Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.

The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.

Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.

Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.

Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.

Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.

I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.

Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.

The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.

Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits. This is not capitalism ...

I wish there was a way to automatically mirror those things to Codeberg as a backup. For issues/PRs that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Truth is, GitHub has a whole suite of really great features that's hard to move. Especially for open sourced projects/communities

Launchpad.net offers project management and git code hosting and is run by a UK company (Canonical).

Are they still alive? i am somewhat hard-opponent of git, and still use bazaar - now breezy - as main repo storage, and only keep github as copy for PR, eh public relations, i.e. for jobhunt.

Are they still project-based? instead of person-based? It's the Person-based thing a-la-social-network that rocketed github into skies.. not git or MS

Would you be up for making recommendations?

https://european-alternatives.eu/

I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en

Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage

Infomaniak is great email.

Here’s the tweet: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

Some have interpreted this as a political signal. The Intercept article provides additional context and takes a more critical view: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

------

one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm

Thank you for the heads-up !

Also, it's not good that they do not have any status tracker that shows summary stats on uptime over the past, say, year so one can get a quick idea of how reliable the service was historically.

The status monitor only has entries for incidences from the past 7 days. It could have been down for 10 days a month ago, you wouldn't know this unless someone wrote about it.

_You_ know the service is new, but this isn't mentioned on the landing page either. They don't say something like "only 4 months old, public beta" - in that case I wouldn't feel negatively surprised.

I learned (the hard way) to have a plan b for everything. I'll study an emergency solution in case of a prolonged downtime.

I don't want to continue to contribute to making richer companies that try in every possible way to steal data and wealth from their customers and other nations with unfair behavior at the edge (or beyond the edge) of the law.

And if that is not enough to also use every possible way to manipulate the people's beliefs with false claims and evil psychological tactics.

This makes it hard for US-companies handling data of EU citizens to comply with EU privacy regulations. Some legal provisions have been made to facilitate this, but, to answer your question, what changed recently is that the Trump administration recently effectively incapacitated the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" that was central to these legal provisions.

Above is my interpretation of matters, for a large part based on posts by a Dutch expert in these matters, Bert Hubert. In particular see this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you... and this news article it links to: https://noyb.eu/en/us-cloud-soon-illegal-trump-punches-first...

This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)

https://alternativeto.net/

> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

Based on their comment it seems like they're pro-left, anti-liberal more than anything. They lament the Dem party's decision to reject Bernie in favor of corporate Democrats

They never once promoted Trump though

If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.

After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/

If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.

I believe that US firms see European tech companies as slow/lazy and think that good engineers only seek high compensation which is available to them in the US. Certainly there are some who are motivated by that, but I have known some great engineers in Europe which was one of my reasons for cautioning my American peers about pushing too hard for WFH; if they can do the job from home, then so can others in countries with lower costs of living.

If that were true then people wouldn't worry as much. It's because there is a fuck-you-and-the-world nationalistic theme going on and US tech companies are unable to escape — that makes people worry. No company in the world is a vehicle to pure financial rationalism, and no human or collection of humans are either.

Ahem … large US tech firms, that is.

FWIW we have had two customers (apologetically) terminate service in the past month citing nationalist concerns.

In Sweden, Russia has always been the enemy.

My prediction is that France and Germany will soon join the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and it will be the end of NATO. UK will probably join the Maximator intelligence alliance.

The death of Five Eyes and NATO in 2025 was not on my bingo card. Good luck with your new alliance with the Russians, Americans!

> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation ($107,600 for 2020, $108,700 for 2021, $112,000 for 2022, and $120,000 for 2023). In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.

Whaou.

Divesting from the rest of the world by introducing tariffs.

Enjoy!

Their point is that OP likely underestimates the effect of their particular filter bubble on their perception of the universality of the discussion and sentiment.

I'd be happy to see other people commenting on the merits of the argument instead of attacking at best a gross misunderstanding or at worst a straw man.

When you ask the extremists, like some of the people in these threads, to list specific concerns about specific things that the USG is currently doing that they're unaligned with, they struggle. The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Look, I think its a distraction for either side to be worrying about this so much. Those actions are a very, very far distance from anything remotely resembling human rights abuse. We've been playing world police since WW2 and we're $35T in debt; we have bigger fish to fry.

