One gossamer-thin silver lining in this current geopolitical lunacy is that it's likely to show the current Commission's pro-corpo anti-citizen endeavors like this, to bend the knee to US corporate interests, in an increasingly bad light. Particularly given that activating anti-coercion measures that target those very corporate interests is now being seriously discussed.
EU and the rest of the world needs to ditch their anti circumvention laws that they put in place to appease the US demands on trade deals historically. They're getting tarrif'd anyways so YOLO. I think you'd see a lot of pressures ease up that are probably putting a lot of politicians around the world in compromised or blackmail-able positions. US Tech really needs to lose this massive leverage they have over the world right now.
Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.
If it becomes big enough, they can't "deport" everyone. The only silver lining in the US right now is that it is way too big (and too stupid) to pull off this sad excuse of a blitzkrieg on its citizens.
I won't say they didn't try their darnedest. But estimations at the very highest but the count at 10 million (this is a very generous number) and Germany had a population of 80 million at the time. 12% is scary, but still something you can overcome.
I really hope I'm not proven wrong, but something of that scale is nearly impossible to pull off in optics with the amount of recording we can do now. The equivalent in America is about 40m Americans being "deported". That's the entire Californian population and then some.
Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.
Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.
> EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office
Selection/rejection of the European Commission president (there is no such thing as the EU president) is indirect democracy, not popular vote. But it is still representative and democratic.
US contrast: in the US, citizens also don't vote for the President directly. Instead, we use a two-step system centered on the Electoral College.
Hypocrisy: if anyone (especially us American citizens) are going to argue that europeans should get to vote directly for the President of the EU commission, then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.
>then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.
I don't think that's an unpopular idea as of 25 years ago now. With current technology, nationals should be a direct democracy (and with ranked choice votes, not FPtP), the house should be doubled (if not tripled since we stopped growing 100 years ago), and the supreme court should be expanded to at least 15.
And that's just the start of small updates we need for government.
> Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
The EU is basically run by the Council, who are the national governments, all of whom are elected.
It's incredibly depressing that this keeps needing to be repeated when its been this way since the inception of the EU (with a small hiatus where we were gonna get a constitution).
The Commission can propose laws, but unless the Council (mostly) and Parliament (theoretically) agree, they won't happen.
When my country and China had border clashes, there was a nation-wide grassroot level movement to boycott Chinese goods and services where possible. It worked to an extent but it fizzled out in few weeks/months. Some of the reasons were the impracticality of total boycott so you start from a position of compromise, difficulty to sustain a movement born out of anger and some inter-govt agreements to avoid escalations etc.
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
>> Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity. You can't reach that goal without collaboration and trade. If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers, the US, China and Russia, in order of importance, who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
I mean if the world has gone mad, don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
>The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity.
How can EU maintain peace and prosperity with no military? With hugs and kisses?
Because if that was their goal, then they really fucked up because they delivered the exact opposite: war next door and lowest purchasing power of the working class in years/decades.
You see, people like this are so detached from reality, they don't understand that peace and prosperity comes from strength, not from weakness. When you don't have military strength you invite conflict, since everyone else now sees you as an easy target and wants your slice of the global GDP.
The world leadership is composed of competitors and bullies fighting for dominance of land and resources, not of nice guys who bend over to your demands just because you're nice and peaceful. If you don't have any leverage, you get run over and colonized. It's wild this hasn't sunk in yet, especially given Europe's colonial past.
>If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers
Ah yes, it's always everyone else's fault that the EU kicked its military, IT, energy, economy, manufacturing industry (and now farming too) in the balls for the past 20-30 years, allowing the US, China and Russia the opportunity to exploit this self inflicted weakness for their own benefits.
All countries are economic competitors to each other. Every fuckup you make is an opportunity for the rest to enrich themselves from your stupidity. They aren't obliged to save you from your mistakes when they can profit from it. It's how Europe got rich in the first place during colonialism.
>who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Doesn't matter what other sovereign countries choose to do on the global stage, they're not accountable to you. But it's your job to have a strong military to deter others from having chimp-outs with you or in your backyard. Unless you live in a fairytale, you would know that world peace was never the default state in human history, but only a temporary state created by wielding orders of magnitude more force than everyone else who will then have to follow your rules and ideologies creating a state of compliance which you interpreted as peace. You should prepare for the worst even, or especially in times of peace, as other countries won't keep world peace for you or in your favor, but will try to free themselves from compliance to your game and try to enforce their own rules that benefit them. It's the EU's fault it slept at the wheel in terms of defence and lets itself get bullied around.
>Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
For all Trump's problems, the US still got TSMC to build a cutting edge fab there, they're getting south Korea to build new ships there, and attract cutting edge tech companies like Infinera to close shop in EU and move everything to the US. What did EU get from being nice and generous with others? Other than illegal welfare scammers.
>don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
I CAN blame the EU since that's where my taxes go so they're accountable to me. Being weak and powerless is not being sane. There's no virtue in letting everyone walk over you and exploit you. "Turn the other cheek" does not work in competitive international politics. Your weakness and complacency will always be used against you. I know what I wrote above isn't popular to hear but it's how the world works. Ignoring it doesn't help anyone.
Boycotting US tech is magnitudes easier than boycotting Chinese-made products. They're in whole different universes. Especially on a country level, let alone a EU level.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
Does that include not using AWS or anyone that is a host interface to AWS? Does that include social media like hacker news or instagram? I have no stakes here (I'm an American who doesn't run a tech business) but it seems like it would be unfathomly difficult if not impossible to avoid US tech altogether.
The most critical and impactful modern day tech is smartphone and that is US tech.
As long as mobile os and adjacent services like the store etc are controlled there is no true path to digital independence especially in a highly digitalized region like the EU.
One example is if EU allows the Android developer verification to pass this year in its current or even in more relaxed form, that just means EU is still open for some hard lessons in the future.
Of course not, smartphones are Chinese tech, and that's the exact crux!
While a massive endeavor, it's absolutely doable to create the EU's own OS and store. It's not doable to create the manufacturing capacity needed to produce all the hardware that goes into smartphones at scale.
China itself ironically serves as a great example - they have their own Android store, mostly run on Chinese phones, some on non-Android OS. Yet they still haven't been able to get rid of the dependency on TSMC/ASML. They're working on it and will get there, but it's taking many years longer than the software part. And not for lack of trying. The fact that they're still tolerating iOS doesn't disprove the existence of the former ecosystem. iOS is said to have maybe 20% market share in China.
By the way, the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before to reduce that dependence, as the cost of reproducing many of the mature technologies is going to cost less than it would have before. Ironically, doing that may require using US tools (like Claude Code), at least for now, but it could be a very interesting evolution/opportunity for Europe.
> the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before
I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).
Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
> USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Oh don't worry, Trump's already kneecapped both of those for a decade to come from 2025's actions alone. Y'all got time to catch up.
China, much scarier. But we all kinda let that happen over 30 years. Too late to complain now. I'd say we work together but uhh... I think we both understand (or rather, fail to understand) modern US policy these days.
What can I say, I expected more than what they actually offer. A Redshift job can fail because S3 tells it to slow down. How can I make this HA performance product slower given its whole moat is an S3 based input output interface.
As a compute engine its SQL capabilities are worse than the slowest pretend timeseries db like Elasticsearch.
Are you trying to treat an OLAP database with columnar storage like an OLTP database? If you are, you would probably have the same issue with Snowflake.
As far as S3, are you trying to ingest a lot of small files or one large file? Again Redshift is optimized for bulk imports.
Redshift does not fit into aws ecosystem. If you use kinesis, you get up to 500 paritions with a bunch of tiny files, now I have to build a pipeline after kinesis that puts all of it into 1 s3 file, only to then import it into redshift which might again put it on s3 backed storage for
Its own file shenanigans.
Clickhouse, even chdb inmemory magic has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.
Its a mess.
Not to mention none of its
Column optimizations work and the data footprint of gapless timestamp columns is not basically 0 as it is in any serious OLAP but it is massive, so the way to improve performance is to
Just align everything on the same timeline so its computation engine does not beed to figure out how to join stuff that is
Actually time
Aligned
I really can’t figure out how anyone can do seriously big computations with Redshift. Maybe people like waiting hours for their SQL to execute and think software is just that slow.
You realize “the pipeline” you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement “Create table select * from…”. Yes you can run this directly from S3 and it will create one big file
I have a sneaking suspicion that you are trying to use Redshift as a traditional OLTP database. Are you also normalizing your table like an OLTP database instead of like an OLAP
And if you are using any OLAP database for OLTP, you’re doing it wrong. It’s also a simple “process” to move data back and forth between Aurora MySQL or Postgres by federating your OlTP database with Athena (handwavy because I haven’t done it) or the way I have done it is use one Select statement to export to S3 and another to export into your OLTP database.
And before you say you shouldn’t have to do this, you have always needed some process to take data from your normalized data to un normalized form for reporting and analytics.
Source: doing boring enterprise stuff including databases since 1996 and been working for 8 years with AWS services outside AWS (startups and consulting companies) and inside AWS (Professional Services no longer there)
Why are you doing this manually? There is a built in way of doing Kinesis Data Streams to Redshift
These things cost money, Redshift handling live ingestion from Kinesis is tricky.
There is no need for Athena, Redshift ingestion is a simple query that reads from S3. I dont want to copy 10TB of data just to have it in 1 file. And yes, default storage is a bit better than S3 but for an OLAP database there seems to be no proper column compression and data footprint is too big resulting in slow reads if one is not careful.
