Added my company (https://mailpace.com) - I’m looking forward to a resurgence of innovation in European tech companies, the talent and education here is amazing, we just need to improve our investment and start treating tech with as much respect as we give to law, finance and other “prestigious” career paths here

That would be the rational and sensible solution. This may be why it’s unlikely to happen. I would be happy to be wrong.

Won't happen without a war - so hopefully not within my lifetime, but playing make believe is fun sometimes.

It also includes context about ongoing emergency EU security meetings and the Trump administration.

No single market, no freedom of movement, unfortunately.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.

People believed the "end of history" narratives about Russia, and even that it would become like the rest of the ex-communist states, a normal part of liberal Europe. That should have changed after 2014, but by then the grip of the financial crisis was preventing any increases in state spending.

Always.

hug

A UK firm would be perfect as a brit, but just not-US is great.

We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.

Unfortunately we haven't seen enough demand in the UK to set up a UK only infra (nor are there any UK cloud providers that would work for us?)

Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community. Progress was gradual, sure, but it was real. Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.

Now, though, it’s all about "national sovereignty" and "independence" as if going it alone could ever match the strength of interdependence.

The trust we built feels shattered and TBH it’s hard to imagine it being rebuilt anytime soon, if ever.

(And then only in the ideal perfectly spherical cow world where single issue voters don’t exist…)

While nailing down all the particulars can be daunting I think the basic sketch as above is what people mean most of the time pretty uncontroversially.

This doesn’t make sense as a response… you can’t gain that kind of credibility just by stating opinions.

And even if millions do so, it’s still just talk, unless consistently reflected at the ballot box.

And baffling that the country leading the charge on the splintering is the one with most to gain/lose.

Feels like selfharm on scale of brexit

Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.

A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.

Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.

In your example they would probably just have puppet citizens who buy land on their behalf. Sure the cost would be a bit higher because the puppets would demand some commission, but hey it’s the cost of running business.

It’s close to impossible to regulate concentrated money. See the drug cartels or Musk as two examples. The cartels operate their own army in South America completely ignoring government regulation. Musk bought an entire gov for himself.

No it's not. A fundamental human freedom is to build or to buy a house. Nobody is owned a house.

That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.

Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.

And this is all before you even break ground.

Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.

Hoppe might have been right about democracy.

How long ago was not long ago in your eyes?

I'd say, the promise of international trade and globalization uniting the world fell apart some time in the 2000 or 2010s with China showing they would not open up to ideas of human rights and personal freedom. The sales pitch for investing in China (from a political point of view) was that we could trade the communism and fascism out of them.

Then in Russia showed that we couldn't trade our way to peace. The idea was that cheap gas from Russia would make Europe and Russia dependent on either side of the deal, and we wouldn't disturb world peace and break the trade. That didn't go well.

And now America wants to but limit trade with their biggest trade partners and closest allies, in the hopes that it'll bring them manufacturing prowess.

My economics professor in 2005, said the world was more globalized in the wake of WWI. I don't know if that was true, but at least they didn't have passports back then.

To be frank, it’s more about the rest of the ”west” updating our list of friendly countries. It is the US that has chosen to take an ever more adversarial position lately, pretty much worsening daily.

The trust among the rest of the west feels like it instead is strengthening. I interpret both ”buy European” and ”buy Canadian” as more of ”don’t buy from USA” with a thin layer of politeness.

It worked until emotions entered the picture. "I don't like making chips. I prefer producing steel. Why do you get to have all the fun?" they've said for decades and with increasing furor.

If you could move freely about the world without any restrictions so that those who enjoy steelmaking could easily move to where the steel is made maybe it would have had a better chance, but even then people generally prioritize location (to be close to family, friends, certain amenities, etc.) above all else so it is likely they would still seek a varied local economy despite the benefits of a global economy.

Who says this? TSMC?

A "Rules-based world order" has been the rationale of the West for decades: WTO, U.N., free trade, democracy, countries' sovereignty, etc. But this "global community" was lipstick on a pig. From a 3rd World perspective that was just hypocrisy.

The "rules" were always chosen by the rich countries: free trade but keep farm protectionism against 3rd world's cheap produce, sovereignty but not for Palestinians, democracy but not if Chile, Iran or most of Africa or Latin America choose to have socialist leaders (Allende, Mossadegh, etc), ...

