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway; and used by special forces in the UK.
Where are you getting your information from, that the US wouldn't allow wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market?
The EU would also have opposed it if the US bought Russian, Chinese or Iranian weaponry.
The EU does seem to willing to reduce itself to a Chinese vassal. That would not improve the situation.
The right play is to maintain relationships (including arms trading) with multiple major powers - as Canada's PM very deftly pointed out at Davos. Getting closer to China doesn't mean exchanging one master for another - it can and should be a way to increase the alternatives available, without going all the way in the other direction.
> The EU would also have opposed it if the US bought Russian, Chinese or Iranian weaponry.
This is such an implausible counter-factual that I can't even begin to imagine what would have actually happened. Still, I doubt any more than some "public letters" would have been issued, whereas I'm sure that the opposite would have resulted in actual economic pressure from the USA against the EU/NATO country that would have dared, under any administration.
I mean, you offered a basically similar, implausible counterfactual. I think we can agree that it is at least parties that the EU would have opposed purchases of Chinese, Russian or Iranian weapons by the USA and vice versa -- but Russia and Iran have been sanctioned for long periods of time (Iran, basically continuously) by both the EU and the USA, and Russia is the main territorial threat to the EU, so maybe only China is really an interesting possibility here.
Arms trading with China is probably not a good idea at all.
I don't see much sign of the EU becoming a Chinese vassal as in relying on it for defence in return for being told what to do. Trading with China is not the same thing.
I'm not sure that's how it is. Sure NATO countries aren't keen on any of the members being reliant on weapons from potential NATO enemies, for example Turkey buying Russian S-400s but it doesn't mean the countries aren't mostly independent.
Likewise NATO countries aren't keen if one of their members gets a leader who rolls out the red carpet to the Russians and threatens to invade other NATO states. It's not like all the members have to do what the US likes.
Here's a Danish vassal MEP saying "Mr Trump, fuck off" https://youtu.be/hASG-hQgk-4
I see the Turks have now changed their mind on the S-400s and I hope the red carpet for Putin folk change at some point too.
No. The US wants the EU to be a vassal, this should be obvious. Why would they want an EU that is more capable of acting against US interests?
The US wants EU to be a vassal, but got tired of paying the protection money for that. Now they are trying, and failing, to keep the EU under their control despite bringing less to the table every day.
Or more obviously the US views China as an existential threat that is about to pop.
US has numerous public docs stating China is prepping for war and has WW2 levels of production. US knows it will be out manufactured in this conflict.
So the US needs:
1. Fully focus on China without distractions. 2. Allies able to handle their own security or help in the fight. 3. Weaken the smaller axis forces as much as possible now before the big event occurs.
Through this lens it alls lines up pretty nicely. Every single world event including US poking europe all work towards these goals.
As of now:
1. EU is finally spending on spending 2. Nato has expanded (sweden) 3. Russia is weakened 4. Iran is weakened 5. Oil production is secure (venuzuela, US internal, middle east) 6. East asia is also spending more on military and heavily aligning with the west (more bases in phillipines)
To me this is going about as smoothly as anyone would expect the buildup to WW3 would go. And it's all going pretty well for western forces. The west is now stronger than it has ever been and getting stronger and the axis forces are all weaker and getting weaker.
Words matter much less than action.
It does not make sense that the US would pay the "protection money" for a vassal. The vassals pay the protection money!
One clue that this discussion of vassals is not right at all.
EU aligning heavily with China is a fantasy.
You really think EU is going to ally with China over japan, south korea, philipines, and Australia?
You really think Russia's current number 1 ally is all of a sudden going to be best friends with EU?
China and North korea are ACTIVELY supporting a war in Europe! China has openly threatened Australia. There are literal north korean troops shooting Europeans right now. Who is north korea's number 1 supporter?
They said "to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China".
I don't see any mention of being "best friends" with China. It's not like if the US was exactly a "friend" at all these days.
Again words vs reality.
Reality is that China is openly suporting a war against europe. But words give leverage against US in negotiations.
EU just signed huge deal with India.
Words vs reality.
That helps US geopolitical goals.
> US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
> US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
It's in both the EU and the US's interest to ensure NATO is the strongest partnership possible and the US's actions over the last few weeks have undermined it almost perfectly.
If you look at actions and results the western alliance is the strongest it has ever been and going to be significantly stronger over the next decade.
Again my point is a theory that either EU and US found a way to make EU citizens get behind military spending or the US found a way to manipulate EU to do it.
You'll know if US and EU are actually not aligned if EU sides with China over USA (which would be suprising to say the least)
The EU's actions over the last 30 years have undermined it almost perfectly.
Tell me which NATO country came crying, triggered NATO Article 5 and as a consequence a good number of EU NATO (and even non-NATO) soldiers have died for the sole interests of said country?
Why are you moving the goalposts from your parent's point?
Yes, the middle eastern wars were a huge issue form the US, but that doesn't explain EU own goaling itself for 20+ years with terrible policies and choices, with or without helping the US in the middle east.
I am saying that for last 30 years actions of European NATO counterparts was not "undermining the relationship".
Also since 2014 there was a 10 year plan devised to get everyone to strictly follow 2% budget commitment. Which happened before you and I even heard about trump starting a presidential campaign (or even if it was there was nothing about NATO, etc). This happened (better later than never) due to ruzzian attack on eastern Ukraine and with a nudge from Obama administration.
Due to 2022 total war from ruzzia against Ukraine - I believe right now there are talks to commit up to 5% in long run, with at least up to 3.5% in next decade.
I know that Europe doesn't have great PR team, but USA is getting better and better at gaslighting (ruzzia has decades of experience in divide and conquer tactics) that Europeans are allegedly freeloading. Europe has it's problems, but it's solving them democratically, whereas USA needs to see herself in a mirror, before it's too late.
Links:
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/584088/defense-expenditu...
- https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/fin...
- https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/defe...
My understanding is that the 2% budget commitment was met or exceeded by all NATO countries only as late as 2025. The Obama administration ended in 2017.
Europeans not taking care of themselves has been "undermining the relationship".
Plan started in 2014.
Also look yourself in a mirror as a country, because by how things are going - you need to prepare yourself for concentration camp.
If this is some kind of move, fair play, but its ham fisted because rank and file westerners across the world have lost respect and faith in America, that wont be rebuilt by some other president. Nobody will want fighter jets etc controlled by America. Perhaps USA is fine with it but to me it feels severely damaging.
Twitter can think what it wants.
The western alliance as of today is about as strong as its ever been. They are actively dismantling and destroying their enemies together one by one.
Words matter little when US's alternative is actively supporting a war in europe.
> The western alliance as of today is about as strong as its ever been.
It's at its lowest point since the Suez crisis, to the point even historical US hawks (notably Poland) are starting to give it a side-eyed look.
I don't think you realize how far and how fast the discourse in Europe has shifted.
Russia and Iran are in shambles. Nato has expanded. Military spending amoungst members is increasing.
Words vs actions.
The western alliance as of today is about as strong as its ever been.
No it is not. Very few people in Europe believe that the US would uphold NATO Article 5. The US did arguably not uphold the Budapest memorandum. Allies have stopped sharing intelligence with the US in many areas because they don't trust the US anymore (Trump would burn allied assets in a Truth Social post). Trump has done a lot of bidding for Putin in the Ukraine-Russian war because he does not care about a good outcome for the rest of the Western alliance, he only cares about some peace prize or whatever.
The Western alliance is almost shattered, NATO is on its lasts legs (well, technically, NATO with the US, I think a new NATO with Canada and Europe would rise from its ashes).
"Shattered" as they have together massively increased military spending and weakened their enemies at every step through heavy cooperation. And added sweden to nato.
If you ignored words actions show a big difference.
No. The US does not want an independent EU. It wants an EU that lets any US company do here whatever it wants. It wants the EU to split up so it can force bad trade deals on our countries. We don't want a trade deal that lets you sell chlorinated chicken or other stuff that is currently banned here.
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff. Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?
Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.
Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it. We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.
Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff.
To underline this point:
https://www.newsweek.com/europes-plan-ditch-us-weapons-spook...
> I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."
My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
I would like to think US has EU interest at heart, a kind of tough love you would hope. But even if they don't all of their reactions have actively helped the US geopolitical goals.
> You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
The US might or might not have Europe's best interest at heart or the European peoples' best interest at heart. But certainly not the European Union's best interest.
> US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe a large number of Europeans look at the lack of US regulation with disgust?
Honestly so often I take my EU consumer and worker rights for granted, only to hear that they simply don't exist for 90+% of Americans. Amd then I wonder how they even live over there.
In large houses with lots of land, multiple cars and lots of money.
Median savings in America: $8,000
Median savings in Belgium: €14,000
A lot of Americans just try to outspend the Jones' and are crippled in debt.
I looked up to the US as a kid. Then I went to the US about 8-10 times in my teenage years (lost the count) due to my dad's work. We travelled through ~20 states. Only during those trips I realized in what poor life standards most Americans live. My wife lived in the US for a year and had the same experience. She also found that average Americans have real weird believes about the rest of the world (this was in the nineties), like they would ask her whether Hitler is still alive, whether Europe only has US radio stations, and some believed that Europeans don't have fridges.
Another thing that surprised me was the segregation. One time we went out to eat something while crossing some states. Apparently we drove into a black neighborhood, and we walked into a large place with a buffet. And suddenly almost everyone was looking at us completely stunned. Then the other shoe dropped, we were the only white people, and they were probably surprised that white people showed up. They were extremely nice to us, but for me it also uncovered how weird the US is.