If you're mad that the United States is asking your country to contribute more to its own defense; or that its no longer going to get that $50M USAID contract for gender fluidity studies or whatever; I don't know what to tell you. Growing up is hard, but necessary. Europe can't keep relying on the US for everything.

If its ending the war in Ukraine; I think judgement should be reserved until we understand the terms of how it ends. Ukraine could lose some territory. Sucks, but again, America voted and does not want to be the world police anymore. Supporting peace at the cost of Ukrainian territory is not automatically "omg Russia and US are allied". Its a sad, horrible outcome of Europe utterly failing its neighbor; but sure, they can blame the US, part of the job of being World Police is also being World Scapegoat.

Most everything else the Trump admin is doing doesn't impact Europe. Its vague generalities about "vibes". You're oversocialized, and those vibes are probably courtesy of Russian/Chinese disinformation propaganda, not reality. Its hard to hear, you aren't going to believe it, but please just log off the internet and orient yourself on what really matters in your daily life.

Really? The biggest concern? Not wantonly cutting long-running programs (even international commitments) with no regard to consequences, just to see what happens?

I think the spending cuts are generally justified under something akin to "we don't have the money to spend on a lot of this stuff", because we don't. I haven't heard any argument on how deficit spending is sustainable, and obviously Americans are tired of mortgaging their childrens' future for short-term gains.

I suspect we'll rebuild a ton of the programs, and I hope we do; but we need to reach a place of fiscal sustainability first.

Can you name examples that you believe should not be cut?

I am not arguing against cutting your government spending,but you shouldn't just cut shit willy nilly without regard for how important work is.

To some degree I think it’s being treated as yet another line item in the long list of things that need to be managed in global companies of a certain size. I presume that the threat of retaliation (see story about X advertisers) is keeping voices quiet too.

It’s different this time… it’s going to get weird. And possibly dangerous. Talk of third term, crashing the economy as a pretense for parting out the assets of the federal government, finding a reason to cancel the next election, and being the war machine for our enemies may not feel like the purview of technology companies even as they angle for federal contracts to “support” some of these things.

We need more bodies at protests. Not everything announced has gone into effect, but they’re testing all the things they want to make happen. And they’re persistent.

The public haven’t yet seen the spark that may light the next resistance fire. It may not feel like we have moves available to us, but public boycotts, protests/ marches, calls to our politicians, honking for peace, supporting our neighbors — these are all reps in the resistance. They are recruitment and rallying measures. They are all little tiny sparks, from which something may alight. Look for something happening today and show up.

Musk is already pretty unpopular. A lot of the damage will hit MAGA territories. It may unravel the base for the GOP. They conspired well for a long time. It’s a daunting situation.

In terms of pensions - I think 99.9% of us have a huge chunk the S&P, so even though we're upset I doubt there will be any movement on that front at all. Money will win in this battle.

Personally I do feel betrayed as well and for the first time in my life I've started looking for where the product I consume come from. About a third is from the US. Stopped buying them, found a European alternative.

To all the Europeans out here - let them live how they want over the pond, let's use this opportunity to promote our industries and products as well as become as independent as we possibly can given our current financial and political constraints.

No hard feelings at all, live and let live.

Here's a particular dutch pension fund that dropped their us stocks: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/dutch-pension-fund-ab...

Do you own anything made in China or have ever used oil and gas from Russia?

In addition, tariffs will be put on cars coming from the US.

Plus, US is now recognized as a very unreliable partner in terms of defense, that Europe regrets buying their systems.

I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason.

I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wall. Tesla’s brand is destroyed in Europe and they can’t ship these promised advanced features in this market. But he doesn’t mind giving up the European market because he’s got a sweet deal at home where his businesses are now part of a 1930s-style union between corporations and authoritarian government. The gains from that arrangement far outweigh the headaches of trying to sell cars globally.

I believe it works better in the US. Elsewhere in the world it’s still practically useless, yet they’ve been selling it for years on the pretense that it’s just around the corner.

Cruise control on a Volkswagen is smarter than “FSD” on a Tesla. It’s just sad for a 7,500 euro feature.

No wonder; the US tanks could just roll over one of the reasonably-sized european cars...

Also, france has a first-strike policy.

So even without US troops, europe will be fine.

