Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options | Hacker News Reader

Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

theregister.com

336 pointsrippeltippel285 comments

Called it, again.

Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service.

Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that the US-centric technology catalog (from hardware to software to services to clouds) cannot be trusted long term, as just a single bad administration will expose how easily the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China or Russia. Welp, now we’re here.

Man, I hate being right.

While I don't like the politics giving rise to this, de-globalization combined with the great social media unbundling and other trends means we might finally see decentralization be a major trend (outside of the cryptocurrency ghetto).

Overall I think this is a good thing. It could mean the end of the monolithic closed SaaS era, which is the absolute worst possible model for software if you care about privacy or any kind of personal or business sovereignty.

I would guess that for the most part we won’t have “true” decentralization, but given the EU has mandated interoperability between big providers like Apple and Facebook I can imagine that we will eventually have major services that are EU centric (either in certain markets or most/all of the EU), and there will be ways for people to use their own setup as well (basically multi polar distribution, plus the ability for someone to do it themselves).

> I can imagine that we will eventually have major services that are EU centric

I work in a research project in a EU country that looks at how educational certificates (diploma's, degrees, credentials) will be done in the future.

A big part of it, are requirements and frameworks imposed, dictated or assumed by governments, commissions, universities, etc. The most important¹ parts of these requirements are:

- it must be self-sovereign. Not decentralized per-se, but technically often one step further than decentralized. My diploma, in my wallet (mobile?) is mine. I hold it, I am free to share it, delete it, copy it.

- it must be separated from the issuers. A person getting a degree might outlive a university, high school, or their servers/services.

- it must be privacy preserving - GDPR and better.

These constraints tell me that the EU, and EC are serious about decentralization and self-sovereign-identities. Which is very different from what local or current governments like and want - At least one EU government is in conflict with its universities and wants to be the gatekeeper of diploma's - they truly want the ability to deny or retract diploma's from people who they don't like.

Which, ironically, makes these constraints and requirements all the more important and critical in e.g. our projects. It went from a "decentralization is nice because in theory someone could..." to "decentralization is critical to ensure no-one, on any end of any political spectrum can take away diploma's as is currently being attempted".

(And for the curious: I work with W3C, openId, IETF and many more standards and -bodies. Verifiable Credentials, OpenBadges v3, OIDC4VCI, VP, etc)

¹ Edit: well, maybe not "most", as there isn't a clear prioritization. And obvious requirements such as "you cannot just fake a diploma" are probably higher in priority.

I personally dread the world in which physical supply chains get decentralized. A multi-polar world is a tinderbox.

> A multi-polar world is a tinderbox

Meanwhile, a unipolar is totally fine....

These things exist on a spectrum, and interdependency, collaboration, partnership, make for a more prosperous and safe world.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-cloud-make...

Just gonna leave this here.

There is tech decentralization and and manufacturing decentralization. Both are being treating equally right now; however, frankly, they probably shouldn't.

Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.

Manufacturing, imo, makes a lot more sense to be spread based on strengths and weaknesses and the logistics benefits (localize supply chains closer to end product).

The current US admin has certainly exposed some of the pitfalls of being technologically reliant on America. Honestly, the main outcome of this will be lower economic/job prospects for American tech employees. It will soon be that having a branch of Microsoft in Europe is not quite the same as utilizing actual European countries.

I would really like to see this trend reversed, but I am afraid some of the damage is already done and will take a long time, if ever, to recover. It would not surprise me if some of this damage is intentional, since it will actually take power away from west coast tech - a population that tends to vote in one direction.

> Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.

Outside Trump — not all Republicans, specifically Trump — the USA was as close to being Europe's buddy as I think it's possible for nations to be.

I'm not convinced nations can actually be buddies, but even with my cynicism, Bush's administration was Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, while Trump is behaving like each "deal" is a completely independent Prisoner's Dilemma.

And yes, that's despite how much we mocked GWB (I even got quoted on the national news for doing so!), and despite how America mocked itself with Team America: World Police, that version of the country still saw itself as needing to go through the motions of friendship.

Would love to see a ditching of not just tech in favor of homegrown options.

I admit that I was initially on the globalization bandwagon, but in hindsight it resulted in products being made in countries with the cheapest costs which led to a decrease in quality and the destruction of smaller, more local businesses.

Go to a tourist area anywhere in the world and you'll be confronted by the same businesses--Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple Store, H&M, Zara. It's the homogenization and boringification of the world.

Making more stuff in the countries with the cheapest costs also means that people in those countries are being lifted out of poverty. China's GDP per capita went from ~350USD in 1990 to 12.500USD in 2023 and similar growth happened for India, Bangladesh and lots of other poorer countries. Globalization brought affordable goods to wealthy nations and better living standards to poorer nations. In addition, closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict.

Smart wealthy countries understand these benefits and move their own economies to higher value creating activities like deep research, high tech development or financial services. Less smart wealthy countries try to erect trade barriers to force a return of uncompetitive manufacturing...

I’m all for poorer countries getting a slice of the pie. Long term I’m not convinced it’s beneficial for the whole population of richer countries to continue, but rather only the elites of those countries. The amount income inequality has skyrocketed in recent decades sort of undermines the theoretical benefits economists love to tout.

Nowadays manufacturing does not have to be uncompetitive. Advances in automation balance out wage disparities. They also provide more chances for a country to retain its skilled workers. Unions in developed nations can help the systematic power imbalance between capitalists and workers.

It's especially beneficial for the poorest people in the developed nation. In the 1940 US, the poorest 20% spent almost their entire income on basic needs, such as food and basic clothing. Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations. Yes, globalization has massively increased market sizes, making the richest much richer. But it also made the poorest much richer.

> Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations.

Well 1940’s being a wartime era would be a bad time to compare to. It’d be best to compare to compare to just before globalization, probably 1960’s, 70’s, or even early 80’s.

Smartphones and flatscreen TVs aren’t necessities. Sure it’s great they’re cheap but they’d be cheap anyway. Only a fairly small fraction of manufacturing costs are due to labor based on leaked iPhone costs I’ve seen that were like 10’s of dollars.

At the same time housing costs have increased massively in the last 2 decades. Worker wages in most fields have not kept apace productivity gains. It’s worse in affluent areas where “free” money has skyrocketed housing prices. Perhaps it’s not related to globalization but it seems partly due to it.

You’re missing another ingredient: taxing the rich fairly will do a lot of goods

Meanwhile people in the West are being dropped into poverty.

The environmental costs of globalisation are (literally) horrific.

And a surprising amount of it is useless makework - disposable "fashion", faddy toys, and shoddy consumer goods that break after a couple of years.

As for lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?

Sorry, could you elaborate on "Meanwhile people in the West are being dropped into poverty."?

As for " lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?" - pretty well, thank you. Deaths in armed conflicts have massively decreased since the 1980s with most of them originating from local wars in Africa prior to 2022. (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) - the Ukraine conflict is a return of exactly the kind of imperialist expansion that we've seen in the leadup to World War 1 which happens when isolated countries with territorial ambitions seek to expand.

If you keep squeezing the middle income class, that’s the direction you’re going: poverty.

Regardless of the existence of Manufacturing.

Tax your rich fairly and you will see major shift.

I'm curious - in 2021, the top 1% earned 26% of all income in the united states. What % of total contribution to the country's federal income tax would you consider fair?

Wealth tax. Capital gain tax.

Not income tax.

Do the top 1% income tax include those people whose wealth increase because of their assets? Something to ponder…

We shouldn’t tax productive workforce more (in fact, we should tax less). We should tax unproductive assets more and redistribute.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Worked for multinational companies and the typical chatters are:

- US based employees get taxed less on RSU maturity but have to figure out how much they owe the Government afterwards.

- Meanwhile, EU and Canada based employees are all paying top rate tax and get refunded afterwards.

Interesting that US is the only outlier

> closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict

This was 100% what Europe believed and the Merkel administration in Germany more than anyone. Not to bring politics into HN intentionally, but I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and threats of invading Poland, Finland, and Germany from Russian spokesmen or MPs kind of throws cold water on this theory.

No matter how well meaning you are, you can't expect dictators and "strong men" to ever act in anything but bad faith. It is time the west realizes this and acts accordingly. As an American, I'm sad to see the "de-americaning" happening due to those here who elected a bad administration, but I can't say it is surprising. Ultimately, a less weak and less dependent on the US Europe is a net good for the world. Europe collectively being able to put a check on the US forces the US to not do stupid things, so this is good long term.

I agree with what you're saying, but lowering the risk does not mean completely eliminating the problem. It's always hard to argue the counterfactual, but I feel the number of conflicts since 1990 that HAVEN'T happened due to countries being economically dependent on each other is significant.