I mentioned clickhouse, data is obviously not OLTP schemed.
I don’t have normalized data. As I mentioned, Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes, slowest part is downloading from S3.
I am not willing to pay 10k+ a month for something that absolutely sucks compared to a proper OLAP db.
Redshift is just made for some very specific, bloated, throw as much software pipelines as you can, pay as much money as you can, workflows that I just don’t find valuable. Its compute engine and data repr is just laughably slow, yeah, it can be as fast as you want by throwing parallel units but it’s a complete waste of money.
While it is a "massive endeavor", it is not impossible, it essentially amounts to writing portable code. A computer is a computer, and most of the tech stack in US cloud providers is based on open source projects.
Not depending on Chinese manufacturing is borderline impossible even if you are starting from scratch. Not only it will be way more expensive, with potentially longer delays and lesser capacities, but just finding some company that can and wants to do the job can be a nightmare. From what I have seen, many local manufacturers in the US and Europe are really there to fulfill government contracts that requires local production.
Most hardware kickstarter-like projects rely on Chinese manufacturing as if it was obvious. It is not "find a manufacturer", it is "go to China". Projects that instead rely on local (US/Europe) manufacturing in order to make a political statement have to to though a lot of trouble, and the result is often an overpriced product that may still have some parts made in China.
Anyone who thinks migrations at scale is just about “writing portable code” has never done a migration at scale.
A large corporation just migrating from everything hosted on VMs can take years.
And if you are responsible for an ETL implementation and working with AWS and have your files stored on S3 (every provider big and small has S3 compatible storage) and your data is hosted on Aurora Postgres, are you going to spend time creating a complicated ETL process or are you going to just schedule a cron job to run “select outfile into S3”?
And “most” of the services on AWS aren’t based on open source software and you still have to provision your resources using IAC and your architecture. No Terraform doesn’t give you “cloud agnosticism” any more than using Python when using AWS services.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that. Just that you can make things less painful with portable code. It still won't be easy, as everybody in this chain agrees with. But we don't put things that need to be done off because it's "difficult".
If it takes a year and half to migrate from plain old VMs to AWS as the first part of “lift shift and modernize” and you have to to do it in “waves” how much difference is the code going to make?
Are you going to tell your developers to spend weeks writing ETL code that could literally be done in an hour using SQL extensions to AWS?
Are you going to tell them not to use any AWS native services? What are you going to do about your infrastructure as code? Are you going to tell them to set up a VM to host a simple cron job instead of just using a Lambda + Event Bridge?
And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
It took Amazon years to move off of Oracle and much of its infrastructure still doesn’t run on AWS and still uses its older infrastructure (CDO? It’s been a while and I was on the AWS side)
I have yet to hear anyone who worries about cloud agnosticism even think about the complexity of migrations bring at scale, the risk of regressions, etc.
While I personally stay the hell away from lift and shifts and I come in at the “modernization” phase, it’s because I know the complexity and drudgery of it. I worked at AWS ProServe for 3.5 years and I now work as a staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company.
This isn’t me rah rahing about AWS. I would say the same about GCP, Azure, the choice of database you use, or any other infrastructure decision.
If it only took 18 months for all that, I'd be very impressed. I was thinking at least a year of inevitable meetings and plannings and maybe 3 years of slow execution. And I still might be optimistic there.
>And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
The "business value" here is not being beholden to an increasingly hostile "ally" who owns the land these servers operate on. If you aren't worried about that, then there is no point in doing any of this.
But if things do escalate to war, there's a very obvious attack vector to cripple your company with. Even if you're only 20% into the migration, that's better than 0%.
I don’t know how long it took before they brought AWS in and they decided to do something or if they failed beforehand and I don’t know how long it was before they brought me in.
Oh, sorry. I wasn't trying to speak on your experiences specifically. It more about general talks on the scenario of "America is compromised, we need to decouple starting now".
I of course don't know the scale of your company and how much they even wanted to migrate. Those are all variable in this.
Yup! Still very doable, and has been done tens if not hundred of thousands of times before. Migrations from e.g. AWS-> Azure/GCP, or even harder, cloud->on-prem.
How often has been replacing Chinese tech manufacturing dependency at scale done before? About 0.
The government has to mandate it on some level with purchasing power.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
to be honest I don't expect a effective long term consumer boycott
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
They are bottled at the same places that bottle Coca-Cola. If those places stop paying for their Coca-Cola brand license because nobody is buying it... then okay? so what?
Or, now that someone's reverse-engineered the Coca-Cola formula and everyone's saying we need to stop pandering to USA IP rights, governments have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. I think Russia already did.
Someone just used gas chromatography to develop a seemingly passable knock off of the unpatented Coca Cola formula and posted it online.
https://youtu.be/TDkH3EbWTYc
I firmly believe that such thing is already know by companies...
In the niche perfumes hobby, you have small brands doing that or people paying for gcms analysis on perfumes, i guess that companies have already done that on coke for decades
I always assumed this to be marketing, as reversing the formula has been easy since the '90s. I know someone with acces to a university lab, and he reverses and recreates popular tastes as a hobby. Also, in double blind taste tests, pepsi tends to win from Coca.
Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
exactly idk. about other EU Countries but at least in Germany outside of small country side stores you tend to have a very wide variety of "alternative" soft drinks. Some trying to emulate some big brand (e.g. Coca Cola) but also many keeping the concept
(Cola) and putting their own twist on it. Most importantly most of them seem to be
EU based (and often Germany based and sometimes local to your region).
The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive.
(but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).
A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
many alternative Colas don't try to imitate Coca Cola but give Cola their own twist, and IMHO multiple of them taste noticeable better then Coca Cola
and for people with little money getting cheaper knock-off is pretty common and people get used to it
at the same time Coca Colas brand isn't seen as "fancy"/"high quality"/"well regarded" enough anymore. So many restaurants for which cola isn't just a "default fallback they don't care about" but a drink commonly combined with their meals, started serving other Cola brand like e.g. Fritz Cola, Mio Mio Cola or Afri Cola. Also some of the more beer/alk. focused companies have started to branch out to soft drinks as Alkohole consume is going down with some surprise successes (e.g. Paulana Spezi) but also with existing distribution contracts with Restaurants and Food Chains, so their stuff is popping up increasingly more often.
And I mean we are still speaking about the kind of soft drink with the most dominant brand control (Cola/Coca Cola), for all other soft drinks the US companies have a far less strong hold on them.
And sure some pople like I guess you will insist on drinking Coca Cola.
But also if the US continues to paint themself as the new big evil (while Russia looks increasingly weak, and China is clever enough to move mostly behind the scene) then it's just a matter of time until people will start ostracizing people for buying (unnecessary) products which are "well known US" and haven't somehow separated their company image from the US. Like seriously how did the US became so incompetent in politics that you find people all over the EU which think joining with China against the US would be a good idea and long term better for their quality of live... like wtf.
I promise you that virtually no people care about avoiding American products that much. You are being idealistic, and are simply out of touch with the average person if you actually believe this.
Virtually one will stop buying Coke. Virtually no one will stop wanting an iPhone. So on and so forth. They will gladly criticize the US while continuing to indulge in the biggest brand names.
There have already been significant decreases in Canadian (and likely other countries) purchases of American goods, and travel to the US. The thing you say will never happen, already happened last year.
Jim Beam (the bourbon distillery) said before Trump 10% of their sales were to Canada, and that has gone to nearly zero.
yep, and in some part of the EU the dominant position of Coca Cola has been crumbling for reasons unrelated to the US and many "not a cheap knock off" alternative already exist...
Only if knockoff are not of the same quality, which is the case because competing on price is a race to the bottom. But if it becomes a brand issue, and some serious investment can be justified, then consumer adoption can be engineered.
It was always a branding issue. But it is not so easy to engineer consumer adoption unless you directly subvert consumer will (ie higher taxes on Coke, etc.)
or by being ostracized for drinking Cola (Coca Cola has bound it's brand tightly to the US image, which was grate for them after WW2, but is pretty bad for them now that Trump is very reliably destroying the US image).
or by most people agreeing Cola isn't healthy, so it's becomes a Luxus product they just sometimes drink and then going for a slightly more "interesting" alternative brand which fit's more the "fancy treat" vibe is pretty common (we already have been seeing this in part of Germany, where it's not rare that restaurants serve Fritz or Afro Cola over Coca Cola as the Brands "seem" more fancy while Coca Cola feels more like the cheaper non fancy choice. By being relative cheap Coca Cola might have opened created the perfect basis for it being replaced in the "fancy" context. And by it not being cheap enough it get replaced in the "people with no money" context. This leads the "in between" context (which would still be a majority in Germany) and all the US food chains etc. but only if the people don't have a personal reason to switch. Most people in Germany drink Cola only from time to time.
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...
Luckily, the orange idiot in charge is doing us (the Europeans) a favor showing us that America (and its companies) are no longer a trustworthy partner. In a way i really hope he goes through with the Greenland stuff... this would be the final nail in the coffin.
Brexit didn’t do anything to correct the UK’s current trajectory. I guarantee you even destroying the relationship with NATO would not shift the course the US is on. Every time something extreme happens, people gasp for a second then accept it and move on. I don’t think the situation in the US is hopeless by any means, but Greenland is not going to suddenly be some magical moment that wakes everybody up. We’ve done this song and dance for a decade with Trump. After the attack on the capitol it be became very clear that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than we thought.
Brexit wasn't an exercise in Imperialism and power-projection though, it was a dissolution of federated oversight and grant conditions to facilitate a transfer of wealth from the working classes to a select group of oligarchs.
