Go European: Discover European products and services
goeuropean.org
goeuropean.org
Added my company (https://mailpace.com) - I’m looking forward to a resurgence of innovation in European tech companies, the talent and education here is amazing, we just need to improve our investment and start treating tech with as much respect as we give to law, finance and other “prestigious” career paths here
Always.
hug
Now what exactly they're goanna do with the extra debt is the question.
More debt to fund innovation, infrastructure, defense, education and healthcare is welcome, but if it's just more debt to fund welfare and pensions, like Southern Europe, then nothing will improve.
People believed the "end of history" narratives about Russia, and even that it would become like the rest of the ex-communist states, a normal part of liberal Europe. That should have changed after 2014, but by then the grip of the financial crisis was preventing any increases in state spending.
If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.
Absolutely not. This was made clear repeatedly. What became clear in the UK was that we'd rather lose market access in order to appease people with an irrational hatred of our fellow Europeans.
If people think trade and movement boundaries are good, why don't we have internal ones? Why should Mancunians be allowed to take up scarce housing in London?
EU: "The free movement of goods is one of the four fundamental economic freedoms laid down in the EU founding treaties, the other three being the free movement of capital, services and people."
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/free-mov...
> "The single market seeks to guarantee the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people, known collectively as the "four freedoms" "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market
The EU would welcome the UK being closer aligned to the EU, trade-wise. But the UK cannot be in the single market without all four freedoms. Which the UK still rules out.
That would be the rational and sensible solution. This may be why it’s unlikely to happen. I would be happy to be wrong.
Won't happen without a war - so hopefully not within my lifetime, but playing make believe is fun sometimes.
It also includes context about ongoing emergency EU security meetings and the Trump administration.
No single market, no freedom of movement, unfortunately.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.
Unfortunately we haven't seen enough demand in the UK to set up a UK only infra (nor are there any UK cloud providers that would work for us?)
A UK firm would be perfect as a brit, but just not-US is great.
Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community. Progress was gradual, sure, but it was real. Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.
Now, though, it’s all about "national sovereignty" and "independence" as if going it alone could ever match the strength of interdependence.
The trust we built feels shattered and TBH it’s hard to imagine it being rebuilt anytime soon, if ever.
(And then only in the ideal perfectly spherical cow world where single issue voters don’t exist…)
While nailing down all the particulars can be daunting I think the basic sketch as above is what people mean most of the time pretty uncontroversially.
This doesn’t make sense as a response… you can’t gain that kind of credibility just by stating opinions.
And even if millions do so, it’s still just talk, unless consistently reflected at the ballot box.
Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.
A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.
Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.
In your example they would probably just have puppet citizens who buy land on their behalf. Sure the cost would be a bit higher because the puppets would demand some commission, but hey it’s the cost of running business.
It’s close to impossible to regulate concentrated money. See the drug cartels or Musk as two examples. The cartels operate their own army in South America completely ignoring government regulation. Musk bought an entire gov for himself.
Also, consider the more "puppets" needed, they less stable the system becomes, and the more likely a "puppet" exposes the system (as whistleblowers in the mafia).
In any case, the thinking can't be "it's too hard, we can't do anything anyhow" because then society is really f-ed and the rich get what they want: hopelessness and conformity.
Again, there are examples of northern & Scandinavian countries that did this with great results. It's just a matter of pushing through.
No it's not. A fundamental human freedom is to build or to buy a house. Nobody is owned a house.
Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
And this is all before you even break ground.
You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.
Your argument is totally disingenuous and pedantic, you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath the footing and make this argument. In your car analogy, a house without a deed is like a car without a title, you don't own it in any useful sense.
If the agreement includes the land, septic system, etc., then sure, absolutely. Likewise, I could also sell my car with the driveway it is currently sitting on, given a willing buyer, and it would equally be fraud if I ripped up the driveway. Lawyers can draft up all kinds of different agreements as far as your imagination, and another willing party, can take you.
But it is not unheard of to sell a house alone. Granted, houses are becoming massive – with the average home today being twice the size of the average home in the 1950s – which makes them harder to load onto a trailer, let alone fit down the road, and thus seeing less and less of it, but it was somewhat common in the past to move a house (and I don't mean a mobile home) from one property to another. They are clearly distinct things.
But, most importantly, the context of discussion explicitly removed land from the equation. It was posed under a theoretical assumption that there were no land constraints. To keep talking about the land in that context doesn't make any sense.