The approach overall is a good one. It’s mutually assured (economic) destruction.

Dictators just don’t care however and Europe hasn’t had a ton of those since the 90s sans Putin.

That's ignoring all the times when closer trade ties did lower the likelihood of armed conflict - not in the least, within Europe itself.

I agree that we badly miscalculated Russia, but not every actor is Russia and willing to tank its own economy for revanchism.

Note that I said specifically dictators, and most of Europe isn’t that. The closest would be Orban and maybe Erdogan. But Hungary is seemingly a disliked minor player. Turkey is actually interesting in that Erdogan is a strong man and he’s actually really good at it seemingly. He’s also got a very modern and well trained military.

The US also isn't a dictatorship yet and certainly wasn't when we started becoming so dependent on them.

You can try avoiding dealings with any autocracies, but that's really hard given our modern world and it's not like other democracies can never screw you over. I think it's more realistic to demand that we diversify our imports so that we can react to things like Russia's Ukraine invasion better.

This reasoning completely ignores NATO essentially trampling over red lines established with Russia in the past, doing a soft coup in Ukraine in 2011 and reverting their stance on Ukraine joining NATO.

NATO is the reason Russia attacked, not because "Germany was soft". Over-reliance on an external parter for a strategic economic input (cheap gas) was also a huge mis-step (all while shutting down self-reliant nuclear plants), but doesn't really dispute the "closer trade lowers likelihood of conflict" argument.

Or put in another way, Ukraine can't be free and get a shot at democracy because imperialistic Russia deems it its sphere of influence.

And no amount of denouncing US hypocrisy in defending democracy will make me change my mind. Two wrongs doesn't make a right and if it happens that Pax Americana allows a country to take a more democratic route, then let it happen.

Or as some Ukrainian said :

"We are not Russian doorstep, we are free, independent Ukraine. F** you"

> countries with the cheapest costs which led to a decrease in quality and the destruction of smaller, more local businesses.

So, you alone declare that it has led to these things so everyone should isolate and drive up costs and share less? I get that we can't let the free market go unchecked, but free trade seems fundamental to competition and innovation.

Despite the McDonald'ses, Amsterdam is not very boring or like, say, Prague.

I don't go to a touristy city for the shopping. Thanks to the Internet, I can already do that from anywhere, really. Sometimes I go to a touristy city for restaurants, but the presence of McDonald's doesn't take away from the dizzying array of typical food options in these places. Plus, globalization, to some degree, made it easy for a Dutch chef to come to my city to open a restaurant.

Maybe it's a blessing in disguise, yes. But I wrote up here [0] about how sad this makes me feel. We've squandered a huge opportunity this past 20 years by allowing BigTech to emerge and basically destroy the good political agenda of the original (D)ARPA project. Sure it was hegemonic. Sure we screwed up with things like "Arab Spring".

But I cannot stop feeling the Internet was the greatest tool of democracy and liberty - and we messed it up by allowing weak minded greedy and insecure types to take over.

It's no surprise that the latest brand of technofascist thugs targeted "data" as the new power-lever. "Flipping" carefully installed defective leaders is a new kind of threat and a new kind of attack we need to think about more in cybserscurity.

I don't think it needs us to be Cassandras for everyone to understand (vigilance is the essence of democracy) that if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily. I'm also quietly optimistic that taking it back won't be such a big deal as we fear. We'll just have a lot of repair work to do when this sad episode is over. I think a Euro-centric rebuild will be a useful step towards a healed global vision again. One day.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/layer10/

My personal perspective is that our (technology evangelists) mistake was constantly lowering the barrier to entry under the guise of removing "gatekeeping" abilities of entrenched players. This idea that technology would be this great equalizer, lifting everyone up together and spreading free access to information to everyone would somehow solve so many of our ills.

The reality is that most people do not care enough about the systems of life to educate themselves, and bad actors exploited this constant lowering of the barrier to entry by flooding these forced-participants with advertising, "free" services, and a glut of cognitohazards. We created a world where authenticity comes not from expertise, but how pretty and usable your website is - and that had knock-on effects our elders tried to warn us about (just look at games like Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, and similar cyberpunk games of the era and how they warned about mass surveillance, forced adoption of technologies, centralization of infrastructure, etc).

> ...if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily.

This is what I've been trying to instill in others for nearly twenty years, since my days of playing SysAdmin in High School and bypassing proxy-based web filters to get to Newgrounds. To truly be participatory in any community, you must volunteer time in bettering it somehow. Maybe volunteer to be a moderator and improve site policies, or donate surplus resources towards self-hosting, or just helping folks move to better, less centralized or more community-supported platforms.

How I see it digital literacy 1.0 was crude stimulus and not at all disguised, to get globally competitive in the new microprocessor wave, and in the late 70s and early 80s Japan, and to a lesser extent USA were players at the time. BASIC for school kids was like cod liver oil in the workhouse gruel. It made us strong. The "equaliser" worked out well for the few, ones like me, maybe you. Digital literacy 2.0 is a different project. It's to enable those two generations removed, who natural tech users facing de-stimulus and social warehousing, what that tech is really for and who really controls it. Keep at it.

Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS.

LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....

I’m all for open source but suggesting libre office is perfect is a bit too much for me

Perfect for 98% of the things government officials are using Word, Excel and PowerPoint for...

If you have a spreadsheet with macros that are anything more than the most basic, you can't run it in Calc. It's not that trivial.

The 2% ...And your company logic should not be in the Macros.

"The Wall of Shame for the Worst Excel Errors" - https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...

Right, so your argument is that this is easy, and if it turns out that it's not, we'll just be smug and tell them that they were holding it wrong all along?

It sounds like you are picturing in your head that all spreadsheet work is greenfield. Do you have any idea how much Excel code is embedded everywhere? Very often made by people who are no longer around. You can lecture all you want, but this is the situation. I don't like it either.

Relax...the weekend almost here... :-)

Did not intend to be smug...honestly..not really. :-) In my defense, I have more than 20 years corporate experience in tech AND finance domains, in more than 25 countries. And in the cultural domains of the five different languages I am familiar and whose grammar I regularly brutalize. Can't recognize the problem you are describing, as the mountain that would stop any company from start using LibreOffice.

All that logic in Excel sheets is just a serious governance problem...

"How an Excel error cost JP Morgan $6 billion" - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eriklidman_how-an-excel-error...

Good enough for the vast majority. Just not the ones making the decisions. And when it is changed, you have to fight all m$ because it keeps breaking formats and compatibility let alone standardisation with others.

LibreOffice works for 99.99% of the cases where Microsoft Office is being used. Moreover, NextCloud offers a free "LibreOffice on the web" capability if you prefer.

Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice.

Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).

I got access to a NextCloud instance as part of my Hetzner storage.

Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works.

I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!

Installing it on a bare metal server is equally easy. Not a walk in the park, but half a day at most, with server optimizations and polish.

It updates nicely too. I'm managing one for ~4 years now, and it's painless.

Nobody calls for me for support either. I think this is, good?

It is not perfect, but in a number of areas it is significantly better than MS Office, and this has been the case since it was still OpenOffice back in 2005: I'd import collaborative schoolwork into Open Office to fix the mismatch of styles that other students had used[1] and then (to be fair) I'd export it back to Word format and do final formatting in Word to get the exact layouts and page numering options that was demanded from us.

Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.

If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.

A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.

With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.

List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.

[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

Genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?

I don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world. Excel still "supports" buggy issues from versions in the 1990s as to not break financial models.

IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.

I know what you mean, but now you're talking about a very niche market. Finance, which uses Excel or spreadsheets since 90s. You can't replace these, I agree.

But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about.

It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2, 3000x3000, double precision floating point matrices, and a couple of vectors and some multiplication (i.e. in a range of a couple of billions)".

I remember back in the 00s Excel could support millions of rows on an office PC used in a bank department to check approvals for loans. I don't want to know what perversions they're doing now but at some point all that needs to get in normal DBs.

Excel has native DB connectivity for quite some time. Maybe they were using that, actually?

Libreoffice Calc also supports the same thing over ODBC AFAIK.

Damn, you might be right. I even made a tutorial on Excel ODBC for our sales department recently and completely forgot it's ancient tech. But even then, why in the hell would you query that much shit outside of management diagrams...

I recently switched from Excel. I'm not a FOSS ideologue, but I found that Calc does more of the things I need with less of the distraction, more customisability, and less irritation with bugs and breaking updates.

It's true I'm not a spreadsheet power user - but not many people are.

The trouble is that excel really does have a disproportionate share of all the tiny applications that keep the world running, so it's very very hard to move.

