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Comment by vladms | Hacker News Reader

It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).

I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.

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I knew plenty of office workers managing just fine using OpenOffice 10-15 years ago.

Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.

Agree, Personally I consider these newer systems a curse as far as productivity goes, using a simple email/open-office combination never caused any issues with clients or suppliers in the last 20 years.

Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection.

Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.

Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products, one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural selection (sort of) and there still were shortages.

Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.

And, compared to USSR, Yugos production was much higher quality and shortages were much smaller.

EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died

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