And now that even the rules are not advantageous to the rich anymore (e.g.:China's and Mexico's manufacturing, India's and South America's farming) the rich countries are scrapping the rules.

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

That isn't actually true (or at least is only allowed in the "it's a small enough violation of the law that the enforcers have bigger fish to fry" sense).

Cookie banners are required to gather informed consent, which is relevant for two EU legislations: the ePD, which requires it to access or store _any_ data from terminal equipment, and the GDPR which requires it for personally identifiable data. Most people only consider the latter, but the former is a much bigger hurdle to pass.

Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment. That was made very explicitly clear in a 2023 guideline from the EDPB[1].

The one saving grace for Plausible is that the ePD is a Directive, so the actual implementation into law differs by Member country. The claim might be true for some EU countries, but certainly isn't for all.

I've written a longer analysis of this in the context of Plausible for anyone interested[2] (although it might be worth skipping the first section, to get to the meat of the issue).

[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid... [2] https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compl...

Since Plausible is selling a product that clearly claims this, who is on the hook in case a user of Plausible gets a fine?

But GDPR enforcement is more like 'you need to fix this, if you don't you get the fine' - if you are actually helpful and do your duty to improve the process the fine is usually reduced.

As someone living in Europe who watches the EUs best and brightest mostly go to work in consulting firms because the only growth industry in the EU is “companies spending money on regulatory compliance,” it pains my soul.

The funniest part about GDPR is that currently any organization that uses pretty much any US tech is in violation of the latest rulings, including much of the EU government itself running on Microsoft tech.

If you've just been consuming journalist or internet comment narratives on this topic you have no idea.

But please also share the more nuanced take on the GDPR of your lawyer. You can't go around making claims like that without substantiating them ;).

if you're tracking users for analytics using cookies, fingerprinting, or any other method that identifies them (even probabilistically), you generally need explicit consent under GDPR and similar privacy laws. The key point is that it's not just about cookies; any persistent tracking requires consent.

The law mandates that you inform the user if you are setting any type of cookies. So its necessary to have a banner even if you don't need to get consent. You could inform the user in other ways, but cookie banners are easier.

With GA, google uses cookies, fingerprinting and all other possible options to track correct attribution from various channels.

So even with ad blockers you can get a pretty accurate picture. It is also tightly integrated with google ads.

Plausible can tell you what users do inside your app. But honestly this is so basic you can pretty much build same functionality with a few sql queries.

   Article 6
   Lawfulness of processing
   1. Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:
   (a) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;
   (b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;

Member States shall ensure that the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned is provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing, and is offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

This decreases the attack surface for loopholes. What is desirable is the end result, not the technical details.

The law is actually clearer because the intent is clearly spelt out. The point of the law is to protect privacy, not cover every screen with cookies banners.

This leaves room for different implementations and flexibility (yay, competition).

It makes the law more resilient, because it does not need to be re-engineered every time anything happens. 10 years from now, even if cookies and banners have completely vanished, the core of the law will still be relevant.

This is why debates about the spirit and the letter of laws translate poorly across the Atlantic. Different places have different approaches.

These are trying times.

The end result is that you get mixed messages, depending on where the information ultimately came from.

I personally don't know how hard it actually is to comply with GDPR, but I know that it has to be easier than it's made out to be.

- How much of the product/company's supply chain is in EU (to get an idea of just how European the product is, is it made here or abroad)

- Some way to show if the company is paying "fair" tax in EU (or are profits shifted abroad)

These are difficult datapoints to get, but I wonder if there can be some sort of "community notes" where this data can be crowd sourced and updated on the directory.

So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.

The idea is whether the company has some loophole where the profits are registered in some offshore island in order to avoid taxes, as well as how big part of the product is actually made in europe as opposed as in X non-european country. I have seen a lot of products advertised as being products of the native country when they are actually rebranded chinese products or whatever (I have no issue with chinese products, but if the point is to know which products are european products this is important information).

High-level discussions rarely go down to this level of detail, and from the point of view of the consumers it is not very relevant. What matters is coupling with the US or China, and the relevant regulations.

Back then, one of the arguments I convinced myself with was that the cloud behemoths had so much to lose on integrity breach that it would just not happen.