Yes. A few do, a lot don't.
Unfortunately they made the mistake to ban slavery /s
Slavery was a major economic drain, it wasnt a boon to the us economy. There is a reason the south remained agricultural and under developed, it was slavery.
And a few innovative Europeans look on EU regulation with disgust and leave, taking their companies with them.
They're going to the US for the VC funds and the capital markets, which is America's great competitive advantage globally. In the few industries I went through (PaaS, Health, Finance) what I got was that the regulatory environment in Europe was welcome for being stable and clear, or existing at all in a few cases. There's been one case where I've seen regulation being an issue and preventing business from being fully conducted in Europe, and that was related to banking (in that instance that company had to be set up in Dubai).
It's not ideal, but the EU has 450 million people. It can probably survive.
Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
>"I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure)."
So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal
Putin will need to die for Russia to change. Change is not possible in Russia until then. A strong EU is required post Russia.
Until then, starve the Russian economy of fossil fuel export revenue (which funds their war efforts). They have liquidated a majority of their gold reserves and have exhausted a majority of their military hardware stockpiles. If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.
Russia Liquidates 71% of Its Gold Reserves to Finance War Effort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738690 - January 2026
If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.
Ukraine seems to be doing that pretty well.
lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
> lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
EU countries give final approval to Russian gas ban - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-countries-give-fi... | https://archive.today/wOHeR - January 26th, 2026
> Under the agreement, the EU will halt Russian liquefied natural gas imports by end-2026 and pipeline gas by September 30, 2027.
> The law allows that deadline to shift to November 1, 2027, at the latest, if a country is struggling to fill its storage caverns with non-Russian gas ahead of winter.
> Russia supplied more than 40% of the EU's gas before 2022. That share dropped to around 13% in 2025, according to the latest available EU data.
> The European Commission plans to also propose legislation in the coming months to phase out Russian pipeline oil, and wean countries off Russian nuclear fuel.
Ember Energy: The final push for EU Russian gas phase-out - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-final-push-for-... - March 27th, 2025
Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022, it's fairly impressive Europe has only needed ~5 years to disconnect entirely from Russian gas supplies. Better late than never. They've proven they have the capacity to achieve these objectives in a timely manner, when motivated.
> Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022,
You mean 2014.
But thank you for proving my point. 2014 - 2027 just a short 15 years (assuming it actually happens I have my doubts).
You also previously asserted, without citations, that Canada could not export natural gas to anyone but the US, so forgive me if I don’t take your opinion in high regard as it relates to global energy trade.
China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932 - January 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919165 ("This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline." -- tick_tock_tick - November 13th, 2025)
I'm confident you could make more factually accurate and less emotionally driven comments if you tried. Please consider it. Very little of the information I rely on for my comments is paywall gated, they are web searches away for your consumption and mental model enrichment.
They still don't have the capacity and I'm still betting they aren't going to build new ones.
They literally have an LNG export terminal that is operational today and shipping cargo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919580 (citations)
I've never argued with you that they can't export any oil of course they can. I'm simply stating they don't have the capacity to shit away from exporting to the USA nor do they plan to build said capacity. Maybe if Alberta's proposal actually gets fast tracked approval and isn't bogged down in a decade of court battles with environmental and indigenous groups and I'll consider changing my view.
What’s closer to Europe, Canada‘s West Coast or Australia?
lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades
In the local harbor, they built an LNG terminal in 6 months (Eemshaven, NL).
The Russian invasion was on February 24, 2022. They opened an LNG terminal on September 8, 2022.
My primary lessons of previous crises (2008-2010 financial crisis, COVID, 2022 invasion) is that under pressure EU/EU countries can do things very quickly and do things well. The pundits always say the next crisis breaks the EU, but it always ends up with the EU being stronger and more unified than before.
Switching gas providers is more difficult than switching from Zoom to Google Meet or other alternative.
I think building an entire software stack that works is probably harder than buying more expensive gas from a different country
Even starting from scratch with the software, I'd make the opposite bet. Imported energy on the scale of nations a lot of expensive physical hardware. Given the numbers people throw around when talking about upgrading the electrical grid, think trillions*.
Software also has the potential to be made by forking open source projects. That Canonical Ltd. (London) has Ubuntu is already a decent foundation, a wheel that probably doesn't need to be fully re-invented.
* ironically, one of my hobby-hills on green energy is that I have noticed that a genuinely global electrical grid fat enough to get resistance down to 1 Ω the long way around, would only cost a few hundred billion in aluminium. Currently only China makes enough to consider it, but still, the BOM for such a project is much less than the price of all the manpower needed for the last 100 miles.
Not really once it's coming in my ship
I think they should (in practice there could be something in the middle). Yes, they may have more bickering with the US, but that's just part of the messy diplomatic process. At the end of the day, we want to see strong allies that share a compatible value system with us. I'm actually more optimistic too: a stronger Europe will earn more respect because of their strength. And that respect will lead to more negotiation instead of more bickering.
> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
> even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
My bad. I meant Guangdong Province
Guangdong Province at the moment has about 140,000,000 people. About the same as Russia so it figures. Also it is not the best idea to estimate GDP of Russia in USD and using US criteria.
Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
Good thing we're not in the US to terrorize us with the ICE.
> even the current administration want
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
oh man, I agree with what you are saying but EU is a joke.!
Is it really though? We have strong labour laws, consumer laws, antitrust laws, personal information laws and so on because the majority of us want it. We understand that this do not maximize growth, and consider that worth it. In fact, the most of us sees the current US administration as a very big joke.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
EU market is by no mean easy, it's heavily fragmented requiring very often intense localization effort.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
Seems easier to comply to the single market rules though than 50 odd different states.
I'm American and sell my software to all 50 states (plus the rest of the world). I don't have a single special market rule for any state, not even my own. My payment providers take care of tax collection for me and my accountant tells me how much to pay the government each tax season.
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
> s in a somewhat unified market
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
Why did he threaten 100% tariffs?
He did not like the Canadian prime minister's speech about "great powers" weaponizing economic integration, so he decided to prove him right.
I do feel as why demands reason and I am not sure if you can reason with the unreasonable which is what the Canadian speech was about in Davos and then POTUS threatened 100% tariffs again.
Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
Because Canada has been in trade talks with China and may potentially lower its tariffs on China which gives them a back door into the US. There are some specifics and it's all conditional. It depends on the kinds of deals it settles on.
It's not a back door to anything. It's competition for the US and Japanese automotive manufacturers who are protected by the existing tariffs.
It's multiple things. Yes, the automotive manufacturers matter not just for business sense, but because manufacturing base is important to be able to leverage in case of a war. Manufacturing lines played key roles in WW2.
In addition to that, since we're on the car angle, Chinese EVs are basically just privacy nightmares. I mean, all cars are at this point, but that's why we definitely don't want Chinese ones coming across the Canadian border and ending up all over the place.
In the end there are in fact legitimate national security concerns that the tariffs address and Canada risks weakening those. So, that is the actual answer to why.
[flagged]
No it is not. Canada did not try to do anything resembling Free Trade with China. It is btw prohibited by NAFTA / CUSMA. Canada pursues reasonable targeted deals like every normal country should. Trump is just getting hysterical because some country does not want to suck his dick. He should learn to be civil when dealing with neighbors, well it might be too late for that.
prohibited by nafta/cusma isnt particularly important. the US already ignores the parts it doesnt like
canada should have a free trade deal ready to go for when the US pulls out of it altogether
Because after the US threatened to destroy our economy and/or annex us by force and/or cancel nu-NAFTA and/or impose tariffs on us regardless, we realized that Americans don't actually want us as friends so we started diversifying our trade partnerships and negotiated a mutual tariff relaxation deal with China.
The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Probably bummed because nearly everyone (rightfully) praised Mark Carney's speech in Davos (in contrast to Trumps incoherent ramblings). I am pretty sure he can be that petty.
Delusion? Dementia? Being surrounded by yes-men?
US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
I am not sure I would be able to stand that.
As a European I'm glad for all of these pesky regulations. https://noyb.eu/en
> Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
ok bro I think you might want come down off your high horse and mingle amongst the people again
I'm on a high horse because I like that the EU tries to regulate big tech? I wish they went further and actually enforced it. Some of you seem to live in a parallel universe.
Elaborate what's so bad about the EU instead of assuming who I am or how I live. I'm criticizing your ideas, not your person. Make some effort and do the same, "bro". Don't be such a stereotype.
i understand it from a neutral perspective.
building a simple business in south east asia is drastically easier. there are effectively no privacy laws, no class action lawsuits (a big US problem not EU), no gdpr, energy is cheaper, no punitive labour courts, much looser zoning laws. almost no restrictions on international trade, no withholding taxes, no major issues with transfer pricing, no capital gains taxes, relaxed packaging laws. of course, there are different challenges.
When you go from an open market to EU mode it is insanely stressful having to suddenly deal with these enormous regulatory regimes that simply dont exist anywhere else, and to figure out how to deal with them. this stress is an energy cost, which becomes a capital cost, which makes it much more difficult for small businesses to be created. I also find supranational regulatory regimes difficult to understand, unlike other parts of the world where each country has its own law and thats it. I think its generally a good thing for the people who live there though!
when i am driving around in ASEAN i don't look at my speed. in EU i am anxiously making sure i am 1km/h below the limit to avoid a fine in the mail.