It sounds like a niche market, but every company in the world has a finance department that plugs everything from sales forecasts, various inputs (goods, employment, supply chain components, etc), to things we don't even think of that flow through it. At some point these companies are talking with other companies and a shocking amount of data interchange is done by emailing excel spreadsheets around (or CSVs exported from excel).

I forget about it myself as I've worked for modern tech companies since 2008, but outside of that world is a very different place where old ways of doing things stick around. Anecdotally, about 2 years ago I got a cold email from a co-op job that I had in 2002 for a manufacturing company that I wrote a perl script for asking for help modernizing it. The perl script consolidated raw EDI(1) files coming into some ancient HP-UX machine, then exported it...to an excel file, MS Access DB, and a SAP DB so that the accountants and the manufacturers could simultaneously get work processing the order. When I started people were inputting these all manually.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange

> I don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world.

Most people working in software understand this as a huge chunk of software projects are "let's get these people off of their spreadsheets!"

Client company of mine likes to document server rack layouts with Excel sheets (not a bad idea really). I used LibreOffice for years to _read_ those Excels, but any time I would write the smallest change the whole Excel sheet broke... In the end I just bought Office (one-time payment still exists) and while that company is using Macs and I'm using Windows we never have any problems sharing and modifying those xls files.

Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

> LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets.

Citation very much needed :-)

Excel on the other hand is barely usable for anything that involves formulas for us who are forced to used the localized version.

In fact if one is stuck with a localized Excel the easiest way is often to write in LibreOffice Calc and then export it to xls format.

I would much rather see a viable alternative to Google Docs with at least an attempt at feature parity.

I have yet to see a solution that has a chance at comparison, especially considering performance and features.

Nah, it is not gonna be that simple. Office is not just editing software, that would be fairly easy to replace, Office is a collaboration suite, provides documents storage, provides authorization and authentication that can be integrated with practically anything companies, governments, universities are using.

Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email?

Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.

Easier than it looks.The EU is currently still sending 200 Billion EUR a year in oil and gas imports to Russia per year.

A peanuts project of 100 million EUR ( basically one Microsoft Global Customer Contract...) could get something like this or similar going within 24 months:

https://www.collaboraonline.com/

As long as it would not be managed by EU bureaucrats. Otherwise the tenders would take 18 months....

It seems the Microsoft influencer team [1] is again all over this thread. They must have some alerts...

Reminder LibreOffice for most things is better than Office - Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

[1] "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community..."

[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...

A proof Microsoft has sock puppet accounts here, from the words of their own CEO, selectively down voted out of a whole thread...Fascinating....

Suggesting LibreOffice 19 years after Google Docs is so weird to me.

Are you expecting people to shuffle around single files to each other every time something is changed? Is that what we consider perfect?

Except for emailing Linux kernel patches...:-) Do people for example do that with Code in 2025? Or do they use Version Management and Shared Portals with document locking?

Are most companies having three or four employees working in the SAME document at the SAME time? Maybe while singing Kumbaya over Teams? That would not be very efficient...

Or just use: https://www.collaboraonline.com/

It's about not putting your data in the hands of a US company.

Collaboration can be managed by offline servers that facilitate that. Not everything needs to be in a web page.

The files can be on a shared filesystem with open file locking, the word processing suite is irrelevant.

Samba existed long before google docs and already did this.

We only use google because of the convenience of having everything in one interface. I think this is the real issue, we are all so lazy we would rather give away our freedom for a little bit of convenience.

A suggestion to dump Office and Teams and move out of Windows, selectively down voted out of a whole thread...Fascinating....

>the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China

You typed this on hardware made by a hostile state actor: China.

As long as the hardware side of digital civilization is completely dependent on the Chinese communist regime, I certainly don't worry about American tech companies dominating the software side.

There are alternatives on the software side if you want them, meanwhile try to build a computer system without hardware made in China..

> hostile state actor

Source?

Obama just made a random decision to make a China pivot. We had a large force in the Middle East and instead of just bringing them home, we created this weird apparatus to shift the strategy over to China. This is similar to if your company decided to introduce Agile. That extension of your company will never go away, and will have ideas.

The idea that “someone is stealing our technology” is just an idea, similar to “developers don’t give good estimates or timelines”. An idea that will feel like the right idea to all, and will be copied. Copy cat culture exists in war too (why are you fighting them? Because they are fighting me).

This is a contrived problem, and demagogues like Trump seized on it. Was it all Obama’s fault? Not quite. Bush had already created a war apparatus in the 2000s, and there was no turning it off, just turning it around and pointing it somewhere else.

——

We are the storytellers of this history, we lived it. We are the primary sources, don’t doubt your ability to document this history. AI was never imagined in the halls of Research to create a never ending forever digital war.

I’ll paraphrase Jensen Huang regarding China:

You can’t keep a country behind

Data sovereignty is a piece of cake, you can survive here easily, unless with some inconvenience like lack of access to Netflix fake documentaries.

European Union decided to sing EU–Mercosur Association Agreement, which will make European agriculture unable to sustain in comming years. As a result in case of war, sea routes blockade or Mercosur teaming up with Russia (what is happening anyway) Europeans will die from starvation.

There is nothing wrong with global software, as long as it is self-hosted open source that you can control and you mitigate the risks by contributing back time and money to the projects you use.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1013614/e52394a236575047/

Lets see if they put cash where there mouth is they should have been pouring billions of dollars into opensource software instead of paying Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle etc in the first place. Europe countries have been client states of the USA for decades and just do whatever USA wanted first time USA has hurt their own interests so are waking up to the fact.

And there were so many wakeup calls... Microsoft alone would be reason enough to not use any of their software. They've been breached how many times in the past years?

Microsoft is huge and produces a ton of software. The bigger the surface area and the bigger is their popularity and number of consumers, the more the breaches. It's not like there's a breach every day. They're being good a patching their software and we have Patch Tuesdays where often they often patch zero day holes.

Last time I've checked they didnt even know if they were still breached after losing highly important keys, for months. And sorry, thats inexcusable.

I was pondering in why the EU never really got targeted directly like Canada and Mexico with Trumps tarifs.

I think this is it.

And it would be incredibly bad for US tech billionaires if the EU started to move home all these contracts.

Nothing so rational, I'm sure. Tariffing Canada was already insane and he didn't care.

Your point exactly - why didn't he do the same to the EU?

His particular personal obsessions? Errant random neuron firings? Who knows. But definitely not an accurately calculated balance of incentives, is all I'm saying.

Who says he won't? I think he is just waiting for the market to stabilize first. When the DOW has flattened out and started to rise again, he will do it.

"fentanyl"; this weird conspiracy theory that Canada and Mexico are somehow major drug producers / importers and that they don't do enough to stop it or "illegal immigrants". Even though only 1% of fentanyl enters the US from Canada.

Look, I'm both Canadian and not a supported of Trump, but people keep repeating this "1% of fentanyl enters from the US from Canada", and it's a little disingenuous. 1% of the fentanyl entering the US that is CAUGHT is CAUGHT at the Canadian border. We don't actually know how much is entering because we aren't catching or examining everything. Admittedly, this is likely because Mexico does produce and export more fentanyl. Carry on.

> Tariffing Canada was already insane and he didn't care.

Was it really ? It seems a bold and smart move. Some Canadian companies have already moved to the USA and many are contemplating moving this year if the tariffs still hold.

Indeed. In many quarterly reports of large tech companies, the revenue from the whole of Europe combined is sometimes bigger than that from the US. European revenue is often a close second.

It's truly significant if this revenue dissapears. Which is why I am baffled by how e.g. Zuckerberg is flailing at Europe and the EU. If EU regulations cut services off, or users move elsewhere out of fear or disagreement, that would be a crippling drop in revenue. For some tech companies enough to put them under, I'd say.

In some ways, these contracts are already 'home' in that the datacenters used are in Europe; they meet all the data protection and locality laws, get certified for it, etc.

But, if the US parent company or its government decides to pull weird shit - like Alexa changing its data collection policy one-sided - it'll be too late to withdraw the data and reliance.

A major current day concern is the US siding with Russia and putting sanctions on the EU by for example pulling the plug on US tech companies' services in the EU unless they also withdraw any military aid from Ukraine. It's a huge escalation but given how unstable and rash the US leadership is at the moment, that's the kind of scenarios we have to consider.

Europe actually has put a bunch of money into open source software. Things like Mastodon come from the EU. Look up the projects funded by NLnet: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

But European open source projects tend to be, you know, open source, so they don't get nearly as much marketing attention as things which have a billion dollars spent on marketing.

its really far less cash than you think, if they make a central clearing house for digital ad sales and anoint a EU wide cloud leader, they have two trillion dollar companies in the next few years with little innovation needed. then use the funds and talent from that to build a tech industry, this is exactly what china did.