It didn’t even occur to me at the time that my data being held hostage in some geopolitical gameplay should be part of the risk assessment.

I'm seriously considering self-hosting as an alternative, in combination with regional cloud services.

Maybe we have an Internet renaissance on our hands, taking it back to its decentralized nature?

While i'm from EU and I support the movement, after I looked over some numbers it is hard to ditch something like Amazon. 1st thing for me are the prices and monthly I can save at least 100 Euros just from shopping on deals. Second Amazon employs 150k people across EU and this is not a low number (how about them?).

Yes we need alternatives but the rich EU guys also have to invest some. Sometimes I feel that average Joe needs to support the "movement" while rich just mid their own business.

Same goes also with local producers: "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!" Sorry, I'm not in a position to just spend more just because...

I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.

My sister lives in a fairly remote town in France, and they wouldn't dream of leaving a package unattended. It's not otherwise considered an "unsafe" or "rough" or whatever area.

But it isn't the same thing. Locally grown food tends to taste much better and have higher nutritional value.

Plus, something I didn't expect when I started buying most of my food from my local farmer's market-- these farmers are like friends. Every meal I sit down to eat, I have a direct connection to it's source. Of course I go to "grocery stores" for staples, and it always feels so weird, empty, fake.

Besides this outrage at the US from EU perspective is mind-boggling, for the first time since I can remember US is moving away from imperialist global polices, and Europe is in a position where they can become an independent global actor after WW2. Sure Trump administration isn't making the process pleasant but Europeans should be happy about these changes. And the tariff situation is nothing the EU has not been doing for decades, Trump did escalate it suddenly, but it is not like EU is not imposing massive tariffs to protect its industry, even at the expense of EU members that have no significant stakes in this industry.

Its fine if you can't afford it or don't want to pay the difference, but by and large they are not suboptimal, at all.

Buying local is usually more expensive because of economies of scale and comparative advantages. And they are often less scrutinized because of smaller reach. Same thing with "organic" produce actually being more dangerous to eat than processed food in terms of poisoning/bacteria.

How do I "support local" when purchasing a micro-format PC for running a Cloud node? There's no chip-fab in town. The parts are sourced to two or three different countries.

What's mind boggling is saying that the US is becoming LESS imperialist, when Trump has threatened to annex both Canada and Greenland, and come out in favor of the most imperialist country in Europe.

And what about his very clear support of Russia? Is that also a positive change for the EU?

I do not think Trump is supporting Russia, it seems like he does not view them as a threat and is very China focused (which is actually scary since antagonizing China can have far worse consequences). He is also focused on cutting spending/reducing inflation pressure from war/sanctions.

Meanwhile EU, and Germany in particular, built their economic growth on cheap Russian energy - and is now bending over backwards to revive it in a world where energy prices are rising. If Europe took Trumps stance of deescalating Ukraine ASAP, wrapping up the war and ending sanctions - our economy would recover much faster. And it would give EU the resources to build a proper military. Even if Ukraine got all of its territory back its going to be a humanitarian disaster zone for decades and a burden on the rest of the country. I really do not see a winning scenario Europe is pushing for in Ukraine.

It's not mind-boggling when the US is threatening to take over territories from EU member-states. That's the mind-boggling part: that it is acceptable and normal to the point where it's not even part of the discourse anymore, it's completely normal to have a US president stating a desire to annex Greenland.

Surely Overton's window can't have shifted that much that fast.

On the other hand I do agree on the imperial ambitions part with you, having the USA pull out from being an imperialistic power is definitely something I cheer on, just upsetting they can never seem to do anything with grace and subtlety, have to live up to the stereotypes I guess.

If Trump was not so obnoxious I do not think a lot of people would be welcoming Germany building up its military for example.

Amazon shines in customer support though.

Search & categorization is entirely broken, the webshop experience is absolutely abysmal. Just order from better online stores. In Germany, I found these (surprisingly ok):

- Kaufland --> https://www.kaufland.de

- Galaxus Deutschland --> https://www.galaxus.de

- Lidl --> https://www.lidl.de (Schwarz IT is building a European Cloud btw!)