Some Americans. Others of us are very aware of this.
> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
What about China? India?
To add to what has already been said:
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
india is a great market, but:
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
edit: fixed formatting.
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
> there’s not an easy 3rd economy
There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade
EU market is _very_ regulated comparing to the US one, and also don't dismiss the language barrier in the european countries. Not everyone speaks English.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US
well, you can finally hardcode the date in mm/dd/yy format without worrying for a menu to change it.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU
Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
India.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
Good call out, India is likely the most viable option.
India's position on Russia means it's a non-starter as a serious trade partner.
India doesn't really have a position on Russia/Ukraine itself but wants peace within the region.
Yes, India does seek russian oil but that's because I feel like India and russian trade deals have been from the start of cold war where America supported pakistan.
If you actually observe our history, we were hesitant about joining any block but it was the fact that America started investing in Pakistan which made us closer to russia.
I feel like the average person is either Ukraine supporting/Neutral for what its worth.
That being said, I feel like India's just looking out for its own interests. (Ahem America's attacking venezuela for oil)
I feel like if this is such an non-starter, then India has made its stance clear that its always willing to co-operate to grow its country and if EU gives a more lucrative deal to India. I feel like India can slowly decrease its dependence on Russian oil as well.
The thing is, EU right now is in this position because it got so reliant on America. We had seen this during cold war and we have always kept our cards open while still maintaining peace. I feel like India should look after its own interests first and foremost and see when objectives align (something canadian's PM said recently too and Trump got so angry on him that he's again talking about raising 100% tariffs)
Honestly full support to Ukraine. I hope a peace deal can be arranged in Ukraine-russia.
That being said, if you feel like EU's gotten a better partner (Americas invading Greenland, China's authoritarian, which other country has the tech innovation close to India?) then sure, I hope EU does whats in best of its incentives as well.
But my honest bet is that India is EU's best bet to move from American techno-dependence given recent Greenland crisis.
I can't wait to see how many indians we are going to be forced to import due to that "free trade deal". They must have looked at how well it went in canada and said among themselves "now that's how you destroy a country we gotta get some of that". [EDIT] Hopefully national politicians get balls, more balls, and tell their MEPs to vote against it like the mercosur deal.
This BS should stop (even if you vote for AfD or National front)
It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde.
When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix)
So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse.
On the other hand this is encouraging people to apply and get passports. I for one would have never naturalised as German if the residence permit was quick and easy.
In summary, there are encouraging people to migrate.
Then EU citizens should support undocumented immigrants, as we do in the US. It is inhumane not to give them full welfare.
Is your first sentence sarcasm or you don't see news?
Sadly I would consider now that America's just not an ideal position for immigration right now and this will remain a scar for America imo.
Many of people I know (or friends of friends/brothers) are migrating from America to either Europe or shifting back to India.
I don't think that America can particularly do something about it. Trust's pretty fragile.
What little immigration we have from India are highly educated and thus quite productive individuals.
You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.
I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)
For what its worth, I have to mention that India losses more on this deal than Europe because India's actually for the first time iirc imo giving up tariffs or reducing them. India has the highest tariff rates for a developing country from the start (indiscriminant) and is only offering upgrades to EU mostly fwiw in terms of this free trade deal.
I have heard this deal be described as EU beneficiary from EU sources.
Ah yes, I feel like what you want for an EU is a connection with America which has been a very unreliable partner would even be an understatement in today's geopolitical environment.
It's saddening to see if you are from EU who actually believes so. I am more than happy to answer your queries in good faith but this just feels like pushing some of your own agenda or straight up racist.
We come with open arms even though the massacre of jallianwala bagh is still in our memories. There is just no question regarding the fact that EU primarily british forces had extracted immense wealth from India and India had to primarily rebuild it from scratch healing from the scars of its colonial past.
There's actually an internal pushback from some people i feel like who feel like EU is still imperialist & want to shut down this deal from India side given India hasn't lost much after the trump's tariffs compared to EU whose greenland was in some serious sovereign threats.
But I guess the point is that EU India deal is inevitable in this multi polar deal. India wants EU to be the financial hub where EU can then reinvest in India and India can create technological innovation.
I have tried to respond with as much calm as possible but I must admit that your message felt like a must admit,ragebait to me in start but I hope that this detailed message can help clear up on the details.
If you have any reasonable questions man, feel free to ask!
Both may benefit. Some will lose. If benefits overweigh losses then ok.
Well Rapido bike means Auto-wallas are angry. That is reality.
The highest tariffs are holding India back. A decent original nike shoe is about €50 here but why it is Rs5000 there (with lower Purchasing power). Local businesses have too long bribed Indian politicians. Recently I replaced the gate of my house here in EU. It was 20 years old. No rust despite old. I remember the steel supplied by our companies is crap - we repaired our gate every few years. Or it was not properly painted.
Costs of computer etc are too high for any startup etc. and with our talent more cheaper imports from china would be great to build a local giant.
On the other hand our people do
- exploit Digital Ocean T-shirt give away to create stupid pull requests and burden maintainers in GitHub open source project
- curl dev stopped bug bounty due to many sending AI reports
- clone AOSP and IIT Chennai said it have created a independent OS.
Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmai founder) recently said we have become users not creators.
Even Ambani with all his money can't do a good tech company.
I am not saying India's perfect. Far from it.
All the issues you mention are valid and I guess it all boils down to some aspects of over population and also crowding within the CS market too which impacts passionate people in CS too (something I wrote about as well)
But like I feel like leadership skills in India will go far. It's time to go and build things instead of trying to be consumers. The people who do this in India are gonna get rewarded disproportionately in my opinion.
I will just do my work building new things which isn't work for me but fun which I enjoy. So yeah!
Edit Leadership skills don't mean leading people but rather like I guess I meant Innovative skills in the sense of building new things and everything ykwim tho leadership skills can go far too, I feel like innovation skills are more needed too and the same point goes for both essentially imo.
> not saying India's perfect. Far from it
The is the reason it will never change.
Talking in double negative.
Citizens are so shameful to admit issues.
In most of the West, that I know of, people admit to issues. Brazenly say, yes , German train system is under performing, no investment in the last 10 years from both parties. Then there is chance for change. It is happening.
Ego issues need to cleared away.
Mic drop
You do know that the UK literally isn't in the EU, right? A lot of your rant is really weird.
I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
I wouldn't consider it a rant per se but rather that India's trying to move towards an multi polar deal and EU and India actually has a more net negative and Indians are wary of this deal even more so but on aggregate the deal would be extremely beneficial if seen from both sides with reason.
Also isn't UK trying to pester back into the EU again. It's super complicated to follow even as someone who follows geo-politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_re-accession_of_the_...
> I mean perhaps, yea I must've got sidetracked by India's colonial past but for the average Indian I would consider for that passage that they generally equate UK to be part of EU usually. (Perhaps from the pre-brexit era's or just in general)
When I started writing about jallianwala bagh I probably got distracted because I used to be part of drama club and we had this act when we were young and literally the amount of people dying and everything truly shocks one & genuinely disturbs one.
I recommend this documentary to know more about Jallianwala bagh massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JZJx67cvo
I think my point which kind of got muddied up is that India wants to cozy up to EU and build things together but not to UK so much. India's extremely sensitive regarding UK given its past and in this deal,is cautious about EU and UK making ties again or any such discussions too.
India has literally just finished agreeing a significant new trade deal with the UK.
I guess I can only give anecdotal evidence as there aren't any surveys about it but India posseses a historical resentment towards UK.
I guess only time will tell how the Indian public perceives such deal.
Judging by the very large Indian community living in the UK, and the extensive community and business links between the two countries, I imagine “very well”.
I really think we (as OCI/NRI) should move on from using Jallianwala or whatever. This doesn't help. Don't use BS to justify.
Every damn guy that get visa refused uses this and in a way insults those sacrifices.
Come to reality. Present or at least last 10 years.
Who did what? You need to fix your own country. Even if British didn't invade - the princely states of India were feuding. Fighting. If it was not one country then TN and Karnataka would have gone to war.
UK were open minded to elect a non- white as PM in UK. Though he was very bad for for UK.
Do some creative things instead of using colonial things. Nobody cares. If some from that family hate UK or west then why come and live a happy life here (being UK/EU citizens). As an OCI holder, I get better treatment at immigration than I was an Indian citizen.
While lots of things exist like ISRO etc there is still abject poverty, pollution, health care issues.
Yes, India sends talents. Myself living about 10 years here.
But note. TCS etc employees gain more coming here than they contribute. Yes, skill shortage etc. at the end while using the fantastic TGV here in France - I am benefiting more than contribute despite working in a high tech scientific industry.
Eventually Bihari in TN will say I did so much work in Coimabatore mills but you guys are treating me shit; and for the non-hindi speaking Tamil in Pune they treat like shit.
If all these are better the internal economy will be great. On path to some self sufficiency. No. Instead you come here to insult current EU UK citizens. It is of no use.
The point is even if Sundar Pichai was in India he would not have built a Google.
You can be cautious but at the end people like Bhavish Aggarwal or biju or l&t CEO etc are the ones you get there. They don't give a shit about people. Until then people will try to move here. Fix that.
Otherwise people will come here to work. Just 9-5. No sat/sunday work. No fking Manager would call you after office hours.
(Again, there will be YouTube videos of NRI telling - it is better life in India than USA/EU. Yes, true. If you are 10%top earner in India or at the
Wtf am I reading...