It always surprises me that people only act when a problem becomes undeniable, rather than preventing it in the first place. In a country with a voting system and power structure like US, where a single person can abruptly shift the entire nation's direction, this has always been a security flaw for others. It's the same as relying on Russian gas, people pretend the worst can't happen because it would be harmful to everyone, right up until it does.

Reminder that Russian gas is not a closed topic.

Several European countries are still financing Russia's war economy by buying Russian gas. There is no 100% embargo ... yet.

I see a lot of people discussing this as if we are all running on windmills and nuclear, it is absolutely not the case... yet.

I know, but it's always former Russian colonies that fall for their propaganda—partly because some still see Russia as an "old friend." These countries are also much poorer than those in the West, which is pretty ironic since the Russian gas they get isn’t even that much cheaper. It’s more about having the infrastructure in place and simply being used to living next to the Russians.

Nord Stream 2 is beyond repair—just like Russia’s reputation for the coming decades. There may be trade again in the future, but they will never be the sole supplier again.

> but it's always former Russian colonies that fall for their propaganda—partly because some still see Russia as an "old friend."

The largest importers of Russian gas in the European Union are Germany and Italy, accounting together for almost half of the EU's gas imports from Russia. Other larger Russian gas importers in the European Union are France, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Slovakia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

I always think of how people treated Musk after he did the Nazi salute, versus before.

Before, there were all these people saying "Elon Musk is a Nazi" and the response was always "you're overreacting" or "show me where he killed 6 million Jews"

Then he did a Nazi salute. And now, in the minds of the average public (excluding his devoted fans), he's undeniably a Nazi. Just with that one simple gesture.

It seems like you can get away with a lot of bad things as long as you don't telegraph them.

It's a few things but they act in almost every large organization. 1. Valuing everything purely by cost - giving up sovereignty is "cheaper" to do and will only lock you in more as cost goes up, until like you mention there's a tipping point. 2. Seeing support of domestic options as cost rather than investment. This supports issue 1 because it makes it harder to justify the (currently) higher priced domestic alternative. 3. Concrete cost of investing NOW vs possible future cost of fixing an issue later. This is why every app on a long enough time scale becomes 100% tech debt.

Finally! At least one parliament wants to invest in local technology and give the region a fair chance, rather than going with the (today) technically superior hyperscalers. There's no discussion that e.g. Azure solves a lot of problems that EU clouds don't solve today, but diversifying some bets to a local market will definitely pay dividends in terms of local economy and knowledge growth. I hope it pays off.

I am curious if this post will be deleted by the moderators, like the last time a discussion about European tech sovereignty was brought up on this American website.

They don't remove posts that discuss European tech sovereignty. It was probably flagged by the community instead.

Everything that can be connected in a negative way to the current government gets flagged, so this will probably get flagged soon too.

You would say that they are shielding themselves from Trump or his minions and are as opportunistic as every other tech based company? To be fair I do not see much of the critiques to the "other side" either. Someone can just perceive this as a politics and just doesn't need it in his information space.

This feature has definitely been abused by fans of the current US administration. Anything close to being critical gets flagged and needs manual intervention to be brought back.

The post disappeared from my home page, though I can still find it when searching. Is anyone else experiencing this issue? I hope the free speech administration recognizes the flagging as satire, but such nuance will probably go over their heads

I hope the free speech administration...

well right there is where you went off the rails isn't it.

These people never said they supported free speech. Maybe people assumed that's what they were saying? But that wasn't actually what any of them said.

Mostly what they were saying was that they felt conservative viewpoints were being systematically removed from public discourse. That's subtly different than saying they support free speech.

It and anything mildly questioning the morality of the current moves being made by popular VCs including YCombinator.

I have seen multiple comments on Hacker News suggesting that CEOs should be guillotined.

Could you link to two of them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40087723

Thanks for the effort, I appreciate it, but neither of those are actually calling for anyone to be guillotined. The first is a prediction of what could happen long in the future if certain behaviours continue to worsen and the latter is asking why guillotines aren't valid solutions. Both seem to have been delivered with tongues in cheek.

Have there been any comments suggesting CEOs "should be" guillotined as you claimed above?

> Have there been any comments suggesting CEOs "should be" guillotined as you claimed above?

Fundamentally this is not a question of whether or not I can pull up specific comments that meet your interpretation of my original comment, it’s a question of whether or not Hacker News is permissive of narratives contrary to the interests of Bay Area technology executives. Here’s a few comments (some of them qualified: “I would never advocate for violence BUT…”) celebrating the murder of the United Healthcare CEO:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42318585

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42318319

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42318391

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317953

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349705

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349649

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42328735

The moderation of this forum is incredibly permissive; the people who feel they are being censored are more often than not just getting flagged by the community for posting off-topic political rants that were never permitted here to begin with.

> Fundamentally this is not a question of whether or not I can pull up specific comments that meet your interpretation of my original comment,

If your claim is that HN is demonstrably permissive because there have been multiple calls for people to be executed then it really is a question of being able to back that up with examples, otherwise the "because" aspect of your assertion falls apart. I also find it bizarre that you're framing my reading of "should be guillotined" as an "interpretation" just because it doesn't include jokes. Is that the point we're at with the doublespeak now?

If "x is true because of y" then you should be able to demonstrate y and not change the definition of y after the fact.

> The moderation of this forum is incredibly permissive; the people who feel they are being censored are more often than not just getting flagged by the community for posting off-topic political rants

In terms of viewpoints that can be shared the wider site moderation is relatively permissive. But the people who are feeling censored are explicitly noting three things:

1. Things on one specific topic are being flagged (by "the community," not HN) 2. Even when they relate to technology or startup matters 3. While other political stories unrelated to 1 are still being shared.

> If your claim is that HN is demonstrably permissive because there have been multiple calls for people to be executed then it really is a question of being able to back that up with examples

Let’s accept that no such comments have ever been made on the site (or if they have, they’ve been removed). How do you account for all the comments I linked to which were in favor of killing the CEO?

> 1. Things on one specific topic are being flagged (by "the community," not HN) 2. Even when they relate to technology or startup matters 3. While other political stories unrelated to 1 are still being shared.

What topic are you referring to?

> How do you account for all the comments I linked to which were in favor of killing the CEO?

Why would I account for that at all? It's neither relevant to the claim I responded to (members are calling for guillotines) nor to the broader topic at hand (anything that could be seen as remotely critical of the US administration is being hushed).

> What topic are you referring to?

The actions of the current US administration.

> anything that could be seen as remotely critical of the US administration is being hushed

The US stops sharing air quality data from embassies worldwide (apnews.com) 639 points 448 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274821

> I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks (theguardian.com) 931 points 834 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548

The A.I. Monarchy (substack.com) 213 points 268 comments

(This one is about Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and their relationship with the Trump administration.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229245

GSA Eliminates 18F (nextgov.com) 529 points 482 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221549

All of these threads were posted to the front page in the last month. None of them were flagged, none of them were removed, and similar threads have been getting posted since November of last year. You do not have to look far to find comments and threads critical of the Trump administration on this website. Note that all of these threads were just the ones I happened to see in the last month; if you browse New, posts about the Trump administration (and more specifically Elon Musk) make up somewhere around 10% of all submitted threads. I actually went and checked as I was writing this, and 3 out of 30 threads were related to DOGE or Elon Musk; so exactly 10%.

While I don't doubt that at all, what does that have to do with the censorship of the mildest criticisms?

Hacker News does not censor criticism. Even when these comments get flagged and the accounts making them have a history of bad behavior, I’ve yet to see one of them get banned.

When people complain about this it’s because they think Hacker News is just orange Reddit and that removing off-topic political posts is part of some conspiracy to censor their inane opinions when they were never supposed to be posting them here to begin with.

This isn't Reddit

It is being soft censored by not getting to the front page even though the submission has plenty of upvotes.

TBH, while I feel like this is the way, I’m noticing more and more politicians using this as a way to simply gather more votes with a "cause US bad" angle.

Companies are eager to get your money, so they'll try to get an "EU made" label and use it as marketing as hard as they can, even if 90% of their operation happens outside the EU.

And the way they talk, it seems like decoupling from the US is something trivial done overnight. No, it is not, it’s a kind of a slow process in some areas, and pragmatic decisions must be made along the way.

> I’m noticing more and more politicians using this as a way to simply gather more votes with a "cause US bad"

You typed that like they're wrong

More and more politicians will use this obvious own-goal by Trump to their advantage, and so will more and more competitors to US companies. Yes, it will be a long and slow process.

The Buy Canadian, Bye America campaign from the US's northern neighbors won't change things on a dime, and if the US administration gains some basic common sense the movement might be killed before it grows too large.

Yeah, that Military-Industrial Complex thing that we hated?

