Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!
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
I know that it's not in the cards (yet), but I hope the UK and the EU can be a single market again (even if the UK does not rejoin the EU). Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible! We love the UK and you are part of the European family :hugs:.
If only it was so simple, there are of course many conflicting interests in Europe, with certain countries who are more export oriented for instance benefiting from a weak Euro and others from a stronger Euro etc.
A single one on paper but a heavily divided one in practice where every country wants to be king or at least backstab everyone else to get what it wants.
Whilst a good idea, no politician is going to try and do it under the fear of reigniting the Brexit argument which ends up dominating politics in the country.
Most people who voted for Brexit were mostly concerned about free movement of people, not goods. I doubt a free trade agreement would upset them too much.
If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.
> If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.
Absolutely not. This was made clear repeatedly. What became clear in the UK was that we'd rather lose market access in order to appease people with an irrational hatred of our fellow Europeans.
If people think trade and movement boundaries are good, why don't we have internal ones? Why should Mancunians be allowed to take up scarce housing in London?
Yeah, that's why I don't think it's in the cards yet. On the other hand, things are very fluid now. Things that were unthinkable two months ago (e.g. Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.
>Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.
Now what exactly they're goanna do with the extra debt is the question.
More debt to fund innovation, infrastructure, defense, education and healthcare is welcome, but if it's just more debt to fund welfare and pensions, like Southern Europe, then nothing will improve.
They will change the paragraphs only wrt infrastructure, defense (and possibly climate things to get the votes of the greens). Meaning that the debt brake will still exist for all other things, basically. (but yes: creative bookkeeping will become easier ;))
The US did disarm somewhat after the Cold War, but kept a lot in place for pork-barrel reasons and then the absolutely huge waste of money that was the War On Terror.
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.
Let's get Russian disinformation and influence out of Europe and heal the European relationships. Cannot wait to see Farage begging for food in the subway.
Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.
Containers IaaS, plus managed Postgres. So far I’ve only found UK hosts that do VPS, VMs, or bare metal- the abstraction above this is (heroku, fly.io etc.) makes Ops 10x easier for smaller companies
Civo.io have had both for many years and for Katapult.io these are coming in April. Both are british companies, if you need referring feel free to shout.
It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.
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.
Maybe. But, isn't the EU a large collection of countries? Meaning that it isn't about updating the free trade of the West; it's about rejecting the US which turned into a not-a-friend seemingly overnight. As a Canadian and a European, I'm going outside my way to not buy from the US. I used to boycott Nestle but if Canadian Superstore has only Nescafe or something from the US, I'm going for Nestle.
The problem was that the people that benefitted most from free trade never do the work to ensure that a fair share of the profits went to the working class who were now being displaced. If you can no longer get lifelong middleclass job with a high school diploma, but you need a degree, then the degree should be paid for by the state... or you see what you see, a race to the bottom and then a backlash.
Tariffs unlikely would benefit working class either. Benefits likely will be captured mostly by business owners (in protected by tariffs sectors) while everyone will get higher prices (which will hit peoples with low income the most). Manufacturing is more automated nowadays (than it was in the post WW2 era) so it will bring a small number of jobs (copare to the US population) and many of them will require a degree (or certfication).
The greatest number of people benefiting from free trade in this instance have been Chinese. Within America, the beneficiaries seem to have been farmers - China is a major US export market as well as an import market, people keep forgetting these things have two sides.
There are plenty of worker owned businesses. If this leads to more worker prosperity then the free market should push workers into them and to form them. They are free to do so, so what gives?
Sure but if worker own businesses generate more profit for workers then the workers can use that wealth to buy, I mean lobby and later employ, officials just like other businesses no? I don't see why they cant do all the same corrupt regulatory capture stuff.
This seems circular, since there are no credible authorities to decide what is “a fair share” or not, other than the political process in the first place.
(And then only in the ideal perfectly spherical cow world where single issue voters don’t exist…)
I think fair can be refined to a middle class lifestyle where after working for 30 years you can have your house paid odd and enjoy the final third of your life in retirement having healthcare coverage the whole time.
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.
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.
Rich people have smart folks whose job is to think ways to avoid regulation.
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.
I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.
Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
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.
This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.
Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.
Nah protectionism is really important. Globalization introduces dependencies and therefor allows countries to easily exploit others. Globalization is not as good as you describe it.
I'm not sure. On one side, having trade relationships would maybe also contribute to peace between the countries who take part in these agreements. On the other side you have countries that might try and conquer instead of building relationships. There are so many edge cases to this question it's hard to think of a answer that feels right. I am also no expert on the matter.
One thing to note though, is that wars are not always grenades and guns, sometimes having more money is enough to get unfair advantages on other countries. It's a big topic.
It's crushing Hong Kong was handed over, as they had about the free-est import/export burdens and regulations in the world. Everyone everywhere wants to kill the golden goose and it's mind boggling that the only people that seem to understand this right now is a few emirates and Singaporean quasi-dictators.
> 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.
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.
Those who don't like their jobs. Hence why Trump's "We'll bring back the jobs you like doing" messaging was so appealing to a lot of people, even if a lie.
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.
Understood. From my reading of /r/canada I’ve got the impression that you are further along that path. I’ve been quite impressed with the political response to the whole 51st/governor madness as well.
Globalism or imperialism 2.0 perpetrated by America? I'd like to see that kind of utopia, but unclear how we can overcome greed, corruption and bad actors.
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.
If you are advocating for European products, I would expect you to use Plausible or similar products instead of Google Analytics. This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
> This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
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).
The user can always sue Plausible for lying about their product to get their damages back. In the end, the user of these services is responsible for maintaining the privacy of their customers/visitors.
I'm not a lawyer but Company using Plausible gets fined, but then they can sue Plausible. most likely.
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.
I would like to turn this comment into a gold plaque and point to it any time an HN commenter repeats the “EU privacy regs and GDPR are actually super simple!” narrative.
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.
I think you're posting a strawman here. ePD is known to be bad (though for different reasons depending on who you ask), GDPR on the other hand _is_ easy to understand and follow.
Understanding the GDPR is quite easy, but following it can be quite hard if you're intending to violate people's privacy. If you read the GDPR because you want to enable the full Google Analytics suite without users even knowing, the GDPR will read like an absolute nightmare.
folks mess "cookie banner" with "consent banner". many people do conflate them, but in some jurisdictions (e.g., the EU under GDPR), a "cookie banner" typically includes a consent mechanism.
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 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.
Could you be more specific? As far as I know, they have bunch of features like funnels, goals, revenue attributions etc.: https://plausible.io/docs/top-referrers
When doing paid marketing you need to track users as hard as you can otherwise you have no clue which ads work and which don’t, what are profit margins etc.
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;
Point (a) covers purposes that require cookie-banner. Point (b) covers login or shopping cart cookies, as these are necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party.
Also relevant to cookies, ePrivacy directive Article 5 (3):
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.
That says nothing useful. The legislation refuses to be specific and you have to know what all the relevant ICO decisions are, which is why compliance is so frustratingly vague.
That’s cynical and edgy, but misses the mark. There are several reasons why rules tend to be more specific about the outcomes than the ways to get there.
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.
I completely agree with your points. However, my admittedly snarky comment was regarding the idea that simply searching for a term across a document is how one decides legal validity, with no regard to alternate jargon, definitions, and of course, as you point out outcomes.
The law is written to prevent loopholes and exploits -- an extremely hard task, given the number of people willing to break it for even the slightest profits. The sheer number of these "false exits", that, then need to be covered, makes making reading and interpreting the law a hard endeavor. And a very precise one. It could be easier by some fraction, but never anywhere near easy.
There are competing incentives. Governments/politicians want to make it easy for companies to comply in order to encourage economic investment, and also to gain goodwill among their voters. Legal institutions want to make things appear as complicated and uncertain as possible so that they make more money selling lawyers.
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.
Great to see a directory like this starting to include physical products. I'd be interested in having some extra datapoints to help with decision making:
- 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.
It might be worth noting that this is not specific to the EU, it's the whole of Europe. So for example it includes companies from Norway, Switerzland and the UK.
So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.
Im not particularly fussy if it's EU or European.
The idea is more to get insight if it's just a dropshipper/reseller type of business, or involved in regional manufacturing.
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).
In this case, "in the EU" is a shorthand for "in the single market", "in the customs union", or "in the EEA (plus Switzerland)".
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.
Today I learned that DeepL was German. It's hands down the best Japanese to English translator (according to my Japanese coworkers) and I was surprised how many used it in office. (never used it myself as a trilingual)
What I like about DeepL is that it tries to translate colloquially. For popular metaphors or sayings, Google does okay but it’s not perfect, especially if you don’t provide the entire sentence as context. DeepL does better with recognizing fragments imo.
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.
Sure. But what is the reason sites like this are popping up? Which county is threatening to take over Greenland "one way or another"? Not China. Which country has invaded multiple countries over the last decades? Not China.
Personally I find myself reevaluating the choices I made for my personal data at the beginning of the cloud era.
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...
Amazon is probably the easiest for me to ditch. It's not really that much cheaper, and when you include shipping it's certainly not cheaper. Shipping times are horrible, search is broken, half of everything is a scam and again, it's not that much cheaper, if at at all.
I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.
The inventory commingling thing was the thing that made me stop using Amazon, one could never, ever be sure something was legitimate or counterfeit, until it was in one's possession and this made it never feel like it had in the early days.
I don't think that's much of an issue on this side of the pond. Trust has been low enough for a long enough period of time that packages don't get left on porches.
That's area dependent, there are multiple shipping companies that have options for leaving package by the door step and rarely are things stolen. It's completely down to where you live.
I'm quite curious to know where this is a thing, and whether people actually pick that option. FWIW, I live in Paris and that's also an option sometimes.
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.
I'm in Denmark, in a midsize town, but I also lived in a larger city, neither places are having a package dropped on your door step an issue. I do that all the time, if I don't feel like stopping by the package pick up place on my way home. There are absolutely neighbourhoods where I would never pick that options, like certain apartment blocks. Pretty much anywhere with single family houses is fine (in my area). The majority of apartment complexes is also perfect safe, though my sister-in-law did get 25kg of dog food delivered to the apartment below her by mistake and never got the bag back.
Here in Belgium, by default they will bring it to the post office, but I've checked the option to leave it on the porch. There's a camera. Been just fine for years, in a suburb area.
> "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!"
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.
I have stopped using Amazon all together >1 year ago. Prime Video is as shitty as it gets and most stuff ordered on Amazon is Chinese shovelware in the same rankings as Temu. I give exactly zero shit about same day delivery in 99,99% of the cases.
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):
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.
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:
Your arguments ignore externalities. You aren't saving 100 EUR. You pay for it in many other ways. There's no such thing as free lunch, as the saying goes. They're just hijacking your short-term thinking.
He isn't saving 100€ at all if Amazon's prices are higher than the competition, which is almost always true for every product I ever checked during the last five years, at least.
Prices vary wildly across Europe. Countries like Serbia have absolutely insane prices for basic products that are two thirds or half the cost across the border, sold by the same companies.
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.
Thats what every "support local" campaign boils down to - accept suboptimal deals because they are somehow more connected to you. I am glad to sell my services to the US and will buy their services, likewise for EU stuff if it is competitive.
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.
They aren't suboptimal where I am. US products are cheaper, but they are routinely less healthy, more addictive, and poorer quality than the alternatives.
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.
Hard disagree. For me, "support local" means paying a little more for goods that are 10x better instead of commoditized crap fully optimized for enshitification.