How can you even suggest moving from Jallianwala bagh when so many people were killed in the most gruesome way. I suggest you to watch the documentary once and then go ahead and suggest the same.
> Come to reality. Present or at least last 10 years.
??? No, it is our bloody past that we will never forget what the British did that day.
Even British historians from documentaries mention that people in Britain think that British empire was "the good guys" but in reality, the atrocities committed were equal to nazi germany levels and they really tried to suppress this information getting out.
Would you say to a Jew to come to reality right now? Do you realize how in-sensitive things are you talking about right now??
Heck, Even Germany apologized about the genocide that it took against the jews (holocaust) but Britain has never issued an true sincere apology about it in much capacity.
> Every damn guy that get visa refused uses this and in a way insults those sacrifices.
Those weren't only just sacrifices. Those were cold hearted murders by British people to "fire higher" & a calculated attack to kill.
Now you mention some problems within India.
UK extracted $64.82 trillion from India during colonial rule & we are still improving. I am not kidding when I say that UK left us in freaking shambles and the partition day echos screams too.
You mention Indian states fueding. Well, firstly they are now Indian states but they were sovereign nations comprising the now Indian states. Suppose EU and America are feuding over greenland too, so would your suggestion be for say China to occupy both to create peace? Do you realize the ludicrousness in your comment?
Do you realize that Britain tried the rowlatt act and so many other acts which was the FREAKING reason that Jallianwala bagh massacre took place.
People were humiliated on a street where they had to rub their noses and walk on all fours and crawl. There can be no justification for this.
Do you realize that whole of India voted against any British law that restricted Indian freedom yet they still passed the law iirc?
India has its issues right now some because of its colonial past. I am Indian. I am trying to call a spade a spade and you aren't. If I am wrong, feel free to correct me about anything.
So even if India has its issues and I will admit nobody likes talking about Indian issues than Indian themselves. My point is, we are working on fixing them. We have a multi party system with decentralization & we are seeing growth and India has 0 angel tax, 0 startup tax, insanely good seed funds by GOVT itself and green tech cities and startup cities like bangalore, gurugram etc.
But in no way of form does India having problems try to justify the bloody past and not even Britishers try to justify it now so its crazy to see your wild response (let's admit UK's having problems too, Every country does and that's okay and that's my point)
As I have mentioned repeatedly, I am not against EU but you can absolutely see why some people in India are worryful of the deal given UK was part of EU (pre-brexit) and wants to come back (like tf?)
I am not saying that UK people are all like this. What I am saying is that they take pride in the former british empire from what I can gather when it was established on mass exploitation and blood bath.
Building railways in India would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”, Governor General Lord Hardinge had said in 1843. The fact that it was not Indians that urged the rapid construction of railways in the country, but the Chambers of Commerce of Manchester and Glasgow, and the European Chambers of Commerce at Calcutta and Bombay, underlines why the British built railways in India — to make exploitation of raw material more efficient.
Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...
Britain was very much racist during that time (from what I can gather, there are still certain parties and people who are racist towards Indians)
Simply put, Britain extracted 60 trillion $ worth of our wealth, built railways to only exploit us further, killed people in massacres and humiliated them, tried to really really put down the revolutionaries for so long.
This is our past. The scars of our past still haunt India. If you can't show sympathy or have to say things like this is what people say after not getting Visa then that's so disgusting to say.
I hope I have made my stance clear. Out of our respect and sympathy to elders and our nation's sovereignity, India generally suggests to distance ourselves from UK.
India prefers a partner like EU much much over UK. We really don't want to negotiate much with UK from what I can tell. But once again, the question is if UK wants to pester back into EU, we will be questionable about any such free trade agreement.
I have nothing against the genuine normal UK people and businesses tho. I talk with UK vps providers on quite a frequency but just, I want to point out that we are aware of our past. We always will be.
I am just saying that even those UK provider would be/have been more sympathetic than you because literally not even british historians argue anything and the question they ask is if they should apologize or not but I feel like the apologies if insincere would be worth nothing.
It's saddening to see people with such mentality as yours in a forum I enjoy. I have tried to put forth reason first.
Propaganda works man, I don't blame you, When enough things get repeated, we repeat the same.
But I know that you are smart, so use reason not propaganda to answer such query. I highly recommend you to enlighten yourself over what happened in Jallianwala bagh massacre from the youtube documentary that I provided.
I am willing to have a good faith discussion (only after you watch the documentary), have a nice day.
FYI, you seem shaken by what you saw, but I do have to point out a few things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
1. This massacre happened 107 years ago. None of the people involved are even alive any more. In some cases even their children or grand-children are no longer with us. Judging children by the sins of their parents leads nowhere.
2. Holding grudges for so long does not seem healthy for the person holding them.
3. Another commenter points out that India is looking for a trade agreement with the UK... I guess the government of India doesn't hold the same view point as you (as an outsider, your viewpoint seems very extreme).
Edit: found the trade agreement: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-india-trade-dea...
So continuing from my past comment which did get extremely long but I hope that I could capture the nuance.
My point's probably that EU and Indian relations feel the most easy to form out of any major world right now and honestly I do have a bit of bias in here as I wish to create private solutions or open source solutions from India and the EU market and its privacy conscious users feels better connection if EU and India themselves are connected better and I am feeling like the chances of that happening is quite high.
But I guess politics tricky and I can be wrong, I usually am so yeah. But I am just gonna build private (or Open source solutions) and have a bit of focus within EU market as well.
Politics isn't really my best suit because I like to come to agreements and politics in this case is trying to tangle the untangled which feels pretty tricky to do such I guess but I also really like talking about India-EU relation so yeah. Probably sacrifices must be made & looking for hopefully a healthy discussion of politics which I didn't witness in the GP's comments being honest.
See I want to thank you for this comment because we can approach something new on top of it man.
I will try to respond to each of your point but before that I have to say something.
The Jallianwala bagh massacre fundamentally showed to us that we cannot co-exist with British Raj. We have to demand for purna swaraj & such demands were what led us to our independence. So any historical book of ours mentions the massacre starting from 4th grade to all the way to 10th maybe even till college. We learn more and more gruesome details as we progress mentally.
You can go ask any Indian about Jallianwala bagh and we would all know it. I can bet on that.
(IMP): My point of extreme frustration is with people who somehow try to lessen its historical significance or somehow say factually in-accurate words like the OP did & I took my sweet time trying to explain everything. There is just no justification of what happened but you can just observe from the original parent on how some justifications were trying to be given (we gave you trains, you were fighting etc.)
What your 1) and 2) point are is about the fact that its very historically old & that's a valid point on which I will come. But you can just see even today, we have people who somehow are (propagandized?) about it. This is what annoys us as a community & why we still judge children sometimes if they are taught about the glory of british empire (this is what I feel like I have heard from people in UK) & they forget to read about the bengal famine, the jallianwala bagh massacre and all the atrocities committed whether in India or in the colonies of our African friends.
And this is why India and British relations have never really been repaired after the massacre (Quoting a british Historian)
Also, India isn't alone in this of what you consider "extremism".
Like, in China something approximately 100 years ago happened the extremely sad and depressing event we call rpe of nanking by Japan.
China still remembers it & you can see how it still impacts Chinese-Japanese relations even to this day and it impacts the whole region.
Taking a chinese article from Chinese media: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1099911/agony-endure...
Let me read you the wikipedia article of China-Japan relations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Japan_relations
As a result of Japanese war crimes during the Second Sino-Japanese War such as the Nanjing massacre, and the Chinese view that Japan has not taken full responsibility for them, the bilateral relationship between China and Japan continues to be a sensitive issue in China.[2]: 24
Coming to American Civil war. You can still observe how even after a 100 year old war. People of color are having issues in America even to this day & the problems still persist to this day.
My biggest issue which you might consider judgement is the fact that I feel like UK still romanticizes this era (and teaching children to romanticize it too), like they treat it as when UK had all colonies and it was all good and everything. And this is why I have an issue to this day. I have only heard that UK people still don't know the gruesome details of all the massacres which took place.
Every country have these sensitive nerves. Time really doesn't have an impact, in fact as more and more time passes on, the impact deepens in my opinion.
I just wanted to say the post to all the people who ever thought that India benefitted from Britian's colonialism. Nil nada, (negative) India was extremely exploited and India would've been better off without colonialism without a doubt of anybody's including historian's minds. I have given sources in the past detailed comment too.
This is an extremely sensitive issue to India and we don't like people who are reductionist in this approach just as China regarding Nanking massacre.
Now regarding 3) the point is that just as how China and Japan's relations have improved over the years and gotten worse as well, India and Britain's official relations are the same as well.
That being said, every Deal somehow reflects back to an average citizen in country. I am not over-exaggerating when I say that people's blood especially nationalist/political people boil over this instance. I wouldn't consider myself much nationalist and I am mostly moderate (Heck I am complimented for my moderacy) but this is literally the one point where whole India went extremist. I seriously can't explain how much sensitive this topic is.
So at some point if UK and India FTA does pass consider a huge resentment from Indian side. Politically I doubt something like this would happen but perhaps, I can be wrong I usually am but I haven't seen any one person who is enthusiastic about having stronger ties with Britain out of all countries.
It's part of our history and no matter how bloody, quite frankly we will not forget it.
I don't know what you want me to say but I will say what my heart feels in the moment. We aren't against the normal genuine people of Britain. But we are simply cautious and have our guards up because of the bloody past regarding our agreements with Britain. Britain came to India out of free trade agreements and slowly started expanding military. Of course, something like this rehappening feels implausible but not exactly off the table given some romanticization of british empire being observed from outside.