Well, now we want one.

It’s like a mortgage. I want one. I need one. But I still hate it.

We don’t hate our Rafales, submarines and nukes at the moment though!

The dislike is for the influence, not the existence of a military industry. See Eisenhower's original speech:

> we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

Exactly, everybody misunderstands this.

Eisenhower realized that we were crossing a threshold where the US would need a specialized military industry and equipment stockpiles, where you couldn't just mobilize and convert civilian production to military production over the course of 2-3 years anymore like we did in WWII. Should war with the USSR break out, things were going to move too fast for that to be viable, and you simply couldn't take your eye off the ball with respect to developing new technologies either.

The military industrial complex during the Cold War is like the tech giants in the 2010s. Everybody understands their importance, and yet you still have to be vigilant about letting them leverage that into too much political power. That's the point he was trying to get across. The MIC would be highly necessary, but vigilance was required to avoid letting their interests push the government around.

> The dislike is for the influence, not the existence of a military industry.

While true, this feels like a difference without a distinction. It's like saying "We don't want something humans always do, without fail, but we want humans."

a) that was noted European socialist Dwight D Eisenhower's phrase

b) the entire history of Europe from before the first world war (+) has been tied up with industrialized war. It was sufficiently awful that great steps have been taken to move away from it. The US tried to keep a balance between "preventing the USSR from invading Germany further" vs "preventing Germany from invading everywhere again".

I gave a workshop yesterday on the effective use of large language models. We had participants from numerous Dutch corporations.

There is a lot of unmet demand for a non-American LLM. I suggested DeepSeek, but that's Chinese. I suggested Mistral, but that's French (joke!). I found OpenGPT-X from a European consortium, but it seems quite immature as yet. https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X

Perhaps there will be a European DeepSeek replica soon -- it should be quite affordable to build. But that's just one piece of the ecosystem -- there is a need for a lot of digital infrastructure.

>I suggested Mistral, but that's French (joke!)

You joke but there is a lot of truth behind this. Europe is a very divided place and often prefers to do business with a foreign company than help their literal neighbour due to historical baggage.

And replace with what, more regulations?

Source: am a startup in the EU. The amount of bureaucracy is kafkaesque.

Where in the EU?

rn I'm in Poland, where things are still sane. I have tried in Germany as well, and that's just impossible.

Oh, it’s possible in Germany. What problems do you have in Poland?

> Oh, it’s possible in Germany

Of course.

How do I fire an employee? That's right, I don't. Otherwise sure it's possible.

always amusing when people realize that workers have and deserve rights in other parts of the world.

Social security is an incredibly good thing. It defines Europe.

There's a price for it and that's what we're discussing here.

If you have a reason, just terminate the contract? That's how it works in pretty much all of the EU.

It’s not so easy in Germany when the company has 10+ employees. You need a process consisting of warnings, giving time to correct the behaviour and what not. There are cases where people who have been terminated for sexual misconduct or stealing have been ordered by the court to return to work.

Sure it is. I suspect the reason that you didn't provide any details from those cases is that the judgements wouldn't be surprising if you did.

If you really want to be able to get rid of people willy-nilly in Germany, use subcontractors and 'rent' the labour you need.

Oh, you can. You just need to provide a valid reason, that's all.

Firing someone because they are stealing from the company, harassing a coworker, consistently underperforming, or because you're shutting down a business unit? Easy!

Firing someone because it's a Tuesday, or because they got pregnant? Sorry, can't do that.

Collecting data in order to come up with a valid reason is prohibited. Like, impossible to fire a programmer if he only does a bare minimum and simply is not productive.

Unless you have a valid suspicion. However, you have to tell the employee he is under observation.

> How do I fire an employee? That's right, I don't.

It's easy to fire employees in Germany (especially in small shops), e.g. when they steal, are always late, are badmouthing colleagues, are talking about company internals, are insolent to customers, deliver bad work, and on and on.

You simply have to follow a defined process (basically at least one written warning for the same thing before firing).

What you can't do is having a Musk style temper tantrum and fire someone at will because you feel like that.

Source: I had to fire multiple people in Germany.

> What you can't do is having a Musk style temper tantrum and fire someone at will because you feel like that.

This is kind of double-sided coin. Like, people are feeling protected and have a sense of security and that's what defines Europe. On the other hand, businesses hands are tied and they cannot scale dynamically as in the US.

> follow a defined process

And that's the main problem in the EU. There's a process for everything and sometimes it's a burden and limits the abilities to change things.

> What you can't do is having a Musk style temper tantrum and fire someone at will because you feel like that.

What about if you just don't feel they are a good fit anymore, even if you can't show why based purely on numbers.

Is any amount of advance notice sufficient to allow that?

The problem with “even if you can’t show why” is that it often means wrong gender, race, religion, political affiliation, drinking club, etc. A better question would be whether you could articulate what change you’re looking for and show that this standard was clearly communicated and applied to the entire team.

Why not? How many fo you have?

You don't like worker rights. You should have written that. That is not bureaucracy.

Am working for a large company in the EU. The amount of bureaucracy is insane.

The US is little different in many areas, it's just that the EU is less integrated so there are bigger differences between EU Member States than US States.

Funny, because those motions were for a good part inspired by local companies complaining that they weren't even approached prior to critical infrastructure being outsourced to Amazon.

There's undoubtedly bureaucracy, but that hasn't stopped local companies from popping up. The bigger problem is CxOs thinking a transition to $LocalCorp would look less sexy on their resumé than a transition to Amazon or Azure.

Besides, when US tech companies operate in the EU, they still have to follow all those regulations. They don't get an exception for being based in the US. If anything, it should be easier for a small local company to operate.

I'd love to become a larger AWS competitor for a certain service.

I've got a colocation agreement in a large local datacenter, a few racks of servers are humming day and night and you know what? The more energy I consume, the more I pay per kw/h because green.

Yeah, sure, you are welcome to scale up and compete with AWS.

I really hope Europe seizes this as an opportunity to start pushing public money, public code.

https://publiccode.eu/en/

"Dutch parliament calls for end to reliance on US software" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43401487

"Dutch government urged to stop using "unsafe" US cloud services " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411061

The Dutch government however transferred everything to Microsoft Cloud last year.

This is practically impossible, however. The entire population of the Netherlands is only about twice the size of the entire US tech sector. That would mean dedicating half the population of the Netherlands to tech work to compete with the US. The reason why China and India are competetive is because those countries have similarly sized tech sectors as the US. A single European country cannot compete with the behemoths of today’s industry. Perhaps if the EU, as a whole, sought such sovreignty it would be possible. But that infrastructure needs to be built up and that won’t happen overnight, at least not in just 4 years.

That's why the Netherlands is in the EU, and the EU has a Sovereign Tech Fund for helping fund and organize the development of (mostly FOSS) non-US reliant technologies.

If you're talking about the STF that I'm thinking of, that's purely a German project.

Maybe actually read the article.

This would be the same country (The Netherlands) that is prohibiting construction of new data centers...

Really joined up thinking!

Only in certain areas, not in general.

This is because our energy grid is full, American companies have come in to take advantage of our investments in green energy by buying up capacity of newly built offshore windmill parks subsidised by the Dutch and EU governments [0][1], and they're using millions of liters of drinking water to cool their datacenters [2].

Sure, they bring in some money, but is it worth it? We have carbon emission goals to meet as well, but if the projects intended to replace carbon emitting power generators are used for datacenters instead, that won't happen. And using clean drinking water, which is treated, used, and dumped again in surface water, is just a huge waste of our aquifers, especially with climate change. We already saw the water companies reduce pressure and trigger other such water saving measures a few years ago when the stores ran empty, why should a data center take precedence over people? They should pay a premium for this kind of thing.

[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2350450-opening-grootste-windpark-van... (translate link: https://nos-nl.translate.goog/artikel/2350450-opening-groots...)

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2017/10/09/microsoft-ge-sign-agre...

[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-...

I'm sure we could annex some from Microsoft. You know, for security reasons.

Also, data centers from big tech have a large environmental impact and cost a lot of energy, yet do not bring any jobs.

Europe's problem in this area seems to be inability to build a mechanism to realize large, unprofitable projects. It looks like the whole continent operates on thin margins, and has no resources set aside to pursue strategic initiatives.

US is building its pile of resources by capitalising on its current advantage, but also by pushing larger and larger parts of society into poverty. Europe is maybe more fair, but ultimately unable to keep up and very vulnerable because of that.

Even Russia, a country with much smaller economy is able to concentrate its resources to affect politics and develop few important techs (missiles). Of course it achieves the goal even more by expoiting its own population. Few people benefit from it, but their wealth is immense. Before 2022 whole regions of Europe catered to needs of foreign millionaires, not few homegrown ones. Lack of large projects translates to little opportunities to become rich.