You could theoretically buy a shell of a house in a vacuum but it would be condemned the second it drops off a trailer. It's not useful in a vacuum, no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
Nobody is talking about housing prices, so... They are pointlessly squabbling over whether or not a house and land are the same thing, when it is obvious that they are not.
>Nobody is talking about housing prices
Actually we were?
Nobody but you thought land and a house is the same thing. House prices include the land they are on. Unless you are living on the space station or sea steading, the land and infrastructure is part of housing prices.
I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
We were earlier talking about the cost to build a house. I suppose that is close enough to satisfy your historical observation, but we also moved on from that a long time ago.
> House prices include the land they are on.
It was recognized that we are in different jurisdictions, so maybe things are different where you are, but around here you effectively need to own the land[1] before building the house. How, exactly, can the price include something that doesn't even exist at the time of the land purchase?
Perhaps you are suggesting that once the house is standing and all the bills are paid one might sum it all up and say that is what it cost to get them into a house? Perhaps, but the prices (e.g. the price of the land and the price of the contractor) will still have been observed independently.
> I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
I have no idea how you think someone could take offence to a comment on the internet. It is an emotionless venue.
[1] It is not entirely unheard of to build a house on someone else's (e.g. a family member) land, but in that case it is even clearer that the price of the house is not included in the price of the land.
A "Rules-based world order" has been the rationale of the West for decades: WTO, U.N., free trade, democracy, countries' sovereignty, etc. But this "global community" was lipstick on a pig. From a 3rd World perspective that was just hypocrisy.
The "rules" were always chosen by the rich countries: free trade but keep farm protectionism against 3rd world's cheap produce, sovereignty but not for Palestinians, democracy but not if Chile, Iran or most of Africa or Latin America choose to have socialist leaders (Allende, Mossadegh, etc), ...
And now that even the rules are not advantageous to the rich anymore (e.g.:China's and Mexico's manufacturing, India's and South America's farming) the rich countries are scrapping the rules.
To be frank, it’s more about the rest of the ”west” updating our list of friendly countries. It is the US that has chosen to take an ever more adversarial position lately, pretty much worsening daily.
The trust among the rest of the west feels like it instead is strengthening. I interpret both ”buy European” and ”buy Canadian” as more of ”don’t buy from USA” with a thin layer of politeness.
Hoppe might have been right about democracy.
It worked until emotions entered the picture. "I don't like making chips. I prefer producing steel. Why do you get to have all the fun?" they've said for decades and with increasing furor.
If you could move freely about the world without any restrictions so that those who enjoy steelmaking could easily move to where the steel is made maybe it would have had a better chance, but even then people generally prioritize location (to be close to family, friends, certain amenities, etc.) above all else so it is likely they would still seek a varied local economy despite the benefits of a global economy.
Who says this? TSMC?
And baffling that the country leading the charge on the splintering is the one with most to gain/lose.
Feels like selfharm on scale of brexit
How long ago was not long ago in your eyes?
I'd say, the promise of international trade and globalization uniting the world fell apart some time in the 2000 or 2010s with China showing they would not open up to ideas of human rights and personal freedom. The sales pitch for investing in China (from a political point of view) was that we could trade the communism and fascism out of them.
Then in Russia showed that we couldn't trade our way to peace. The idea was that cheap gas from Russia would make Europe and Russia dependent on either side of the deal, and we wouldn't disturb world peace and break the trade. That didn't go well.
And now America wants to but limit trade with their biggest trade partners and closest allies, in the hopes that it'll bring them manufacturing prowess.
My economics professor in 2005, said the world was more globalized in the wake of WWI. I don't know if that was true, but at least they didn't have passports back then.
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The end result is that you get mixed messages, depending on where the information ultimately came from.
I personally don't know how hard it actually is to comply with GDPR, but I know that it has to be easier than it's made out to be.
This decreases the attack surface for loopholes. What is desirable is the end result, not the technical details.
The law is actually clearer because the intent is clearly spelt out. The point of the law is to protect privacy, not cover every screen with cookies banners.
This leaves room for different implementations and flexibility (yay, competition).
It makes the law more resilient, because it does not need to be re-engineered every time anything happens. 10 years from now, even if cookies and banners have completely vanished, the core of the law will still be relevant.
This is why debates about the spirit and the letter of laws translate poorly across the Atlantic. Different places have different approaches.
These are trying times.