Now my point isn't to bring hate towards the normal genuine people of british state and we don't have a grudge towards the normal people. Because even British historians are really apologetic about the whole scenario and provide no single justification ever. I personally continue to have customer relations with British VPS providers etc.
I don't know how to explain this, feels a little contradictory but just as how Chinese trade with Japanese, India trades with Britain & we set aside our differences at the moment and even make friendly relations & in no way as an Individual I am saying that you britishers are responsible for what your grand parents might've done. But i am just simply reporting it on why there is a hard limit on the amount of trust and relations which can be established in the first place given the bloody past.
I really don't think that many are completely anti british but just cautious. We would still somehow prefer more EU (non British) products than say British simply something akin to how EU is now preferring to move over from America in the first place.
Sure one can argue about the events of time here again but I hope that I have done a fair job at explaining how from an Indian context time really isn't part of the equation so much as one is imagining from outside.
I don't think I am doing a great service telling. You just have to be an Indian to really know what I feel like I am talking about.
I can be wrong, I usually am. But I am speaking this comment from the experience I witness around me.
If you ever visit India, Visit Jallianwala bagh. You can say that I am from that state, those were my people & if you really want, I will be more than happy to guide you this one time.
Honestly Britishers were racist [not sure about right now] (during that time, something which British historians point out once again) and hated us and you could see that. I don't intend on answering hate with hate and that never was the intention. But the reasons are so extreme (in details and everything) that it might make the answer feel extremist.
Honestly Idk, India's answer to hate has always been an open arm or peace. We always try the peace route first (tho I feel so obligated to point out that in Jallianwala bagh, They ordered to shoot on peaceful people enjoying some festival WITHOUT any warning, just straight up shooting bullets and killing people)
I think India still runs on Gandhian principles for the most part. And that's honestly how we got our freedom.
Yes, India still has its issues (Overpopulation leading to an extremely hard competition in exams and all the other issues) and there are lots of issues and nobody likes talking about it more than us ourselves.
But overall, I still feel like there's some real optimism and hope for India and Indians kind of feel it.
Have a nice day man.
[dead]
There are plenty of viable alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
Then why aren't Europeans using them?
Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
Europe has good software companies. It's just that the US has bigger VC funding which makes European companies unable to compete when US/EU companies are "fighting".
There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.
Canada's government is not looking for MS or AWS alternatives.
i wouldnt be surprised if theyre talking about it internally, and avoiding saying it out loud until they've secured alternative options
>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
Regulations are le bad.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
And in France alone 7.5 million home have lead pipes [1].
[1] https://www.zerowaterfilter.com/blogs/zerowater-knowledge-ce...
Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.
And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.
There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
Lead pipes in Chicago were due to union regulatory capture and not lack of regulations
We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
> I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
The issue was the sheer number of various regulations/standards/(taxes?) changing by country.
It was good enough for the US.
What was different between countries?
For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.
Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.
Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.
If you sell products to all 27 EU members and sell above a certain threshold you will have to work with all 27 tax offices in regard to VAT. There is OSS for B2C but that comes with significant downsides.
The US does not have that.
The US has state has county taxes. All with different thresholds of when you're required to collect and remit.
> It was good enough for the US
A lot of things good enough for the US are not considered suitable or safe here.
Correctly so, I might add.
If your government is not concerned with public safety, why should the EU adopt the same stance?
Well I am unaware of any deaths or injury from dishwashers in the United States, so it seems those regulations are fine.
Hope you don't accidentally fall off a historical ledge that can't get a handrail.
Probably there are plenty of regulations related to safety and suitability regarding electricity, water, washing residue on dishes, etc.
Without being more specific, the only thing I can presume is that you were unwilling to follow regulations here.
I furnished and equipped my home a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of options for dishwashers, from multiple brands. Many different models at varied price points.
This tells me that serious companies have little problems to follow regulations to compete here.
This all really sounds like a "you" problem.
Yep, small biz can't compete with big business.
And to clarify, if there was a single regulatory body, it would be fine. I just didn't want to deal with each country.
Probably a shame since it was totally safe. Too much regulation causes your costs to go up and features to go down.
I don't blame your attitude here. If you can't get something, you want to come up with something that makes you feel better.
> I just didn't want to deal with each country.
Yes, the EU is not a country. Each country has their own government, with regulations of their own.
I am in favor of some sort lf EU federalization for this reason, there's a lot of redundancy.
On the other hand, you could just choose a country to operate, which is a normal thing to do. There are things I could find, for example, in France that I cannot find in the country where I live
Did you remember to put a "Don't put your cat in the dishwasher" page into the user manual of your dishwasher for the US market?
China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.
Outside companies don't do well in China
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
Let's not go over the top.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
My point is that you don't achieve that by having the state start developing internal tools (unless it's highly sensitive stuff like for the intelligence services or military) for standard office applications. The French state is already massively oversized...
It’s not just this, it’s the arrogant attitude of the administration on tarriffs, Ukraine, and a broad range of topics
And that will change in 3 years or even at the end of this year... A lot is blown out of proportion by the EU itself because it serves its own agenda to expand reach and power.
Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
There is also australian and british markets I assume?
100M people isn't nothing, but it is highly likely that EU products would compete strongly in those markets.
Britain is trying to get tighter with UE and back into the common market.
It’s not trying to get back into the common market.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada.
The Internet Research Agency worked to get Trump elected in the US. Putin paid them to push Trump here.
Has Russia won EU tech by foreign interference in the US?
FWIU Yandex is operating out of EU now?
"Russian Court Imposes $2.5 Decillion Fine on Google" (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD44zqhCnMo
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
It's also pervasive. The weirdest thing in the world is watching someone I know who works for a big tech company and moved to the States suddenly wanting to get a New Zealand citizenship "just in case".
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
Sure.
Canada has a GDP of:
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
> Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
This is not correct as of 2024. In 2024, Ontario had a GDP of CAD 1.17B. [1] In USD, this is (at .73 exchange rate, which is favorable for these calculations) this comes to US 854B.
In 2024, the following US states had greater GDPs [2]: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and tied with Washington. GDP growth in 2025 was worse for Ontario than these states, and it would be expected Ontarios' position to continue to decline.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/248023/us-gross-domestic...
The dollar losing its value probably makes it correct again now since early 2025.
The dollar strengthened against the CAD in 2025 compared to the figures I used. It really only weakened against the EUR and RMB.
January 1st 2025: $1 USD = $1.44 CAD
January 28th 2026: $1 USD = $1.36 CAD
Seems like the USD weakened against the CAD too no?
The figures I provided are for 2024. You would need to compare USD/CAD ratios for 2024 versus 2025. Annual GDP figures for 2026 are not yet available as 2026 has not yet come to pass, so usage of 2026 data is not accurate in this context. To compare, I would consider USD/CAD on December 31, 2024 which was 1.386 [.72] and USD/CAD on December 31, 2025 which was 1.4359 [.69] which are both less favorable than the .73 given.
As stated above, the usage of more accurate figures would render Ontario with a lower GDP than more states.
I am pretty sure many in Minnesota right now would love to be able to exit the current fascist regime and be part of Canada instead ...
Canada isn't coming to save you. Get your own house in order before it burns ours down.
What's is your argument? That tech companies don't need them? Sounds like such a brutally myopic american take.
India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
What corporate norms are notably different in this context?
No, thank you. I would rather run Chinese spyware.
> nor respect corporate norms there.
What do you mean?
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
AI is great at translating, doing a task in seconds which would take days. For almost no cost.
That is quite significant on a continent like Europe, with dozens of different languages.
I have a friend who's a professional translator. No it isn't. She's forever cleaning up after the mess it left people in. In fact business for her is really booming thanks to people who think that is the case.
And I'm not talking about LLMs here but DeepL etc.
AI translates correctly, with a few minor imperfections which don't impede communication. Compare that to waiting a day and paying hundreds of euros for each message.
AI translation is comparable to the telephone or e-mail in how it improves communication.
The end-user costs are slim to none, but for OpenAI alone they're hundreds of billions USD.
LLMs certainly have their use and are here to stay but it remains to be seen how they can be commercially successful without constant injections of venture capital.
These days even the French (!) speak English.
> They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
> build a better model with lower latency.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
The US capital markets are truly a wonder to behold. There's no way to replace that. For good and ill, you'd only get weird looks in Europe if you asked for €10 billion for an unproven business model in what's somehow also a competitive market.
To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
>There's no way to replace that.
Nothing is truly irreplaceable
It's not really a wonder, Americans will simply lose their pensions if the AI business models don't work out. The same way it happened many times in the past.
This is part of the answer.
I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.
Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
Hasn't this also something to do with the cultural dominance that US have had over the EU? We considered US services more valuable just because they where from US. But that cultural dominance might not be as strong anymore, maybe because of social media/TikTok?
You don't have to love risk to build something you need.
>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
> There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
Brand recognition.
Uhhh... 800m active users?
Uhhh... barely 5% paying users?
The day they ask 1 cent from free users they'll go to the countless alternatives
Lolol
They’re not going to. You’re rooting so hard for a downfall that won’t happen. They’re going to be an advertising giant.
1. ChatGPT is shit
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Ffmpeg.
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
I don't know what's the ETA on VLC 4 but it's been entirely usable for me for the past year, and it's pretty cutting edge (internally). Hopefully it's not too long before we'll see beta releases.