They, in essence, traded 10% of their GDP for Regulatory Independence and UK’s accession to the trans-pacific partnership, estimated by the government to be worth only 0.06% of GDP by 2040.
If the Falklands represented a major turning point, then imo Greenland does too. The simple mustering of an international task-force of troops for defense is a move unprecedented in the 21st Century. The recent Spectator article correctly identifies Trump as “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.
The author identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers - concluding by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere and asking if they could be next on Trump’s list.
I suppose you're not one of the conscripted (or even professional) soldiers that would be called to duty to protect the region in case of an armed conflict?
Oh, I see. I'm in a similar position, but would rather not see things escalate at all. Even so, it is difficult to see how the relations between Europe and the US would return to what they have been for a long time. But a real conflict would be an entirely different scenario, with very unpredictable, yet possibly world changing consequences.
We know that appeasement has never worked. Hence we must be prepared. But to wish for this sort of escalation is a step too much for me. I hope that people in positions of power have cool heads. But also that they remember history.
(I see I was downvoted quite a bit, not sure why, though.)
Europe is desperately trying to find some way to let US have "control" without destroying the Danish kingdom; A Minsk Agreement for Greenland if you will.
The US already has bases on Greenland. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and therefore is already a NATO ally territory. They already have all the "control" they need to keep it out of the hands of Russia and China. There is no need to "let" the US have "control". If the US were being run by people who understood the basis on which they have a base there, they would realise they already have all the control they need from a strategic perspective.
Yes, all of this is true. But they need the American president to find an off ramp that somehow satisfies his faction's desire for ownership without blowing up Nato - at least not before the mid-terms.
As for no stomach for a fight, Nato Europe can't even shoot down shahad drones that fly over their own territory.
> As for no stomach for a fight, Nato Europe can't even shoot down shahad drones that fly over their own territory.
You would have been right if this were a couple of years ago, hell... even at the beginning of last year you might have been right, but now? If i would go with the things i hear of coworkers or other people around me (normal people in the lower middle class, no activists or something like that) then i can tell you: People are out for blood. The sheer arrogance of the Trump administration is just a tad too much to be ignored and this time Europe will not back down.
Greenland invasion is just a distraction by Trump from the Epstein files. The US already have massive military presence in Greenland with permission from Denmark since the 1950s, they can already do whatever illegal things they want there (and they have, like installing a portable nuclear reactor), without the downsides that come with actual ownership of the island. They already have a really sweet deal.
Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.
Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
He also attacked Venezuela, after talking about it a lot.
The problem is our Kremlinology is no longer capable of discerning what's a bluff and what's not. Therefore, at significant cost to both sides, we have to unravel some of the interdependency between the EU and the US.
No doubt the distraction from the Epstein files is a contributing factor, but it’s a mistake to think he won’t do incredibly harmful things simply because they seem insane and without purpose to us, who grew up post World War II.
His decision tree is like
Does it make me feel like a tough guy? -> Is there some way I can leverage it for grift and personal gain? -> Does it make my political enemies and undesirables feel angry and helpless? -> Is it a decision I can make unilaterally? -> Then YES
So, he wants to distract from past illegal shit by doing more illegal shit? Doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy to me...
But yeah, I also wonder what would happen if the media would just stop dissecting every late-night bleat (as some commentators have decided to call his Truth Social posts) and start treating them as what they are (the ramblings of a deranged 79-year old) instead? But of course those ramblings now spill into other places too: plaques on the "presidential walk of fame" (https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2025/1...), letters to allies (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-letter...) etc.
Yeah that was my point, it doesn't matter if it's left or right, because the only ideology Meta et-al speak, is USD, so they will kiss the ring of whoever is in power at the present moment in EU, far left or far right. Same how many of them also kissed the ring of the CCP or Saudi Arabia while flying the pride flag in the west.
They don't really care about those ideologies they preach, they just virtue signal however needed in order to appease the mobs and governments in power so they can be allowed to extract wealth.
I'm just pointing out hypocrisy and double standard of politics. The left is no more righteous than the right as they both want the same thing when it comes to social media, see the social media and big tech censorship of the Biden administration[1][2][3], to control the narrative in their favor as control over social media means the difference between winning and losing the next elections.
But of course you are unable to objectively see such non partisan issues, so you can only resort to calling everyone who has a different option than you on the left's actions as "defending" the right wing.
Just as with most parts of the EU (imo both it's strength and it's weakness) there is some complexity and bureaucracy involved with founding out the political spectrum of MEPs. You can research the EU political groups and the political alliances and the corresponding positions on these Wikipedia pages.
Nonsense since the 2024 European Parliament that has a big far-right wing. The EPP has already broken down a lot of progressive green policies with help of the far right [1], the "cordon sanitaire" is now broken.
The EU must fix itself, and that means ignoring those NGOs. The EU's current tech laws penalize EU startups vs. US Big Tech. It should be reversed. Remove these worthless regulations (except DMA), and explicitly start discriminating against US Big Tech vs. domestic firms, like China.
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Lobbying having undue influence is entirely a government problem that it needs to fix. It will never be fixed while people have the attitude that lobbyists are the problem. (I'm not saying you're saying this; just making a statement.)
As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.
I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.
Medical data is a domain that requires extremely careful consideration of privacy and implications of what you're collecting. Most engineers work in highly regulated fields, except for software engineers, because they're not engineers.
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. The big picture is that medical AI is scary stuff that can ruin countless lives if done even slightly wrong.
Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:
Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.
The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
Those things are all necessary anyway, apart from the last one (communicate to users) which absent GDPR is a nice-to-have. If you don't do them, or something equivalent to them, then your processes will be wrong and you'll have breaches – and breaches of healthcare data are extremely bad. What GDPR gives you is the assurance that you won't be at a competitive disadvantage for doing the bare minimum due diligence, because your competitors are required to do so, too.
> We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
GDPR does not require that any of the data subject rights are automated, other than "right to be informed" (which it doesn't explicitly spell out has to be automated, but "put the information on the website" is the easiest way to comply if you're relying on the consent basis for anything). If you expect that under 200 people are ever going to exercise a particular right, and automation will take longer than manually fulfilling those requests, then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
> that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about.
You can't use "people are choosing not to waste the time of a healthcare provider" as an argument that people don't care. They may simply be being kind. I very rarely require GDPR data subject access requests, but when I do, it's very important that I can get them in a timely manner.
If I know what information is kept by the organisation (and therefore would be included in the GDPR request), and there are other ways of me accessing the information I care about having, I don't need to perform a GDPR request. It's organisations where there aren't where I'm most likely to need to make a GDPR request. If a company is actually complying with data minimisation and purpose limitation, I do not need to make a GDPR deletion request. etc etc. I think you're focusing on how annoying it is for you, and not thinking of the impact on your less-ethical competitors (who might otherwise be able to run you out of business – depending on the industry).
I think you’re conflating security with compliance.
If the goal is to stop breaches, we should mandate MFA and ban default-public cloud buckets. Those are technical solutions. GDPR, instead, mandates a massive administrative layer. No data breach has ever been stopped by a well-drafted Privacy Impact Assessment or a 50-page DPA. Those are legal shields, not security measures.
> then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
The DPO isn't an engineer. To let them fulfill a request, I still have to build the internal tooling to query, redact, and export data from distributed production databases. Also, "I'll have my DPO do it manually" never sounds good when going through an audit.
> they may simply be being kind.
The simpler explanation is that the average person has no clue what these rights are because they’ve never had a reason to care. In healthcare, patients care that their data is secure and the service works. They aren't losing sleep over "data portability."
Ultimately, this "level playing field" only benefits incumbents. Unethical players ignore the rules until they’re caught, while legitimate startups are hit with a compliance tax that makes it nearly impossible to compete with US-based firms that can focus 100% of their energy on the product.
> Those things are all necessary anyway
It's a bold statement. Have you ever actually been working on any compliance yourself? 80% of everything is just senseless bureaucracy. I've worked in a medical startup and we had it all: GDPR, HIPPA, FDA approvals etc. The requirements are completely detached from reality and are usually written for some X-Ray producing firms from 20th century, not an health-tech AI startup. And they're trying to regulate everything, even how your organizational structure should look like, how you should create tickets in Jira (or any other _compliant_ products). Developers had to take useless trainings on how a medical organization should operate, which were essentially the courses of Aesopian language of medical bureaucracy. And legal expenses, boy o boy, the company had to spend twice as much on compliance staff than it did on developers. And what was the result? Rich American competitors with a ton of VC money were getting approvals while our company was struggling with all this idiocy despite having a much more superior product.
I'm specifically criticising the claim that GDPR was among the most burdensome requirements. Very little of GDPR is additional to what you need to do anyway, apart from DSARs (which aren't burdensome: you may charge a fee if someone's abusing the process), appointing a DPO (optional for most organisations), and the third-country restrictions (which are partly necessary, and article 45 reduces the burden). I don't dispute that regulations can be silly and a waste of time (e.g. PCI compliance requiring the removal of effective security measures, as directed by incompetent auditors, because the legal requirement is "passes an audit"), but I do dispute the use of GDPR as an example.
I'll note that of the three regulatory acronyms you gave, two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American.
> two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American
I specified all three via comma to highlight that we had quite some history in compliance, in different jurisdictions.
HIPPA covers only medical devices, GDPR covers everything. FDA approval process is convoluted and expensive, especially for new types of devices, but it's still much easier than European MDR.