A sizable part of the population has wanted the US out of especially germany for a looong time now, so those movements have become pretty popular again. I haven't heard "ami go home" in a long time, but right now it's common.

It's served us well having a member of NATO saying they'll go full-on nuts. One of the best deterrents ever. Thanks France, with love, USA.

Can you provide a source for this? It would be big if true, in particular the Germany claim. I've not heard it and couldn't find things with a quick google search.

Germany is currently already doing nuclear weapons sharing with the US, i.e. they have access to US nuclear weapons though of course with some restrictions.

What you wrote sounds like Germany would be working towards having new nuclear weapons to be produced in Europe without US involvement and shared without US restrictions.

The political work for it is being done right now. However, I reread my comment and realized, it could be interpreted as "actively working at the weapons" instead of the political framework. My apologies in that case.

[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/nuklearwa...

I think that's quite an important difference from your original wording.

A powerful conventional army capable of proportional response is the only realistic deterrent.

The entire point of the doctrine is that any sane person in charge of a country('s military) would never risk getting their own country nuked just to attack another country, so having nukes on your side means that no one else will attack you.

This...does somewhat break down when we end up with people in charge of nuclear countries who are not sane.

Certainly something for the invader to think about, isn't it.

Edit: seen your other comment, that clarifies: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/merz-consider... -- this is already a surprise to me, even though it is well short of self-made nukes.

France (and the UK) having an independent nuclear deterrent is because they (/we) didn't want to risk someone like Trump when the USSR was still around:

“The General himself had asked whether we would be ready to trade New York for Paris.” - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v14...

If push came to shove, the only ally Ukraine needs to equal Russia (as it is today) is Poland.

They'd rather not have to as it would be expensive, but Poland could match 100% of current outside assistance for Ukraine[0] for a smaller fraction of their GDP than Ukraine itself is currently spending on the war[1].

The USA and Russia agreeing with each other to carve up Ukraine would be a much harder battle.

Well, it would be harder unless DOGE actually does make good on the claim of $2T cuts, because the only way of reaching $2T without touching the "mandatory" budget (mandatory = social security etc.) is to delete the entire armed forces and the CIA (and basically everything else) and just under half the interest payments on the loans, which in turn means they'd have no power to carve anything up.

[0] $380bn over the first 2 years according to Wikipedia, so lets say $190bn/year

[1] Ukraine plans to spend ~$53.7 billion in 2025, about 26% GDP

Poland's GDP is $915, 26% of that would be $237.9 billion / year.

I don't even know how Europe would respond to that, and I live in Berlin.

Canada… not so much. For all the talk, he'd be absolutely screwed if he tried. If you think Fentanyl is a problem now, wait until it's supplied for free by drones sent by Canadian civilians paying for it out of pocket because they've never heard of the Geneva Convention or the Chemical Weapons Convention.

(Harder done than said, of course; if it was that easy to mess with populations, western Russia would be high as a kite right now).

Even if the sanctions would include, e.g. all Trump assets (like the Scottish golf course) being seized.

So I guess my question is aren’t Europe already by themselves?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/dutch-pension-fund-ab...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fewer-canadi...

America's image is toxic to everyone right now (including its own citizens). But I don't really see that many valid alternatives. It's not like Europe has done much to cultivate any kind of relevant software industry.

But you're kind of showing here why Europe doesn't have the software innovation America does.

Americans are not inherently smarter or more capable of doing innovative things than Europeans. It's just that whenever a European wants to do something interesting, there's a handy European regulation making it harder or less profitable to do it.

If this American administration is the impetus for that to change, that would be good! But I doubt it.

Think technical debt with 0 refactoring ever, because you can't break the existing system, only grow it.

A refactoring, that's how I see what the government is currently doing in the USA.

(I'm French, living in Asia)

Not exactly a healthy refactoring, and it'll take decades to undo the damage if ever possible.

1- I think the previous administration used various agencies to avoid justice quite a lot. Heard of a laptop maybe? If agencies were shields for the last admin’s messes, why assume they’re pure now?

2- I wouldn't say republicans started the cultural wars over progressive ideologies

3- The US still votes, judges rule, hardly a dictatorship. Fascists charm everyone, while Trump and Musk two just piss half off

Seriously? Please read just a little bit of history and civics, and stop making false equivalences.

These moves are straight out of the bog-standard authoritarian playbook.

