Posted by s_dev 13 hours ago
I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.
Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.
When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.
Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.
It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)
It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. It's easy to understand the change in behaviour if you understand this.
Back to the European Alternatives stuff, I've been looking at the services I use and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
If you think the US' "altruism" should buy us goodwill, then you're not for altruism, you're for good PR.
That’s a bit of a negative way to think about things. We’ve tried globalism, I don’t think it works. It’s utopian.
Small and distributed, this is the way. Not large and centralised. Stop over complicating things. If people just looked after themselves, their family, and their neighbours (in that order) the rest would figure itself out. This is how love works, it’s personal and intimate. I wish people would just stop trying to meddle with the world and let people be.
Sir, please read up on Wikipedia what the EU is. What Europe is. Also, this is a very mild response to a "American first" new world order.
Pedantic. My state didn't vote for the US president, yet you are looking to buy from a different state now.
Wales can no more disavow the PM than California can disavow POTUS. So this separate status is limited.
The big counter to this is the idea that US states have their own militaries. States may have militias, but they can be subsumed by the federal government pretty easily, as we saw in California in 2025. They are not truly independent armed forces.
OTOH, states are not allowed to leave the US, we had a war about this a while ago. Meanwhile Scotland had a referendum on leaving the UK a few years ago.
Love it or hate it, we are Americans first before we are New Yorkers or Mississipians and so forth. This is especially true when it comes to international relations; that's handled on a federal level and most people in the world couldn't tell a Nebraskan from an Alaskan.
There are racist European nationalists - the Anders Breivik type.
This website is not either. However I think its worth looking beyond Europe. Avoiding the US and China and a few other countries leaves a lot of possibilities.
You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.
A huge proportion of your electorate is actually not only fine with the current direction, but actively cheer on this.
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."
This sounds a lot worse than you imagine. We will be always one election away of anothe asshole that will want to leveraged the US relative strength to cause harm. Better to not keep strengthening it.
> 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?
I almost choked at this.
The US has a long history of fucking over other countries.
The only thing that changed is that it just decided to be more direct about it, even with former allies.
I actually prefer it this way.
Eg go into a big store brand in most of the US and the cashier will be all flashy smile asking how is your day, and you ignore it and ask your request, and that's the game. A french person would mostly hate that, feel the question as annoying.
You go to a similar french store and the cashier and yourself will say the bonjour / merci / ... yada yada game and if someone doesn't do his part he's considered rude; I found a lot of foreigner surprised by that, the fact that you're not answering "merci" or asking "s'il vous plait" because it's nice, but because not doing it puts you in unpleasant person territory.
Ok business meeting, even in tech. American are always super optimist and happy, and seeing a solution and the end goal, French are over realist bordering on pessimist.
It's not that black and white of course there is a lot of inter mingling and differences, but overall which one you feel "better" is very personnal and based around what you're used to.
The closer to a drop-in replacement the better. Tying all of these functional bits and pieces together to form a consistent whole is just not going to happen. You need to approach this on a per-company level.
So, who will step up to the plate and re-implement as much of Google as necessary to catch 80% of the functionality and their EU customers?
That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US.
> the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details
I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services.
Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
Everybody and their mother is using Gmail anyway
Though that's one of the easy ones. Get your own domain and you're free to use whatever you want forever.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense for consumers or small business to have to wrangle dozens of IT providers. How can we consolidate them?
Consolidation of various open source projects is underway with projects such as owncloud but it is still very fragile and hard to maintain.
I think a pledge never to be bought out and a way to restrict stock to EU UBOs would be one step in the right direction, then you'll need a massive amount of capital to pull this off. But maybe the climate is finally right to raise a proper amount of money for such an undertaking.
This is basically just saying "we need to start by replacing 5 of the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen".
I think the EU should start a little smaller so they might actually make some progress on digital sovereignty within the next century.