Thats not support local, that is buy higher quality - and while demagogues try to conflate these two - it is very rarely the case in my experience. In cases where it is - you do not need buy local movements at all - they should be the default.
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.
And for some things (and most tech things), "support local" isn't an option.
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.
> 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
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.
Thats them orienting themselves to neighboring territory and not that relevant to EU, aside from Greenland. But contrast that with recent past where US was blowing up middle east for oil, drone striking in Africa, building missile shields in Ukraine, etc.
Now its actively looking to pull its bases out of Europe and calling for Europe to arm itself. A positive change for EU in the grand scheme of things.
If the US actually tried to annex Canada, there would be huge ramifications in the EU. And besides, Trump seems more serious about Greenland: in his address to Congress, he said something along the line of "I think we're going to get it, one way or another". Trump is serious about wanting to steal EU land. You seem to be trying to hand wave that away.
And what about his very clear support of Russia? Is that also a positive change for the EU?
> 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.
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.
Well my point is more that EU is in a situation where Trump can realistically demand Greenland because without the US we cannot even protect ourselves. We should be outraged at the leaders that brought us to this situation more than Trump, while some other administration could have been less on the nose about it, they are still in a situation where they hold "have all the cards" (exaggerating).
If Trump was not so obnoxious I do not think a lot of people would be welcoming Germany building up its military for example.
Using price comparison services here in Sweden I almost never see a better deal on Amazon, at best they have the exact same price as the cheapest deal, seems to be their MO here to check the pricing data from competitors and set their prices exactly the same as the cheapest on offer at the time.
In Switzerland amazon never bothered to enter the market, so local competition filled the gap, and it created much better service while doing it.
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.
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.
wow, didn't know about Galaxus, that's great sorting and sensible filters for things (only looked at dehumidifiers). Will keep it in mind in the future. Amazon is just a big mess of bad UX, impossible to compare things and find what you need
Similar here. It doesnt have to be all or nothing. Im in the u.s. and have a cool local co-op. So i buy most commodities at the cheapest grocery store and then some fancy stuff at the co-op to help them stay afloat and support local farmers. It's probably enough if everyone spends to their ability and maybe pushes themselves a little too.
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.
We must be buying different things if you think Amazon is cheap in the EU.
I find almost everything can be had cheaper elsewhere these days, except the Chinese junk like you find on Temu, the enshitification has well and truly sunk in.
I always paste products I find right back into Google and more often than not find them cheaper elsewhere
I guess people just buy different stuff and have different experiences then.
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.
Such a shame to see Gitlab go for gold in America rather than staying with its European basis. While Codeberg is absolutely fine in itself, I think Gitlab is a much better offering for many companies.
- 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.
I know a tiny bit about this regarding the UK but no other country in Europe:
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).
> - In Europe, getting funding is literally like pulling teeth.
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.
zero-interest-rate-policy-enabled, i.e. it's a reference back to the prior paragraph. But I don't think the US government's money-printing tells the full story. There's been just as much "cash" created by stock market overvaluations and un-backed securities.
Isn't funding at that extreme level pretty much localized to a few areas in the US, like Silicon Valley/Bay Area, Portland/Seattle area, New York and maybe Colorado. It is probably easier than in the EU, but I don't think may start ups in Alabama are getting crazy funding.
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.
For a while there, funding in US was as simple as putting the right keywords into your proposal, and sending it to the right treasury office, getting it practically auto-approved. I hope they will align closer to the sensible European practices in the future.
Unfortunately that’s the case because large US-based companies can leverage their existing global sales / marketing / governance setup to rationalize very high exit valuations. In the EU we don’t have the large software shops that can do that. So for an EU based startup - it’s exit to a US-based company or go all the way to an IPO / profitability.
America loves investing in risky ventures, and startups love money so they go to fish where the fish are.
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.
>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.
> 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.
In Canada, there's a big push for buying Canadian given the Trump trade war, and especially avoiding products from the US. A kitchen store I went into over the weekend had little red maple leaf stamps on the price tags of Canadian products and the provincial liquor store in Ontario has pulled US products from shelves (though that's more of a marketing stunt by the populist Premier). Many Canadian-owned businesses have added logos at the top of their webpages (I noticed Canada Computers and Memory Express over the last few days, as I was browsing for graphics cards).
The European alternative was sold to--sorry, merged into--Mastercard and rebranded to Maestro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europay_International. It was the E in EMV. So friendly were European and American relations in the past that it was allowed to happen.
I don't think there's such a thing yet for payment terminals. Local alternatives all seem to have died off because banks in other countries didn't support them.
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.
Technology-wise this is a solved problem. Uses open-source software too. All the EU needs to do is say 'self-custody is fine, please use a EUR-based stable coin for payments EU-wide'. The market will do the rest (the stable-coin, payment terminals, integrations with cash registers, DeFi forex for places where EUR is not used, etc.).
I hope there will be more adoption of EU stable coins like https://monerium.com, and a payments ecosystem will form around it. The rails are there, we need the apps and the integrations next.
Unfortunately, data on Cypriot companies is quite limited.
There are far more products built on the island than what is officially listed.
Speaking as a founder of a CY-based company, SpatialChat
I was recently in Malaysia and they've boycotted certain American brands over the Israel-Palestine war. For example, KFC has given up and was shutdown everywhere. So boycotts can work.
Maccas seemed to be doing just fine though, take from that what you will
I suppose a big ticket item like a car is much easier to boycott than 50 small items from the grocery where trying to search through the ownership tree for every conglomerate would use up the rest of my sanity
The good news (at least for the EU, don't know about non-EU European countries) is that groceries are only a blip on the radar when it comes to imports (of course, energy is used for groceries, but that applies both to European and US products) [1]:
[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.
Looking at labels is hardly a test of your sanity. In Canada right now a majority of the population is regularly checking and avoiding anything made in the USA.
While I do find it an interesting exercise to reflect over my own choices of products and services and consider how I could divest myself from relying on ones provided by US companies (and I do agree Europe is too reliant on the US in some regards), it is a bit sad to see how quickly things are spiraling here. People really love to have a clear enemy...
Well, it's not really to have a clear enemy. It's an effort to avoid having one.
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.
You don't need an enemy for this sort of campaign to make sense. It should be common sense to prefer local products, and even more so to avoid extreme dependencies like the one most of the West has on American tech companies.
In my view, we (Europe) have long been acting foolishly by passively sitting in the back seat and allowing the US to drive for us, thereby creating a radical dependency. This wouldn't be healthy even if the US were the most loyal ally. What Trump's antics are doing is trigger a return to what should have always been the norm.
If you walk into a European supermarket, fashion store or MediaMarkt there is very little coming from the US.
The giant container ships are coming from the East not the West.
Sure. My microwave from 1988 is about the only thing made in the US in my home (interstingly an Electrolux). However, every purchase I make is with a Visa card. Most services I use are American. And as I'm typing this... anyone know a European alternative to SwiftKey? :P
> anyone know a European alternative to SwiftKey? :P
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.
>Chips made with Dutch chip fabrication technology
Using american EUV light sources....this train of who makes what in the supply chain can go on forever, the point is who's making the highest margins from the end product and it's not ASML nor ARM but Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
Hence my point that while EU has some IP, its value is dwarfed by the IP the US makes. Just look at market cap of US vs European tech sector. It's not even a competition. ASML can't offset that. I think Apple has enough cash in the bank to buy ASML if they wanted to.
I think the most critical missing piece is GPUs right now. As AI becomes more and more crucial, GPU/AI hardware design and manufacturing will become a matter of sovereignty and unfortunately, can't find any EU alternative
i actually didn't realise Scaleway is a real European alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure. They seems to be covering the most common use case for AWS managed services.
There are plenty of national TLDs, but internationally the English language ones are more common.
gov and mil aren't available to non-American institutions anyway, and .edu locked down to American-only around 2001.
Perhaps this website could've gone with .eu, but this movement is larger than just the EU. I don't think TLDs matter much at the moment, at least not until America's trade war starts affecting TLDs as well.
The problem with buying European is that shipping between countries is nightmarishly expensive.
If Brussels wants to try something useful - instead of bottle caps create a proper shipping network that can ship from Malaga to Vilinus in 2 days for 0.5 euro per KG. It is not that we don't have national postal companies. It is absurd to buy something for 15 euro in italy and pay 30 euro shipping to romania.
International freight shipping is incredibly cheap per kilogram (1 TEU/20ft shipping container costs about 6000 euros to ship, with a max eeight of about 28900kg, so about 20 cents per kg), at least by sea and rivers. Many of the costs come from the moment products arrive on land. Land-locked countries and countries with major population centers far away from docks and freight terminals pay the price.
Shipping individual packages within a short amount of time costs money. The solution is to do what companies like Amazon and AliExpress do: stock up products in many different companies in bulk so that packages can be dispatched locally for much cheaper.
Many of the shipping routes between countries go by plane rather than by boat, filling up unused weight in passenger planes or being shipped in bulk by passenger planes. Planes are a lot more expensive, especially by weight, but you'll get your products within days rather than weeks.
If you're a business importing goods in bulk, you'll have to deal with weeks or even months of delays between ordering and delivery, but international cargo delivery per product is essentially free unless you ship things like cars.
Things will become cheaper as warehouses are spread wider and transport legs get optimized more. Currently, there aren't many companies shipping from Italy to Romania, so there aren't many boats or trains making the journey, and shipping is expensive. When demand grows, more availability will follow, and prices will drop eventually.
I understand that for you cheaper shipping options are important, but other people might find other things important. The EU has the capability to address multiple issues at a moment, so it should not be "instead of doing <my favorite thing to make fun of>". btw, shipping to Romania is expensive because infrastructure is still quite bad and the reliability of the national post is quite low.
PS: Bottle caps that stay attached to the bottles is great!
Breakups are painful. A great battle is afoot on the "data
sovereignty" ground, for sure.
It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent
need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American
companies.
At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people
accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply
enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled
creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic
about relocating away from US BigTech.
It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US
BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned
with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.
Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are
running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that
seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.
Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly
having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end
encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.
For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC
where they are not strictly NTK.
> It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism.
It's amazing to see people say things like this as if the US was any different before. Trump just put an honest face on fascism and imperialism. Before, they were exercised in a 'polite', polished manner. Even by Obama who stomped down the Occupy Wall Street.
Yes, it was different before. The status quo may have been fascistic and certainly imperialist but still would have been far more preferable to what's coming.
A similar product is Boycat - https://boycat.io. AFAIK they are adding a campaign focused on the US since the US started adding tarifs everywhere. Would love to see them adding something for the EU side of things.
I think this is useful more than just actual Europeans.
I'm an American, and my wife and I have been looking at "Made in…" labels on our products for decades. Not as a geopolitical protest; just as routine intellectual curiosity.
Over the last five years or so, we've noticed a significant shift in the locations listed on the things we buy. A lot of what we buy used to read "Made in China" (and before that shift, "Made in Mexico") but these days more and more of it is from Europe.
Sometimes it's the vague "Made in the EU," which I assume means Turkey or Romania or some other less-fashionable quarter. But increasingly, it's France and Switzerland, and the U.K.
(My personal, completely unscientific guess is that the next shift in manufacturing will be to Africa. Lots of cheap labor close to raw materials and access to both hemispheres by sea.)
They started the process to join the EU, but political ideals have since shifted and I don't think they'll ever join the EU with the way things are going now. Even if Turkey changes their mind, I don't think most of Europe would still want them in in the state they're in right now.
