I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
We'll see what the States that were the most against any form of common European defense will do now that the US has proven unreliable. And if they are still under the delusion that the current US policies will go away, then it's time for Two-Speed Europe.
The hypothetical should really be on the vassal or it is just rethorics.
This is the time to call each other bluffs and keep revealing the naked emperors
It is true that most(not all, for example Switzerland, Finland Poland all have excellent militaries) European countries have been underfunding their military in stark contrast to the war mongering nation across the Atlantic, but I would not call that “relying on”, just a delusion that we lived in an eternal peace.
FWIW I served my country Sweden for three years, including a tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. I have been against this recklessness for as long as I can remember.
Also, the EU is hardly irrelevant, stop the hyperbole…
It is subtle, but different
USA is pure aggressor here. USA becomming fascist is not fault of Europe, so no, Europe does not deserve to be attacked by USA.
USA asked Europe for help, got it, used it for own benefit and then attacks Europe with lies and threats.
Because "the EU" is not a country. It is a bloc. People that speak lf EU here are very delusional about what it is, and seemingly never understand its function.
People speak of the EU as if it was going to be as nimble as a unified country with a single government structure. It is not. It is a bloc composed of 27 countries each with its own government structure, interests, budgets, industries, culture, and so on.
Also - defense. The EU has no army. Each of its 27 countries have their own separated armies, and make their own decisions.
In a post WW2 scenario, where most of Europe needed to rebuild, outsourcing defense to an ally was a correct decision (especially considering that escalating power in the preceeding decades only led to war).
Perhaps the current state of affairs lead to a more federalized EU, who knows.
[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...
People need to stop buying into propaganda.
all nations around the world are currently increasing their surveillance capability... And it's worth keeping in mind that at least some of us see that as an issue, that's actually not a broadly accepted fact. There are a lot of people that don't see an issue with it.
And you'll be able to find a topic you disagree with with all politicians, if you discredit everything they say afterwards, you're essentially left holding your ears closed to all dialog.
A man that is in directly involved in surveilling his own people does not have a leg to stand on in the Geo political arena. And to think otherwise is a massive mistake. Stop propping up people that do deserve it.
Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.
I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.
Not sure whether Excel is still good.
Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?
MS was working hard on creating feature parity but at some point they just dropped everything and gave up.
For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.
Do you recreate a spreadsheet, use an existing online service, and/or create a database with proper logic, etc.? If the latter, how do users handle the UI change, and can they have an ease of creation similar to what Excel provides?
Good source of money for contractors as OP said.
Yes!! Misusing Excel as a database is really part of the problem. It also causes so many issues. Having multiple data elements within one cell. Someone overtyping a formula in a column of 200.000 values leading to one cell no longer being updated. Needing 32GB of RAM just to edit a spreadsheet with a measly 500.000 rows.
All stuff that never would happen with a real database. Microsoft never really put much effort into making Access approachable.
A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.
Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.
In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.
I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.
I'm sure it'll be paraphrased to another company in another 30 years.
> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap
You answered your own question.
It does seem like you can put your money where your mouth is in this case. You can now put a literal dollar value on how much you actually care about being tied to US tech. And it's like $20-40/user/month. Which isn't nothing but it's not untenable amounts of money.
NextCloud looks ok.
For some reason I thought it was open to the public, but France also maintains a full sovereign cloud office suite for use by civil servants: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
Maybe one day they'll open it up publicly.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
Google Workspace with Chromebooks. No windows endpoints getting a virus or ransomware or some other malware. It's all about the bubble you're in. Mine, windows isn't even needed anymore for games because SteamOS is sufficiently there for the games we play.
You could absolutely nail the document compatibility aspect and it still wouldn't be enough because of freaking Outlook.
But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.
To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.
Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.
Well, that sounds easy! I wonder why no one else ever thought of it. Good thing there are geniuses like you around.
But it’s one of the thing the EU could do to win in new industries.
Honestly if the EU became more innovation and entrepreneur friendly I think they’d kick America’s ass. Tons of smart people, and the positive side of the social safely net is that it derisks entrepreneurship. America is full of would be founders who can’t afford to take the leap since they could lose their health care, etc.
As for GDP, EU overall GDP is only slightly less than US GDP, so it could very well sustain the industry of comparable size. Per capita GDP is indeed lower, but I'm not sure how that precludes creation of something like Eurobook.
FB was incubated in a single unified market before it really spread to the EU. It’s harder for companies to take off and reach tech giant reach with the much smaller individual markets in the EU.