I have no idea how Europe can build institutions to develop large projects without impoverishing lots of its citizens.

Europe isn't that far behind and often produces new technologies. It has some of the best universities and research labs in the world.

The problem is the uncompetitive business environment.

How do we make it more competitive? Work 996 like the Chinese? Have no maternity leave like Americans? It would certainly make us more competitive...

There are lots of people (both in and out) perceiving Europe in different ways, but is this a result of facts or of repetition of some ideas in the news?

Can you give without searching 5 examples of large unprofitable projects in Europe and the USA?

Each time I look for examples, I find more than I knew before. And anyhow the purpose is not for the project to be unprofitable or large! If (just as an example) Europe obtains 50% of the result with 25% of the investment is that bad? I (as European) also want to live a good life, I don't care that Europe is that first at throwing money around like crazy.

And is it about size in monetary value or impact? Anybody talks about UK Bio Bank? No, while the impact on healthcare is amazing and they don't even try to make it for profit (ofc lots of US companies are crazy to use it)...

The data business in the US was not developed by “building institutions” through centralized government projects but by private enterprise. There is a fundamental difference in mindset regarding the relative importance of the public and private sectors between the two regions, and I suspect that difference underlies the stark difference between the US and EU in terms of tech companies. The US has Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, all of which innovate to offer products appealing enough that customers are willing to use or buy them in a free and consensual transaction (which does not require any impoverishment). If they fail at innovating to appeal to customers, they go bankrupt. EU institutions funded through taxpayer money have less incentive to produce goods and services that appeal to taxpayers. I’m not sure where “impoverishment” fits into this at all.

[flagged]

I do. These companies offer me choices and compete for my business. I can deploy to AWS (Amazon), Azure (MS), Google Cloud, or other competitors. My business will go to the one who gives me the best results for the least money. If they fail to provide me the services I want at a price that seems reasonable, or if I'm unhappy with them for any other reason, I can take my business elsewhere. Freedom and consent lie at the heart of private enterprise.

On the other hand, when a government tells me that I can't use the services I want to use and cannot trade with the people I want to trade with because of politics, and that I have to use different services because they're located in a particular region and favored by the government, that's not freedom, nor is it consensual.

Despite this, do you still recognize the countless tactics businesses use to lock their consumers in into their ecosystem as nonconsensual, or do you view that in a different light still?

You also mention innovation with regards to companies like Meta. How do things like the network effect fit into this model? To be more explicit, suppose I want to migrate off of Messenger to Signal. Meta won't allow bridges, and the people I know don't wish to switch. Surely it is not unreasonable for me to consider my continued usage of Meta's Messenger platform as nonconsensual, and my choices as impaired?

I personally regard this the same when people say stuff like "freedom of speech does not imply freedom of consequences from that speech". Very clearly that betrays the expectations one would reasonably build when they hear such a phrase.

On "impoverishment": the difference between private sectors in Europe and US are of course important, but I'm referring to a challenge on much lower level.

Lagging country that wants to increase pace, must find resources to invest. The easiest way to find these resources is to squeeze out parts of its population, to decrease consumption and rise investment. This was done historically in the Soviet Union, in Korea, in China. Europe is of course much more prosperous, but I don't think it can escape this logic. I'm not sure if either European politicians and populations are ready to implement such catch-up initiatives that would result in partial dismantling of the welfare state.

> The US has Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, all of which innovate to offer products appealing enough that customers are willing to use or buy them in a free and consensual transaction (which does not require any impoverishment). If they fail at innovating to appeal to customers, they go bankrupt.

I make iPhone apps.

No Apple software update has appealed to me since back when they were still named after cats. In agregate they have added some useful stuff, but even then what has gotten worse over the years means my only interest in updates is (1) the security issues and (2) the way all developers (including me!) are pushed towards supporting only the most recent releases that in turn means that even modern websites, let alone apps, don't work right on older systems: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/07/03/running-10.6-snow...

And, bluntly, the library updates are also unimpressive, SwiftUI has obviously been the intended way forward for a while now, but even Apple themselves have to keep updating UIKit because SwiftUI isn't good enough yet: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10118

Microsoft has a very different set of issues, but at least they sucessfully diversified into gaming platforms without destroying their dominance in office work. But how much of that dominance is the updates, vs. backward compatibility with so many people's old documents that would be extraordinarily difficult for 3rd parties to replicate? https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...

And they have LinkedIn now, which has weirdly become my standard minigames(!) experience, presumably because someone finalky noticed games helped Facebook get stickier back in the day.

Amazon's consumer offerings suck. Almost everything I've bought from the website has had some issue or turned out to have been more expensive than the same stuff from a local shop I just hadn't found yet. But most people tell me AWS is good, so there's that.

FB and X's main asset is network effects, not tech. The web version of FB has bugs that I'd expect from a junior with no oversight, not a $1.5T market cap giant. Meta is more than FB these days, but is that enough? Horizons was a disaster for them, and they were outraged by Apple's ad changes that only implemented what various laws already required, their foundations may turn out to be a marshy flood plain.

No, what these companies have is mindshare, branding, and deep enough pockets to make government-scale spending capital allocations and survive their inevitable incorrect allocations.

(And by being so big that governments listen to them, regulatory capture etc.)

> Europe's problem in this area seems to be inability to build a mechanism to realize large, unprofitable projects.

I don't disagree with this take completely, especially in regards to IT infrastructure, but I don't think that this explanation captures the main problem.

There are clear counterexamples for large European no-profit infrastructure (CERN, ITER) or even currently ongoing projects (e.g. railway infrastructure like the Brenner base or Fehmarn tunnel).

My take is that there simply was no strong enough incentive to spend a lot of money/effort to duplicate American offerings just to stay independent, but the current US admin is providing sufficient incentives to start spending on this, and while independence is nice in general, I think this is overall just a huge waste.

Data and cloud sovereignty has been a theme in Europe for many years. Most efforts to develop European 'clones' of popular US services have had mixed successes (compared to China for example).

Number of declared meetings with EU officials since 2014: Google (381), Airbus (318), the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (241), and Meta (235)

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/02/24/big-tech-banki...

The documents from Uber released a few years ago revealed a lobbying effort by some EU officials. In that context growing homegrown options will be difficult:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62057321

I hope more countries will follow suit

Let's first see if the actual government follows suit - this is just a call by Parliament. And even if the government follows suit, we'll have to see how long it will take and how well they will do it.

But still a good first step.

France and Germany are already taking steps and have deployed a significant systems. Dutch parliament gave a strong signal to the Dutch government to also move in that direction.

The government has no plans to move their spending from Microsoft to European businesses. On the contrary, they are still very likely to move more systems into O365.

I wonder if this would be a favorable time for someone within the EU to pursue MS with regards the windows user account being tied to an online account unless you jump through unofficial (or at least hidden) hoops. In the context of a business/office I doubt it's a big issue, but it'd be interesting whether there's any angle that businesses or individuals should be able to run their computers independently. There's been a strong distaste for the compulsory online user account for years now, although knowing luck if forced MS would find a way to only comply within territories they have to rather than making it a basic opt-in for all users wherever they live.

I wonder what they will replace their MacBooks with ...

Macs aren’t that widely used in Europe. If anything, Windows is a problem: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/europe

Tulip computers, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_Computers

I've never seen anyone in Dutch government with a MacBook.

On the other hand every single government agency is addicted to Office 365 / Outlook / Teams / Azure, and I don't see them getting rid of those any time soon.

While this might sound reasonable on the surface, here's the thing: Not only are there hardly any homegrown options in the EU, but the EU is actively regulating against such homegrown alternatives.

At the same time, people regularly call for the authorities to pitch in and provide such alternatives.

There are numerous ridiculously expensive - and now defunct - projects (e.g., Quaero and Theseus, just to mention two of those) that have tried to achieve something to that effect already, with little - if anything - to show for.

Why people seem to think this is going to work this time around is beyond me.

100%! Between US tech surveilling the population, selling their data to data brokers, controlling what content they see, and surveilling even their customers customers, this has to happen extremely quickly.

The end goal has to be that EU businesses should be able to easily ensure that their customers' data is never accessible to US companies. This is incredibly challenging at the moment due to SaaS - the amount of subprocessors that a company uses, and then transitively uses, makes it impossible at the moment imo.

Although this isn't foreign related, I started a regional freelance software company to help build websites or software for local government and businesses or other kinds of software/IT help. It sucks to know that there are state funded organizations that just impede any sort of locally homegrown software development. And it made me realize that software is one of the strange fields where competition both feels like its extremely lacking or flourishing, depending on which sect your in.