"Return" to whom. Byzantium was never "European", it was shunned at its time by entire Europe - by both the Catholic Mediterranean parts and the Germanic parts. The Romaioi (as the Byzantines called themselves) turned into Ottoman Rums as the empire was a multi-cultural, multi-national empire united under the banner of Ottoman-ness. The uncle of the fallen emperor, who was next in line for being the Byzantine emperor after the fall of his nephew was made the "Grand Beg" (akin to viceroy) of the entire Ottoman Balkans after the fall of Constantinople. He governed lands far bigger than what his ancestors governed even ~200 years ago. A lot of Mehmed I's begs were ex-Byzantines who were still Christian, and, well Byzantine. Except they wore Ottoman turbans now - and most of them just didn't and kept wearing Byzantine attire.
So its like what some historians say: The fall of Constantinople was mostly a change of hats.
Is there any European alternative for Hacker News? And if yes, what's its URL/web address?
Preferable in French or Italian, or maybe even German, which I wanted to learn for a long time and this would be a good enough motivation, because, and with all due respect to the Irish, having a continent-wide conversation in a language natively spoken by only ~5 million of its own people is not very conductive to the forming of an European spirit.
Please no. It's good that tech conversations are global. I wish there were more Chinese and Russians on here, not less. And this comes from someone who's very critical of the current US admin, and lives in the Baltics.
Also, please no regarding the language. Coming from a small country, it's great that we have a lingua-franca that we can use to communicate effectively. Doubling-down on going native when it comes to our respective languages won't help the single market, or European integration in general.
EDIT: Won't help our militaries either if and when they'll need to coordinate.
Splitting Europe by language again will only be a disadvantage. Depending on where you live in Europe, the lingua franca is either English or Russian, with maybe a bit of German and French in border regions.
I don't see the value add of an international forum with local languages. There's a great Dutch tech forum already (tweakers.net) visited almost exclusively by Dutch and Flemish people. Great for locals, but entirely impossible to join in on as a foreigner.
Also, you may be confusing Europe with the EU. The UK has almost 70 million people speaking English every day.
All modern business is built on trust, since Americans are keen on throwing that out the door now, every EU business is going to re-evaluate who to trust.
What is trust to you? It looks a lot like Europe is getting upset that American taxpayers do not want to waste money on a conflict that is going nowhere, that is not America’s concern.
First, taking you at face value: it's not clear we did that yet.
Second, this is ridiculous. Trusting an until-this-point-mostly-trustworthy ally is not spineless (although I guess it might be naive).
Your ignorance of history and willingness to buy Russian propaganda is sad.
Europe downplayed investment in military capacity because this was seen and agreed as the best way to reduce the risk of WWIII.
Europe also realized that building things is better than destroying things. Is it spineless to do this? Question to you, mavdi, did you volunteer to serve in the armed forces? If not, do you view yourself as spineless for this decision?
> Economic nationalism is bad when Trump does it and bad when Europe does it too.
Now, now. Because Trump is 'hOrRiBLe' for putting an honest face on fascism and imperialism that always existed in the US and its vassals, we have to have outrage and do the very things we criticize him for doing.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. We'd all be better off if nobody started any trade wars, but the moment one party starts becoming hostile, everyone else must respond in kind or they'll be taken advantage of.
I hoped Americans had stopped being stupid and elected better leaders, but Trump's re-election shows that America and its people do not care about being reliable business partners. Ridding ourselves of American dependence will take decades, but with at least four more years of this bullshit ahead of us, we'd better get started soon.
But Ricardo determined the opposite. That unilateral free trade is better even in the face of tariffs. In the end, it's their own consumers that pay the tariffs.
If Trump wants to make Americans poorer then so be it, but we shouldn't follow suit.
Toting Adidas, Puma, Jack & Jones, Decathlon etc. as "European-meade" is laughable when everyone knows their clothes are actually manufactured in third-world low-labor-protection countries.
Heck, I can make a safe bet that the vast majority of the companies listed here sell items at least partially made outside of Europe.
Why do you need one company from which you buy everything? Go to idealo.de/es/fr... find what you need, compare prices and buy it from the cheapest supplier
For anything time critical Amazon Prime is a godsend.
1) Anything PC related I can get shipped to me tomorrow. There is one local computer store and they just repair laptops and phones with absolute rip off prices (£70 for a HDMI cable). Before Amazon it took days to get an order shipped from one of the big PC suppliers in the UK, Payment used to an absolute PITA frequently card gets rejected on dubious grounds. I've had a PSUs die before, I can get one shipped to me tomorrow.
2) I am working on an old car at the moment as a hobby. Working on old vehicles you will find many small bodges or you won't realise until 50% of the way into it you need a replacement part. Almost everyone uses the postal service and the delivery time is 3-5 days or they charge you £15 for next day delivery (which is often more than the price of the part). So any job can be stopped by a missing part and I have to wait 3 days to get a replacement part or be ripped off. I have literally no alternative than to use these suppliers much of the time and it is a major source of frustration because it will take me an extra week to do a job.
I have several options within walking distance that sells HDMI cables for same price as Amazon, and I can trust that they sell a cable that works according to spec.
Amazon uses a 3rd party to deliver here, and their short delivery times is really only available in larger cities if the item is in that particular warehouse. Since they use 3rd party to deliver I can buy from other stores and also have next day delivery, not like delivery times were bad before though. Have several package locker services available as well, next day delivery is common but depends on how far it has to travel.
Can Amazon be better for some niche stuff? Probably, but its unlikely to be in the warehouse close to me anyway. I'd rather wait an extra day than exfiltrate barely taxed money to the US if I can help it.
> I have several options within walking distance that sells HDMI cables for same price as Amazon, and I can trust that they sell a cable that works according to spec.
1) I used to example of the HDMI cable to show how much of a ripoff that shop was. I use Amazon to buy all manner of PC equipment. Alternatives in the UK have poor delivery times, stock or payment is a faff.
2) I don't have any options in walking distance at all and I don't buy the cheap cables from Amazon.
Not all of us live in a city. I live in a countryside town and options are severely limited. The only shop near me is a Nisa General, a Chinese Takeaway and a Hardware Store that has some old guy talking about the Freemasons all the time.
> Amazon uses a 3rd party to deliver here, and their short delivery times is really only available in larger cities if the item is in that particular warehouse. Since they use 3rd party to deliver I can buy from other stores and also have next day delivery, not like delivery times were bad before though. Have several package locker services available as well, next day delivery is common but depends on how far it has to travel.
Good for you this isn't everywhere. I don't have this option. The nearest PC parts supplier is in Manchester which is over an 1 hour drive and closes before I finish work. The other PC parts supplier is 1 hour 30 minutes away in Stoke-on-Trent.
They rip you off on next day delivery (it doesn't cost that much more as I post stuff regularly myself) or they just don't offer it.
> Can Amazon be better for some niche stuff? Probably, but its unlikely to be in the warehouse close to me anyway. I'd rather wait an extra day than exfiltrate barely taxed money to the US if I can help it.
No Amazon isn't good for niche stuff (this stuff I am ordering for my car isn't that niche either). I have no other option for many car parts to either go to Ebay or I have to go to a official parts seller. The main issue as stated is delivery times are slow because most of the guys that are part suppliers are guys in their 60s.
Waiting an extra day isn't an option sometimes. You did notice where I specifically said where I need things quickly right?
> Can get next day delivery to locker even outside the bigger metros here.
Good for you. I don't have that option. You were asking (somewhat rhetorically) why people would want to use a megacorp like Amazon. The alternatives in the UK are either no better than Amazon or objectively worse.
Also the North of Europe is generally much better than the Eastern and Southern Europe for e-commerce. I have lived Southern Europe and they were at least about 10-15 years behind the UK offerings when I lived there. After speaking to some people in Eastern Europe, I understand that they are in similar situation.
> Guess you'll be surprised when Amazon starts gouging you.
The only company that hasn't gouged me so far is Amazon. If they do, I will stop using them.
The modern computer was invented in Britain, we have ARM, designers of the most popular chip architecture in the world and make things like Raspberry Pi. We've got the ability but not the ambition. The attitude of "we'll design the chips, others can do the scary bit of building them"/"we'll publish the paper and others can monetize it"/"We'll make a fun little toy for research, but we'll let the americans make the commercial version" attitude is absolutely endemic here.
As part of the European reorientation I avoid products and services from Hungary and Slovakia. I also avoid one specific Swedish company, Spotify, for promoting and funding the misinformation spewing American podcastbros who were partially responsible for the rise of Trump 2.0.
- "We are a group of individuals from across Europe who connected via the subreddit r/BuyfromEU."
Then, why do you promote a list of European Reddit "alternatives" such as "Lemmy", you say people are supposed to use instead?
This is the laziest form of internet activism there is: lecture people what you believe they're supposed to be doing in ways you don't yourself do, and can't be inconvenienced to try.
(Bonus points for building this boycott website on top of Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, and Google Analytics).
Nobody seriously claims that Europe should be self-sufficient in everything and isolated from the rest of the world. It’s ok to simultaneously 1) try to make things better, and 2) still talk to Americans or use American products (same for China). Discussing alternatives does not imply burning bridges.
This is such a shame, we should be looking to source and produce things globally and find better ways to improve the logistics and efficiency world-wide. Why would the EU take such a protective stance which only enforces isolation and increases cost?
Edit: Thanks for the responses, I am still looking for a signal that tells my post is sarcasm multiplied by cynicism.
Why? Because it's reacting to the current US trade policies.
The EU is realizing that one of their major trade partner, who they trusted with critically important goods and services, might pull the rug under their feet.
Not to mention that the EU in itself is already a huge achievement in terms of free trade agreements between EU countries.
That doesn't really work as long as you have legislation like the CLOUD Act, which means EU-based businesses have to think twice about using any US providers, especially if they handle sensitive customer data and also since the DPF is on the way out.
Only because the US refuses to properly protect consumer privacy and seemingly can no longer be trusted at all. If Trump forces Microsoft to turn off Office 365 for example for the EU, or blocks AWS, GCP or Azure from doing business with the EU then European businesses are screwed. We’ve now realized these risks are potentially real and European countries are scrambling to look for alternatives (and realizing that they don’t really exist).
Considering the PCLOB has lost some of its members, it's questionable whether the DPF can continue to exist in its current form. If it does go out the window, then Trump won't need to tell AWS/GCP to stop doing business with the EU, since European companies wouldn't legally be allowed to transfer data to US companies anyway.
I expect the EU commission will take a _very_ long time to actually act on this tho. Maybe we'll see Schrems III first.
Right now directories like this are getting popular mostly because they offer alternative to US products. Pretty sure Europeans would be happy to use a Canadian alternative to a US service.
But not alternatives to Chinese products? China’s human rights, environment, currency manipulation, tariffs, IP theft — some people seemingly unify as anti-Trump, but ignore China?
This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
Yep it isn’t principled at all. This is just making clear that Canadians and Europeans are willing to openly support a communist dictatorship. I guess that sort of aligns with the trend in these countries away from Democratic values like free speech. But it is still disappointing.
The situation with China hasn't fundamentally changed in the last two months. People operate under the assumption of some kind of stability in this relationship. The West imports and exports products from/to China, with some restrictions: critical infrastructure like antennas cannot be built by Huawei in many countries, for instance. People in the West wouldn't use a Chinese email provider, etc. Today China is not an ally, but not an enemy either; rather a partner. There is no reason to expect a change in behaviour right now. It doesn't mean that the West agrees with everything that China does, of course.