Article 6
Lawfulness of processing
1. Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:
(a) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;
(b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;
Member States shall ensure that the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned is provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing, and is offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...
With GA, google uses cookies, fingerprinting and all other possible options to track correct attribution from various channels.
So even with ad blockers you can get a pretty accurate picture. It is also tightly integrated with google ads.
Plausible can tell you what users do inside your app. But honestly this is so basic you can pretty much build same functionality with a few sql queries.
That isn't actually true (or at least is only allowed in the "it's a small enough violation of the law that the enforcers have bigger fish to fry" sense).
Cookie banners are required to gather informed consent, which is relevant for two EU legislations: the ePD, which requires it to access or store _any_ data from terminal equipment, and the GDPR which requires it for personally identifiable data. Most people only consider the latter, but the former is a much bigger hurdle to pass.
Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment. That was made very explicitly clear in a 2023 guideline from the EDPB[1].
The one saving grace for Plausible is that the ePD is a Directive, so the actual implementation into law differs by Member country. The claim might be true for some EU countries, but certainly isn't for all.
I've written a longer analysis of this in the context of Plausible for anyone interested[2] (although it might be worth skipping the first section, to get to the meat of the issue).
[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid... [2] https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compl...
Since Plausible is selling a product that clearly claims this, who is on the hook in case a user of Plausible gets a fine?
But GDPR enforcement is more like 'you need to fix this, if you don't you get the fine' - if you are actually helpful and do your duty to improve the process the fine is usually reduced.
As someone living in Europe who watches the EUs best and brightest mostly go to work in consulting firms because the only growth industry in the EU is “companies spending money on regulatory compliance,” it pains my soul.
The funniest part about GDPR is that currently any organization that uses pretty much any US tech is in violation of the latest rulings, including much of the EU government itself running on Microsoft tech.
If you've just been consuming journalist or internet comment narratives on this topic you have no idea.
But please also share the more nuanced take on the GDPR of your lawyer. You can't go around making claims like that without substantiating them ;).
if you're tracking users for analytics using cookies, fingerprinting, or any other method that identifies them (even probabilistically), you generally need explicit consent under GDPR and similar privacy laws. The key point is that it's not just about cookies; any persistent tracking requires consent.
The law mandates that you inform the user if you are setting any type of cookies. So its necessary to have a banner even if you don't need to get consent. You could inform the user in other ways, but cookie banners are easier.
- How much of the product/company's supply chain is in EU (to get an idea of just how European the product is, is it made here or abroad)
- Some way to show if the company is paying "fair" tax in EU (or are profits shifted abroad)
These are difficult datapoints to get, but I wonder if there can be some sort of "community notes" where this data can be crowd sourced and updated on the directory.
So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.
The idea is whether the company has some loophole where the profits are registered in some offshore island in order to avoid taxes, as well as how big part of the product is actually made in europe as opposed as in X non-european country. I have seen a lot of products advertised as being products of the native country when they are actually rebranded chinese products or whatever (I have no issue with chinese products, but if the point is to know which products are european products this is important information).
High-level discussions rarely go down to this level of detail, and from the point of view of the consumers it is not very relevant. What matters is coupling with the US or China, and the relevant regulations.
No it isn’t because the UK is not in the EEA or the single market.
While i'm from EU and I support the movement, after I looked over some numbers it is hard to ditch something like Amazon. 1st thing for me are the prices and monthly I can save at least 100 Euros just from shopping on deals. Second Amazon employs 150k people across EU and this is not a low number (how about them?).
Yes we need alternatives but the rich EU guys also have to invest some. Sometimes I feel that average Joe needs to support the "movement" while rich just mid their own business.
Same goes also with local producers: "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!" Sorry, I'm not in a position to just spend more just because...
As much as Europe wants to be a single market sometimes, every country has different cultures and different economic situations. Where I live Amazon is never the cheapest option (and almost never the fastest to deliver), but 20km to the east of me it's a valid competitor to many online storefronts.
I find almost everything can be had cheaper elsewhere these days, except the Chinese junk like you find on Temu, the enshitification has well and truly sunk in.
I always paste products I find right back into Google and more often than not find them cheaper elsewhere
The last physical thing I bought on Amazon was a Brita glass carafe.
44.99€
The cheapest I can find elsewhere is 49.9O€ with 4.99€ of shipping. Otherwise it's mostly 54.99€ and it's even 59.90€ on Brita's own store.