Impossible n'est pas français !
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
CYCLADES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES) was influential in the design of important Internet concepts like the OSI model and TCP.
That'd be the same osi model which only is used by academics and nobody in the real world.
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
Countries are waking up to the danger of having the US in a position to take control of most of their computers and phones via software updates.
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
For those who don't want to use Twitter:
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Or here's the linked article:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
And here's the app, Visio:
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio
For those who don't want to use Twitter, I would also suggest replacing it with nothing.
> And here's the app, Visio
That UI looks suspiciously similar to Jitsi Meet. I wonder if it's based on it.
It says "powered by LiveKit": https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
It's not really clear to me what livekit is, but it appears to be some sort of agentic coding tool.
Perhaps the similarity to Jitsi Meet is due to it regurgitating the source that an AI has ingested.
The code base looks very different but a lot of the same terminology is used and the UI layout, navigation, menu options etc look very similar.
Nah, it's just a basic case of a pivot from a company that previously offered a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go that offer WebRTC-based backbone to build audio and video sharing products upon: https://github.com/livekit/livekit
The AI stuff that the original LiveKit company put on top of it (to pivot to more investor-friendly endeavours) is not that relevant in this case, in my humble opinion.
Ah that's it. I made the mistake of visiting their website which is heavy on marketing and low on what the heck their product actually is.
Makes more sense reading the Github (though that too is pushing the AI angle more than A/V stuff.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change
it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
How much have the "tarrifs" (sic) increased the cost of "US services" by to EU providers?
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I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Products don't necessarily win on merit.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
> Even though it is acceptable these days
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
He didn't say good. I'd agree with his assessment. It's acceptable.
And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):
* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".
* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.
* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.
Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is much longer, but even so it just about makes it to acceptable.
Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
It falls below the bar of acceptable for me because I can't share videos or images over a certain size because it requires someone in my org to have configured SharePoint correctly which is apparently an impossible task.
I'd take teams over google chat any day.
And maybe you'd take gargling diarrhea over gargling battery acid, but the rest of us are looking on in disgust and pity either way.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
Sure, and right now, a product being owned by a corporation susceptible to direct influence from the US government is a massive negative when people are evaluating products.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
Not to get too much into a debate about Beta vs VHS, but VHS did have longer run times and its cheapness was the main reason it won, It just fit better for the consumer overall desires at the time
Exactly. It's about whose definition of "better" you use. Sony thought that a better picture would win out, and it did where that mattered: TV studios and video-journalists used Betamax until digital formats took over. For consumers, "better" meant cheaper tapes and longer run time.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Pro TV used Betacam, not Betamax. Same physical tape, but four instead of two tape heads and a much faster tape speed.
Technology connections did a video on Betamax vs VHS that debunked this in a practical sense as Betamax had a version II that allowed 2 hour recordings, the quality was slightly better to early VHS instead the significant improvement of beta I (original standard)
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
I'm absolutely against banning usage of computer programs and platforms BUT I would rally for getting Teams banned from the face of the earth and applying a law to prevent Microsoft to attempt to create or acquire any kind of communicator for the next 50 years.
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
The security issue is real and the main motivation behind decoupling from US cloud services.
Export tarrifs aren't really a thing, particularly for software. Making US cloud more expensive would only make transitioning away from them faster.
The 25% export tariff on Nvidia chips from the US to China wants to have a word.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
> The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.
> If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.
Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.
Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
I see a "top-down" approach, actually.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
Yeah "all bids for government contracts must" is a really powerful sword.
It pushes money into the market, creates skills and business and, crucially can look beyond quarterly profits (for better or worse).
Yes! We must mandate that all loyal citizens have to use Arch Linux and Vim. Severe punishment and long prison terms for any other distro or text editor.
Given how software is largely delivered via SaaS models these days, I'd start with a Chrome OS competitor as a client
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
Good luck getting the EU off Android and iOS?
It would take Samsung (or what's left of Nokia) a whole 10 seconds to produce a Google-free phone based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) if there was a market for it. Which it might soon be.
They "just" have to make a phone that can be supported by GrapheneOS.
So AOSP would survive fine after stopping taking in new code from Google?
What scenario is this?
If AOSP is suddenly the only acceptable smart-os on phones for 600 million people, I think it would work out yes.
Isn’t that the scenario in this post? Cutting all ties with US companies. So they would stop using code written by Google. Isn’t most of the AOSP code written upstream by Google?
AOSP is mostly licensed Apache and LGPL. The repos have probably been cloned a million times. Although Google has taken large swathes of the project (like the launcher or Settings app) behind closed proprietary doors. But that is not a huge obstacle, there are already plenty of decent open source launchers.
The most important thing would be a (drop-in) alternative for Firebase Cloud Messaging. Without it, you can say bye bye to any decent battery life.
That might be, but with hundreds of millions of paying customers there is a market, and it will be filled. Maybe by some of the tens of thousands of European developers currently working for Google in Europe, or the other American companies.
Continuing a already existing open source OS is far down on the list of challenges.
There's /e/OS, a fork of Android
Also Sailfish, which supports running Android apps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS
And GrapheneOS.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
I don’t think that’s accurate. These issues were always there, but “the sky is falling” rhetoric is all the rage at the moment (in both directions).
> “the sky is falling” rhetoric
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
I’ll give you that the current US administration isn’t exactly scoring points for subtle diplomatic negotiation, but remember too that most of the United States was purchased from other countries.
It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
> Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style
I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
> aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days
This is what someone would say if they only know Donald Trump from TV.
Everyone who knows Trump from his NYC real estate days knows that he's (and this is possibly the worst insult any New Yorker can hurl at someone) "a bum." There's a reason NYC would never vote for him.
He doesn't pay his contractors, reneges on legal agreements he himself created, and uses legal threats and fights to screw over anyone he pleases, especially if they can't afford the legal fight. It's a lie-cheat-steal mentality, and might makes right.
It's not like, some hard-nosed NYC negotiating strategy. He's a crook. There's really not much more than that.
Yes, but the difference is that Denmark has said it many, many times, that it Does Not want to sell Greenland. The discussion should have ended there. But Trump kept saying "We will get it one way or the other" and did not rule out the use of force, etc. This is just insane and will alienate any allies. The Greenlanders also have said that they do not want to be part of the US. Some americans have joked that you could pay 100k to every greenlander and they would accept you happily, which would be totally stupid. They would lose the free education and free healthcare that Denmark provides currently. Having to pay for medical insurance or to send your children to university from Greenland would wipe out any of the money the US would pay to bribe the greenlanders. It would be an unbelievably bad deal for them.
You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps... He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?
Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.
Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
This post right here is why the rest of the free world will never trust the US again.
This is incredibly mild compared to some things I've heard from family and people that went to my highschool. People here are completely unhinged, unmoored from the reality of the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.
The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
Trust has been eroded.
This is all a roundabout way to get Europe to step up and do more for its own defense… the current negotiation style leaves much to be desired, but it’s shaking things up as intended.
The thing is that the cat is out of the bag now. EU alternatives are popping up. Governmental services are moving to national or regional (EU) services/providers.
There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.
Yes, it's clearly all 5d chess to manipulate a retarded ally to do what's best for it against it's will, all going according to plan. /s
Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.
Let's be clear that meddling means destroying freedom and democracy in Europe. That's the stated goal of the US at this point.
It doesn't have to be the sky is falling, it's reality. In one year Europe went from "can we fight Russia with American help" to "can we fight Russia without American help" to "can we fight America". If Europe doesn't get itself unencumbered with the US they are in a very vulnerable position.
The US is not trustworthy anymore. Your president is switching randomly from on insane idea to something equally insane. Canada doesnt want to the the 51st state. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, which has been the biggest ally for the US and now your president was not ruling out using force to take over greenland.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
>but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic
Not to mention that threatening to go to war with an ally as a negotiating tactic is crazy regardless of how inconsistent you are about it.
There were always issues with Nordstream, but the project rapidly imploded only after the war made it all untenable.
Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.
Sure the issue was always there for you or people like you. But for a majority of the EU population there was no problem until very recently. And now people like you are starting to have more leverage to influence people who can make the right calls.
Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.
> Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.
There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.
Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.
But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
And at the same time, Germany spied on Obama.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
And also, the speed at which you can build solutions has significantly been reduced because of AI. I wonder if this plays a role in their decision.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
You probably think about Munich and LiMux. Well, Microsoft had to move their German HQ there to get them back.
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
What I wonder is if there will be the pay for enticing developers to build it.
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
If they want to build viable competitive products then they'll need to pay for a lot more roles than just developers.
Certainly, there is a whole industry if you count support, sales, infra, testing, etc.
But I suspect that is developers the main problem for the bootstrap phase (ie: that is already the case here in LATAM)
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
Tariffs are good now
The big difference is that USA was nor perceived as a threat before. It is acutely dangerours now and there is no perspective of it changing.
> legit better
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
Teams is not better than Slack, but here we are ...
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
Half the EU are a few percentage points away from electing their version of trump.
For what it's worth, I was trying to write "..get alont withOUT TeaMs and police state just fine".
EU stands against police states! Now here is our new best friend, China.
Better is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
> it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want
That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.
The French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
I really hope Marc Andreessen is happy.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
Carried interest loophole
He's helping with a fascist takeover of the country, why wouldn't they be happy?
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Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment. Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
https://galene.org/
+1.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
What happened to Jitsi?
They switched to requiring google/microsoft accounts, and now dead to me. Looking at jami now.