- ShopApotheke --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/

- Home24 --> https://www.home24.de/

Then, buying specialized stuff on the actual website is often a decent experience. Just price hunt on sites like Idealo (attention though, Axel Springer!) and proceed to the specific stores from there.

https://www.idealo.de/ --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/

I explicitly avoided mentioning Otto as alternative to Amazon although it is technically the closest. While their shop is ok, prices and customer experience are horrifyingly bad (especially returns and delivery). For an unbiased view:

https://www.otto.de/

As much as Europe wants to be a single market sometimes, every country has different cultures and different economic situations. Where I live Amazon is never the cheapest option (and almost never the fastest to deliver), but 20km to the east of me it's a valid competitor to many online storefronts.

I speak specifically about galaxus/digitec which often have more and more available stock than actual amazon in EU, any category has 1000s of items, much better organized and findable. Plus it has many great features not seen or usable elsewhere - directly showing evolution of price across the time, reviews which are absolutely not gamed due to tiny market, so I can rely on them very well (while on amazon its tricky at best). You can easily buy used versions of same item at fraction of the price, its showed at top of each product page.

Their guarantee handling is stellar. And for stuff in stock its next day delivery.

https://www.galaxus.at/

https://www.galaxus.de/

https://www.galaxus.it/

https://www.galaxus.fr/

Digitec is not available outside Switzerland, as it's the old franchise name which would have been dropped in Switzerland as well, if it wasn't so well known. But Galaxus has all items of Digitec anyway.

I can highly recommend it, a very nice interface and I had very good customer support over the last decade.

In the summer we also have farners markets and thise are about the same price as the cheapest stores so i switch to them for fruits and veggies.

The last physical thing I bought on Amazon was a Brita glass carafe.

44.99€

The cheapest I can find elsewhere is 49.9O€ with 4.99€ of shipping. Otherwise it's mostly 54.99€ and it's even 59.90€ on Brita's own store.

The other physical stuff in my order history of the last three months are orders made for relatives because they found that it was cheaper on Amazon and wanted to take advantage of my Premium subscription.

So, as always, YMMV.

(btw: codeberg is the European alternative to Github)

Also it seems to be missing some techs company: pigment, aircall, contentsquare (but not sure if it's a mistake)

- In Europe, getting funding is literally like pulling teeth. Just to get a measly hundred thousands of € in funding you're expected to provide a comprehensive business plan, financials, etc. that would rival M&A due diligence other places. In Silicon Valley you can get more funding by simply meeting the right angel investor, and providing a good pitch - done deal.

- In Europe, the end goal for many startups is to be acquired by some megacorp or market leader, for something like €10m-€50m. In the US you can multiply that number by 10 or 100, or in general have ambitions of developing the startup into a unicorn.

That was at least how things used to be. US has a long, long history of (risk willing) VC investments - while European countries have been lagging far behind.

Good VC cultures have developed in some European countries for the past 10-15 years, and startups have become more ambitious, but unfortunately there's still a culture of nickel and diming startups. And the places that rob you, will fund you maybe a month or two worth of capital.

EDIT: Should be said, that I'm also from Europe. And as someone else have pointed out in this thread, Europeans hate risk.

I say this as proud European: the problem isn't just VC culture, it's European culture. In Europe there's an extreme risk aversion to trying things that have nonzero risk of failing.

My mental shortcut has always been "The US never inherited debtor's prison." Historically in the UK at least, getting into a situation where your debts can't be honored was utterly ruinous (this has improved IIUC). In the US, there are strict upper bounds on how much sway creditors can have over you. One could imagine this would result in a chillier credit market when creditors have fewer protections, but ironically, this makes it easier to get credit in the US because creditors don't have another option. Interest on a successful venture is still the quickest path to making one's money grow, so even knowing the debtor could walk away and the worst that would happen is "bankruptcy followed by a judge telling you you get pennies on the dollar of your investment", people still put up the money.

The most obvious example of how failure to pay debt in the US isn't personally ruinous is probably that our current President has filed bankruptcy six times.

(Note: I am speaking broadly and about non-medical debt. Medical debt in the US is ruinous for several significant reasons. But that's generally a non-overlapping concern to most tech-company funding).

Because Europe was not able to print unlimited Euros to flood its economy with free cash like how the US was able to do it thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. But no worries - now that dollar's monopoly is ending, the American investment landscape is also coming down back to Earth. US startups and companies wont be able to burn endless amounts of shareholder/investor money to out-compete and kill all competitors anymore. That should allow all regions in the world to be able to compete.