Also, I mentioned FDA because we didn't even try to get a proper compliance in the EU, because it's impossible for a startup without huge support.
This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
i'd argue that, at least in my european country, there already more severe laws regulating such thing that might earn you jail time, while gdpr wasn't made with that in mind
The problem is enforcing those laws now the Trump administration is using X and other social networks as instruments of national policy and forcing others to use them, to the detriment (potentially considerable) of European societies.
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
I don’t see/share the HN outrage. If the EU wants to stay in the game, it has to be realistic about how regulation affects scaling and investment ... tweaking or rolling back parts of digital rules to compete with US/China tech isn’t “evil” .. it’s just how global competition works tbh.
Becoming like your opponent must be for sure not the only way to compete with them... China and the US are not the same, why should the EU become like either?
Seriously, the EU needs to actually make it possible to build successful businesses in the EU. Starting any business there is such a nightmare, it's no wonder everyone takes their ideas to the US.
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It is interesting how downvoted you are for stating simple facts. Many people in the EU will just willfully bury their head in the sand when it comes to the impact of regulation on the economy.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's always easier to focus on a shared ennemy than to look inward. Talking about the Draghi report forces people to confront that the EU is actually extremely disunited at the moment and the political landscape is very messy. The report was buried by Germany and the Netherlands after all.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
This has been my prediction for the last year: the EU is going to be forced to take the China approach of creating their own version of all US tech companies.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
Ironic if Trump's Greenland stunt ends up killing the Digital Omnibus. Hard to gift-wrap GDPR rollbacks for US tech giants while they're simultaneously being tariffed.
Sadly, I fear the opposite might be true. Trump acts by creating leverage and then asking for something in return to renounce that leverage (in other contexts this could be described as blackmail or racketeering - "nice Greenland you have there...").
Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Conveniently sidestepping the discussion of "should we care". I don't know how many people care or not, but I think more would care if the situation and implications were better known. It's good that this is brought to attention, and to say "people don't know so let's not talk about it" is absurd.
People have been caring about this for 20+ years. I'll admit that it's a minority position, but Germans in particular get very upset about mass surveillance.
I've been actively moving away from USA originated products. I'm happy to see alternatives being discussed. I really don't think it's moral to fund fascist states in this way, sorry.
Yes, I'm still here, despite being told (paraphrasing) 'fuck off we don't want anyone from outside USA here'.
Fascism: 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'
Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.
When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
A clearly corrupt dictatorial leader, lack of rule of law, violent oppression of ones own citizens, perpetual lying and use of mass media to influence the populous, violent incursions in to the affairs of other countries without UN support, threats of violent invasion against erstwhile allies, release of violent offenders and drug dealers (clearly in exchange for money), accepting of bribes more generally, acting against supposed allied interests, purging of military leaders according to political affiliations, manipulation of international markets for insider trading, refusal to address child trafficking for rape and sexual abuse (and possibly murder), release of violent insurrectionists, release of violent neo-nazi offenders (eg Proud Boys), breach of constitution, actions to prevent national and foreign journalists having access, actions to suppress proper reporting of the regimes actions, war crimes/murder of shipwrecked people, ...
I'm sure there's loads more if the question is somehow genuine?
Just spending $billions on an illegal (ie not established through constitutionally sound, democratic legislative means) military force, who travel in unmarked vehicles, conceal their identities, and target citizens in areas that politically oppose Trump are alone actions of a fascist regime. They murder, disappear, deport with no due process and act as if outside the law. Their actions, such as murder, are supported fully by the public face of the regime.
This regime is publicly supported by the billionaire owners of tech and media companies operating in USA.
Little people like me don't have much, but every £pound is a vote.
One gossamer-thin silver lining in this current geopolitical lunacy is that it's likely to show the current Commission's pro-corpo anti-citizen endeavors like this, to bend the knee to US corporate interests, in an increasingly bad light. Particularly given that activating anti-coercion measures that target those very corporate interests is now being seriously discussed.
EU and the rest of the world needs to ditch their anti circumvention laws that they put in place to appease the US demands on trade deals historically. They're getting tarrif'd anyways so YOLO. I think you'd see a lot of pressures ease up that are probably putting a lot of politicians around the world in compromised or blackmail-able positions. US Tech really needs to lose this massive leverage they have over the world right now.
Cory Doctorow's talk on this: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...
Is it a silver lining? I think it's clear that whoever runs any government is free to do whatever they want with total impunity. Dissatisfied citizens complaining on Twitter is not gonna remove any "pro-corpo anti-citizen" politician from power. And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
Power corrupts, and the more steps removed politicians are from whomever put them in power, the safer they are.
There's a fair chance that discordant voices in the Parliament will grow increasingly stronger, party affiliations notwithstanding. It wouldn't be the first time that the Parliament has asserted its power over the Commission.
> And if they take it to the streets, they'll just copy the UK's playbook.
What is the UK's playbook in this case?
Call all the dissidents terrorists and arrest/deport them under terrorism law
If it becomes big enough, they can't "deport" everyone. The only silver lining in the US right now is that it is way too big (and too stupid) to pull off this sad excuse of a blitzkrieg on its citizens.
Sure they can. Look how efficiently Germany did it.
I won't say they didn't try their darnedest. But estimations at the very highest but the count at 10 million (this is a very generous number) and Germany had a population of 80 million at the time. 12% is scary, but still something you can overcome.
I really hope I'm not proven wrong, but something of that scale is nearly impossible to pull off in optics with the amount of recording we can do now. The equivalent in America is about 40m Americans being "deported". That's the entire Californian population and then some.
Yes. Masks are off. And Musks.
Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
It was a (steel and coal) corp affordances union to begin with, so it's no wonder it's pandering to business rather than civic interests after all.
Von der Leyen is corrupt yet shapes EU policy without backlash, and the citizenry is left to pay the price, precisely because the EU pretends to speak for the people.
> EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office
Selection/rejection of the European Commission president (there is no such thing as the EU president) is indirect democracy, not popular vote. But it is still representative and democratic.
US contrast: in the US, citizens also don't vote for the President directly. Instead, we use a two-step system centered on the Electoral College.
Hypocrisy: if anyone (especially us American citizens) are going to argue that europeans should get to vote directly for the President of the EU commission, then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.
>then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.
I don't think that's an unpopular idea as of 25 years ago now. With current technology, nationals should be a direct democracy (and with ranked choice votes, not FPtP), the house should be doubled (if not tripled since we stopped growing 100 years ago), and the supreme court should be expanded to at least 15.
And that's just the start of small updates we need for government.
Yep, EC rather than EU, my bad.
> Yep, EC rather than EU, my bad.
And the democracy part which you got wrong. That's the salient point.
Imho the indirection ends up removing the democratic aspect.
> Masks have been of for a while, but as long as the EU people can't vote the EU presidency out of office, it's to no avail.
The EU is basically run by the Council, who are the national governments, all of whom are elected.
It's incredibly depressing that this keeps needing to be repeated when its been this way since the inception of the EU (with a small hiatus where we were gonna get a constitution).
The Commission can propose laws, but unless the Council (mostly) and Parliament (theoretically) agree, they won't happen.
True but they can keep pushing those laws over and over again like they're doing with chatcontrol.
Most of ChatControl has (unfortunately) been driven by the national governments.
The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
If you want to do your part as a consumer, boycott all American products:
https://www.goeuropean.org/
https://di.day/
When my country and China had border clashes, there was a nation-wide grassroot level movement to boycott Chinese goods and services where possible. It worked to an extent but it fizzled out in few weeks/months. Some of the reasons were the impracticality of total boycott so you start from a position of compromise, difficulty to sustain a movement born out of anger and some inter-govt agreements to avoid escalations etc.
Do you have plans to overcome those sort of challenges and sustain this initiative ?
You speak about India?
Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
Trying to undo just one dependency is a slow and painful process, but fighting all 3 at the same time is a suicide mission.
The US outsourced its manufacturing too, but unlike EU, it has a strong enough economy and military that they can just snap their fingers and the likes of Taiwan and Korea will immediately onshore manufacturing of their high end chips and ships to the US, but EU doesn't have this kind leverage.
> only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake
If only! We just outsourced all our agriculture to Latin America (MERCOSUR free trade agreement).
>> Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.
The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity. You can't reach that goal without collaboration and trade. If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers, the US, China and Russia, in order of importance, who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
I mean if the world has gone mad, don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
>The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity.
How can EU maintain peace and prosperity with no military? With hugs and kisses?
Because if that was their goal, then they really fucked up because they delivered the exact opposite: war next door and lowest purchasing power of the working class in years/decades.
You see, people like this are so detached from reality, they don't understand that peace and prosperity comes from strength, not from weakness. When you don't have military strength you invite conflict, since everyone else now sees you as an easy target and wants your slice of the global GDP.
The world leadership is composed of competitors and bullies fighting for dominance of land and resources, not of nice guys who bend over to your demands just because you're nice and peaceful. If you don't have any leverage, you get run over and colonized. It's wild this hasn't sunk in yet, especially given Europe's colonial past.
>If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers
Ah yes, it's always everyone else's fault that the EU kicked its military, IT, energy, economy, manufacturing industry (and now farming too) in the balls for the past 20-30 years, allowing the US, China and Russia the opportunity to exploit this self inflicted weakness for their own benefits.
All countries are economic competitors to each other. Every fuckup you make is an opportunity for the rest to enrich themselves from your stupidity. They aren't obliged to save you from your mistakes when they can profit from it. It's how Europe got rich in the first place during colonialism.