This only (but still sadly) applies to the use of the meet.jit.si instance.
If you self host there are no such requirements.
It is still a thing. I used it 2 days ago actually.
I don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Hardware is the biggest problem: PCs (CPUs, RAMs, GPUs), Cellphones, routers, etc.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
What if there was a culture rooted in the ideology of an 'efficient market'?
I assume, then, that culture would be doomed to fail.
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ScaleWay and OVH are already filling this gap.
StackIT is the AWS competitor actually, OVH is not really laid out to be a hyperscaler.
CleverCloud, Hetzner
I'm also trying Gcore and so far, apart for an intial problem with payments, has been good. It has a lot of services
Good luck with OVH. Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts.
Even assuming this is true, EU cloud providers no longer have to compete with their American counterparts on an even footing thanks to the insanity coming out of the White House (and American society more generally). There's a very big push to get off of American providers, and many (though not all) customers are willing to make sacrifices to do so.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
They are fine. Cloud is a commodity. Hetzner and Bunny are pretty great and i am sure there are many more.
The problem is when US decides to ban sales of compute hardware to EU (like they do to China). Then it will be clear who's really in power.
> Then it will be clear who's really in power.
If China closed the door overnight to the US, it would also be clear who's really in power.
The US simply does not have the capacity to replicate the manufacturing domestically.
Even if it were possible, "100% Made in the US" would end up costing at least 20–30% more.
And the US does not have a plan B. Sure there might be India .... one day....years away.
Oh I agree. China is clearly outplaying everyone. But EU surely doesn't want to replace one leash (US tech stack) with different leash (Chinese tech stack).
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
Well, then the EU can also ban the sale of ASML machines to US and anyone dealing with the US. Let's hope we won't get to that.
The US actually controls the distribution of those machines already, because they incorporate made-in-USA export controlled technology.
That could end in an ugly stalemate pretty fast, considering ASML is Dutch.
There'll be a vacuum filled by non-US brands, China is learning and given they'll push to be independent eventually they'll compete with AMD/Intel/Nvidia, Europe has ARM.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
I think companies should just allocate raw computing and put agnostic stacks on top of it instead of using whatever shinny serverless G-Azurezon Serverless Function Lambda Cloud with NOTREDIS CACHE and LOCAL FLAVOR OF KUBERNETES plus the new OTEL-BUT-INVENTED-HERE monitoring solution.
I agree with Scaleway (I would more compare it to Digital Ocean) but OVH is really good and comparable.
My fingers always ache when I hear praise for the company that through its incompetence nearly lost me my company's domain name... twice. Shame on me for staying with them.
DigitalOcean is fantastic in my experience, way better than The Big Three, especially Azure.
Yes I know! Scaleway is great as well. But I was referring to the product portfolio.
I’ve used OVH for multiple projects and they’ve been wonderful to work with.
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
AWS offers subpar services for their price too
sure, gotta start somewhere.
Jitsi meet exists for long time and it works. What is needed is eu sovereign clouds
They need to do both the hard things and the easy things, and do them in parallel.
Which they are.
Stop being reasonable!
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
Can access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique
Ironic to use Github to post about sovereignty )
I'm trying to not use it myself but yes, la suite numérique should get out of GitHub.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
GitLab, a YC and by extension an American company )
This can go as far as we want )
It does not matter in that case, the software is open-source.
The chips your computer is using were produced by hardware that was itself produced by ASML, a Dutch company.
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Built using Django!
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The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- LinkedIn
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
It might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.
We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.
Until now nobody thought it was a problem. At least not a big one. The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
>Until now nobody thought it was a problem.
I've seen these "EU digital sovereignty is around the corner!!" articles weekly for the past 10 years
I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
For what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.
That's the case now, yes. However, EC2 and S3 were started by using idle compute for .com, which they had boatloads of due to their size, and Windows Azure was originally meant to be an app hosting platform for .NET apps running on Windows.
The only other companies I can think of that tried being/are trying to be _just_ cloud provider are Rackspace (which has been barely hanging on as the CSPs are eating their lunch) and Hetzner (who seem to be doing okay), but both of these companies lean more towards "hosting provider" (i.e. renting compute is their business) rather than "cloud provider" (i.e. providing platforms for many use cases).
Yes I agree there is no pure hosting/cloud company that comes close to the scale of the big 3 who also use their cloud infrastructure expertise and inventory to subsidize all the other parts of their businesses. Maybe it’s only possible to be reach the top if you already have all the money and infrastructure in the world, but just pointing out that for the top two cloud providers these platforms are at the core of their business and are their most profitable units.
The cost to bootstrap a sovereign cloud offering in Europe that can even begin to compare to the big ones in the US would be humongous. There would need to be a solid, multi-year incentive for a company/startup to even want to attempt it. It has to come from the top. Else force the big US clouds operating in Europe to be ready to effectively detach from their US counterparts if shit hits the fan, though this one's probably not realistic.
As a dual US/EU national who would love to move to Europe, I, for one, welcome the increase in tech demand on that side of the pond.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Even something already available off the shelf!
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
One of my networking groups uses Jitsi. It's fine.
It's pretty awful to setup compared to the Livekit-based solution.
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
The reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
What is that option?
Visio with live kit (part of lasuite) or opendesk with jitsi would be my guess.
https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en
As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.
My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
Visio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
It's funny that it's such a blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...
It doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
I feel like we would see a lot more movement if we’ve reached the commodity point…
It's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word.
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
> blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names
That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
As much as I cheer for OpenOffice, it sucks. And it has been decades now.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
OpenOffice? Do you mean LibreOffice?
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
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Yes, the name confusion is bad, I'm not really sure what this has to do with the topic though.
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
What's wrong with SEPA instant?
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
I'm totally sold on scan to pay apps, would be great to pay anywhere in Europe with my banking app.
I still need a credit card when I rent cars and sometimes for online payments. That is an issue.
I would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.
was talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).
The problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Which itself links to:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
> in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam
They will learn :-)
Judging by the amount of people who still suck at Zoom or Teams after 6 years ... I am not that sure :)
But then they can suck at Visio all the same, right? :D
They should probably fund their military first.
It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
>They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
The US is literally threatening to invade an EU overseas territory.
> They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
Threatening to take over Greenland by force isn't considered "going to war" for you?
That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones. In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less. But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.
Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".
I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
Comrade, what is the weather in St. Petersburg?
> They should probably fund their military first.
They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.
> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
If you’re honestly OK with the maths Trump used to calculate the trade deficits then I’m not really sure you’re going to fit in here at HN.
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
French report: The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing.
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.). The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.
Every choice comes with a cost.
With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.
> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
The EU commission would be in an interesting position to mandate American platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, etc...) to support interoperability in order to avoid "market distortion".
Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.
The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.
The question then becomes "what happens first":
1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)
2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)
So I've opened their AWS replacement website (Outscale), Computing page.
No dedicated servers (VM only). Ok let's check VM price https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/
Press the "Do you have a Cloud Project?" which is the only button? Oops! Something went wrong here.
Is this supposed to be an AWS replacement?
Outscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software.
For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).
I love Scaleway, been using it since micro ARM64 bare metal offerings they've now deprecated. Just saw Outscale in one of the announcements thus the reason I've checked them out.
Obviously, Hetzner is also great, as a European example.
I'd put Hetzner in the same bucket as OVH: solid infra company at a more than competitive price, but lacking in managed products. In my experience, they're more reliable than OVH though.
Outscale has the advantage of a huge pile of money behind them, as well as a natural endorsement from gov agencies. They'll lack the niceties, but provide certifications from day one. Different motivations. They're not really meant to be a public cloud in the same sense as the big three. It's kind of the same deal as the Lidl "cloud", which is more of a private cloud managed by someone else meant to run SAP monsters.
France’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.
For all these there are protocols that could allow interoperability in-between offers, EU policy makers seem to be aware of the issue given what was mandated to Whatsapp. Let's hope for the best outcome!
Every country should ban American social networks and messaging tools ASAP
De Gaulle strikes back)
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
I think it's a bit of a Pandora's box issue. Their eyes are now open to the very real, no longer hypothetical, threat. There's no going back.
I wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
> Some are optimizing for better lives
Of course. I just hope these people know that for example healthcare in Europe is by no means free.
It's not free, but it's much cheaper. (And yes, that includes taxation.)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...
As a bonus, all that spend doesn't make us better in outcomes.
https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low#life-expec...
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-... | https://archive.today/MnYz9 - January 22nd, 2026
That article is just mindblowing. My countries Health Service is far from perfect, but that is insanity.
This is a component of what those who can qualify for some sort of visa are fleeing. The economics are undeniable.
i have questions about this! is there a way to get in touch with you?
I mean the issue here is your arguing on hackernews. The vast majority of people on this site in the USA just don't have these issues. Health care is taken care by the employeer and they are paid more.
Nobody in Europe thinks that healthcare just exists for free, but that it should be available to who need it for free and are happy to pay for that via tax.
I think you're not quite understanding just how bad EU pay is for software. Frankly with the $$ you basically always going to come out ahead with the more comp especially since USA software companies normally offer great healthcare and comparable vacation.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
With a baby on the way, I'd seriously consider it for their lifetime benefits. Where does one begin looking?
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
They've been incentivizing it for years. Talent passport, EU Blue card and the Tech Visa. As I have heard they'll pay you to move there.
Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.
Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care, and have access to public schools as well.
> As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care
You're "not really worrying" ... whilst you are in a job.