The other physical stuff in my order history of the last three months are orders made for relatives because they found that it was cheaper on Amazon and wanted to take advantage of my Premium subscription.
So, as always, YMMV.
In the summer we also have farners markets and thise are about the same price as the cheapest stores so i switch to them for fruits and veggies.
I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.
My sister lives in a fairly remote town in France, and they wouldn't dream of leaving a package unattended. It's not otherwise considered an "unsafe" or "rough" or whatever area.
Besides this outrage at the US from EU perspective is mind-boggling, for the first time since I can remember US is moving away from imperialist global polices, and Europe is in a position where they can become an independent global actor after WW2. Sure Trump administration isn't making the process pleasant but Europeans should be happy about these changes. And the tariff situation is nothing the EU has not been doing for decades, Trump did escalate it suddenly, but it is not like EU is not imposing massive tariffs to protect its industry, even at the expense of EU members that have no significant stakes in this industry.
It's not mind-boggling when the US is threatening to take over territories from EU member-states. That's the mind-boggling part: that it is acceptable and normal to the point where it's not even part of the discourse anymore, it's completely normal to have a US president stating a desire to annex Greenland.
Surely Overton's window can't have shifted that much that fast.
On the other hand I do agree on the imperial ambitions part with you, having the USA pull out from being an imperialistic power is definitely something I cheer on, just upsetting they can never seem to do anything with grace and subtlety, have to live up to the stereotypes I guess.
If Trump was not so obnoxious I do not think a lot of people would be welcoming Germany building up its military for example.
What's mind boggling is saying that the US is becoming LESS imperialist, when Trump has threatened to annex both Canada and Greenland, and come out in favor of the most imperialist country in Europe.
Now its actively looking to pull its bases out of Europe and calling for Europe to arm itself. A positive change for EU in the grand scheme of things.
And what about his very clear support of Russia? Is that also a positive change for the EU?
I do not think Trump is supporting Russia, it seems like he does not view them as a threat and is very China focused (which is actually scary since antagonizing China can have far worse consequences). He is also focused on cutting spending/reducing inflation pressure from war/sanctions.
Meanwhile EU, and Germany in particular, built their economic growth on cheap Russian energy - and is now bending over backwards to revive it in a world where energy prices are rising. If Europe took Trumps stance of deescalating Ukraine ASAP, wrapping up the war and ending sanctions - our economy would recover much faster. And it would give EU the resources to build a proper military. Even if Ukraine got all of its territory back its going to be a humanitarian disaster zone for decades and a burden on the rest of the country. I really do not see a winning scenario Europe is pushing for in Ukraine.
That should be the EU's position. I'm sure the citizens of the EU countries would pay more to equip their military with enough resources to do so.
How do I "support local" when purchasing a micro-format PC for running a Cloud node? There's no chip-fab in town. The parts are sourced to two or three different countries.
Buying local is usually more expensive because of economies of scale and comparative advantages. And they are often less scrutinized because of smaller reach. Same thing with "organic" produce actually being more dangerous to eat than processed food in terms of poisoning/bacteria.
Its fine if you can't afford it or don't want to pay the difference, but by and large they are not suboptimal, at all.
I speak specifically about galaxus/digitec which often have more and more available stock than actual amazon in EU, any category has 1000s of items, much better organized and findable. Plus it has many great features not seen or usable elsewhere - directly showing evolution of price across the time, reviews which are absolutely not gamed due to tiny market, so I can rely on them very well (while on amazon its tricky at best). You can easily buy used versions of same item at fraction of the price, its showed at top of each product page.
Their guarantee handling is stellar. And for stuff in stock its next day delivery.
Digitec is not available outside Switzerland, as it's the old franchise name which would have been dropped in Switzerland as well, if it wasn't so well known. But Galaxus has all items of Digitec anyway.
I can highly recommend it, a very nice interface and I had very good customer support over the last decade.
Amazon shines in customer support though.
Search & categorization is entirely broken, the webshop experience is absolutely abysmal. Just order from better online stores. In Germany, I found these (surprisingly ok):
- Kaufland --> https://www.kaufland.de
- Galaxus Deutschland --> https://www.galaxus.de
- Lidl --> https://www.lidl.de (Schwarz IT is building a European Cloud btw!)