Now regarding the US, it has fundamentally changed in the last two months. From the US government threatening to invade allied countries to actively destabilising them through people close to Trump downright making nazi salutes. On top of threatening militarily, the US is attacking its ex-allies economically with tariffs. The people in power in the US are explicitly talking about destroying Europe, and the US is now becoming an ally of Russia (which again makes it look like an enemy to the West).
Two months ago, people were operating under the assumption that the US was an ally. Now it's a partner that is going down the slope of becoming an enemy. Go ask if Canadians or Europeans feel threatened by China right now. Ask the same question about the US.
So yes: people are more scared of the US right now, and the US look more like enemies than China right now.
> This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
TL;DR: It is obviously resistance, against the US becoming an enemy. There are two obvious reasons for finding alternative to US products:
1. If it hurts the US economy (and therefore the US citizen), the hope is that maybe they will realise that Trump is not helping them and push for stopping this madness. The US won't get back to beeing trusted allies anytime soon (that ship has sailed), but they could stop from becoming enemies of the West.
2. National security: the US cannot be trusted, so it is very urgent for the West to turn to alternatives and run away from the US as fast as they possibly can.
Apparently unreliable partner just means “not being taken advantage of”. If stopping a waste of American taxpayer money results in this reaction, it’s clear the countries looking to decouple were never really partners of the US.
If you want to go theoretical one would argue that this effort is precisely what you ask for: one link in the global chain has become inefficient and this page is the result of the system routing around it.
It's to discourage the US from escalating the tariff war, which in the end always hurt consumers. People in the US are already paying that insane choice, but I don't hold my breath waiting for GOP voters to reconsider their choice: propaganda is a powerful weapon, and we're struggling against it also over here.
That's why I mentioned the escalation. We already had tariffs against China to protect internal market and bring prices on par to have fair competition, just like the US already had, but Trump wanted to go full berserk, and here are the results.
Yes, and ideally we would have no wars, either. But because of fucking psychos like Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping and many more, we do. Therefore, unfortunately, it makes sense for EU to decrease their economic dependence on outside players like the US and China.
I think it's important that we _do_ also include China in this. It's not just that Trump has demonstrated that the US is unreliable. We have also seen (again) that sociopaths in charge of authoritarian regimes can do things that are perfectly capable of acting against their own economic interests for political, cultural, religious reasons.
Depending on global interconnectedness of markets has not and will not save us. We need to divest and disconnect from all economies which are not reliable liberal democracies which broadly share our values.
I would include in this Hungary: We should be giving serious thought to how to kick them out of the EU.
But we have huge economic dependence which could also be used. We need to wean ourself off the Chinese supply chain. This will take decades, but the lesson here is that it will be used against us in future.
Europe is big enough as an internal market to sustain a good quality of life for the majority of the population — even if our 1% are disadvantaged relative to those in US, Russia. We have the capital and resources to defend ourselves too. We can open outward to Canada, Australia, democratic parts of Asia, Africa. But we need to avoid any dependence on powerful authoritarian regimes like China, India, the US, Indonesia etc.
I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.
Civilisation is organising in larger and larger groups - everyone becoming more dependent on each other and having laws and so on to resolve problems instead of fighting.
.....so somehow, for the sake of making Star Trek and all those wonderful science fiction stories possible.....we have to get that dependence back somehow. I'm joking but not joking. Some Americans are reasoable and somehow, for the world to survive, we have to find some way to help reasonable people all over the world to work together. So we can reach the science fiction future.
> I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.
As it looks now, there might be a limit on the scale of global collaboration. There's nothing that says that the trend of global depenence and collaboration will continue (in fact, it is reversing now).
That sounds great. I'm just not sure it's compatible with current nation states.
As a first step we could perhaps agree that individual people could come and live in Europe and participate in our democracy?
I think physical presence is actually quite a good precondition for participation. At least people physically present have some skin in the game.
With a transition period, I'm not sure I'd have a big problem cutting many other links with non-democratic countries. I agree with your ideals but all evidence is that trading and communication links and other sources of interdependence will be abused. We need to have policies which respond to that.
So Romania should be kicked out as well? They’re denying ballot access to a candidate that has broad popular support. Is that democracy when the people can’t vote for a candidate of their choice?
Possibly. I'm ignorant of Romanian politics. But the idea that EU should strengthen policing of democratic norms and sanction members who don't conform to them is important.
In this case, no I don't think Romania should be kicked out. Restrictions on party membership are complicated, but it seems here the courts have applied Romania's electoral law. We are going to have to be smart to avoid situations like this in other EU countries, where Russian, Chinese or US money are used to support non-democrats.
Are you seriously asking why? If you've paid any attention to the news in the past few weeks, you couldn't have missed the daily efforts by Trump and his cabinet to isolate the USA from its allies. In the past, European countries have trusted that the common values shared by the Western countries will ensure mutual cooperation now and in the future. Now this thinking has proven naive, as Trump has threatened Europe with, e.g., shutting down technological services if it's in his interest to do so. It doesn't seem to matter whether Europe pays for these services or not. Therefore, it's paramount for Europe to not vendor-lock themselves in American companies, as they can't be trusted anymore. It's sad and shocking, but Europe has been backed into the corner with this one.
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but it's not part of the EU. It was originally part of the EU (back when it was the EEC) but voted to leave in a referendum in 1982, officially exiting in 1985. Today, Greenland has a special status called Overseas Country and Territory (OCT), meaning it has trade deals with the EU, but EU rules don't directly apply there.
Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!
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
I know that it's not in the cards (yet), but I hope the UK and the EU can be a single market again (even if the UK does not rejoin the EU). Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible! We love the UK and you are part of the European family :hugs:.
> Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible!
That would be the rational and sensible solution. This may be why it’s unlikely to happen. I would be happy to be wrong.
If only it was so simple, there are of course many conflicting interests in Europe, with certain countries who are more export oriented for instance benefiting from a weak Euro and others from a stronger Euro etc.
But the EU is a single market.
A single one on paper but a heavily divided one in practice where every country wants to be king or at least backstab everyone else to get what it wants.
Labour party manifesto explained in this fresh (5 days old), official document.
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-...
You should look to Norway https://www.norway.no/en/missions/eu/areas-of-cooperation/th...
Whilst a good idea, no politician is going to try and do it under the fear of reigniting the Brexit argument which ends up dominating politics in the country.
Most people who voted for Brexit were mostly concerned about free movement of people, not goods. I doubt a free trade agreement would upset them too much.
If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.
The UK has a FTA with the EU. What they don’t have is access to the single market or a customs union.
> If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.
Absolutely not. This was made clear repeatedly. What became clear in the UK was that we'd rather lose market access in order to appease people with an irrational hatred of our fellow Europeans.
If people think trade and movement boundaries are good, why don't we have internal ones? Why should Mancunians be allowed to take up scarce housing in London?
Yeah, that's why I don't think it's in the cards yet. On the other hand, things are very fluid now. Things that were unthinkable two months ago (e.g. Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.
>Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.
Now what exactly they're goanna do with the extra debt is the question.
More debt to fund innovation, infrastructure, defense, education and healthcare is welcome, but if it's just more debt to fund welfare and pensions, like Southern Europe, then nothing will improve.
They will change the paragraphs only wrt infrastructure, defense (and possibly climate things to get the votes of the greens). Meaning that the debt brake will still exist for all other things, basically. (but yes: creative bookkeeping will become easier ;))
It's to fund re-armament.
The other question is why did Germany/EU disarm in the first place when the US didn't, despite not living next-dorr to Russia?
The US did disarm somewhat after the Cold War, but kept a lot in place for pork-barrel reasons and then the absolutely huge waste of money that was the War On Terror.
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.
Oh I think a war with Russia would override those concerns!
> Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!
Always.
hug
Let's get Russian disinformation and influence out of Europe and heal the European relationships. Cannot wait to see Farage begging for food in the subway.
Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.
Who do you host with btw? I'd love to avoid the big US SaaS providers if I can but would like something a level above a VPS, especially for database.
Clever cloud for containers and database (French)
Great, thanks I will have to check them out.
A UK firm would be perfect as a brit, but just not-US is great.
hetzner has been working great the last 10 years for me. they opened datacenters in the us too.
Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!
We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.
I'd love to use this, but notice it's hosted in the EU, is there any way of ensuring we go through UK servers only?
Our infra is split across France (our API, database, inbound servers etc.), Germany (backups) and UK (outbound SMTP servers).
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?)
For what it's worth we have to stand up a UK infrastructure for UK customers and EU for EU customers, it really sucks.
That's a shame. There are many UK cloud providers, who would work - what do you need, I'd be happy to make suggestions?
Containers IaaS, plus managed Postgres. So far I’ve only found UK hosts that do VPS, VMs, or bare metal- the abstraction above this is (heroku, fly.io etc.) makes Ops 10x easier for smaller companies
Civo.io have had both for many years and for Katapult.io these are coming in April. Both are british companies, if you need referring feel free to shout.
It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.
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.
Maybe. But, isn't the EU a large collection of countries? Meaning that it isn't about updating the free trade of the West; it's about rejecting the US which turned into a not-a-friend seemingly overnight. As a Canadian and a European, I'm going outside my way to not buy from the US. I used to boycott Nestle but if Canadian Superstore has only Nescafe or something from the US, I'm going for Nestle.
The problem was that the people that benefitted most from free trade never do the work to ensure that a fair share of the profits went to the working class who were now being displaced. If you can no longer get lifelong middleclass job with a high school diploma, but you need a degree, then the degree should be paid for by the state... or you see what you see, a race to the bottom and then a backlash.
Tariffs unlikely would benefit working class either. Benefits likely will be captured mostly by business owners (in protected by tariffs sectors) while everyone will get higher prices (which will hit peoples with low income the most). Manufacturing is more automated nowadays (than it was in the post WW2 era) so it will bring a small number of jobs (copare to the US population) and many of them will require a degree (or certfication).
The greatest number of people benefiting from free trade in this instance have been Chinese. Within America, the beneficiaries seem to have been farmers - China is a major US export market as well as an import market, people keep forgetting these things have two sides.
[dead]
There are plenty of worker owned businesses. If this leads to more worker prosperity then the free market should push workers into them and to form them. They are free to do so, so what gives?
"It's called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes this can be done imperceptibly over time."
Sure but if worker own businesses generate more profit for workers then the workers can use that wealth to buy, I mean lobby and later employ, officials just like other businesses no? I don't see why they cant do all the same corrupt regulatory capture stuff.
This seems circular, since there are no credible authorities to decide what is “a fair share” or not, other than the political process in the first place.
(And then only in the ideal perfectly spherical cow world where single issue voters don’t exist…)
I think fair can be refined to a middle class lifestyle where after working for 30 years you can have your house paid odd and enjoy the final third of your life in retirement having healthcare coverage the whole time.
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.
Did you fully read my comment?
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.
> It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.
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
Turns out capital without borders ruins prices for scarce things (like housing) everywhere.
Housing is a fundamental human right.
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.
Rich people have smart folks whose job is to think ways to avoid regulation.
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.
>> Housing is a fundamental human right.
No it's not. A fundamental human freedom is to build or to buy a house. Nobody is owned a house.
I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.
Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
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.
This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.
Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.
Nah protectionism is really important. Globalization introduces dependencies and therefor allows countries to easily exploit others. Globalization is not as good as you describe it.
Does dependency make wars less probable? Genuine question. Logically it should, but I don’t know the numbers.
I'm not sure. On one side, having trade relationships would maybe also contribute to peace between the countries who take part in these agreements. On the other side you have countries that might try and conquer instead of building relationships. There are so many edge cases to this question it's hard to think of a answer that feels right. I am also no expert on the matter. One thing to note though, is that wars are not always grenades and guns, sometimes having more money is enough to get unfair advantages on other countries. It's a big topic.