I have a goal to get rid of all US based software. I already replaced some services but I will continue to look every chance I get.

This is the best thing to ever happen to EU based tech companies.

I wonder what the implications are for AWS’s efforts in building the "AWS European Sovereign Cloud" in Dublin, Ireland. They are recruiting aggressively, even offering a relocation budget of up to €9,000. Although I was tempted to interview for an SDE role, I felt it would be wrong to uproot my family and relocate from the Netherlands to Ireland. And for what? A higher-paying role at a FAANG company? Still tempting, but I decided to put my family first.

"The best time to ditch tech giants was 15 years ago. The second-best time is now." -- Dutch proverb

Hopefully this will also be a push for public sponsored open source / free software dev.

It would be the fastest way to bootstrap a local hyperscaller, I mean, most of AWS is open source software with a HUGE integration to make it easy to administer.

Hopefully we'll see non-US tech salaries increase due to its importance.

Fingers crossed, we're seeing some brain drain because people are working for US companies (not necessarily moving there though) who offer Dutch contracts but with American salaries. Over €100K / year in some cases.

I love the idea of a bit of inspiration and invigoration of tech in Europe.

But for some reason Estonia is the only country that can execute on this, I don’t know why. The rest of Europe loves their bureaucracy too much.

I like Estonia, but if their approach was valid it not can only be judged after the Russians tried to disable all those shiny new digital services or the American decide to invalidate all IT contracts or the Chinese’s mandate Chinese’s products don’t work in Estonia.

Paper works even if the electricity goes away and we have to live in caves again … or bunkers.

What’s the Google Sheets/Excel of Europe?

libre office lol

I switched 7 years ago and haven’t looked back; not because it’s good (it’s fine), but because the alternative is using Microsoft products.

Best thing about Libre Office... if it doesn't suit their needs, they can invest in improving it :)

Collabora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

Thank you. The overall site design and UX makes me pessimistic. Its not just depresses me to use it. I really wanted to be enthusiastic and pleasantly surprised by it.

https://www.collaboraonline.com/

This is simply the American empire in decline. Maybe with the ascendancy of China, we'll at least get trains.

This is what people need to understand about the current US administration: there's no grand plan. There's no deep strategy. The people in charge have absolutely no idea what they're doing. I'm not even sure if people at the top even know how tariffs work, like is the idea that foreign countries pay it just propaganda? I hope so. But do they believe it? I'm actually not sure.

It's just a bunch of Ayn Rand devotees who are out to destroy the government that made their wealth possible to begin with. to try and recreate a "traditional" society like the 1950s, just without the 91% top marginal rate of taxation that made prosperity possible. It's only when neoliberalism fully took hold in the 1970s did the standard of living start to decline and the wealth gap rise, just so the very wealthy can have just a little bit more wealth.

Gutting USAID says it all. That money mostly went to US firms, so they've lost that income, and the purpose was to project US soft power. Through organizations like NATO, the US used its military to get allies to do what they want and to buy US arms. Withdrawing F16 support to Ukraine, for example, completley undermines confidence in US arms.

The rush for US tech CEOs to kiss the ring and fall in line was always going to alienate other countries. They really are going to kill the golden goose.

I understand that most of what Trump does fits in Project 2025.

Globalization and trickle down irrigation are... wait, that should have been economics... anyway, are the worst scams of the century. Sure, there were some benefits from globalization. But consumers lost sight on the notions of self-sufficiency and sovereignty, and played nicely into capitalism's 'extend, embrace, extinguish' philosophy. In my view, the net exports from the US to the rest of the world has been negative. Therefore, in due time, the rest of the western world, or wherever there prevails some notion of democracy, should strive to excise the US out in all shapes and forms--politically, culturally, technologically, and everythingally. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is now.

And, no: the irony of my writing this on a US-based platform is not lost on me!

I mean, ok, fine guys but this is just more empty gestures from a club of empty heads in the GroenLinks/PvdA clown-car.

I don't recall that they were against (in fact they were in favour) of the removal of the 30% tax rules intended to attract expats in, among other things, tech businesses. I don't recall that they've ever done or said anything to make the country a more attractive place to start or grow a business of any kind, let alone the kind of venture capital funded technology startups that would allow us to move a substantial fraction of our tech consumption to homegrown alternatives.

Maybe they're at least in favour of permitting for data centres so that we can at least host our own services... oh wait, they don't want those either.

Not all these motions were by GL/PvdA (but a few were), and they haven't been in power for a long time, and aren't now, so there's not much more than "gestures" you can expect of them at the moment.

But yes, the key thing will be how the government (current and future ones) will followup.

It sounds like you have a bone to pick with GL, which is totally fair. But do you have any thoughts on the proposal itself?

It's fine but a proposal to do something without the political will to make any of the difficult compromises required to achieve them is meaningless.

I don't vote for this party but you sre totally straw manning them with respect to data centres. The whole reason those became controversial is because American big tech companies would come in and negotiate deals with municipalities to consume all the energy of newly built green energy projects so they could claim they would make their green goals withouth making any investments themselves. Also you can question if the Netherlands is the right place being so densly populated resulting in issues with both the electricity grid and general land shortage.

The move from home grown solutions to Google/Microsoft cloud services happened under the VVD government some 10 to 15 years ago. The "pro-business", somehow always end up being the "pro giving a big contract to the most compelling lobbyist from the US".

It's always the same song and dance.

We need to move away from US tech? Ok Great, where to? The European AWS or Google Cloud? Those don't exists.

What about the European Stripe which is a big pillar of the new digital economy? Still no.

What about the payment cards? Mastercard, Visa, Amex? Where are the EU alternatives?

The EU is all talk and no bite. We fine US companies for breaking the law but instead of using that cash to foster innovation, we use it to hire more paper pushers in Brussels to come up with the next idiotic regulation like the bottle cap one.

The best time to replace US tech was 10 years ago but that did not happen and it's not going to happen now.

Do you know anyone who is ready to give up their IPhone or Mac?

I could easily give up my iPhone or Mac, even though I do use them exclusively for ~10Y. The issue with Linux is not that it impossible to use (I did it for several years) but that there is no incentive to support hardware and corner case software given Win/Mac prevalence. The moment they disappear the problem will solve itself within a year or two and we would be certainly better off afterwards, given the current course of corporate technology - not even including politics.

While I agree with your general point, Europe does have Adyen which is a strong competitor to Stripe.

I guess it's better than nothing.

Nice move Ducks! :)

Makes sense to prepare for the Greenland war

A heads-up in case there's any confusion: Greenland is part of Denmark, whereas the Dutch Parliament is the parliament of the Netherlands. Both are part of the EU, of course (although Greenland isn't).

As a Dane I've always wondered why so many English speakers think "Dutch" goes with "Denmark" when "Danish" is what you're actually after.

It’s a similar thing with Switzerland and Sweden but even more confusing because the Netherlands doesn’t start with a D. It’s very rare in the English language for a country’s name to not be a part of its demonym. They also share common stereotypes in terms of being educated, North European welfare states. I read about geography quite a lot and I still often mix them up. Similarly, the difference between North and South Dakota is probably obvious to the people living there, but so far as the two of us know they are both exactly the same.

Honestly for German it somewhat makes sense, since "Deutsch" (German for "German") sounds like "Dutch", but Danish is farther-fetched. Then again, I can imagine the two countries (and a couple of other similar ones) melting into a single concept if you're on the other side of the planet - I'd have a hard time telling most US states or Latin American countries apart as well.

And more importantly, all are part of NATO. So if Greenland is attacked, the Netherlands has to help defend.

I don't think that necessarily holds if the attack is by a NATO member.

NATO (article 5) does not compel a member country to defend another member if attacked. This is a widely held misconception.

Sorry. Dutch, Netherlands, Holland. Very confusing.

This is the way.

Big talk. Let's see if it will survive another media cycle.

Now do ASML ...

> there will be no Dutch expertise left

I'm curious about the kind of existing expertise they are referring to

Ever heard of ASML? NXP? Philips? Booking.com? ElasticSearch? Adyen? Messagebird? Just Eat Takeaway?

Just because you are not familiar with the expertise doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Somehow i doubt it coming from a country which could be described as a datacenter for big US tech

I'm Dutch and genuinely confused by what you're getting at. There are foreign datacenters here but AFAIK not particularly many.

8th in this list of number of datacenters per country [0], most of the countries listed being much larger.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1228433/data-centers-wor...

> Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. "If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left."

This kind of casual anti-technology attitude among European politicians is part of the reason we are in this mess.

No. The main reason we got in this mess is because the US is a better market for startups, simply because of the amount of available money, and the fact that it’s easier to start in a market with 340M people who speak the same language.