> That was at least how things used to be. US has a long, long history of (risk willing) VC investments - while European countries have been lagging far behind > Europeans hate risk

Right, that's because Europe did not have zirp-enabled free cash. You can dump millions on all kinds of ideas including dumb ones when you have free cash and still see 1% of them make it big even if 99% of them fail. But when you don't have free cash, you have to be careful.

So finding investment wasn't a problem or issue of the European culture or business landscape. The US being able to burn cash on even dumb ideas thanks to zirp made it appear like it was a problem.

As for getting acquired, that's the same in the US. Either you goal is total dominance on your own or getting acquired by Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.

You do have a point, start ups doesn't have access to the same level of uncritical funding. The SV model also isn't ideal, but it should be possible to find somewhere in the middle.

Those Europeans who are not at home with that culture move to America. It's been like this for hundreds of years.

If Europe would invest into local startups instead of propping up the real estate bubble, they wouldn't sell themselves to the US for money. Our downfall is by our own design here.

Governments don't create startups but they can 100% create the right legal, monetary and tax incentives to steer private capital and workers towards them, but as long as they are steered towards protecting the interests of gentrified land owners and those of 100-year-old companies, nothing will ever change and we'll just stare at how US and Chinese companies are overtaking us.

Rich people can invest relatively small amounts in hundreds, if not thousands of startups through preferentially treated retirement funds and pay no (or little) tax on the ones that make it big.

This is what has made it so easy to secure funding in the US.

Should Europe do the same? There's definitely an ethical dilemma in making the rich, richer for the sake of innovation.

What do you mean? The European rich have always been getting richer via inheritance regardless of innovation. That's a monetary and legal policy hack that's been in place for decades/centuries here which is how the richest families are centuries old.

Investing in innovation instead would be a much needed breath of fresh air and give current generation of youth some skin in the game instead of a defetist mentality that there's no point in working hard because the zero sum game is rigged. So I don't get your point.

I already pointed it out in another thread about this exact website: Go and search for "keyboard", what's the first search result? Logitech, a company that makes their products almost exclusively in china. There's nothing european about this.

"Yeah but it's a european company so!" yeah i don't care. It's not an european product. It's a chinese product. I don't care if the CEO lives in europe or it has a German flag on the cover or whatever - if the product is made in china, it's not an european product.

Also this is like the 5th time i see this here, which makes me wonder if this is some sort of organic-looking promotional campaign.

You are contradicting yourself. There is something European about it.

Anyway, as long as it's not from the USA, it's a win.

Which is the lesser evil, really?

Average geopolitical comprehension level of HN on display

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

contrast with:

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

Yeah, China sucks. But the US sucks even more.

> Why did you change your name from Buy European Made to Go European?

> We changed our name to better reflect our evolving mission and values. "Go European" encompasses a broader range of initiatives and activities that support European culture, tourism, and services, beyond just promoting European-made products.

Not a shill, just a happy customer.

{hug emoji}

I hope the new attempt you linked will make a difference. This time, international support seems to be at the basis of the system. Widespread integration of a unified form of iDeal/Bancontact/Payconiq could easily replace the need for American style credit card forms across Europe.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

We do 'import' a lot of services from the US:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[1] Of course, there are US conglomerates that produce in the Europe. But a good chunk (at least here) is Unilever, Nestle, etc., which are all European.

The day the US drops the Cloud Act would be the death of all European CSPs. Until then, cloud offerings not subject to it will thrive, and the US will be seen as hostile.

And for all other subjects, it's a simple matter of not putting all of your eggs in the same basket. Having privileged trade partners is a good thing, but it becomes a bad one when it's a partner (singular). Today, the US has full power on Europe's tech landscape, which is concerning, even if it's a friend country.

Oh, and I say a "friend country", but given the latest announcements where the US Govt. clearly targets Europe and wants to sanction it (e.g. tariffs on French exports), the friend is turning around.

TL;DR today Europe does not see the US as an enemy. But it does everything for it to never happen, and this include reducing the dependency on the US.

Sadly, SwiftKey is/was actually a UK company that was acquired by Microsoft. Most successful European tech start-ups seem to end up being acquired by one of the American tech giants. Perhaps this is will be ending now.