It's crushing Hong Kong was handed over, as they had about the free-est import/export burdens and regulations in the world. Everyone everywhere wants to kill the golden goose and it's mind boggling that the only people that seem to understand this right now is a few emirates and Singaporean quasi-dictators.
Hoppe might have been right about democracy.
> 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.
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.
> "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.
Who says this? TSMC?
Those who don't like their jobs. Hence why Trump's "We'll bring back the jobs you like doing" messaging was so appealing to a lot of people, even if a lie.
European here.
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.
There is no such veneer of politeness in Canada. The sentiment is more 'boycott USA'.
Understood. From my reading of /r/canada I’ve got the impression that you are further along that path. I’ve been quite impressed with the political response to the whole 51st/governor madness as well.
Canada is the canary in the coal mine. Watch it closely if you want to see what's coming for Europe.
Globalism or imperialism 2.0 perpetrated by America? I'd like to see that kind of utopia, but unclear how we can overcome greed, corruption and bad actors.
Depends on the perspective.
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.
If you are advocating for European products, I would expect you to use Plausible or similar products instead of Google Analytics. This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
There are other listings like that, e.g.:
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...
> This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.
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...
> Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment.
Since Plausible is selling a product that clearly claims this, who is on the hook in case a user of Plausible gets a fine?
The user can always sue Plausible for lying about their product to get their damages back. In the end, the user of these services is responsible for maintaining the privacy of their customers/visitors.
I'm not a lawyer but Company using Plausible gets fined, but then they can sue Plausible. most likely.
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.
I would like to turn this comment into a gold plaque and point to it any time an HN commenter repeats the “EU privacy regs and GDPR are actually super simple!” narrative.
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.
I think you're posting a strawman here. ePD is known to be bad (though for different reasons depending on who you ask), GDPR on the other hand _is_ easy to understand and follow.
Understanding the GDPR is quite easy, but following it can be quite hard if you're intending to violate people's privacy. If you read the GDPR because you want to enable the full Google Analytics suite without users even knowing, the GDPR will read like an absolute nightmare.
folks mess "cookie banner" with "consent banner". many people do conflate them, but in some jurisdictions (e.g., the EU under GDPR), a "cookie banner" typically includes a consent mechanism.
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 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.
It was an interesting day when EU legislators made our Apache access logs questionably-legal.
They are used for different things. If you are doing paid marketing or other more or less complex marketing Plausible doesn’t cut it.
Could you be more specific? As far as I know, they have bunch of features like funnels, goals, revenue attributions etc.: https://plausible.io/docs/top-referrers
When doing paid marketing you need to track users as hard as you can otherwise you have no clue which ads work and which don’t, what are profit margins etc.
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.
Only if you’re not using cookies for anything else.
Wrong. Functionally necessary cookies like login or shopping cart cookies need no banners.
Right, yes, I was thinking about advertising cookies and additional functionality but you are of course correct for those examples.
$ wget -qO - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... | pdftotext - - | grep -i banner | wc -l
0
Also relevant to cookies, ePrivacy directive Article 5 (3):
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...
It doesn't mention "banner" because it doesn't prescribe the exact user interface. But people seeking to comply often choose the banner as a solution.
That says nothing useful. The legislation refuses to be specific and you have to know what all the relevant ICO decisions are, which is why compliance is so frustratingly vague.
you can just not track the users, that might be easier.
absence of evidence != evidence of absence
You really think law would be such a highly sought-after and highly-compensated field if it was that easy?
That’s cynical and edgy, but misses the mark. There are several reasons why rules tend to be more specific about the outcomes than the ways to get there.
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.
I completely agree with your points. However, my admittedly snarky comment was regarding the idea that simply searching for a term across a document is how one decides legal validity, with no regard to alternate jargon, definitions, and of course, as you point out outcomes.
So covering every screen with cookie banners is a form of malicious compliance?
It should be easy.
The law is written to prevent loopholes and exploits -- an extremely hard task, given the number of people willing to break it for even the slightest profits. The sheer number of these "false exits", that, then need to be covered, makes making reading and interpreting the law a hard endeavor. And a very precise one. It could be easier by some fraction, but never anywhere near easy.
There are competing incentives. Governments/politicians want to make it easy for companies to comply in order to encourage economic investment, and also to gain goodwill among their voters. Legal institutions want to make things appear as complicated and uncertain as possible so that they make more money selling lawyers.
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.
Great to see a directory like this starting to include physical products. I'd be interested in having some extra datapoints to help with decision making:
- 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.
It might be worth noting that this is not specific to the EU, it's the whole of Europe. So for example it includes companies from Norway, Switerzland and the UK.
So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.
Im not particularly fussy if it's EU or European. The idea is more to get insight if it's just a dropshipper/reseller type of business, or involved in regional manufacturing.
Substitute EU with EU+norway/switzerland/UK/etc
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).
In this case, "in the EU" is a shorthand for "in the single market", "in the customs union", or "in the EEA (plus Switzerland)".
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.
Today I learned that DeepL was German. It's hands down the best Japanese to English translator (according to my Japanese coworkers) and I was surprised how many used it in office. (never used it myself as a trilingual)
What I like about DeepL is that it tries to translate colloquially. For popular metaphors or sayings, Google does okay but it’s not perfect, especially if you don’t provide the entire sentence as context. DeepL does better with recognizing fragments imo.
Deepl is amazing as it is way faster in translating than LLMs
How does it compare to 4o? I used to use deepl but not since the later chatgpt versions came out.
what do you mean by chatgpt versions?
I think they are referring to “models” in this case as versions. 4o is a ChatGPT model as is o3, 4o-mini, Sora, etc etc.
I like DeepL, but without Catalan, it has less value.
Yeah this isn't what people make it out to be.
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.
>There's nothing european about this. / "Yeah but it's a european company so!"
You are contradicting yourself. There is something European about it.
Anyway, as long as it's not from the USA, it's a win.
I don't care. It's a chinese product, i refuse to take anyone who says otherwise seriously. European products are made in europe, not china.
Sure. But what is the reason sites like this are popping up? Which county is threatening to take over Greenland "one way or another"? Not China. Which country has invaded multiple countries over the last decades? Not China.
Which is the lesser evil, really?
> Which country has invaded multiple countries over the last decades? Not China.
Average geopolitical comprehension level of HN on display
These days, from a Canadian perspective, non-US is already good enough.
Yeah, China sucks. But the US sucks even more.
Personally I find myself reevaluating the choices I made for my personal data at the beginning of the cloud era.
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?
(Rant sorry)
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...
Amazon is probably the easiest for me to ditch. It's not really that much cheaper, and when you include shipping it's certainly not cheaper. Shipping times are horrible, search is broken, half of everything is a scam and again, it's not that much cheaper, if at at all.
I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.
The inventory commingling thing was the thing that made me stop using Amazon, one could never, ever be sure something was legitimate or counterfeit, until it was in one's possession and this made it never feel like it had in the early days.
Add to that how amazon boxes stand out, and are easily targeted by porch thieves.
I don't think that's much of an issue on this side of the pond. Trust has been low enough for a long enough period of time that packages don't get left on porches.
That's area dependent, there are multiple shipping companies that have options for leaving package by the door step and rarely are things stolen. It's completely down to where you live.
I'm quite curious to know where this is a thing, and whether people actually pick that option. FWIW, I live in Paris and that's also an option sometimes.
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.
I'm in Denmark, in a midsize town, but I also lived in a larger city, neither places are having a package dropped on your door step an issue. I do that all the time, if I don't feel like stopping by the package pick up place on my way home. There are absolutely neighbourhoods where I would never pick that options, like certain apartment blocks. Pretty much anywhere with single family houses is fine (in my area). The majority of apartment complexes is also perfect safe, though my sister-in-law did get 25kg of dog food delivered to the apartment below her by mistake and never got the bag back.
Here in Belgium, by default they will bring it to the post office, but I've checked the option to leave it on the porch. There's a camera. Been just fine for years, in a suburb area.
> "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!"
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.
If you can't afford it, don't. But perhaps you will find alternatives for some of your purchases.
Non-US companies ALSO employ non-US workers
I have stopped using Amazon all together >1 year ago. Prime Video is as shitty as it gets and most stuff ordered on Amazon is Chinese shovelware in the same rankings as Temu. I give exactly zero shit about same day delivery in 99,99% of the cases.
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/
Your arguments ignore externalities. You aren't saving 100 EUR. You pay for it in many other ways. There's no such thing as free lunch, as the saying goes. They're just hijacking your short-term thinking.
He isn't saving 100€ at all if Amazon's prices are higher than the competition, which is almost always true for every product I ever checked during the last five years, at least.
Prices vary wildly across Europe. Countries like Serbia have absolutely insane prices for basic products that are two thirds or half the cost across the border, sold by the same companies.
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.
Thats what every "support local" campaign boils down to - accept suboptimal deals because they are somehow more connected to you. I am glad to sell my services to the US and will buy their services, likewise for EU stuff if it is competitive.
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.
They aren't suboptimal where I am. US products are cheaper, but they are routinely less healthy, more addictive, and poorer quality than the alternatives.
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.
Hard disagree. For me, "support local" means paying a little more for goods that are 10x better instead of commoditized crap fully optimized for enshitification.
Thats not support local, that is buy higher quality - and while demagogues try to conflate these two - it is very rarely the case in my experience. In cases where it is - you do not need buy local movements at all - they should be the default.
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.
And for some things (and most tech things), "support local" isn't an option.
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.
> 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
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.
Thats them orienting themselves to neighboring territory and not that relevant to EU, aside from Greenland. But contrast that with recent past where US was blowing up middle east for oil, drone striking in Africa, building missile shields in Ukraine, etc.
Now its actively looking to pull its bases out of Europe and calling for Europe to arm itself. A positive change for EU in the grand scheme of things.
If the US actually tried to annex Canada, there would be huge ramifications in the EU. And besides, Trump seems more serious about Greenland: in his address to Congress, he said something along the line of "I think we're going to get it, one way or another". Trump is serious about wanting to steal EU land. You seem to be trying to hand wave that away.
And what about his very clear support of Russia? Is that also a positive change for the EU?
> 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.
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.
Well my point is more that EU is in a situation where Trump can realistically demand Greenland because without the US we cannot even protect ourselves. We should be outraged at the leaders that brought us to this situation more than Trump, while some other administration could have been less on the nose about it, they are still in a situation where they hold "have all the cards" (exaggerating).
If Trump was not so obnoxious I do not think a lot of people would be welcoming Germany building up its military for example.
Using price comparison services here in Sweden I almost never see a better deal on Amazon, at best they have the exact same price as the cheapest deal, seems to be their MO here to check the pricing data from competitors and set their prices exactly the same as the cheapest on offer at the time.
In Switzerland amazon never bothered to enter the market, so local competition filled the gap, and it created much better service while doing it.
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.
Why don't they compete outside of Switzerland?
They started recently:
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.
wow, didn't know about Galaxus, that's great sorting and sensible filters for things (only looked at dehumidifiers). Will keep it in mind in the future. Amazon is just a big mess of bad UX, impossible to compare things and find what you need
Similar here. It doesnt have to be all or nothing. Im in the u.s. and have a cool local co-op. So i buy most commodities at the cheapest grocery store and then some fancy stuff at the co-op to help them stay afloat and support local farmers. It's probably enough if everyone spends to their ability and maybe pushes themselves a little too.
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.