Under well-functioning democracies, the branches of govt (legislative, executive, judicial), and the branches of society (press, industry, business, academy, religion, sport, social, etc.) are all independent with a relative balance of power

Under fascism, all of these institutions are coerced or corrupted to serve the will of the executive.

Every move already done (not anticipated) is a decapitation or coercion attack on the institutions to force them to serve the will of the executive.

Over seventy moves already done have been challenged in court, and the judiciary, even those appointed by appointed by the same President, in the preliminary rulings have been ruled illegal.

No other administration has ever sued or prosecuted a Press organization or journalist for coverage they didn't like. This one already has in the first few weeks in office. That is not anticipating, that is observing fascist moves in real time.

The administration has already challenged the legitimacy of judges' rulings ("who are they to tell the executive how to rule?") and threatened to not follow judges' rulings. Again, in the first few weeks, and utterly unprecedented.

Russia and Venezuela also "still vote". The Rs have already introduced a bill, the SAVE act, which will disenfranchise most married women (require them to register to vote with a birth cert matching their current driver's license name). And that is only one attempt to disenfranchise anyone not a white male.

>> I wouldn't say republicans started the cultural wars over progressive ideologies

I would say they did. What you call "progressive ideologies" is simply living up to the ideals of the country — equal treatment for everyone. It does not take rights away from anyone, only allows everyone to have the same rights in public spaces, employment, healthcare, etc. It is the right wing who turned it into a culture war. It sure as hell was no one but the right-wingers who politicized and turned simple scientific public health measures like N95 masks and vaccinations into a culture war.

>>Fascists charm everyone

Seriously, the fact that Trump and Musk are not charming is your argument they are not fascist? You seriously think Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot, Chavez, Maduro, etc. etc., etc. charmed everyone? They managed to create chaos and barely get elected before corrupting their countries into their dictatorships.

Again, please get real, read some actual history, stop posting misleading nonsense and looking like a Useful Idiot (in the specific Vladimir Lenin sense).

The choice is then whether to lead and have an opportunity to influence and benefit, or to follow and have neither.

For independent indexes, Brave’s search came from a German company and Yandex certainly isn’t American.

It's a massive opportunity for European-based companies to compete. I expect a lot more funding to start materialising here as a result.

In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.

This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.

I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.

That is evidently not true. You being unhappy, doesn't make the whole world unhappy too.

Doubt it though

I fortunately also got rid of Facebook a while ago. This gave me a lot more time back. It's difficult at first, because there's a little fomo, but now I am very happy.

I never started with all the other social media. No Instagram, no Twitter. So that makes it easy.

My computers have always run Linux, very happy with that.

Streaming services are next. At least the US ones.

Replacing whatsapp with signal also. I noticed a lot of my contacts are already in there, just not actively using it. It's a question of just starting communications and groups there.

It's quite doable, but you have to really want to "vote with your wallet" so to speak. I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. In fact, it rids you of psychological warfare, reduces anxiety, costs less money and gives you your time back.

If you think about it that way, it's a no brainer.

That is just the business part of things, the removal of DEI at all cost in conjunction with the Russian dealings and the statements from JD Vance are also a bit hard to be positive about.

We like the companies but the noise increases risk as opposed to European partners.

They will care very, very much when it bites them in terms of higher prices and loss of jobs because of decreased tech exports. Dollar hegemony has benefitted the US economy tremendously over the past few decades; money rushed _into_ US dollar denominated holdings in the 2008 crash as one big example.

Let’s stop pretending that the individuals who voted for this administration actually wanted most of what it is doing. The majority voted off of feelings and will not like the end result. There is a lot of explaining away the stupidity and I find it really annoying.

It’s not a difference of opinion that Tariffs will cause a rise in prices, no matter what the current administration says.

Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau...

FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3...

FT: How Washington plans to defend the dollar - this is about Crypto - https://www.ft.com/content/bfafb8f7-bd1c-48bb-85f4-8ba25475c...

FT: Donald Trump considers tarriffs to counter Big Tech service taxes: - https://www.ft.com/content/558b5a20-c25e-483d-8fdc-bbfd2923a...

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have similarly significant, unbiased sources presenting some contrary view, it would behoove you to share them, rather than chiding.