There fixed that for you.
As I am sure you are acutely aware US is the home of lay-offs and is generally easy to fire people.
If you loose your job in the US it becomes panic stations because you loose that precious employer-paid healthcare overnight.
Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
"Health Insurance Is Now More Expensive Than the Mortgage for These Americans" - https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/aca-health-insurance-c...
What happens to your health insurance if you get too sick to work?
The bet is that you will earn enough prior to 50 or maybe even 40 so that you won’t have to work, and then you can live off the investments and wherever you want.
High risk, high reward and all that. Although, the previous 20 years of high compensation are obviously no indication of the next 20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...
> The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period to care for a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or recover from a serious illness.
There's limitations on that, but the common idea that Americans don't have healthcare is unfounded and appallingly ignorant.
So why is it that medical debt reached more than > $200B ?
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
What if you get laid off?
"free"... as in paid for with high taxes
"In 2024, the United States spent an estimated $14,885 per person on healthcare - the highest healthcare costs per capita across similar countries. For comparison, Switzerland was the second highest-spending country with $9,963 in healthcare costs per capita, while the average for wealthy OECD countries, excluding the United States, was $7,371 per person."
"Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates for many services in the United States is lower than other wealthy OECD countries."
"In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — approximately five times more than the average of other wealthy countries"
"Despite higher healthcare spending, America’s health outcomes are not any better than those in other developed countries. The United States actually performs worse in some common health metrics like life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes, and safety during childbirth."
- https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings. You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world). And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
Europe is a _very_ different place.
Not everything here is so bad.
> But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
I don't fear mass shootings any more than I fear terrorist perpetrated subway or event bombings.
> you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition
Medical debt and the discourse around it is interesting. Not having insurance is the fundamental issue, medical debt itself is legally mandated to be negotiable. As in they are legally required to find a negotiable payoff price that will work for your personal financial situation, similar to school debt. I pay $70/month for school debt and will for the next 25 years. Is that a lot? Yes. Does it matter to me? Not so much. I could be wrong about the medical debt, but I don't think i am.
> You can freely walk
This is huge and something that would drastically improve my quality of life in a substantial way. Love Europe for this. Love.
> They've been incentivizing it for years.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
https://ngisargasso.eu/
Will not. You should love to move youself to pay 30% more taxes and work for 30% less salary (not sure what percentage to apply first).
> pay 30% more taxes
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
first, one have to prove he is 24 not 40. taxes can tell 24 and tell you do 40 becauses they decided so.
add social security percentage. while one still need real insurance and pension saving on top. yes, one 6 figure person have to pay two times. once for self and other one unemployed local drunk.
and on top, when one buys anything, all things are taxed 2x compared to usa(but i guess trump tries fo equalize that).
on top. there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all.
and yeah, one is foreigner? does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
> there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all... does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
Mate, I made this exact move ~5 years ago, it's really not that hard to learn a foreign language and navigate a bit of bureaucracy (although I will admit, Spain may be better than most in this regard)
more like 50+ % less salary, just saying
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
Do you have a suggestion of where to begin looking? Doesn't have to be France either.
I'm not sure, it depends on what kind of work you're looking for. For the Netherlands, I'd start here.
https://www.tech-careers.nl/job-seeker-visa-for-tech-roles-i...
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
the first 10 what? Years? It's actually not like that: https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-pe...
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
I think it was like that some years ago. Now, as you said, it's really useless. 20 months are just the time to find an apartment, furnish it and get used to the place.
Afterwards you have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world....
Isn't the primary tongue of locals in the Netherlands Dutch? Yes you know English, but don't the locals speak Dutch or German to each other?
Dutch people still speak Dutch to each other so if you were going to live there permanently and wanted to properly participate in society you would need to learn Dutch.
However the average level of English ability in NL is extremely good, you won't meet many people who don't have really good English especially for younger generations. Definitely not the case in e.g. France or Italy
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As a FOSS advocate, I am quite astonished that this space has no FOSS "product." I mean PBX has things like asterix. We have good servers like ejabberd and prosody for XMPP. There are excellent voice chats like mumble.
Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage.
I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".
Isn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source?
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
I found the answer in the FAQ. Anyone can deploy it in their own instance.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%2...
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
The US has already employed its technology and financial instruments, including sanctions, to coerce and control its partners. Sanctioning an ICC prosecutor and subsequently restricting Microsoft’s access to his emails and documents are just a few instances of this. They have demonstrated their willingness to use their technology, financial instruments, and sanctions against their partners. It seems almost too late for Europe to achieve its independence in both technological and financial spheres.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.
I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
They've already invested in Matrix. Why not use that?
Yeah, I remember reading about an article on France govt adopting element/matrix. Surprised it didn´t go mainstream in other departments/companies/people.
You can see uptake at https://stats.tchap.incubateur.net/public/dashboard/8c6560e3... - looks pretty mainstream.
Visio could also use Matrix for E2EE & decentralisation by implementing MatrixRTC - we're talking to them about doing so.
though it's interesting it's using livekit which Element adopted as well for Element Call
Link to the actual article: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
Earlier repo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.
US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
Europe must have their own tools created from scratch. Replacing how, with which infrastructure? If you use existing libraries, don´t expect full ownership nor full privacy, same applies to hardware and cables. It is though a big step finally. It is a start, Viva la France :)
Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
It will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this).
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
You say this like you are unaware of how the US has utilizied cheap manufacturing in China, relied on imported manpower from both developed and developing countries as well as, until recently, been a net importer of energy from other nations.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
The actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French)
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
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This is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
Skype wasn't _that_ great at chat especially to be completely fair. But it definitely was okay for everything, that's for sure...
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
Replicating the software is easy, running the services at AWS-scale is hard.
Would you need to though?
If an organisation ran it's own instance, it would only need to scale for that organisation ( including any external attends over a bridge ).
That does of course assume companies have the expertise/appetite to run things themselves.
@see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
This would be a great thing for humanity as a whole, but not for France. So I doubt it will happen. Hope strings eternal.
If they did it by growing open source competitors, it would be brilliant. Linux-equivalents for all major categories.
I summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/france-replace-video-conferencing...
Semi-related thought bubble:
I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
For a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives.
Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
You mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet ?
The tool they're building is open source: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
They do. « we are committed to contributing back to the LiveKit community whenever feasible ».
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Indians are doing the same too.
Honestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty.
I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.
Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.
Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.
For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
> i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan
Sure, and let's give Ukraine to Russia while we're here so we can get their gas. The problem with the bullies is that they'll keep taking.
Ukraine is European problem. Taiwan, Who cares in Europe ?
As long as we have access to microprocessors…
Trump v2 is the greatest change in world policy, adapt or die trying.
It's fairly obvious that France won't do much if China were to invade Taiwan, but we can at the very least pretend that we care about their fate. It's a much better functioning democracy than ours.
There was never a scenario in which Russian tanks were to get into Paris.
If only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.
They won’t be able to make products as great as here in the US
They don't need to. They need just good enough. Don't underestimate "Made in Europe", just like "Made in America"
"You know what they call Zoom in Paris?"
"What do they call it?"
"Le Zoom"
translation (and without twitter): https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...
Let's hope the alternatives they build are open source
I live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries.
I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action.
Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
Same. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
Well, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
> What I don’t see is action.
Building serious products and services in this space is easily 5 year investment, by that time there will be a new US administration.
Hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly cheaper in the short run.
----
But have you divested from US assets?
Maybe one should, considering we just deployed armed troops with live ammunition to scare of America.
I fear we don't know how close this was. Maybe, we'll know in 50 years.
The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.
Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.
The French government has its own version of Ubuntu, used by law enforcent, and is supposedly slated to be used by all agencies in 2027.
Ought to add X to that list as well!
This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.
So a huge waste of taxpayers money...
This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
Jit.si supports the EU privacy rules
They should just fund pairux
I pulled all my servers from the US months ago. Everyone I talk to is doing the same. Tech giants are going to feel this, especially when the AI bubble is going to burst.
I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
n1, should drop X as well
Jami is read for the big time!
... probably using whatng cartel web engines, and that would be ridiculous for sure.
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
Not to mention JD Vance uses it so it's like sharing a room with a massive dog turd
Politicians use it a lot. Because media and journalist started using it.
Because for better or worse it still has significance and popularity. Nothing else really comes close.
Because they EU still can't make software and most people in America don't care.
We’re talking about Twitter. Mastodon exists. It is not about making software. Maybe about selling it or marketing.
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It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The "Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.
The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
I moved my stuff to Hetzner. Obv I have no idea about your situation, but I found it fairly trivial for my stuff.
But I can't figure out how to replace GSuite.
Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.
And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.
Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
You're not wrong. Europe has no clouds only hosting & vps providers. Nothing has changed in 20 years. Really sad actually.
Oh, I wasn't trying to say you're wrong. Just wanted to share that for me, the bottleneck has been elsewhere, and that I personally found GSuite harder than the compute cloud.
> but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.
Scaleway offers all of these.
> Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed.
I had the same worries and then we moved to OVH and Hetzner and had no issues.
AWS RDS is about 10x more expensive than bare metal with maybe 1/4th the disk performance.
Regarding operations I simply setup a primary and read replica together with a PGBackRest continuous archiving and backup solution to a S3 compatible storage service.
Has worked like a charm in the last two years and recreating the database is a breeze.
Our database is ~8 TB large.
I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
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Deleted tweet?
It's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.
This is just some account from a tech journalist
This is the press release:
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...