It’s much harder to build a product that appeals to everyone from the Irish to the Bulgarians, and to advertise to them than it is to do the same for everyone in the US. And it’s not just the tech companies, the individual content creators on the platform have the same comparative problems.
Because having "big tech" is a sign that the government has completely failed to enforce anti-trust laws and allowed dangerous concentration of power to occur. It's a symptom of a disease not some desirable goal.
The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech". It needs generous public funding for infrastructure, open source, and it should aim to build upon open standards whenever possible.
We don't need domestic monopolies that are just going to fuck us in the same way that US corporations fuck Americans while we all pretend to enjoy it for the sake of looking superior to the other camp.
If you walk into a bank in Europe and have some money to invest they will sell you mostly debt and the "Magnificent Seven" or a funds with those stocks inside.
The EU is ridiculous when it says it want to built an alternative because it's entire financial/banking system end up fueling the saving of its citizen into those companies.
This is also why we end up in that absurd situation where the Mag 7 make up 1/3 of the S&P 500 market cap.
If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it. Not do another fake program where insiders will grab some public money and get nowhere (it has been tried for 25 years).
Did US government do something like that? If US has some attractive investments and EU does not, why don't they? I mean, EU citizens would probably like to invest in EU companies, much better than in US companies, they are not some self-haters to refuse a good investment just because it's in EU, right? So why don't they invest there? Why do they invest in US instead and there is a need in a special action - not taken prior to now - to enable them to invest in the EU?
Why doesn't it already have "tech" and has to resort to governmental action to procure one? I mean, it is obviously very easy to acquire just "tech" without government completely failing to enforce laws and population being fucked by corporations, and it is a testament to how dumb Americans really are that they failed to do that. But Europeans are not dumb, so why they didn't do it by now? Why we are discussing the matter now instead of just pointing to clearly superior open-standard non-fucking European "just tech" as a superior alternative to American "big tech"?
The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?
Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.
In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.
Bezos is actually a great example, because he made almost his entire US$250B fortune from unrealized stock appreciation rather than salary or new awards. Even the most extreme wealth tax proposals I've seen wouldn't get him down to US$25B. The US could only have achieved that target by restricting how much Amazon is allowed to innovate and grow.
The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)
I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!
I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.
I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!
Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.
The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.
And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.
Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.
Why the difference?
Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.
The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.
Everyone else are low information voters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...
Populists come to power when the ruling elites bankrupt by corruption and ineptitude the trust that the populace had had in them.
Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Are you saying that had no impact? How do you know this?
I don’t see how your point disagrees with what I said.
Mostly though: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-billionaires-publicly-ba...
Headline: More billionaires are publicly backing Kamala Harris than Donald Trump
https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/118th-congress/hou...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Regarding the last national election:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fift...
The Court’s decision and others that followed shaped the 2024 election to a greater degree than any that came before it. Most notably, Donald Trump substantially trailed Kamala Harris in traditional campaign donations, which are subject to legal limits and must be disclosed. Yet he was able to compensate for this disadvantage by outsourcing much of his campaign to super PACs and other outside groups funded by a handful of wealthy donors. While such groups had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in previous cycles, this was the first time they successfully took on many of the other core functions of a general election presidential campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their activities unquestionably would have been illegal before Citizens United.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
This isn't about who wins campaigns -- this is about who influences the issues they campaign on. Since the Citizens United decision politicians have had to switch to the Super PAC model to be competitive, which gives drastically more power to dark money donors. And unsurprisingly, as cited in that study, the influence of average citizens on politics has been completely surpassed by businesses and economic elites:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Doesn't matter anyway because the poll doesn't mean shit. Most people are idiots and will answer the poll completely differently if you actually give them a realistic question like "would you accept a major tax increase to get universal healthcare?"
Just for anyone else reading this comment, it’s pretty wildly incorrect.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administra...
> CBO estimates that as result of P.L. 119-21, U.S. households, on average, will see an increase in the resources available to them over the 2026– 2034 period. The changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households. The agency estimates that, in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.
That's hardly a picture of billionaires pulling the strings
Care to quote the second one? The one whose byline is “Trump giving hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the ultra wealthy”?
Or will you dismiss that too because it doesn’t explicitly say billionaires?
Regardless, I think the parent comment facts are wrong and there there have been massive changes benefitting the wealthy: There have been massive tax cuts for them, reduction in enforcement of financial laws (e.g., by the SEC, etc.), lagging financial regulation of private equity, destruction of consumer protection (such as the CFPB), massive changes in policy and action to benefit the fossil fuel industry including use of the US military, ... there was a big tax law change to benefit SV founders that was advocated here on HN, protectionist measures increasing prices for consumers and giving the benefits to corporations, etc.