If you just want to share your personal views, that is also welcome. The tone-policing and attacking reliable, unbiased sources is pretty empty, though.

> If you just want to share your personal views, that is also welcome

I meant your personal views on the topic (how Europeans view America lately), rather than your personal views on media bias.

Not that you can't share those, too, but it doesn't add to the discussion about how Europeans view America lately, and to be honest, the talking points I saw were pretty tired.

> I honestly believe the only way to get at "unbiased" sources is to triangulate all the bias

If you indeed believe that, and you have any sources with a reliability and bias level equal to FT (whatever you feel that may be) which you think are necessary to "triangulate all the bias" on this topic, please go ahead and share them.

I mean that quite literally. Go ahead and try it. Assume the devil's advocate for any contemporary sacred cow and see how far you take it before you reject the position as not merely wrong but absurd or declasse.

Are you European? Do you live in Europe? Tell me how "Europeans" view the US at the moment.

You were linked a reliable, low-bias source answering this question, but it's seeming more like you just want to spread FUD about the answer and complain about the media, rather than actually discuss the topic.

Your empty talking points about media bias, while unhinged ("propaganda" thrown out multiple times), are quite tired, and it doesn't seem like anyone here (least of all myself), is interested in the distraction of retreading such tired metadiscussion that one could see repeated ten times an hour from bots and humans alike while browsing truth social, if they were so inclined to so subject themselves (I no longer am).

Feel free to reengage with the actual topic if you're interested in talking about it, rather than being upset that other people are talking about it. Please don't reply just to complain at me about the media again.

I don't expect that I'll change your feelings about the topic**, and I don't want to oblige you to keep replying in a post about a topic** which you personally don't like and personally don't want to discuss.

* – all of these are shallow dismissals from you here

** – how europeans feel about american tech lately

You have an opportunity here to share these equally-biased, equally-factual sources you've been talking about which provide alternative perspectives on the topic*. You can take that opportunity or leave it. Personally, I'd love to read them and learn their perspectives, but as far as I can tell from what you've linked, they don't exist. Don't you want to help others "triangulate", as you called it?

If you just don't like FT or don't like the topic*, that'd be a different topic (and not one that interests me).

* – how europeans feel about american tech lately

It seems clear to me now, that the dependency on US tech needs to be reduced _a lot_, and I sincerely hope this current political storm will bring renewed interest in protocols and European tech

It's like rain on your wedding day

It has many links to articles with an European viewpoint.

But you have to read between the lines as EU media does not like to write "this is too crazy to be happening, what are they thinking?".

E.g. a title like "Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump". How bad do you think it has to create a EU summit solely for handling the new US relationship?

tldr: large increase in EU military and which has to be EU made. US is seen as ending "rule of law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law) and has become an unreliable partner, great loss of soft power and prestige.

Suppose the war ends. Will the Europeans keep boycotting the cheap russian gas?

Tarriffs are a nuisance to the US - the US doesn't export much.

Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...

"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]

If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...

I think they absolutely will, yes. It will cost some money, just like spending more money on defense will, but from what I can see, no one in the European politic elite imagines a world where we can go back to buying gas from Russia.

How fast can Ukraine scrap the parts of the pipeline going through their own territory?

Even those countries that would quite like access to Russian gas, may just not have a choice in the matter.

And given we've already seen some spectacularly poor decision making by whoever fires the various missiles[0] that end up hitting multiple different nuclear reactors in the area, there's a non-zero risk of the entire border region suffering catastrophic (though likely not Chernobyl-1986 level[1]) radiation leak incidents.

This also makes it somewhat of a moot point to consider any mineral wealth besides oil, or even a return to normality for food output, at this point.

[0] Zaporizhzhia: both sides blamed the other, and irregardless of who did it, the nature of the damage says it was done by shelling; more recently Chernobyl's outer barrier was also hit.

[1] I think Russia still has some reactors with positive void coefficient in Kursk (near where Ukraine's counter-invasion was), but Ukraine itself has decommissioned all their positive void coefficient reactors.

So it's not impossible for another Chernobyl, but it's really unlikely.

US to EU gas trade is insane right now due to pricing and a 20% tariff won't change anything.