>who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.
Doesn't matter what other sovereign countries choose to do on the global stage, they're not accountable to you. But it's your job to have a strong military to deter others from having chimp-outs with you or in your backyard. Unless you live in a fairytale, you would know that world peace was never the default state in human history, but only a temporary state created by wielding orders of magnitude more force than everyone else who will then have to follow your rules and ideologies creating a state of compliance which you interpreted as peace. You should prepare for the worst even, or especially in times of peace, as other countries won't keep world peace for you or in your favor, but will try to free themselves from compliance to your game and try to enforce their own rules that benefit them. It's the EU's fault it slept at the wheel in terms of defence and lets itself get bullied around.
>Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.
For all Trump's problems, the US still got TSMC to build a cutting edge fab there, they're getting south Korea to build new ships there, and attract cutting edge tech companies like Infinera to close shop in EU and move everything to the US. What did EU get from being nice and generous with others? Other than illegal welfare scammers.
>don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.
I CAN blame the EU since that's where my taxes go so they're accountable to me. Being weak and powerless is not being sane. There's no virtue in letting everyone walk over you and exploit you. "Turn the other cheek" does not work in competitive international politics. Your weakness and complacency will always be used against you. I know what I wrote above isn't popular to hear but it's how the world works. Ignoring it doesn't help anyone.
Unfortunately one cannot have military superiority without eventually having to use it. That is the lesson from history.
Another one is that war doesn't work anymore and if we keep at it, we'll just mess everything up to a point of no return.
Boycotting US tech is magnitudes easier than boycotting Chinese-made products. They're in whole different universes. Especially on a country level, let alone a EU level.
Is removing the dependence on US tech easy for the EU? No, it's tough and takes a lot of work and time. It's still a piece of cake compared to the dependence on Chinese manufacturing. They're incomparable.
Does that include not using AWS or anyone that is a host interface to AWS? Does that include social media like hacker news or instagram? I have no stakes here (I'm an American who doesn't run a tech business) but it seems like it would be unfathomly difficult if not impossible to avoid US tech altogether.
Nobody serious is advocating to avoid US tech altogether, at least unless Trump starts a hot war, but reducing dependency would be a very smart move.
The most critical and impactful modern day tech is smartphone and that is US tech.
As long as mobile os and adjacent services like the store etc are controlled there is no true path to digital independence especially in a highly digitalized region like the EU.
One example is if EU allows the Android developer verification to pass this year in its current or even in more relaxed form, that just means EU is still open for some hard lessons in the future.
Of course not, smartphones are Chinese tech, and that's the exact crux!
While a massive endeavor, it's absolutely doable to create the EU's own OS and store. It's not doable to create the manufacturing capacity needed to produce all the hardware that goes into smartphones at scale.
China itself ironically serves as a great example - they have their own Android store, mostly run on Chinese phones, some on non-Android OS. Yet they still haven't been able to get rid of the dependency on TSMC/ASML. They're working on it and will get there, but it's taking many years longer than the software part. And not for lack of trying. The fact that they're still tolerating iOS doesn't disprove the existence of the former ecosystem. iOS is said to have maybe 20% market share in China.
By the way, the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before to reduce that dependence, as the cost of reproducing many of the mature technologies is going to cost less than it would have before. Ironically, doing that may require using US tools (like Claude Code), at least for now, but it could be a very interesting evolution/opportunity for Europe.
> the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before
I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).
Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
> USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.
Oh don't worry, Trump's already kneecapped both of those for a decade to come from 2025's actions alone. Y'all got time to catch up.
China, much scarier. But we all kinda let that happen over 30 years. Too late to complain now. I'd say we work together but uhh... I think we both understand (or rather, fail to understand) modern US policy these days.
Yes, I can see Claude Code making it easier to reproduce - Redshift (or Snowflake) - or anything else you need to be reliable and performant at scale.
Both products are nothing but reliable. Redshift can’t even go around partitioning limits, or S3 limits.
But what’s funny is that Claude Code is from US company so can’t be used in a boycott scenario
Redshift is used at the largest e-commerce site in the world and was built specifically to “shift” away from “Big Red” (Oracle).
What can I say, I expected more than what they actually offer. A Redshift job can fail because S3 tells it to slow down. How can I make this HA performance product slower given its whole moat is an S3 based input output interface.
As a compute engine its SQL capabilities are worse than the slowest pretend timeseries db like Elasticsearch.
Are you trying to treat an OLAP database with columnar storage like an OLTP database? If you are, you would probably have the same issue with Snowflake.
As far as S3, are you trying to ingest a lot of small files or one large file? Again Redshift is optimized for bulk imports.
Redshift does not fit into aws ecosystem. If you use kinesis, you get up to 500 paritions with a bunch of tiny files, now I have to build a pipeline after kinesis that puts all of it into 1 s3 file, only to then import it into redshift which might again put it on s3 backed storage for Its own file shenanigans.
Clickhouse, even chdb inmemory magic has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.
Its a mess.
Not to mention none of its Column optimizations work and the data footprint of gapless timestamp columns is not basically 0 as it is in any serious OLAP but it is massive, so the way to improve performance is to Just align everything on the same timeline so its computation engine does not beed to figure out how to join stuff that is Actually time Aligned
I really can’t figure out how anyone can do seriously big computations with Redshift. Maybe people like waiting hours for their SQL to execute and think software is just that slow.
You realize “the pipeline” you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement “Create table select * from…”. Yes you can run this directly from S3 and it will create one big file
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/ctas.html
I have a sneaking suspicion that you are trying to use Redshift as a traditional OLTP database. Are you also normalizing your table like an OLTP database instead of like an OLAP
https://fiveonefour.com/blog/OLAP-on-Tap-The-Art-of-Letting-...
And if you are using any OLAP database for OLTP, you’re doing it wrong. It’s also a simple “process” to move data back and forth between Aurora MySQL or Postgres by federating your OlTP database with Athena (handwavy because I haven’t done it) or the way I have done it is use one Select statement to export to S3 and another to export into your OLTP database.
And before you say you shouldn’t have to do this, you have always needed some process to take data from your normalized data to un normalized form for reporting and analytics.
Source: doing boring enterprise stuff including databases since 1996 and been working for 8 years with AWS services outside AWS (startups and consulting companies) and inside AWS (Professional Services no longer there)
Why are you doing this manually? There is a built in way of doing Kinesis Data Streams to Redshift
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/using-other-s...
Also by default, while you can through Glue Catalog have S3 directly as a destination for Redshift, by default it definitely doesn’t use S3.
These things cost money, Redshift handling live ingestion from Kinesis is tricky.
There is no need for Athena, Redshift ingestion is a simple query that reads from S3. I dont want to copy 10TB of data just to have it in 1 file. And yes, default storage is a bit better than S3 but for an OLAP database there seems to be no proper column compression and data footprint is too big resulting in slow reads if one is not careful.
I mentioned clickhouse, data is obviously not OLTP schemed.
I don’t have normalized data. As I mentioned, Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes, slowest part is downloading from S3.
I am not willing to pay 10k+ a month for something that absolutely sucks compared to a proper OLAP db.
Redshift is just made for some very specific, bloated, throw as much software pipelines as you can, pay as much money as you can, workflows that I just don’t find valuable. Its compute engine and data repr is just laughably slow, yeah, it can be as fast as you want by throwing parallel units but it’s a complete waste of money.
Tell that to all the companies that built their entire tech stacks on US cloud providers...
Massive endeavor for a lot of setups.
While it is a "massive endeavor", it is not impossible, it essentially amounts to writing portable code. A computer is a computer, and most of the tech stack in US cloud providers is based on open source projects.
Not depending on Chinese manufacturing is borderline impossible even if you are starting from scratch. Not only it will be way more expensive, with potentially longer delays and lesser capacities, but just finding some company that can and wants to do the job can be a nightmare. From what I have seen, many local manufacturers in the US and Europe are really there to fulfill government contracts that requires local production.
Most hardware kickstarter-like projects rely on Chinese manufacturing as if it was obvious. It is not "find a manufacturer", it is "go to China". Projects that instead rely on local (US/Europe) manufacturing in order to make a political statement have to to though a lot of trouble, and the result is often an overpriced product that may still have some parts made in China.
Anyone who thinks migrations at scale is just about “writing portable code” has never done a migration at scale.
A large corporation just migrating from everything hosted on VMs can take years.
And if you are responsible for an ETL implementation and working with AWS and have your files stored on S3 (every provider big and small has S3 compatible storage) and your data is hosted on Aurora Postgres, are you going to spend time creating a complicated ETL process or are you going to just schedule a cron job to run “select outfile into S3”?
And “most” of the services on AWS aren’t based on open source software and you still have to provision your resources using IAC and your architecture. No Terraform doesn’t give you “cloud agnosticism” any more than using Python when using AWS services.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that. Just that you can make things less painful with portable code. It still won't be easy, as everybody in this chain agrees with. But we don't put things that need to be done off because it's "difficult".
If it takes a year and half to migrate from plain old VMs to AWS as the first part of “lift shift and modernize” and you have to to do it in “waves” how much difference is the code going to make?
Are you going to tell your developers to spend weeks writing ETL code that could literally be done in an hour using SQL extensions to AWS?
Are you going to tell them not to use any AWS native services? What are you going to do about your infrastructure as code? Are you going to tell them to set up a VM to host a simple cron job instead of just using a Lambda + Event Bridge?
