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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> The EU would let them and good riddance as far as we're concerned. But there is this pesky notion that it's a huge market and Apple earns a lot of money there. So, they really can't walk away from that.

Does that not seem contradictory to you? If it's a huge market they make a lot of money in, then there's by definition a lot of people who don't think "good riddance" if they leave. Apple has more leverage than you give them credit for.

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American living in Europe here. in the EU, you can't just apply economic logic to everything like you can in the US.

Policymakers will absolutely piss off a huge number of people over some basic principle. Look for instance at Germany's willingness to burn it's industrial base to the ground over Ukraine.

I would argue it's not (just) over Ukraine that Germany has finally decided to wean itself off the unrealistically cheap natural gas from Russia. In fact, the writing has been on the wall for decades; Russian leadership never made a big secret out of the fact that they considered their gas industry a geopolitical weapon. It took a big scare and popular demand to stop the wholesale selling out of the German political class to Russia.

> Policymakers will absolutely piss off a huge number of people over some basic principle.

...which is why a lot of countries are shifting to the right, people are fed up with policymakers ignoring the public will.

(Examples: Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Italy - next up: Germany in 2025, maybe France..?)

They only do that because it has worked for them. They've done it and survived, which makes me think they haven't actually pissed off that many people.

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