We must be buying different things if you think Amazon is cheap in the EU.
I find almost everything can be had cheaper elsewhere these days, except the Chinese junk like you find on Temu, the enshitification has well and truly sunk in.
I always paste products I find right back into Google and more often than not find them cheaper elsewhere
I guess people just buy different stuff and have different experiences then.
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.
There's also a browser extension: https://codeberg.org/K-Robin/GoEuropean
(btw: codeberg is the European alternative to Github)
Such a shame to see Gitlab go for gold in America rather than staying with its European basis. While Codeberg is absolutely fine in itself, I think Gitlab is a much better offering for many companies.
I'm always sad that very successful European companies got fully incorporated in the US: datadog, algolia, dataiku, dashlane, etc.
Also it seems to be missing some techs company: pigment, aircall, contentsquare (but not sure if it's a mistake)
The difference between US and Europe:
- 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.
> Good VC cultures
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.
I know a tiny bit about this regarding the UK but no other country in Europe:
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).
> - In Europe, getting funding is literally like pulling teeth.
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.
whats "zirp-enabled" free cash?
zero-interest-rate-policy-enabled, i.e. it's a reference back to the prior paragraph. But I don't think the US government's money-printing tells the full story. There's been just as much "cash" created by stock market overvaluations and un-backed securities.
Isn't funding at that extreme level pretty much localized to a few areas in the US, like Silicon Valley/Bay Area, Portland/Seattle area, New York and maybe Colorado. It is probably easier than in the EU, but I don't think may start ups in Alabama are getting crazy funding.
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.
For a while there, funding in US was as simple as putting the right keywords into your proposal, and sending it to the right treasury office, getting it practically auto-approved. I hope they will align closer to the sensible European practices in the future.
Money is imaginary and made out of thin air. It makes sense to divert at least some of it to innovation.
True. Innovation is also imaginary and made of thin air, until it is put into practice.
Unfortunately that’s the case because large US-based companies can leverage their existing global sales / marketing / governance setup to rationalize very high exit valuations. In the EU we don’t have the large software shops that can do that. So for an EU based startup - it’s exit to a US-based company or go all the way to an IPO / profitability.
Your comment illustrated the problem: Europeans are very content with making excuses for their failures so they can continue not making an effort.
Those Europeans who are not at home with that culture move to America. It's been like this for hundreds of years.
If they stayed in Europe they wouldn’t have been as successful.
America loves investing in risky ventures, and startups love money so they go to fish where the fish are.
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.
Or America's advantage is by its own design.
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.
>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.
Similar project: https://european-alternatives.eu
Also see this project for web services alternatives: https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
And: https://www.buy-european-made.eu/
This is same as https://www.goeuropean.org/
> 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.
Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
This redirects to the submission link!
Missing olimex.com, a Bulgarian manufacturer and seller of SBC and microcontroller boards, including industrial grade LTS ones.
Not a shill, just a happy customer.
+1 for olimex. They really stayed true to their vision, not looking to go big or go bust, just doing cool, quality things.
Switzerland and the UK will always be honorary Europeans.
{hug emoji}
Switzerland and the UK may not be in the EU, but they're undeniably European!
Switzerland hugs back
In Canada, there's a big push for buying Canadian given the Trump trade war, and especially avoiding products from the US. A kitchen store I went into over the weekend had little red maple leaf stamps on the price tags of Canadian products and the provincial liquor store in Ontario has pulled US products from shelves (though that's more of a marketing stunt by the populist Premier). Many Canadian-owned businesses have added logos at the top of their webpages (I noticed Canada Computers and Memory Express over the last few days, as I was browsing for graphics cards).
There is some push, but still quite a bit of reluctance to see free trade between provinces.
I'm looking for a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard that works across countries, not just in one country. I know there's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative but I believe it's not operational atm.
The European alternative was sold to--sorry, merged into--Mastercard and rebranded to Maestro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europay_International. It was the E in EMV. So friendly were European and American relations in the past that it was allowed to happen.
Yes, and the only current alternative to Mastercard's Maestro is Visa's V-Pay :/
I don't think there's such a thing yet for payment terminals. Local alternatives all seem to have died off because banks in other countries didn't support them.
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.
Technology-wise this is a solved problem. Uses open-source software too. All the EU needs to do is say 'self-custody is fine, please use a EUR-based stable coin for payments EU-wide'. The market will do the rest (the stable-coin, payment terminals, integrations with cash registers, DeFi forex for places where EUR is not used, etc.).
I hope there will be more adoption of EU stable coins like https://monerium.com, and a payments ecosystem will form around it. The rails are there, we need the apps and the integrations next.
cash.
I'd prefer a card with a European payment processor logo on it. An app might do as well...
Unfortunately, data on Cypriot companies is quite limited. There are far more products built on the island than what is officially listed. Speaking as a founder of a CY-based company, SpatialChat
Please add mlbile apps that scan product barcodes and display the origin country. I think EAN-13 barcodes make this easy already
Did similar movements had a measurable impact? Asking because I have the impression that boycott movements are ineffective, but I never verified that.
I was recently in Malaysia and they've boycotted certain American brands over the Israel-Palestine war. For example, KFC has given up and was shutdown everywhere. So boycotts can work. Maccas seemed to be doing just fine though, take from that what you will
Talk to Tesla and ask how they are doing in the EU and Canada :).
I suppose a big ticket item like a car is much easier to boycott than 50 small items from the grocery where trying to search through the ownership tree for every conglomerate would use up the rest of my sanity
The good news (at least for the EU, don't know about non-EU European countries) is that groceries are only a blip on the radar when it comes to imports (of course, energy is used for groceries, but that applies both to European and US products) [1]:
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.
Looking at labels is hardly a test of your sanity. In Canada right now a majority of the population is regularly checking and avoiding anything made in the USA.
While I do find it an interesting exercise to reflect over my own choices of products and services and consider how I could divest myself from relying on ones provided by US companies (and I do agree Europe is too reliant on the US in some regards), it is a bit sad to see how quickly things are spiraling here. People really love to have a clear enemy...
I don't think anyone loves this but it's the most rational response to the threats made by the US government against its former allies.
I'd always rather, if possible, give my money to a company that pays their tax where I do. That's simple self interest.
Self interest is not something to be proud of.
It is when its the most ethical choice.
The US is threatening to take my home country by force and subjugate us. Maybe that context helps understand?
Well, it's not really to have a clear enemy. It's an effort to avoid having one.
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.
You don't need an enemy for this sort of campaign to make sense. It should be common sense to prefer local products, and even more so to avoid extreme dependencies like the one most of the West has on American tech companies.
In my view, we (Europe) have long been acting foolishly by passively sitting in the back seat and allowing the US to drive for us, thereby creating a radical dependency. This wouldn't be healthy even if the US were the most loyal ally. What Trump's antics are doing is trigger a return to what should have always been the norm.
If you walk into a European supermarket, fashion store or MediaMarkt there is very little coming from the US. The giant container ships are coming from the East not the West.
Sure. My microwave from 1988 is about the only thing made in the US in my home (interstingly an Electrolux). However, every purchase I make is with a Visa card. Most services I use are American. And as I'm typing this... anyone know a European alternative to SwiftKey? :P
> anyone know a European alternative to SwiftKey? :P
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.
Electrolux is Swedish though. Or you mean it was actually built in the US but sold by Electrolux?
The chips and software in a lot of those products are coming from the US, even if the final products are manufactured in the East.
The US makes the biggest margins from valuable IP and software services, not from mass produced widgets coming in shipping containers.
Chips made with Dutch chip fabrication technology to English chip designs...
The software situation is grim but maybe open source somewhat ameliorates that...
>Chips made with Dutch chip fabrication technology
Using american EUV light sources....this train of who makes what in the supply chain can go on forever, the point is who's making the highest margins from the end product and it's not ASML nor ARM but Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
Hence my point that while EU has some IP, its value is dwarfed by the IP the US makes. Just look at market cap of US vs European tech sector. It's not even a competition. ASML can't offset that. I think Apple has enough cash in the bank to buy ASML if they wanted to.
Trump isn't really giving anyone the choice with talking about annexing its allies. You seem to be blaming the victim here.
I think the most critical missing piece is GPUs right now. As AI becomes more and more crucial, GPU/AI hardware design and manufacturing will become a matter of sovereignty and unfortunately, can't find any EU alternative
If we want to get really protectionist, ASML could stop selling outside of the EU. That would be kind of bad for everyone though
Also see this project for web services alternatives: https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
Great, but please give me a link to the entry so I can go to it
Go Scaleway! I always wanted to root for it.
i actually didn't realise Scaleway is a real European alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure. They seems to be covering the most common use case for AWS managed services.
And yet the website is hosted on AWS :')
Quite telling, this would be an ideal case for Scaleway/OVH/anyone else.
No top level domain alternatives? Org, com, net, gov, mil are US TLDs.
There are plenty of national TLDs, but internationally the English language ones are more common.
gov and mil aren't available to non-American institutions anyway, and .edu locked down to American-only around 2001.
Perhaps this website could've gone with .eu, but this movement is larger than just the EU. I don't think TLDs matter much at the moment, at least not until America's trade war starts affecting TLDs as well.
The problem with buying European is that shipping between countries is nightmarishly expensive.
If Brussels wants to try something useful - instead of bottle caps create a proper shipping network that can ship from Malaga to Vilinus in 2 days for 0.5 euro per KG. It is not that we don't have national postal companies. It is absurd to buy something for 15 euro in italy and pay 30 euro shipping to romania.
International freight shipping is incredibly cheap per kilogram (1 TEU/20ft shipping container costs about 6000 euros to ship, with a max eeight of about 28900kg, so about 20 cents per kg), at least by sea and rivers. Many of the costs come from the moment products arrive on land. Land-locked countries and countries with major population centers far away from docks and freight terminals pay the price.
Shipping individual packages within a short amount of time costs money. The solution is to do what companies like Amazon and AliExpress do: stock up products in many different companies in bulk so that packages can be dispatched locally for much cheaper.
Many of the shipping routes between countries go by plane rather than by boat, filling up unused weight in passenger planes or being shipped in bulk by passenger planes. Planes are a lot more expensive, especially by weight, but you'll get your products within days rather than weeks.
If you're a business importing goods in bulk, you'll have to deal with weeks or even months of delays between ordering and delivery, but international cargo delivery per product is essentially free unless you ship things like cars.
Things will become cheaper as warehouses are spread wider and transport legs get optimized more. Currently, there aren't many companies shipping from Italy to Romania, so there aren't many boats or trains making the journey, and shipping is expensive. When demand grows, more availability will follow, and prices will drop eventually.
I understand that for you cheaper shipping options are important, but other people might find other things important. The EU has the capability to address multiple issues at a moment, so it should not be "instead of doing <my favorite thing to make fun of>". btw, shipping to Romania is expensive because infrastructure is still quite bad and the reliability of the national post is quite low. PS: Bottle caps that stay attached to the bottles is great!
Breakups are painful. A great battle is afoot on the "data sovereignty" ground, for sure.
It's over a year since I spoke at Cloud Native Media [0] on the urgent need to extricate sensitive processes and data from US American companies.
At the time there were a few angry reactions - mainly from people accepting the risks for the first time and acknowledging how deeply enmeshed/dependent their operations are. Most of the assembled creators, CEOs, journalists, fully understood and were enthusiastic about relocating away from US BigTech.
It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism. AFAICS, all of US BigTech (bar some tepid resistance from Apple) has fully aligned with an agenda that is unconscionable to liberal democracy.