And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
It took Amazon years to move off of Oracle and much of its infrastructure still doesn’t run on AWS and still uses its older infrastructure (CDO? It’s been a while and I was on the AWS side)
I have yet to hear anyone who worries about cloud agnosticism even think about the complexity of migrations bring at scale, the risk of regressions, etc.
While I personally stay the hell away from lift and shifts and I come in at the “modernization” phase, it’s because I know the complexity and drudgery of it. I worked at AWS ProServe for 3.5 years and I now work as a staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company.
This isn’t me rah rahing about AWS. I would say the same about GCP, Azure, the choice of database you use, or any other infrastructure decision.
If it only took 18 months for all that, I'd be very impressed. I was thinking at least a year of inevitable meetings and plannings and maybe 3 years of slow execution. And I still might be optimistic there.
>And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.
The "business value" here is not being beholden to an increasingly hostile "ally" who owns the land these servers operate on. If you aren't worried about that, then there is no point in doing any of this.
But if things do escalate to war, there's a very obvious attack vector to cripple your company with. Even if you're only 20% into the migration, that's better than 0%.
I don’t know how long it took before they brought AWS in and they decided to do something or if they failed beforehand and I don’t know how long it was before they brought me in.
Oh, sorry. I wasn't trying to speak on your experiences specifically. It more about general talks on the scenario of "America is compromised, we need to decouple starting now".
I of course don't know the scale of your company and how much they even wanted to migrate. Those are all variable in this.
Yup! Still very doable, and has been done tens if not hundred of thousands of times before. Migrations from e.g. AWS-> Azure/GCP, or even harder, cloud->on-prem.
How often has been replacing Chinese tech manufacturing dependency at scale done before? About 0.
The government has to mandate it on some level with purchasing power.
If the government switched away from Microsft and refused to accept MS document formats for any legal reason - then things might shift.
Most businesses just don't care, they want they easy button.
A law firm does not want to screw around, they just click 'buy' on Word, Outlook, Teams.
There's a deep psychology to it.
I remember a developer telling me that Oracle 'was the only real database'.
It's not so much propaganda, just the propagandistic power of incumbency. People who only know one thing are hard pressed to believe there could be something else.
This is more than 50% brand, narrative etc.
We techies tend to underestimate the power of perception, even when it's of our own creation etc. i.e. people fighting over Linux and it's various distros.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
to be honest I don't expect a effective long term consumer boycott
but any companies which have their brand closely tied to the US image (e.g. Coca Cola) will most likely have bug issues
and if people have a choice between a product from a company they now is EU or better local and one where they don't know about it the choice will be influenced by it
and maybe we can finally take tear down some of the absurd misinformation companies and corruption originating from MS and similar. (E.g. systematic malicious misinformation often supplemented with non fair competition/subsidization and outright bribery (no joke, MS has (through middle mans) wide spread bribed public, research and school organizations in Germany, like actual bribes, not just things which should count as bribes but do not(1)))
(1): I knew some people which had been involved in it. But any case where legal actions where taken ended without relevant outcome because all the blame always feel to the sales middle man AFIK and supposedly MS didn't know. Also the bribes mostly ended up as additional founding for the research institute and only in small parts in personal pockets from what I have heard. At the same time politics have caused so massive issues due to incompetently made laws and regulations for many public organizations that accepting this bribes and using them as additional founds often looked as a necessary evil... :sob: (yes I know there are not emotes on HN)
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.
I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.
If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
That just means they have all the infrastructure they need to bottle syrup from another source and start selling that instead - no capex needed, just maybe need to get together with other franchisees and figure out how to spend some opex on marketing and getting it onto store shelves. Coca-cola has a moat, but it's hardly protective of franchisees here.
There must be thousands of soda manufacturers in Europe. I can buy dozens of sodas where I live. But they are not Coca Cola.
From a recent hn discussion there's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc
They are bottled at the same places that bottle Coca-Cola. If those places stop paying for their Coca-Cola brand license because nobody is buying it... then okay? so what?
Or, now that someone's reverse-engineered the Coca-Cola formula and everyone's saying we need to stop pandering to USA IP rights, governments have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. I think Russia already did.
Someone just used gas chromatography to develop a seemingly passable knock off of the unpatented Coca Cola formula and posted it online. https://youtu.be/TDkH3EbWTYc
I firmly believe that such thing is already know by companies...
In the niche perfumes hobby, you have small brands doing that or people paying for gcms analysis on perfumes, i guess that companies have already done that on coke for decades
I always assumed this to be marketing, as reversing the formula has been easy since the '90s. I know someone with acces to a university lab, and he reverses and recreates popular tastes as a hobby. Also, in double blind taste tests, pepsi tends to win from Coca.
Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.
> So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
Assuming the person burns the money they would've spent on Cola in the first place. But they aren't, they'll probably just redirect that money to an alternative soft drink, probably a more local one.
exactly idk. about other EU Countries but at least in Germany outside of small country side stores you tend to have a very wide variety of "alternative" soft drinks. Some trying to emulate some big brand (e.g. Coca Cola) but also many keeping the concept (Cola) and putting their own twist on it. Most importantly most of them seem to be EU based (and often Germany based and sometimes local to your region).
The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive. (but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).
A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
Nestle is Swiss, not American, so that seems like a very strange example to use.
not if you somehow thought the last 10 years Nestle is American and never questioned it ...
well I guess that is good news?? maybe?
If you totally remove Coke from the market, sure, but no one wants to drink a knockoff Coke, they want the actual thing.
actual, that is de-facto wrong
many alternative Colas don't try to imitate Coca Cola but give Cola their own twist, and IMHO multiple of them taste noticeable better then Coca Cola
and for people with little money getting cheaper knock-off is pretty common and people get used to it
at the same time Coca Colas brand isn't seen as "fancy"/"high quality"/"well regarded" enough anymore. So many restaurants for which cola isn't just a "default fallback they don't care about" but a drink commonly combined with their meals, started serving other Cola brand like e.g. Fritz Cola, Mio Mio Cola or Afri Cola. Also some of the more beer/alk. focused companies have started to branch out to soft drinks as Alkohole consume is going down with some surprise successes (e.g. Paulana Spezi) but also with existing distribution contracts with Restaurants and Food Chains, so their stuff is popping up increasingly more often.
And I mean we are still speaking about the kind of soft drink with the most dominant brand control (Cola/Coca Cola), for all other soft drinks the US companies have a far less strong hold on them.
And sure some pople like I guess you will insist on drinking Coca Cola.
But also if the US continues to paint themself as the new big evil (while Russia looks increasingly weak, and China is clever enough to move mostly behind the scene) then it's just a matter of time until people will start ostracizing people for buying (unnecessary) products which are "well known US" and haven't somehow separated their company image from the US. Like seriously how did the US became so incompetent in politics that you find people all over the EU which think joining with China against the US would be a good idea and long term better for their quality of live... like wtf.
We are talking about individuals here. People are absolutely capable of not drinking Coke because they want to avoid American products.
I promise you that virtually no people care about avoiding American products that much. You are being idealistic, and are simply out of touch with the average person if you actually believe this.
Virtually one will stop buying Coke. Virtually no one will stop wanting an iPhone. So on and so forth. They will gladly criticize the US while continuing to indulge in the biggest brand names.
> no people care about avoiding American products that much.
Today, yes. Once US troops start forcefully occupying European territory, eh...
There have already been significant decreases in Canadian (and likely other countries) purchases of American goods, and travel to the US. The thing you say will never happen, already happened last year.
Jim Beam (the bourbon distillery) said before Trump 10% of their sales were to Canada, and that has gone to nearly zero.
yep, and in some part of the EU the dominant position of Coca Cola has been crumbling for reasons unrelated to the US and many "not a cheap knock off" alternative already exist...
Only if knockoff are not of the same quality, which is the case because competing on price is a race to the bottom. But if it becomes a brand issue, and some serious investment can be justified, then consumer adoption can be engineered.
It was always a branding issue. But it is not so easy to engineer consumer adoption unless you directly subvert consumer will (ie higher taxes on Coke, etc.)
or by being ostracized for drinking Cola (Coca Cola has bound it's brand tightly to the US image, which was grate for them after WW2, but is pretty bad for them now that Trump is very reliably destroying the US image).
or by most people agreeing Cola isn't healthy, so it's becomes a Luxus product they just sometimes drink and then going for a slightly more "interesting" alternative brand which fit's more the "fancy treat" vibe is pretty common (we already have been seeing this in part of Germany, where it's not rare that restaurants serve Fritz or Afro Cola over Coca Cola as the Brands "seem" more fancy while Coca Cola feels more like the cheaper non fancy choice. By being relative cheap Coca Cola might have opened created the perfect basis for it being replaced in the "fancy" context. And by it not being cheap enough it get replaced in the "people with no money" context. This leads the "in between" context (which would still be a majority in Germany) and all the US food chains etc. but only if the people don't have a personal reason to switch. Most people in Germany drink Cola only from time to time.
It's arguably unhealthy that one company has such global dominance over any market, even a trivial one like soft drinks.
Good thing that locally we produce other sugary drinks that we can buy instead!
China making a firewall so that it would grow its own tech industry instead of relying on the US was, in retrospect, a really smart move.
It was also very smart of them to send their citizens to US universities and companies and exfiltrate research and IP to grow their own tech industry...
Can't wait to fund even more corrupt EU bureaucrats with my taxes.
Luckily, the orange idiot in charge is doing us (the Europeans) a favor showing us that America (and its companies) are no longer a trustworthy partner. In a way i really hope he goes through with the Greenland stuff... this would be the final nail in the coffin.