For starters, they will shock well greased supply chains, that will cause shortages and thus price raises. Who suffer price raising the most? Then, protected industries will have quasi-monopoly power to raise prices (this is the populism behind tariffs). But other industries will suffer because they can't import their resources and have to switch to more expensive and/or lower quality locals. As an example: suppose that car makers are happy with tariffs protecting them from japanese cars, but now they have to buy expensive US steel, and have to move their assembly lines back to US where today is hard to find experienced and cheap workers. Because everyone always claim to want industry back, but then nobody wants a blue collar job if they can get a white collar one.

It’s possible all economists are wrong. It is more likely they aren’t. Tariffs are going to hurt middle and lower classes.

(Same goes for the other side of the geopolitical aisle: European politicians would have liked a much faster and much more comprehensive economic decoupling from China since at least the start of the Ukraine war. But feedback from the private sector was pretty clear that this would have been economic suicide. Hence the official stance is now "de-risking" instead of "decoupling")

America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve America’s problems instead of being feted in European capitals. If that means the rest of world won’t use Gmail, YouTube, or Facebook, so be it. Those companies can take care of themselves.

America is voluntarily stepping down from the international stage by imposing tariffs, ignoring treaties, demonizing foreigners, bowing out of powerful organizations and then saber rattling about the rise of China as the world looks elsewhere for leadership. It's clearly an intentional agitation and eventual war footing by naive self-destructive idiots.

They end up achieving the opposite of their aims. They say they're going to lower egg prices, which is caused by the H5N1 bird flu epidemic, but instead they think it's from DEI hires and defund the USDA and organizations tasked with controlling the spread of bird flu and then egg prices go up. They then think "aughh! more wokeness! it's everywhere!"

This is happening everywhere, with every bugaboo they care about. They blame it on nefarious acronyms and then dismantle the institutions trying to fix things. This is really the time to leave. Start packing the bags folks.

They are all sitting ducks for black swan events, but I don't think getting roasted in Europe will be enough to trouble them.

You yanks might think this is some display of your upper hand. Just wait until the civilized world turns its back on the greenback as the reserve currency. You will be so fucked.

EU has lagged US due to systemic issues like over regulation and limited investments. See Draghi's report.

EMEA has always been a soft market for tech. And it's always been a cost center for regionalization and compliance.

A move away from US tech is not necessarily new or surprising. But it's also not as damning to the bottom line as one would expect.

I will say that the tech sector in Europe is not nearly as robust. While alternatives exist for some products, they are not likely going to find international markets of their own. (Overgeneralization, obv).

Soft power sounds like manipulation to me. So if we destroyed our manipulation, great. The United States has put its fingers on too many scales rather than respecting the rights of individuals in other countries to manage their affairs the way they see fit.

I welcome tech competition from Europe. Let the best products and services win.

Something like 40% of the humanitarian contribution in the world came from USAID, and Thanos just fingersnapped it out of existence last Tuesday.

Until that gap is filled, there will be tons of unnecessary suffering. A "more humane" way would have been to slowly wind down over a period of months/years, giving the market time to react. Even better would have been to work with foreign powers to spin off USAID-backed initiatives and transfer control+funding responsibility to them, but I'm just a girl with a unrealistic dream at that point

Wow. So hard power -- literally killing others -- is OK, but "manipulating" them is not?

The fact is, power is power, "soft" or "hard," and we are discarding ours for nothing.

Also, alliances are not "manipulation." Working together against a common foe is not manipulation. Trade agreements are not manipulation.

I'm not sure where you read that in my comment. That's not something I wrote, and it's not something I believe.

The first question is how broad is this shift; is it really everywhere on the street or just in the "early adopters"?

The next question is how durable is the trend?

The things I've noticed here are reports of AfD rapidly losing 5% in the polls after Vance spoke in Munich, and a French right-wing leader cancelling his planned speech at CPAC after Bannon did a Nazi salute in his talk. When the US wannabe-Nazis are too toxic for European pro-fascists, that is saying something...

I don’t know about people usage of tech.

But it’s now really clear that the US is not a reliable ally. ( not even getting into politics, just stability wise : it’s clear that a change of regime can have the country do a 180 in term of foreign policies. And it’s not a good look )

The issue in EU is Big Tech has many "minions" in public administrations and local critical online services (many dominant online services are theirs anyway). They manage to make hard dependent the "web" on their cartel of whatng web rendering engines (and their SDK).