Yet we still have problems like UK government departments that are running on Microsoft Teams or casually using Google docs in ways that seem wholly inappropriate to security and safety of data and users.
Where I'm working on sensitive projects I find myself repeatedly having to point out that we urgently need independent end-to-end encrypted video chat and collaboration tools.
For email I've started removing some @gmail recipients in CC where they are not strictly NTK.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/cloud-native-talk/
> It's March 2025 and the US has gone full-fascism.
It's amazing to see people say things like this as if the US was any different before. Trump just put an honest face on fascism and imperialism. Before, they were exercised in a 'polite', polished manner. Even by Obama who stomped down the Occupy Wall Street.
Yes, it was different before. The status quo may have been fascistic and certainly imperialist but still would have been far more preferable to what's coming.
great to see list include software products as well
A similar product is Boycat - https://boycat.io. AFAIK they are adding a campaign focused on the US since the US started adding tarifs everywhere. Would love to see them adding something for the EU side of things.
I think this is useful more than just actual Europeans.
I'm an American, and my wife and I have been looking at "Made in…" labels on our products for decades. Not as a geopolitical protest; just as routine intellectual curiosity.
Over the last five years or so, we've noticed a significant shift in the locations listed on the things we buy. A lot of what we buy used to read "Made in China" (and before that shift, "Made in Mexico") but these days more and more of it is from Europe.
Sometimes it's the vague "Made in the EU," which I assume means Turkey or Romania or some other less-fashionable quarter. But increasingly, it's France and Switzerland, and the U.K.
(My personal, completely unscientific guess is that the next shift in manufacturing will be to Africa. Lots of cheap labor close to raw materials and access to both hemispheres by sea.)
Turkey is not part of the EU.
It has a customs union.
They should be.
They started the process to join the EU, but political ideals have since shifted and I don't think they'll ever join the EU with the way things are going now. Even if Turkey changes their mind, I don't think most of Europe would still want them in in the state they're in right now.
Only if they return Constantinople.
"Return" to whom. Byzantium was never "European", it was shunned at its time by entire Europe - by both the Catholic Mediterranean parts and the Germanic parts. The Romaioi (as the Byzantines called themselves) turned into Ottoman Rums as the empire was a multi-cultural, multi-national empire united under the banner of Ottoman-ness. The uncle of the fallen emperor, who was next in line for being the Byzantine emperor after the fall of his nephew was made the "Grand Beg" (akin to viceroy) of the entire Ottoman Balkans after the fall of Constantinople. He governed lands far bigger than what his ancestors governed even ~200 years ago. A lot of Mehmed I's begs were ex-Byzantines who were still Christian, and, well Byzantine. Except they wore Ottoman turbans now - and most of them just didn't and kept wearing Byzantine attire.
So its like what some historians say: The fall of Constantinople was mostly a change of hats.
Byzantion started as a greek colony. Greece is a member of the EU.
But easy, it was just one not very sophisticated joke. History is always more nuanced that those who try to use it.
Is there any European alternative for Hacker News? And if yes, what's its URL/web address?
Preferable in French or Italian, or maybe even German, which I wanted to learn for a long time and this would be a good enough motivation, because, and with all due respect to the Irish, having a continent-wide conversation in a language natively spoken by only ~5 million of its own people is not very conductive to the forming of an European spirit.
Please no. It's good that tech conversations are global. I wish there were more Chinese and Russians on here, not less. And this comes from someone who's very critical of the current US admin, and lives in the Baltics.
Also, please no regarding the language. Coming from a small country, it's great that we have a lingua-franca that we can use to communicate effectively. Doubling-down on going native when it comes to our respective languages won't help the single market, or European integration in general.
EDIT: Won't help our militaries either if and when they'll need to coordinate.
Splitting Europe by language again will only be a disadvantage. Depending on where you live in Europe, the lingua franca is either English or Russian, with maybe a bit of German and French in border regions.
I don't see the value add of an international forum with local languages. There's a great Dutch tech forum already (tweakers.net) visited almost exclusively by Dutch and Flemish people. Great for locals, but entirely impossible to join in on as a foreigner.
Also, you may be confusing Europe with the EU. The UK has almost 70 million people speaking English every day.
> having a continent-wide conversation in a language natively spoken by only ~5 million of its own people
Did something happen to the UK?
Brexit
I was unaware that Brexit included leaving the continent.
I have lots of tech conversations in my native tongue. But they don’t happen on webforums, they happen in (semi-private) chat rooms.
At least what Trump did forced Europeans to grow a spine.
All modern business is built on trust, since Americans are keen on throwing that out the door now, every EU business is going to re-evaluate who to trust.
Which means, no longer trusting American.
What is trust to you? It looks a lot like Europe is getting upset that American taxpayers do not want to waste money on a conflict that is going nowhere, that is not America’s concern.
We have it, although by not being painted in military colors an wrapped in bully speeches needs good eyes and an open mind to be seen.
First, taking you at face value: it's not clear we did that yet. Second, this is ridiculous. Trusting an until-this-point-mostly-trustworthy ally is not spineless (although I guess it might be naive).
It is weak to not recognise the change that has happened. It has been telegraphed for many years.
What has happened in the US could happen to us and we must prevent that while we hope that more sensible people eventually prevail there.
Your ignorance of history and willingness to buy Russian propaganda is sad.
Europe downplayed investment in military capacity because this was seen and agreed as the best way to reduce the risk of WWIII.
Europe also realized that building things is better than destroying things. Is it spineless to do this? Question to you, mavdi, did you volunteer to serve in the armed forces? If not, do you view yourself as spineless for this decision?
Economic nationalism is bad when Trump does it and bad when Europe does it too.
We should have unilateral free trade. Ricardo showed this was better over 200 years ago.
I think some Game Theory 101 might be relevant here. Yes it's good to cooperate initially but after that, tit for tat is the thing to do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
Europe is not a nation, and the boycott is against a single country acting like an adversary. Europeans aren't boycotting Xiaomi or Huawei.
There are EU-wide tariffs though. Like those against Chinese EVs: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
> Economic nationalism is bad when Trump does it and bad when Europe does it too.
Now, now. Because Trump is 'hOrRiBLe' for putting an honest face on fascism and imperialism that always existed in the US and its vassals, we have to have outrage and do the very things we criticize him for doing.
It's a classic prisoner's dilemma. We'd all be better off if nobody started any trade wars, but the moment one party starts becoming hostile, everyone else must respond in kind or they'll be taken advantage of.
I hoped Americans had stopped being stupid and elected better leaders, but Trump's re-election shows that America and its people do not care about being reliable business partners. Ridding ourselves of American dependence will take decades, but with at least four more years of this bullshit ahead of us, we'd better get started soon.
But Ricardo determined the opposite. That unilateral free trade is better even in the face of tariffs. In the end, it's their own consumers that pay the tariffs.
If Trump wants to make Americans poorer then so be it, but we shouldn't follow suit.
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/
Toting Adidas, Puma, Jack & Jones, Decathlon etc. as "European-meade" is laughable when everyone knows their clothes are actually manufactured in third-world low-labor-protection countries.
Heck, I can make a safe bet that the vast majority of the companies listed here sell items at least partially made outside of Europe.
Tbf that goes for American-made too. The goal of this isn't to fix the supply chain, it's to reduce dependency on the USA.
there's absolutely no European alternative to Amazon. Thanks for clearing that up.
Why do you need one company from which you buy everything? Go to idealo.de/es/fr... find what you need, compare prices and buy it from the cheapest supplier
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
No, it just didn't load for you. The snark is boring.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
You will find the brown party again once you go far enough left.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
No we don't have a megacorp like Amazon, why would we want one? You think we cant buy things online without them?
For anything time critical Amazon Prime is a godsend.
1) Anything PC related I can get shipped to me tomorrow. There is one local computer store and they just repair laptops and phones with absolute rip off prices (£70 for a HDMI cable). Before Amazon it took days to get an order shipped from one of the big PC suppliers in the UK, Payment used to an absolute PITA frequently card gets rejected on dubious grounds. I've had a PSUs die before, I can get one shipped to me tomorrow.
2) I am working on an old car at the moment as a hobby. Working on old vehicles you will find many small bodges or you won't realise until 50% of the way into it you need a replacement part. Almost everyone uses the postal service and the delivery time is 3-5 days or they charge you £15 for next day delivery (which is often more than the price of the part). So any job can be stopped by a missing part and I have to wait 3 days to get a replacement part or be ripped off. I have literally no alternative than to use these suppliers much of the time and it is a major source of frustration because it will take me an extra week to do a job.
That is the USP of Amazon Prime.
I have several options within walking distance that sells HDMI cables for same price as Amazon, and I can trust that they sell a cable that works according to spec.
Amazon uses a 3rd party to deliver here, and their short delivery times is really only available in larger cities if the item is in that particular warehouse. Since they use 3rd party to deliver I can buy from other stores and also have next day delivery, not like delivery times were bad before though. Have several package locker services available as well, next day delivery is common but depends on how far it has to travel.
Can Amazon be better for some niche stuff? Probably, but its unlikely to be in the warehouse close to me anyway. I'd rather wait an extra day than exfiltrate barely taxed money to the US if I can help it.
> I have several options within walking distance that sells HDMI cables for same price as Amazon, and I can trust that they sell a cable that works according to spec.
1) I used to example of the HDMI cable to show how much of a ripoff that shop was. I use Amazon to buy all manner of PC equipment. Alternatives in the UK have poor delivery times, stock or payment is a faff.
2) I don't have any options in walking distance at all and I don't buy the cheap cables from Amazon.
Not all of us live in a city. I live in a countryside town and options are severely limited. The only shop near me is a Nisa General, a Chinese Takeaway and a Hardware Store that has some old guy talking about the Freemasons all the time.
> Amazon uses a 3rd party to deliver here, and their short delivery times is really only available in larger cities if the item is in that particular warehouse. Since they use 3rd party to deliver I can buy from other stores and also have next day delivery, not like delivery times were bad before though. Have several package locker services available as well, next day delivery is common but depends on how far it has to travel.
Good for you this isn't everywhere. I don't have this option. The nearest PC parts supplier is in Manchester which is over an 1 hour drive and closes before I finish work. The other PC parts supplier is 1 hour 30 minutes away in Stoke-on-Trent.
They rip you off on next day delivery (it doesn't cost that much more as I post stuff regularly myself) or they just don't offer it.
> Can Amazon be better for some niche stuff? Probably, but its unlikely to be in the warehouse close to me anyway. I'd rather wait an extra day than exfiltrate barely taxed money to the US if I can help it.
No Amazon isn't good for niche stuff (this stuff I am ordering for my car isn't that niche either). I have no other option for many car parts to either go to Ebay or I have to go to a official parts seller. The main issue as stated is delivery times are slow because most of the guys that are part suppliers are guys in their 60s.
Waiting an extra day isn't an option sometimes. You did notice where I specifically said where I need things quickly right?
Can get next day delivery to locker even outside the bigger metros here.
Guess you'll be surprised when Amazon starts gouging you.
> Can get next day delivery to locker even outside the bigger metros here.
Good for you. I don't have that option. You were asking (somewhat rhetorically) why people would want to use a megacorp like Amazon. The alternatives in the UK are either no better than Amazon or objectively worse.
Also the North of Europe is generally much better than the Eastern and Southern Europe for e-commerce. I have lived Southern Europe and they were at least about 10-15 years behind the UK offerings when I lived there. After speaking to some people in Eastern Europe, I understand that they are in similar situation.
> Guess you'll be surprised when Amazon starts gouging you.