Brexit didn’t do anything to correct the UK’s current trajectory. I guarantee you even destroying the relationship with NATO would not shift the course the US is on. Every time something extreme happens, people gasp for a second then accept it and move on. I don’t think the situation in the US is hopeless by any means, but Greenland is not going to suddenly be some magical moment that wakes everybody up. We’ve done this song and dance for a decade with Trump. After the attack on the capitol it be became very clear that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than we thought.
GP was not about America changing but about Europe.
I originally read it as “the final nail in the coffin for him and the shenanigans coming out of the US” but yeah I see I read it wrong now.
Brexit wasn't an exercise in Imperialism and power-projection though, it was a dissolution of federated oversight and grant conditions to facilitate a transfer of wealth from the working classes to a select group of oligarchs.
They, in essence, traded 10% of their GDP for Regulatory Independence and UK’s accession to the trans-pacific partnership, estimated by the government to be worth only 0.06% of GDP by 2040.
If the Falklands represented a major turning point, then imo Greenland does too. The simple mustering of an international task-force of troops for defense is a move unprecedented in the 21st Century. The recent Spectator article correctly identifies Trump as “playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland”, which holds substantial mineral as well as strategic value in the president’s eyes.
The author identified presidential “ego-politics” as a plausible top reason, along with a US quest for hemispheric power and sending a message to rival powers - concluding by noting that both Britain and France hold territories in the western hemisphere and asking if they could be next on Trump’s list.
https://spectator.com/article/trump-is-playing-geopolitical-...
Please read my response to the other comment
I suppose you're not one of the conscripted (or even professional) soldiers that would be called to duty to protect the region in case of an armed conflict?
I am in the reserve of the german army, so i can be called up if things escalate beyond a certain point (the so called "Verteidigungsfall").
Oh, I see. I'm in a similar position, but would rather not see things escalate at all. Even so, it is difficult to see how the relations between Europe and the US would return to what they have been for a long time. But a real conflict would be an entirely different scenario, with very unpredictable, yet possibly world changing consequences.
We know that appeasement has never worked. Hence we must be prepared. But to wish for this sort of escalation is a step too much for me. I hope that people in positions of power have cool heads. But also that they remember history.
(I see I was downvoted quite a bit, not sure why, though.)
Europe is desperately trying to find some way to let US have "control" without destroying the Danish kingdom; A Minsk Agreement for Greenland if you will.
They don't have the stomach for a fight.
The US already has bases on Greenland. It is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and therefore is already a NATO ally territory. They already have all the "control" they need to keep it out of the hands of Russia and China. There is no need to "let" the US have "control". If the US were being run by people who understood the basis on which they have a base there, they would realise they already have all the control they need from a strategic perspective.
Yes, all of this is true. But they need the American president to find an off ramp that somehow satisfies his faction's desire for ownership without blowing up Nato - at least not before the mid-terms.
As for no stomach for a fight, Nato Europe can't even shoot down shahad drones that fly over their own territory.
This is not how it should be, but it is.
> As for no stomach for a fight, Nato Europe can't even shoot down shahad drones that fly over their own territory.
You would have been right if this were a couple of years ago, hell... even at the beginning of last year you might have been right, but now? If i would go with the things i hear of coworkers or other people around me (normal people in the lower middle class, no activists or something like that) then i can tell you: People are out for blood. The sheer arrogance of the Trump administration is just a tad too much to be ignored and this time Europe will not back down.
Very bold claim to make unsourced from an account with a very _interesting_ posting history.
What am I supposed to take from that? It's not even a valid English sentence.
Keir Starmer yesterday: "I will speak to Trump again. We must find a pragmatic solution to this."
QED.
Greenland invasion is just a distraction by Trump from the Epstein files. The US already have massive military presence in Greenland with permission from Denmark since the 1950s, they can already do whatever illegal things they want there (and they have, like installing a portable nuclear reactor), without the downsides that come with actual ownership of the island. They already have a really sweet deal.
Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.
Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
He also attacked Venezuela, after talking about it a lot.
The problem is our Kremlinology is no longer capable of discerning what's a bluff and what's not. Therefore, at significant cost to both sides, we have to unravel some of the interdependency between the EU and the US.
No doubt the distraction from the Epstein files is a contributing factor, but it’s a mistake to think he won’t do incredibly harmful things simply because they seem insane and without purpose to us, who grew up post World War II.
His decision tree is like
Does it make me feel like a tough guy? -> Is there some way I can leverage it for grift and personal gain? -> Does it make my political enemies and undesirables feel angry and helpless? -> Is it a decision I can make unilaterally? -> Then YES
How about building in Greenland that "freedom city" all tech bros are salivating about? Would that be a reason enough to invade?
So, he wants to distract from past illegal shit by doing more illegal shit? Doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy to me...
But yeah, I also wonder what would happen if the media would just stop dissecting every late-night bleat (as some commentators have decided to call his Truth Social posts) and start treating them as what they are (the ramblings of a deranged 79-year old) instead? But of course those ramblings now spill into other places too: plaques on the "presidential walk of fame" (https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2025/1...), letters to allies (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-letter...) etc.
>by doing more illegal shit?
Who said anything about doing. He doesn't have to do anything other than bring it up all the time.
The media loves this since it means more engagement farming and Trump knows this which is why he's doing it. ALong with things like "quiet piggy".
“Since the start of the parliamentary mandate, Meta has met 38 times with far-right MEPs”
Hmmmm
Far left EU MEPs complain about what far right are doing. So what else is new in politics?
Do they also complain when they themselves meet with Meta, or is it an issue only when their growing opposition do it?
You know the saying "For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law"?
The fight against “left” and “right” is just a narrative to gin up allegiance with certain groups.
The only relevance to the article is that it indicates which parties have sided with the US administration to fight consumer’s digital rights.
Yeah that was my point, it doesn't matter if it's left or right, because the only ideology Meta et-al speak, is USD, so they will kiss the ring of whoever is in power at the present moment in EU, far left or far right. Same how many of them also kissed the ring of the CCP or Saudi Arabia while flying the pride flag in the west.
They don't really care about those ideologies they preach, they just virtue signal however needed in order to appease the mobs and governments in power so they can be allowed to extract wealth.
> Do they also complain when they themselves meet with Meta, or is it an issue only when their growing opposition do it?
Are you referring to anything specific or you have just emotional urge to defend far right? (PfE in this case).
I'm just pointing out hypocrisy and double standard of politics. The left is no more righteous than the right as they both want the same thing when it comes to social media, see the social media and big tech censorship of the Biden administration[1][2][3], to control the narrative in their favor as control over social media means the difference between winning and losing the next elections.
But of course you are unable to objectively see such non partisan issues, so you can only resort to calling everyone who has a different option than you on the left's actions as "defending" the right wing.
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/aug/27/mark-zucker...
[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/12/16/political-pressure-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/zuckerberg-meta-whi...
Is there a list of MEPs who are just right, without the far prefix?
Just as with most parts of the EU (imo both it's strength and it's weakness) there is some complexity and bureaucracy involved with founding out the political spectrum of MEPs. You can research the EU political groups and the political alliances and the corresponding positions on these Wikipedia pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_political_alliances
Yes. But if you look into the policies they push, they are all progressive for some reason.
Nonsense since the 2024 European Parliament that has a big far-right wing. The EPP has already broken down a lot of progressive green policies with help of the far right [1], the "cordon sanitaire" is now broken.
https://www.politico.eu/article/epp-votes-with-far-right-to-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe...
Yes ?
The EU must fix itself, and that means ignoring those NGOs. The EU's current tech laws penalize EU startups vs. US Big Tech. It should be reversed. Remove these worthless regulations (except DMA), and explicitly start discriminating against US Big Tech vs. domestic firms, like China.
Then the low-hanging fruits: mandate exclusive data storage in the EU, encryption keys in the EU, ban AWS/Azure/GCP and Windows/Office from government procurement, force JV's or GTFO, force Linux government use.
These NGOs are saboteurs in disguise that will never lead you to the promised land of EU tech sovereignty. China's playbook was: deregulate to build a domestic ecosystem, then regulate to protect society once the ecosystem is mature. Flipping that playbook around is insidious wrecker shit.
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?
Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.
You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
Lobbying having undue influence is entirely a government problem that it needs to fix. It will never be fixed while people have the attitude that lobbyists are the problem. (I'm not saying you're saying this; just making a statement.)
As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.
While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.
Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.
To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.
The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.
You're so right.
I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.
I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.
Medical data is a domain that requires extremely careful consideration of privacy and implications of what you're collecting. Most engineers work in highly regulated fields, except for software engineers, because they're not engineers.
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. The big picture is that medical AI is scary stuff that can ruin countless lives if done even slightly wrong.
So deletion of user accounts meant thousands of hours of development time?
Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:
Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.
The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
Those things are all necessary anyway, apart from the last one (communicate to users) which absent GDPR is a nice-to-have. If you don't do them, or something equivalent to them, then your processes will be wrong and you'll have breaches – and breaches of healthcare data are extremely bad. What GDPR gives you is the assurance that you won't be at a competitive disadvantage for doing the bare minimum due diligence, because your competitors are required to do so, too.
> We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.
GDPR does not require that any of the data subject rights are automated, other than "right to be informed" (which it doesn't explicitly spell out has to be automated, but "put the information on the website" is the easiest way to comply if you're relying on the consent basis for anything). If you expect that under 200 people are ever going to exercise a particular right, and automation will take longer than manually fulfilling those requests, then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
> that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about.