- ShopApotheke --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/
- Home24 --> https://www.home24.de/
Then, buying specialized stuff on the actual website is often a decent experience. Just price hunt on sites like Idealo (attention though, Axel Springer!) and proceed to the specific stores from there.
https://www.idealo.de/ --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/
I explicitly avoided mentioning Otto as alternative to Amazon although it is technically the closest. While their shop is ok, prices and customer experience are horrifyingly bad (especially returns and delivery). For an unbiased view:
But it isn't the same thing. Locally grown food tends to taste much better and have higher nutritional value.
Plus, something I didn't expect when I started buying most of my food from my local farmer's market-- these farmers are like friends. Every meal I sit down to eat, I have a direct connection to it's source. Of course I go to "grocery stores" for staples, and it always feels so weird, empty, fake.
Back then, one of the arguments I convinced myself with was that the cloud behemoths had so much to lose on integrity breach that it would just not happen.
It didn’t even occur to me at the time that my data being held hostage in some geopolitical gameplay should be part of the risk assessment.
I'm seriously considering self-hosting as an alternative, in combination with regional cloud services.
Maybe we have an Internet renaissance on our hands, taking it back to its decentralized nature?
(btw: codeberg is the European alternative to Github)
Also it seems to be missing some techs company: pigment, aircall, contentsquare (but not sure if it's a mistake)
If Europe would invest into local startups instead of propping up the real estate bubble, they wouldn't sell themselves to the US for money. Our downfall is by our own design here.
Governments don't create startups but they can 100% create the right legal, monetary and tax incentives to steer private capital and workers towards them, but as long as they are steered towards protecting the interests of gentrified land owners and those of 100-year-old companies, nothing will ever change and we'll just stare at how US and Chinese companies are overtaking us.
Rich people can invest relatively small amounts in hundreds, if not thousands of startups through preferentially treated retirement funds and pay no (or little) tax on the ones that make it big.
This is what has made it so easy to secure funding in the US.
Should Europe do the same? There's definitely an ethical dilemma in making the rich, richer for the sake of innovation.
What do you mean? The European rich have always been getting richer via inheritance regardless of innovation. That's a monetary and legal policy hack that's been in place for decades/centuries here which is how the richest families are centuries old.
Investing in innovation instead would be a much needed breath of fresh air and give current generation of youth some skin in the game instead of a defetist mentality that there's no point in working hard because the zero sum game is rigged. So I don't get your point.
- In Europe, getting funding is literally like pulling teeth. Just to get a measly hundred thousands of € in funding you're expected to provide a comprehensive business plan, financials, etc. that would rival M&A due diligence other places. In Silicon Valley you can get more funding by simply meeting the right angel investor, and providing a good pitch - done deal.
- In Europe, the end goal for many startups is to be acquired by some megacorp or market leader, for something like €10m-€50m. In the US you can multiply that number by 10 or 100, or in general have ambitions of developing the startup into a unicorn.
That was at least how things used to be. US has a long, long history of (risk willing) VC investments - while European countries have been lagging far behind.
Good VC cultures have developed in some European countries for the past 10-15 years, and startups have become more ambitious, but unfortunately there's still a culture of nickel and diming startups. And the places that rob you, will fund you maybe a month or two worth of capital.
EDIT: Should be said, that I'm also from Europe. And as someone else have pointed out in this thread, Europeans hate risk.
As for getting acquired, that's the same in the US. Either you goal is total dominance on your own or getting acquired by Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.
You do have a point, start ups doesn't have access to the same level of uncritical funding. The SV model also isn't ideal, but it should be possible to find somewhere in the middle.
I say this as proud European: the problem isn't just VC culture, it's European culture. In Europe there's an extreme risk aversion to trying things that have nonzero risk of failing.
My mental shortcut has always been "The US never inherited debtor's prison." Historically in the UK at least, getting into a situation where your debts can't be honored was utterly ruinous (this has improved IIUC). In the US, there are strict upper bounds on how much sway creditors can have over you. One could imagine this would result in a chillier credit market when creditors have fewer protections, but ironically, this makes it easier to get credit in the US because creditors don't have another option. Interest on a successful venture is still the quickest path to making one's money grow, so even knowing the debtor could walk away and the worst that would happen is "bankruptcy followed by a judge telling you you get pennies on the dollar of your investment", people still put up the money.
The most obvious example of how failure to pay debt in the US isn't personally ruinous is probably that our current President has filed bankruptcy six times.
(Note: I am speaking broadly and about non-medical debt. Medical debt in the US is ruinous for several significant reasons. But that's generally a non-overlapping concern to most tech-company funding).