But, at least speaking for Germany here, the anti-technology stance of politicians and Germans in general certainly has a huge part in hampering the startup scene. This always goes both ways. It's not wrong to be skeptical and wanting privacy etc., but it also means it's harder to make bank by tracking everyone and selling their data, which has been a huge part of American technology startups for over a decade. And it often also just means, people don't trust new things and will not try them. Not sure this applies equally to the Netherlands though.

The Dutch people are early adopters. But our startups generally think way too small.

Also yes, because it's easier to start in a jurisdiction with sane laws and bearable tax burden, none of which is available in the EU. EU is indeed drowning in mind boggling bureaucracy.

Source: am a startup in the EU.

If it was merely about taxes and regulations then nobody would want to choose California over almost any other state for their startup.

I'm not sure about that.

Say, at-will employment exists in California and that's just one simple example off the top of my head.

In Germany, an employee is near impossible to fire.

This popular mythology in certain circles but it relies on people not calculating the effective total tax rate, including local and property taxes, and in that case California is the 13th cheapest state in the country:

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-states-to-be-a-taxpayer...

You also want to consider what your taxes fund – for example, a startup founder probably benefits from proximity to two of the best university systems in the country and the better quality of life means you get more top people in your employee and networking pools. The ultra-rich are going to leave but a founder who isn’t already in the top income bracket is making an economically rational decision.

This is extremely enlightening. I'm not surprised New York is basically the most expensive state to live in. There are obvious outliers though, such as Alaska, where you end up paying 50% markup on most basic home amenities just because of transit costs. I think I need to check up on where most of NYS money is really going.

A lot of companies are moving to Texas though (https://www.newsweek.com/multiple-companies-ditching-califor...)

Lag effect. 30-40 years ago, California was a different place, way more business friendly. Lots of military connected companies. Lots of money. Lots of people moving there. Educated workforce. It's very different now.

"EU is indeed drowning in mind boggling bureaucracy."

Just look at how many software patents the EPO keeps printing.

Trust in the US was also at big part of it. That trust is now gone.

> because of the amount of available money

And that capital was started by major government investment in semiconductor manufacturing.

Israel is a small market and English fluency is worse than much of Western Europe (imo roughly comparable to France), yet they were able to crack the US market despite both being poorer than much of Western Europe until barely a couple years ago and having similar access to American markets.

And barely 20-25 years ago, Dutch firms like Philips NV and NXP Semi were both major players in the electronics and software industry, yet squandered their lead.

The issue is European leaders in both the private and public sector just don't care for technology, are overwhelmingly from legal and non-STEM financial/consulting backgrounds. The capital flight due to the Eurozone crisis also played a role, but Israel was also heavily impacted by that as well.

Anti-technology is just a dog whistle for anti-capital. Billionaires have made things exceptionally worse. Facebook was started as a way to rate women’s faces, is the foundation our data collection industry is built off of. We need to tear down the entire system and rebuild something else.

I still can't even see what supposed anti-technology content there is in the quote. But perhaps there's a broader context to incorporate that those from Europe could explain to Americans?

What anti-technology attitude do you see?

Chastising developing space tech?

They appear to be chastising the billionaires, not the space tech. Chastising space tech would not fit in with the argument they are advancing about the need to adopt local tech. However, chastising the US billionaires definitely supports their argument.

I can read what was said without your interpretation of it.

Fast forward 20 years and Europeans will be hopelessly dependent on SpaceX just like they are on big tech now.

They're billionaires because they invested in tech that the whole world is dependent on now. Chastising them shows that European technophobic bureaucrats still don't get it.

The whole point is "escape Earth" -- i.e. Elon doesn't care about the long term effects on Earth, not that space tech is bad.

Chastising "billionaires that would rather escape Earth"; the goal isn't developing space tech, it's escaping the world instead of fixing it with their resources.

You may not agree with the sentiment, but the quote isn't anti-technology.

It doesn't say that "escaping Earth" is an inherently bad thing, it simply highlights the perils of outsourcing digital infrastructure to certain billionaires who wish to do so. Which is a valid concern.

The implication is that "building space rockets to escape Earth" is bad.

Ok but why is that bad here? Because they are not interested in serving the tech needs of the Dutch, and have other interests.

That's not an anti-tech stance, quite the opposite!

No.

The implication is that it should not be an oligarchy but a democracy that inhabits other planets - which is indeed a valid stance.

The issue is not going to space. The issue is supporting a system where a single entity controls it, supporting a dictatorship.

Which is funny, because the US had this stance. At least under WW2 and the cold war.

Who know what happened, the US population allowed corporate greed to take over - what a shame.

I sincerely have no idea why mentioning the anti-technology stance of the EU always gets downvoted on HN.

It's almost like people are confusing the contents of the comment with the comment itself, expressing their disdain for the legal burden of the EU by downvoting a comment mentioning that fact.

This phenomenon is commonplace on HN. It brings to mind the shrieking lady in this Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-51DhOzHE

Please lets just call things what they are.

This is not "anti-technology"-- it is just a potshot at Elon Musk.

You could also accuse it of mixing up issues of infrastructure independence, wealth inequality and increasing plutocratic tendencies. All of those do deserve a nuanced discussion (instead of a single catchphrase).

But labeling this as as "anti-technology" is simply incorrect, and we need to do better than that.

It isn't anti-technology, it's anti-capital/anti-big-business. If you don't allow businesses to scale-up because billionaires are bad, then you're biggest companies will be those that are from the previous century.

> Europe’s lack of industrial dynamism owes in large part to weaknesses along the “innovation lifecycle” that prevent new sectors and challengers from emerging. These weaknesses begin with obstacles in the pipeline from innovation to commercialisation. Public sector support for R&I is inefficient due to a lack of focus on disruptive innovation and fragmented financing, limiting the EU’s potential to reach scale in high-risk breakthrough technologies. Once companies reach the growth stage, they encounter regulatory and jurisdictional hurdles that prevent them from scaling-up into mature, profitable companies in Europe. As a result, many innovative companies end up seeking out financing from US venture capitalists (VCs) and see expanding in the large US market as a more rewarding option than tackling fragmented EU markets. Finally, the EU is falling behind in providing state-of-the-art infrastructures necessary to enable the digitalisation of the economy.

from https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3...

Interesting.

For the government of a country like Denmark, with 1.4% the GDP and 1.7% the population of the US, the only viable way to build homegrown alternatives that avoid relying on software controlled by big US tech companies is to invest in open-source projects like GNU/Linux.

Many other governments around the world are in the same position as the government of Denmark.

Should they decide to invest in open-source projects, the impact could be significant.

Just some food for thought. The percentage of GDP generated by centrally managed government spending vs. free market participants [1]:

- US: 35%

- China: 33%

- EU avg: 50%

The disparity is again similar for interstate integration (in the US) and inter-province integration (in China) vs. inter-country integration (in the EU) being the outlier.

Europe needs deeper inter-country integration and more decentralization of capital to private market participants (less taxation).

Europe can play Soviet-protectionism and build the digital-equivalent of the Lada all it wants, but the above issues are the root cause of why Europe is lagging behind the other two in terms of growth and innovation.

You can't build a tech industry without venture capital and a big cohesive market to sell into, and you can't build a venture capital industry without deep pools of decentralized, risk-tolerant private capital.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

Numbers do lie - it would be nice to have a breakdown of this.

Maybe the difference, 16% points, is what affords the European a fair treatment upon illness where half of that is "shareholder value" in the US.

Feel free to link the study you used so we don't just have to trust some internet rando.

Just google 'percentage of GDP driven by government spending' for your country of choice.

This is some of the most basic and widely available economic data that exists.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

(edited my original comment to include the source as well)

Common source, great!

First, you seems to conflate "free markets" (Whatever free means here?) with decentralized spending. How does that make sense?

And more importantly: If we can agree that a democracy ought to be an aspiration for a society, and a functioning democracy requires some minimum level of equality, how will you ensure that under your "free market"?

Definitionally, government spending is centralized activity.

Definitionally, non-government spending is market activity (controlled by each market participant, so decentralized).

I would question why this data upsets you so much instead of trying to shoot the messenger.

Fair enough.

Now, can you justify your sentiment? Which was what I asked about?

(Or is it more fun to just cycle around in indifferent ontological ramblings?)

Answer to the edit:

I am not upset by the numbers. I am asking how you will ensure a society with equality and democracy under your proposed system.

In particular, taxes are an effective way to ensure equality - something that you are probably seeing in the numbers you refer.

In the US we see that trump is increasing taxes on consumers (Tariffs) while lifting taxes from the highest earners.

To cut to the core: I am asking if you are pro oligarchies? and if not, how do your propose that we ensure the equality needed to uphold a democracy?

What's the source?

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

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