Posted by s_dev 1/23/2026
I would have expected an OS, an Office platform.
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.
to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?
It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
proofs, please?
> who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech
it’s just your assumption. I personally don’t know anyone from the states who would want this except their government
> Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this"
again, it’s the government who fights the dependency on China, not the regular people. You are confusing politics and normal people’s concerns
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.
I get your pain but are you expecting other countries just to take hit?
Should EU lift sanctions with Russia as well? You know "1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population".
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.
I hope you understand now that not even half of Democrats support these things, let alone most of the population, of any country in the world
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.
You're at 2 out of 3, while Biden was mid at best and your senate has been horrendous for a very long time.
It's been ten years of Trumpism. This wasn't a flip of a dime. The opinion flipped after we were threatened with annexation. These aren't jokes.
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.
That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.
That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:
Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.
All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.
"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.
He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.
https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...
(link to malauxyeux's comment where I found this summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738790)