Because Europe was not able to print unlimited Euros to flood its economy with free cash like how the US was able to do it thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. But no worries - now that dollar's monopoly is ending, the American investment landscape is also coming down back to Earth. US startups and companies wont be able to burn endless amounts of shareholder/investor money to out-compete and kill all competitors anymore. That should allow all regions in the world to be able to compete.
> That was at least how things used to be. US has a long, long history of (risk willing) VC investments - while European countries have been lagging far behind > Europeans hate risk
Right, that's because Europe did not have zirp-enabled free cash. You can dump millions on all kinds of ideas including dumb ones when you have free cash and still see 1% of them make it big even if 99% of them fail. But when you don't have free cash, you have to be careful.
So finding investment wasn't a problem or issue of the European culture or business landscape. The US being able to burn cash on even dumb ideas thanks to zirp made it appear like it was a problem.
Yes, though they originate from the free-cash printing. Both through the central bank (Federal Reserve) and private banks that were allowed to do fractional reserve lending, the US infused immense cash into its economy, which led to all the phenomena you mentioned. Because in countries that cant have zirp, such overvaluations of stocks and securities are scarce. Indeed, the derivatives market took a life of its own and created derivatives of derivatives backed by derivatives that were loosely tied to real-world assets and that also contributed to the bloat. But the real deal was always the zirp.
Those Europeans who are not at home with that culture move to America. It's been like this for hundreds of years.
It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American companies.
At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic about relocating away from US BigTech.
It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.
Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.
Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.
For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC where they are not strictly NTK.
It's amazing to see people say things like this as if the US was any different before. Trump just put an honest face on fascism and imperialism. Before, they were exercised in a 'polite', polished manner. Even by Obama who stomped down the Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy protesters who got curbstomped on the ground by police would disagree.
> Why did you change your name from Buy European Made to Go European?
> We changed our name to better reflect our evolving mission and values. "Go European" encompasses a broader range of initiatives and activities that support European culture, tourism, and services, beyond just promoting European-made products.
I already pointed it out in another thread about this exact website: Go and search for "keyboard", what's the first search result? Logitech, a company that makes their products almost exclusively in china. There's nothing european about this.
"Yeah but it's a european company so!" yeah i don't care. It's not an european product. It's a chinese product. I don't care if the CEO lives in europe or it has a German flag on the cover or whatever - if the product is made in china, it's not an european product.
Also this is like the 5th time i see this here, which makes me wonder if this is some sort of organic-looking promotional campaign.
Yeah, China sucks. But the US sucks even more.
You are contradicting yourself. There is something European about it.
Anyway, as long as it's not from the USA, it's a win.
Which is the lesser evil, really?
If Brussels wants to try something useful - instead of bottle caps create a proper shipping network that can ship from Malaga to Vilinus in 2 days for 0.5 euro per KG. It is not that we don't have national postal companies. It is absurd to buy something for 15 euro in italy and pay 30 euro shipping to romania.
Shipping individual packages within a short amount of time costs money. The solution is to do what companies like Amazon and AliExpress do: stock up products in many different companies in bulk so that packages can be dispatched locally for much cheaper.
Many of the shipping routes between countries go by plane rather than by boat, filling up unused weight in passenger planes or being shipped in bulk by passenger planes. Planes are a lot more expensive, especially by weight, but you'll get your products within days rather than weeks.
If you're a business importing goods in bulk, you'll have to deal with weeks or even months of delays between ordering and delivery, but international cargo delivery per product is essentially free unless you ship things like cars.
Things will become cheaper as warehouses are spread wider and transport legs get optimized more. Currently, there aren't many companies shipping from Italy to Romania, so there aren't many boats or trains making the journey, and shipping is expensive. When demand grows, more availability will follow, and prices will drop eventually.
Not a shill, just a happy customer.
{hug emoji}
I hope the new attempt you linked will make a difference. This time, international support seems to be at the basis of the system. Widespread integration of a unified form of iDeal/Bancontact/Payconiq could easily replace the need for American style credit card forms across Europe.
I'm an American, and my wife and I have been looking at "Made in…" labels on our products for decades. Not as a geopolitical protest; just as routine intellectual curiosity.
Over the last five years or so, we've noticed a significant shift in the locations listed on the things we buy. A lot of what we buy used to read "Made in China" (and before that shift, "Made in Mexico") but these days more and more of it is from Europe.
