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Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.”

Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.

It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech.

EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.

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I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful.

[0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."

> EU can’t out innovate US tech

why not?

Okay not today but China was known as the cheap copier and is now the innovator.

EU labor laws, and fractured internal market.

Do you really believe that?

If so, I think the onus would be on you to prove it, not me.

Or, more importantly, if you really think the EU will be a tech powerhouse, shouldn’t you be writing checks to their startups left and right?

Because I think that would be the revealed preference here. I’m guessing you’re not heavily invested in EU tech companies, right? Because that would say a lot about your true beliefs.

A lot of the worlds actual problems are not about innovation but correctly using existing technologies and making the right investments in the needed infrastructure.

> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.

No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.

Maybe, and you might be right. These might be one-off posturing things from the EU.

Sure, a few back office shifts to OpenOffice aren’t a big deal today, but I’m worried about where we are in 10, 20 years. There is no EU tech competition to us today, but who knows… tomorrow is a new day.

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