You can't use "people are choosing not to waste the time of a healthcare provider" as an argument that people don't care. They may simply be being kind. I very rarely require GDPR data subject access requests, but when I do, it's very important that I can get them in a timely manner.
If I know what information is kept by the organisation (and therefore would be included in the GDPR request), and there are other ways of me accessing the information I care about having, I don't need to perform a GDPR request. It's organisations where there aren't where I'm most likely to need to make a GDPR request. If a company is actually complying with data minimisation and purpose limitation, I do not need to make a GDPR deletion request. etc etc. I think you're focusing on how annoying it is for you, and not thinking of the impact on your less-ethical competitors (who might otherwise be able to run you out of business – depending on the industry).
I think you’re conflating security with compliance.
If the goal is to stop breaches, we should mandate MFA and ban default-public cloud buckets. Those are technical solutions. GDPR, instead, mandates a massive administrative layer. No data breach has ever been stopped by a well-drafted Privacy Impact Assessment or a 50-page DPA. Those are legal shields, not security measures.
> then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.
The DPO isn't an engineer. To let them fulfill a request, I still have to build the internal tooling to query, redact, and export data from distributed production databases. Also, "I'll have my DPO do it manually" never sounds good when going through an audit.
> they may simply be being kind.
The simpler explanation is that the average person has no clue what these rights are because they’ve never had a reason to care. In healthcare, patients care that their data is secure and the service works. They aren't losing sleep over "data portability."
Ultimately, this "level playing field" only benefits incumbents. Unethical players ignore the rules until they’re caught, while legitimate startups are hit with a compliance tax that makes it nearly impossible to compete with US-based firms that can focus 100% of their energy on the product.
To quote you, both unethical players and US-based firms can afford to ignore such rules. There must be a difference between these categories, right?
Another thing that was just recently examined (in this case by the french privacy authority) is the savings given by applying gdpr https://www.cnil.fr/en/economic-impact-gdpr-5-years
https://www.cnil.fr/en/economic-impact-gdpr-5-years
unfortunately the whole texts are in french
> Those things are all necessary anyway It's a bold statement. Have you ever actually been working on any compliance yourself? 80% of everything is just senseless bureaucracy. I've worked in a medical startup and we had it all: GDPR, HIPPA, FDA approvals etc. The requirements are completely detached from reality and are usually written for some X-Ray producing firms from 20th century, not an health-tech AI startup. And they're trying to regulate everything, even how your organizational structure should look like, how you should create tickets in Jira (or any other _compliant_ products). Developers had to take useless trainings on how a medical organization should operate, which were essentially the courses of Aesopian language of medical bureaucracy. And legal expenses, boy o boy, the company had to spend twice as much on compliance staff than it did on developers. And what was the result? Rich American competitors with a ton of VC money were getting approvals while our company was struggling with all this idiocy despite having a much more superior product.
I'm specifically criticising the claim that GDPR was among the most burdensome requirements. Very little of GDPR is additional to what you need to do anyway, apart from DSARs (which aren't burdensome: you may charge a fee if someone's abusing the process), appointing a DPO (optional for most organisations), and the third-country restrictions (which are partly necessary, and article 45 reduces the burden). I don't dispute that regulations can be silly and a waste of time (e.g. PCI compliance requiring the removal of effective security measures, as directed by incompetent auditors, because the legal requirement is "passes an audit"), but I do dispute the use of GDPR as an example.
I'll note that of the three regulatory acronyms you gave, two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American.
> two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American
I specified all three via comma to highlight that we had quite some history in compliance, in different jurisdictions.
HIPPA covers only medical devices, GDPR covers everything. FDA approval process is convoluted and expensive, especially for new types of devices, but it's still much easier than European MDR.
Also, I mentioned FDA because we didn't even try to get a proper compliance in the EU, because it's impossible for a startup without huge support.
I'd wager it's less expensive than US medical services.
This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
i'd argue that, at least in my european country, there already more severe laws regulating such thing that might earn you jail time, while gdpr wasn't made with that in mind
The problem is enforcing those laws now the Trump administration is using X and other social networks as instruments of national policy and forcing others to use them, to the detriment (potentially considerable) of European societies.
Somebody needs to investigate the EC for corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Public_Prosecutor%27s...
if there was selling of influence it's within the EPPO's jurisdiction (as far as I understand)
Close the 'legitimate interest' loophole that made the whole GDPR a farce in practice, and I'll take that as a sign you're actually serious.
Let me propose a different title:
Article by article: how lawyers created impractical regulations that made sure big tech monopolized Europe and made sure small players had more trouble participating, and how the legal-industrial complex is fighting to keep milking that cow
I don’t see/share the HN outrage. If the EU wants to stay in the game, it has to be realistic about how regulation affects scaling and investment ... tweaking or rolling back parts of digital rules to compete with US/China tech isn’t “evil” .. it’s just how global competition works tbh.
Becoming like your opponent must be for sure not the only way to compete with them... China and the US are not the same, why should the EU become like either?
Seriously, the EU needs to actually make it possible to build successful businesses in the EU. Starting any business there is such a nightmare, it's no wonder everyone takes their ideas to the US.
Nobody takes their ideas to the US. The US prints money backing them with oil and purchases every single startup in EU.
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It is interesting how downvoted you are for stating simple facts. Many people in the EU will just willfully bury their head in the sand when it comes to the impact of regulation on the economy.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's always easier to focus on a shared ennemy than to look inward. Talking about the Draghi report forces people to confront that the EU is actually extremely disunited at the moment and the political landscape is very messy. The report was buried by Germany and the Netherlands after all.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
what good are digital rights in countries where physical rights are being deteriorated
This has been my prediction for the last year: the EU is going to be forced to take the China approach of creating their own version of all US tech companies.
The current US administration has done more to destroy US soft power on the world stage than any other in the country's history. The administration seems intent on destroying NATO. Personally I'm fine with that because it's a protection racket and a tool of imperialism. But this is going to materially hurt the US defense contractors who profit off of arms sales. That's really the turning point for any fascist regime: when you start screwing up the bag.
US tech companies are also a tool of American foreign policy in pretty much the exact same way the administration accuses China of doing.
So the EU needs to be responsible for its own security. And it's own platforms. But it may be too late for that as the EU itself may well splinter under the rise of far-right governments that are currently in place (eg Hungary) and only one election away from taking place (eg UK, Geermany maybe even France; even though the UK isn't in the EU I'm still counting it as part of Europe).
Unfortunately the EU (and the UK) is too committed to the US imperial project, such as in the Middle East. People don't seem to realize just how connected things like imperialism and the erosion of your own rights at home are inextricably intertwined.
Ironic if Trump's Greenland stunt ends up killing the Digital Omnibus. Hard to gift-wrap GDPR rollbacks for US tech giants while they're simultaneously being tariffed.
Sadly, I fear the opposite might be true. Trump acts by creating leverage and then asking for something in return to renounce that leverage (in other contexts this could be described as blackmail or racketeering - "nice Greenland you have there...").
Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.
Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.
The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."
AI is killing humanity
Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.
Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
Conveniently sidestepping the discussion of "should we care". I don't know how many people care or not, but I think more would care if the situation and implications were better known. It's good that this is brought to attention, and to say "people don't know so let's not talk about it" is absurd.
People have been caring about this for 20+ years. I'll admit that it's a minority position, but Germans in particular get very upset about mass surveillance.
> In europe , this is not news, never.
That's just false. Example, here's a shitty tabloid in Croatia:
https://www.24sata.hr/news/vrh-europske-komisije-mijenja-pra...
>Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
... Because this is hacker news and not euro news? This is pretty much on point both for tech topic and vague "hacker ethos" as a topic.
Speak for yourself.
I've been actively moving away from USA originated products. I'm happy to see alternatives being discussed. I really don't think it's moral to fund fascist states in this way, sorry.
Yes, I'm still here, despite being told (paraphrasing) 'fuck off we don't want anyone from outside USA here'.
What does fascism mean to you, exactly?
Fascism: 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'
Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.
When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
A clearly corrupt dictatorial leader, lack of rule of law, violent oppression of ones own citizens, perpetual lying and use of mass media to influence the populous, violent incursions in to the affairs of other countries without UN support, threats of violent invasion against erstwhile allies, release of violent offenders and drug dealers (clearly in exchange for money), accepting of bribes more generally, acting against supposed allied interests, purging of military leaders according to political affiliations, manipulation of international markets for insider trading, refusal to address child trafficking for rape and sexual abuse (and possibly murder), release of violent insurrectionists, release of violent neo-nazi offenders (eg Proud Boys), breach of constitution, actions to prevent national and foreign journalists having access, actions to suppress proper reporting of the regimes actions, war crimes/murder of shipwrecked people, ...
I'm sure there's loads more if the question is somehow genuine?
Just spending $billions on an illegal (ie not established through constitutionally sound, democratic legislative means) military force, who travel in unmarked vehicles, conceal their identities, and target citizens in areas that politically oppose Trump are alone actions of a fascist regime. They murder, disappear, deport with no due process and act as if outside the law. Their actions, such as murder, are supported fully by the public face of the regime.
This regime is publicly supported by the billionaire owners of tech and media companies operating in USA.
Little people like me don't have much, but every £pound is a vote.
> Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.
A provably untrue statement. Examples:
https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-lobbying-brussels-d...
https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...
https://taz.de/Digitale-Rechte-in-Europa/!6130097/
https://fr.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/18/champ-de-batail...
This. Outside of an extremely small minority no-one cares.