Sometimes it's the vague "Made in the EU," which I assume means Turkey or Romania or some other less-fashionable quarter. But increasingly, it's France and Switzerland, and the U.K.
(My personal, completely unscientific guess is that the next shift in manufacturing will be to Africa. Lots of cheap labor close to raw materials and access to both hemispheres by sea.)
So its like what some historians say: The fall of Constantinople was mostly a change of hats.
But easy, it was just one not very sophisticated joke. History is always more nuanced that those who try to use it.
Preferable in French or Italian, or maybe even German, which I wanted to learn for a long time and this would be a good enough motivation, because, and with all due respect to the Irish, having a continent-wide conversation in a language natively spoken by only ~5 million of its own people is not very conductive to the forming of an European spirit.
Also, please no regarding the language. Coming from a small country, it's great that we have a lingua-franca that we can use to communicate effectively. Doubling-down on going native when it comes to our respective languages won't help the single market, or European integration in general.
EDIT: Won't help our militaries either if and when they'll need to coordinate.
Did something happen to the UK?
I don't see the value add of an international forum with local languages. There's a great Dutch tech forum already (tweakers.net) visited almost exclusively by Dutch and Flemish people. Great for locals, but entirely impossible to join in on as a foreigner.
Also, you may be confusing Europe with the EU. The UK has almost 70 million people speaking English every day.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
We do 'import' a lot of services from the US:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[1] Of course, there are US conglomerates that produce in the Europe. But a good chunk (at least here) is Unilever, Nestle, etc., which are all European.
The US makes the biggest margins from valuable IP and software services, not from mass produced widgets coming in shipping containers.
The software situation is grim but maybe open source somewhat ameliorates that...
Using american EUV light sources....this train of who makes what in the supply chain can go on forever, the point is who's making the highest margins from the end product and it's not ASML nor ARM but Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
Hence my point that while EU has some IP, its value is dwarfed by the IP the US makes. Just look at market cap of US vs European tech sector. It's not even a competition. ASML can't offset that. I think Apple has enough cash in the bank to buy ASML if they wanted to.
Sadly, SwiftKey is/was actually a UK company that was acquired by Microsoft. Most successful European tech start-ups seem to end up being acquired by one of the American tech giants. Perhaps this is will be ending now.
The day the US drops the Cloud Act would be the death of all European CSPs. Until then, cloud offerings not subject to it will thrive, and the US will be seen as hostile.
And for all other subjects, it's a simple matter of not putting all of your eggs in the same basket. Having privileged trade partners is a good thing, but it becomes a bad one when it's a partner (singular). Today, the US has full power on Europe's tech landscape, which is concerning, even if it's a friend country.
Oh, and I say a "friend country", but given the latest announcements where the US Govt. clearly targets Europe and wants to sanction it (e.g. tariffs on French exports), the friend is turning around.
TL;DR today Europe does not see the US as an enemy. But it does everything for it to never happen, and this include reducing the dependency on the US.
In my view, we (Europe) have long been acting foolishly by passively sitting in the back seat and allowing the US to drive for us, thereby creating a radical dependency. This wouldn't be healthy even if the US were the most loyal ally. What Trump's antics are doing is trigger a return to what should have always been the norm.
Quite telling, this would be an ideal case for Scaleway/OVH/anyone else.
gov and mil aren't available to non-American institutions anyway, and .edu locked down to American-only around 2001.
Perhaps this website could've gone with .eu, but this movement is larger than just the EU. I don't think TLDs matter much at the moment, at least not until America's trade war starts affecting TLDs as well.
Heck, I can make a safe bet that the vast majority of the companies listed here sell items at least partially made outside of Europe.
We should have unilateral free trade. Ricardo showed this was better over 200 years ago.
I hoped Americans had stopped being stupid and elected better leaders, but Trump's re-election shows that America and its people do not care about being reliable business partners. Ridding ourselves of American dependence will take decades, but with at least four more years of this bullshit ahead of us, we'd better get started soon.
If Trump wants to make Americans poorer then so be it, but we shouldn't follow suit.
Now, now. Because Trump is 'hOrRiBLe' for putting an honest face on fascism and imperialism that always existed in the US and its vassals, we have to have outrage and do the very things we criticize him for doing.
For digital products and services there is also European Alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu/
As part of the European reorientation I avoid products and services from Hungary and Slovakia. I also avoid one specific Swedish company, Spotify, for promoting and funding the misinformation spewing American podcastbros who were partially responsible for the rise of Trump 2.0.
