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European Critical Dependencies

jurgen.gaeremyn.be

24 pointstaubek19 comments

I think there needs to be identification and marketing of whatever EU agencies are already focusing on these issues.

In discussing policy solution hypotheticals for the US, bodies like the Department of Commerce, the FCC and OSHA are household names but I've lived in Ireland for years and can only name Euratom off the top of my head and need the use of a search engine to get the names of any other EU agencies.

There's no EU OHSA, each country has its own with different regulations.

Contrary to the claim that there is no EU OSHA, I was quite surprised to learn that there is an EU agency with the same role as the American OSHA that is literally named EU-OSHA, and I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised too.

Wikipedia link:

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

That's not the same thing. EU orgs like that only serve to guide policies and campaigns but they have no enforcement, it doesn't do investigations and dish out fines.

If you see a OSHA violation at your workplace you have to go to the local authority in your member county which has different rules than each other country.

decades(!) ago there was a German documentary about exactly this. on how the eu commission dictate the tone and everyone fall in line. the director of IT for the eu commission at the time is now responsible for HR. where people critical of this are barred with a "no political knowledge" stamp, which is the eu commission equivalent of "not a techbro culture fit" in silicon valley.

Decades ago? So at least 20 years ago? I hardly doubt that. Are you perhaps thinking of the 2018 documentary called The Microsoft-Dilemma?

It's surprisingly good and shows how Microsoft manages to influence decisions on small to massively large scales. In European countries and the EU itself.

correct. i fat fingered a question mark there :)

Generally, while the EU makes rules, regulatory bodies are _mostly_ a national competence.

FCC equiv in Ireland would be some combo of Comreg and the BAI, OSHA equivalent would be the HSA, US Department of Commerce is broad enough that it doesn't have a single equivalent. But that's just Ireland, it'll be different in every country.

We've been looking to migrate away from FastMail and we are considering Proton Mail. More alternatives there: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers

Ah Proton Mail. Supporter of Trump and Republicans. With the CEOs statement at the start of this year, that company died for me and I would not move any critical services to it:

> “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”

Why not self-host open source software instead of adding a critical dependency on a third-party?

So the EU Microsoft countries are: Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway.

Topic-adjacent: do tariffs exist for cross-border services like consulting, accounting, legal, cloud services, etc.?

My understanding is that the Euro Alliance is a tariff-free zone: workers and goods from within the Euro Zone are not taxable.

General tariffs exist, e.g. the "10% on everything" that you probably have read about recently. "Everything" includes immaterial imports such as paying for consulting when the consulting company is in another country.

While in general this comment is true (you could, in theory, apply tariffs to services), the recent American "10% on everything" are in fact only for goods.

Source: consulting from another country, have US clients.

Sorry, my bad.

I don't think I've ever seen a tariff being applied to consulting, have you? I remember a contract that escaped tariffs because the subject was excepted from an exception from an exception, which suggests that slightly different work would be covered, because the deepest exception would not apply. But in the event, my/our consulting was covered by the deepest exception.

I haven't either.

I do know there's a default 30% withholding tax on stuff like IP licensing, but that's different from tariffs (it's just income tax on digital goods, and usually lower for countries that have tax deals with the US (to avoid double taxation).

Isn’t that true for the entire world?

I’d imagine most of the sysadmin world globally just straight up collapses if Active Directory and Office disappears

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