The only company that hasn't gouged me so far is Amazon. If they do, I will stop using them.
In the Netherlands we have Bol.com which also offers one-day delivery for many (most?) products.
That is good. I wish we had something decent in the UK.
So, what's wrong with Europe is that we try to care for the environment and that we don't make enough tanks?
I'm OK with that.
The modern computer was invented in Britain, we have ARM, designers of the most popular chip architecture in the world and make things like Raspberry Pi. We've got the ability but not the ambition. The attitude of "we'll design the chips, others can do the scary bit of building them"/"we'll publish the paper and others can monetize it"/"We'll make a fun little toy for research, but we'll let the americans make the commercial version" attitude is absolutely endemic here.
you know that the EU produce more steel and Aluminium than the US, and that its industrial output/GDP is a bit higher than the US, right?
First is often repeated bullshit - China is heavily investing in renewables, and heavy industry in EU fares better than in US.
Second is funny as current war in Ukraine proves that super-advanced tanks are that important anymore.
Europe has two issues that are real
1. In reality it doesn't exist (if understood as a single political entity).
2. European Union, and especially Germany, was handicapped by stupid fiscal policy.
Love it.
For digital products and services there is also European Alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu/
As part of the European reorientation I avoid products and services from Hungary and Slovakia. I also avoid one specific Swedish company, Spotify, for promoting and funding the misinformation spewing American podcastbros who were partially responsible for the rise of Trump 2.0.
Nice, and this doesn't even include non-EU offerings like Switzerland's Exoscale, Proton, etc.
Proton seems to be there?
It includes UK offerings (Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, etc.)
- "We are a group of individuals from across Europe who connected via the subreddit r/BuyfromEU."
Then, why do you promote a list of European Reddit "alternatives" such as "Lemmy", you say people are supposed to use instead?
This is the laziest form of internet activism there is: lecture people what you believe they're supposed to be doing in ways you don't yourself do, and can't be inconvenienced to try.
(Bonus points for building this boycott website on top of Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, and Google Analytics).
Nobody seriously claims that Europe should be self-sufficient in everything and isolated from the rest of the world. It’s ok to simultaneously 1) try to make things better, and 2) still talk to Americans or use American products (same for China). Discussing alternatives does not imply burning bridges.
I am just going to leave this here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
They can be on both? Lots of users on reddit to reach.
This is such a shame, we should be looking to source and produce things globally and find better ways to improve the logistics and efficiency world-wide. Why would the EU take such a protective stance which only enforces isolation and increases cost?
Edit: Thanks for the responses, I am still looking for a signal that tells my post is sarcasm multiplied by cynicism.
Why? Because it's reacting to the current US trade policies.
The EU is realizing that one of their major trade partner, who they trusted with critically important goods and services, might pull the rug under their feet.
Not to mention that the EU in itself is already a huge achievement in terms of free trade agreements between EU countries.
That doesn't really work as long as you have legislation like the CLOUD Act, which means EU-based businesses have to think twice about using any US providers, especially if they handle sensitive customer data and also since the DPF is on the way out.
Only because the US refuses to properly protect consumer privacy and seemingly can no longer be trusted at all. If Trump forces Microsoft to turn off Office 365 for example for the EU, or blocks AWS, GCP or Azure from doing business with the EU then European businesses are screwed. We’ve now realized these risks are potentially real and European countries are scrambling to look for alternatives (and realizing that they don’t really exist).
Considering the PCLOB has lost some of its members, it's questionable whether the DPF can continue to exist in its current form. If it does go out the window, then Trump won't need to tell AWS/GCP to stop doing business with the EU, since European companies wouldn't legally be allowed to transfer data to US companies anyway.
I expect the EU commission will take a _very_ long time to actually act on this tho. Maybe we'll see Schrems III first.
Right now directories like this are getting popular mostly because they offer alternative to US products. Pretty sure Europeans would be happy to use a Canadian alternative to a US service.
As a European citizen, I'd say, indeed, I gladly consume Canadian products.
Furthermore, Canada should apply for EU or EEA membership.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/documents/treaties-agreem...
Close, but not quite the same. (e.g. free movement of labor would be cool)
But not alternatives to Chinese products? China’s human rights, environment, currency manipulation, tariffs, IP theft — some people seemingly unify as anti-Trump, but ignore China?
This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
Yep it isn’t principled at all. This is just making clear that Canadians and Europeans are willing to openly support a communist dictatorship. I guess that sort of aligns with the trend in these countries away from Democratic values like free speech. But it is still disappointing.
I think you don't understand the situation.
The situation with China hasn't fundamentally changed in the last two months. People operate under the assumption of some kind of stability in this relationship. The West imports and exports products from/to China, with some restrictions: critical infrastructure like antennas cannot be built by Huawei in many countries, for instance. People in the West wouldn't use a Chinese email provider, etc. Today China is not an ally, but not an enemy either; rather a partner. There is no reason to expect a change in behaviour right now. It doesn't mean that the West agrees with everything that China does, of course.
Now regarding the US, it has fundamentally changed in the last two months. From the US government threatening to invade allied countries to actively destabilising them through people close to Trump downright making nazi salutes. On top of threatening militarily, the US is attacking its ex-allies economically with tariffs. The people in power in the US are explicitly talking about destroying Europe, and the US is now becoming an ally of Russia (which again makes it look like an enemy to the West).
Two months ago, people were operating under the assumption that the US was an ally. Now it's a partner that is going down the slope of becoming an enemy. Go ask if Canadians or Europeans feel threatened by China right now. Ask the same question about the US.
So yes: people are more scared of the US right now, and the US look more like enemies than China right now.
> This tells me the resistance isn’t principled at all, but simply grandstanding.
TL;DR: It is obviously resistance, against the US becoming an enemy. There are two obvious reasons for finding alternative to US products:
1. If it hurts the US economy (and therefore the US citizen), the hope is that maybe they will realise that Trump is not helping them and push for stopping this madness. The US won't get back to beeing trusted allies anytime soon (that ship has sailed), but they could stop from becoming enemies of the West.
2. National security: the US cannot be trusted, so it is very urgent for the West to turn to alternatives and run away from the US as fast as they possibly can.
Because US proved itself to be an unreliable partner.
Apparently unreliable partner just means “not being taken advantage of”. If stopping a waste of American taxpayer money results in this reaction, it’s clear the countries looking to decouple were never really partners of the US.
Because the US is asking Europe to defend itself eighty years after ww2
Because the US helped an enemy in the middle of a battle and prevented us from using aircraft and equipment we bought....in the middle of battle.
You can argue the rights and wrongs if you want but all that matters is the US cannot be trusted.
If you want to go theoretical one would argue that this effort is precisely what you ask for: one link in the global chain has become inefficient and this page is the result of the system routing around it.
It's to discourage the US from escalating the tariff war, which in the end always hurt consumers. People in the US are already paying that insane choice, but I don't hold my breath waiting for GOP voters to reconsider their choice: propaganda is a powerful weapon, and we're struggling against it also over here.
Did the EU not have tariffs before Trump? How about Canada? Or China? Or Mexico? Are tariffs ok as long as it isn’t Trump?
That's why I mentioned the escalation. We already had tariffs against China to protect internal market and bring prices on par to have fair competition, just like the US already had, but Trump wanted to go full berserk, and here are the results.
Clown in charge has made the US an unreliable trading partner and ally.
Yes, and ideally we would have no wars, either. But because of fucking psychos like Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping and many more, we do. Therefore, unfortunately, it makes sense for EU to decrease their economic dependence on outside players like the US and China.
I think it's important that we _do_ also include China in this. It's not just that Trump has demonstrated that the US is unreliable. We have also seen (again) that sociopaths in charge of authoritarian regimes can do things that are perfectly capable of acting against their own economic interests for political, cultural, religious reasons.
Depending on global interconnectedness of markets has not and will not save us. We need to divest and disconnect from all economies which are not reliable liberal democracies which broadly share our values.
I would include in this Hungary: We should be giving serious thought to how to kick them out of the EU.
We haven't built quite as much of a security dependence on China so I think this is more like the US becoming "another China."
But we have huge economic dependence which could also be used. We need to wean ourself off the Chinese supply chain. This will take decades, but the lesson here is that it will be used against us in future.
Europe is big enough as an internal market to sustain a good quality of life for the majority of the population — even if our 1% are disadvantaged relative to those in US, Russia. We have the capital and resources to defend ourselves too. We can open outward to Canada, Australia, democratic parts of Asia, Africa. But we need to avoid any dependence on powerful authoritarian regimes like China, India, the US, Indonesia etc.
I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.
Civilisation is organising in larger and larger groups - everyone becoming more dependent on each other and having laws and so on to resolve problems instead of fighting.
.....so somehow, for the sake of making Star Trek and all those wonderful science fiction stories possible.....we have to get that dependence back somehow. I'm joking but not joking. Some Americans are reasoable and somehow, for the world to survive, we have to find some way to help reasonable people all over the world to work together. So we can reach the science fiction future.
> I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.
As it looks now, there might be a limit on the scale of global collaboration. There's nothing that says that the trend of global depenence and collaboration will continue (in fact, it is reversing now).
That sounds great. I'm just not sure it's compatible with current nation states.
As a first step we could perhaps agree that individual people could come and live in Europe and participate in our democracy?
I think physical presence is actually quite a good precondition for participation. At least people physically present have some skin in the game.
With a transition period, I'm not sure I'd have a big problem cutting many other links with non-democratic countries. I agree with your ideals but all evidence is that trading and communication links and other sources of interdependence will be abused. We need to have policies which respond to that.
So Romania should be kicked out as well? They’re denying ballot access to a candidate that has broad popular support. Is that democracy when the people can’t vote for a candidate of their choice?
Possibly. I'm ignorant of Romanian politics. But the idea that EU should strengthen policing of democratic norms and sanction members who don't conform to them is important.
Replying to myself. I just looked up what gp was talking about, and I think it's this: https://apnews.com/article/romania-georgescu-election-d0541a...
In this case, no I don't think Romania should be kicked out. Restrictions on party membership are complicated, but it seems here the courts have applied Romania's electoral law. We are going to have to be smart to avoid situations like this in other EU countries, where Russian, Chinese or US money are used to support non-democrats.
Are you seriously asking why? If you've paid any attention to the news in the past few weeks, you couldn't have missed the daily efforts by Trump and his cabinet to isolate the USA from its allies. In the past, European countries have trusted that the common values shared by the Western countries will ensure mutual cooperation now and in the future. Now this thinking has proven naive, as Trump has threatened Europe with, e.g., shutting down technological services if it's in his interest to do so. It doesn't seem to matter whether Europe pays for these services or not. Therefore, it's paramount for Europe to not vendor-lock themselves in American companies, as they can't be trusted anymore. It's sad and shocking, but Europe has been backed into the corner with this one.
> Trump has threatened Europe with
He even threatened to invade a country that is part of the EU
Greenland? Weirdly, Greenland is part of Denmark but _not_ part of the EU. Still the greatest US realignment in regard to Europe since the war.
Well, as Greenland is part of Denmark, the threat is against a member of the EU
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but it's not part of the EU. It was originally part of the EU (back when it was the EEC) but voted to leave in a referendum in 1982, officially exiting in 1985. Today, Greenland has a special status called Overseas Country and Territory (OCT), meaning it has trade deals with the EU, but EU rules don't directly apply there.
The threat is something Denmark will have to respond to in some way. The rest of this is specious.
Because we do not want to support the Trump administration and the only way we can vote is with our wallets.
This only makes sense in a simplified world of academic economics.
Try ending sarcasm with /s