Then, why do you promote a list of European Reddit "alternatives" such as "Lemmy", you say people are supposed to use instead?
This is the laziest form of internet activism there is: lecture people what you believe they're supposed to be doing in ways you don't yourself do, and can't be inconvenienced to try.
(Bonus points for building this boycott website on top of Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, and Google Analytics).
I am just going to leave this here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Edit: Thanks for the responses, I am still looking for a signal that tells my post is sarcasm multiplied by cynicism.
I expect the EU commission will take a _very_ long time to actually act on this tho. Maybe we'll see Schrems III first.
You can argue the rights and wrongs if you want but all that matters is the US cannot be trusted.
The EU is realizing that one of their major trade partner, who they trusted with critically important goods and services, might pull the rug under their feet.
Not to mention that the EU in itself is already a huge achievement in terms of free trade agreements between EU countries.
Depending on global interconnectedness of markets has not and will not save us. We need to divest and disconnect from all economies which are not reliable liberal democracies which broadly share our values.
I would include in this Hungary: We should be giving serious thought to how to kick them out of the EU.
In this case, no I don't think Romania should be kicked out. Restrictions on party membership are complicated, but it seems here the courts have applied Romania's electoral law. We are going to have to be smart to avoid situations like this in other EU countries, where Russian, Chinese or US money are used to support non-democrats.
Europe is big enough as an internal market to sustain a good quality of life for the majority of the population — even if our 1% are disadvantaged relative to those in US, Russia. We have the capital and resources to defend ourselves too. We can open outward to Canada, Australia, democratic parts of Asia, Africa. But we need to avoid any dependence on powerful authoritarian regimes like China, India, the US, Indonesia etc.
Civilisation is organising in larger and larger groups - everyone becoming more dependent on each other and having laws and so on to resolve problems instead of fighting.
.....so somehow, for the sake of making Star Trek and all those wonderful science fiction stories possible.....we have to get that dependence back somehow. I'm joking but not joking. Some Americans are reasoable and somehow, for the world to survive, we have to find some way to help reasonable people all over the world to work together. So we can reach the science fiction future.
As a first step we could perhaps agree that individual people could come and live in Europe and participate in our democracy?
I think physical presence is actually quite a good precondition for participation. At least people physically present have some skin in the game.
With a transition period, I'm not sure I'd have a big problem cutting many other links with non-democratic countries. I agree with your ideals but all evidence is that trading and communication links and other sources of interdependence will be abused. We need to have policies which respond to that.
As it looks now, there might be a limit on the scale of global collaboration. There's nothing that says that the trend of global depenence and collaboration will continue (in fact, it is reversing now).
Furthermore, Canada should apply for EU or EEA membership.
Close, but not quite the same. (e.g. free movement of labor would be cool)
This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
The situation with China hasn't fundamentally changed in the last two months. People operate under the assumption of some kind of stability in this relationship. The West imports and exports products from/to China, with some restrictions: critical infrastructure like antennas cannot be built by Huawei in many countries, for instance. People in the West wouldn't use a Chinese email provider, etc. Today China is not an ally, but not an enemy either; rather a partner. There is no reason to expect a change in behaviour right now. It doesn't mean that the West agrees with everything that China does, of course.
Now regarding the US, it has fundamentally changed in the last two months. From the US government threatening to invade allied countries to actively destabilising them through people close to Trump downright making nazi salutes. On top of threatening militarily, the US is attacking its ex-allies economically with tariffs. The people in power in the US are explicitly talking about destroying Europe, and the US is now becoming an ally of Russia (which again makes it look like an enemy to the West).
Two months ago, people were operating under the assumption that the US was an ally. Now it's a partner that is going down the slope of becoming an enemy. Go ask if Canadians or Europeans feel threatened by China right now. Ask the same question about the US.
So yes: people are more scared of the US right now, and the US look more like enemies than China right now.
> This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
TL;DR: It is obviously resistance, against the US becoming an enemy. There are two obvious reasons for finding alternative to US products:
1. If it hurts the US economy (and therefore the US citizen), the hope is that maybe they will realise that Trump is not helping them and push for stopping this madness. The US won't get back to beeing trusted allies anytime soon (that ship has sailed), but they could stop from becoming enemies of the West.
2. National security: the US cannot be trusted, so it is very urgent for the West to turn to alternatives and run away from the US as fast as they possibly can.
He even threatened to invade a country that is part of the EU