201–210 of 318 posts
Never thought I'd live to see the end of Pax Americana and yet here we are. To give up this amount of control and soft power just to cozy up to the corpse of the Soviet union is not the universe branch I expected to find myself in. You yanks might think this is some display of your upper hand. Just wait until the civilized world turns its back on the greenback as the reserve currency. You will be so fucked.
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I have a Tesla with so-called FSD in Europe, and it still feels like it’s ten years away from being road-safe. It can’t even recognize speed limit signs correctly. I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason. I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wal…
Counterpoint, I helped my father buy a model Y and it helps him do the 2 hour drive to visit his grandchildren. The FSD marketing has been a bit over the top but it’s still the best system by far.
I believe it works better in the US. Elsewhere in the world it’s still practically useless, yet they’ve been selling it for years on the pretense that it’s just around the corner.
Cruise control on a Volkswagen is smarter than “FSD” on a Tesla. It’s just sad for a 7,500 euro feature.
What did the US do to Europe this week? Are you referring to Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine?
Vance came to Munich, and promoted European fascist political parties. I wish I was kidding.
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It's beyond clear that the AfD are a far right fascist group. So clear that it has caused the majority of their leadership to change - explicitly citing them being anti-democracy and pro-russian and extremist - and the actual government's protection arm to consider then a threat to the nation's democracy:
> In January 2022, after a lost power struggle, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as he claimed he came to acknowledge that the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order. Former party chairman and co-founder of the AfD, Lucke, had left the party in 2015 with the same remark.
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> When party founder Bernd Lucke had left the AfD in 2015, he cited, among other reasons an "anti-western, decidedly pro-Russian foreign and security policy orientation" as well as increasing calls to "pose the 'system question' with regard to our parliamentary democracy" as reasons for his departure from the party.
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> In March 2020, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (German: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) classified AfD's far-right nationalistic faction known as Der Flügel as "a right-wing extremist endeavor against the free democratic basic order" and as "not compatible with the Basic Law", placing it under government surveillance.
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That other commenter is either ignorant to the point of negligence or a fascist themselves.
I am European and I've never even seen anyone talking about it outside the internet. Majority of people do not know and do not care.
When you ask the extremists, like some of the people in these threads, to list specific concerns about specific things that the USG is currently doing that they're unaligned with, they struggle. The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Look, I think its a distraction for either side to be worrying about this so much. Those actions are a very, very far distance from anything remotely resembling human rights abuse. We've been playing world police since WW2 and we're $35T in debt; we have bigger fish to fry.
If you're mad that the United States is asking your country to contribute more to its own defense; or that its no longer going to get that $50M USAID contract for gender fluidity studies or whatever; I don't know what to tell you. Growing up is hard, but necessary. Europe can't keep relying on the US for everything.
If its ending the war in Ukraine; I think judgement should be reserved until we understand the terms of how it ends. Ukraine could lose some territory. Sucks, but again, America voted and does not want to be the world police anymore. Supporting peace at the cost of Ukrainian territory is not automatically "omg Russia and US are allied". Its a sad, horrible outcome of Europe utterly failing its neighbor; but sure, they can blame the US, part of the job of being World Police is also being World Scapegoat.
Most everything else the Trump admin is doing doesn't impact Europe. Its vague generalities about "vibes". You're oversocialized, and those vibes are probably courtesy of Russian/Chinese disinformation propaganda, not reality. Its hard to hear, you aren't going to believe it, but please just log off the internet and orient yourself on what really matters in your daily life.
I am European and I've never even seen anyone talking about it outside the internet. Majority of people do not know and do not care.
Thanks for this, as an American I was stressing out. But if it's only Europeans with internet access talking about it we should be fine. Let's just hope Europeans don't start using the internet.
Their point is that OP likely underestimates the effect of their particular filter bubble on their perception of the universality of the discussion and sentiment.
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There's an entire subreddit dedicated to helping people degoogle. One of the hardest things to get rid of is Google Maps as there's no real alternative that's as good. https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/
I haven’t touched Google maps in ages - I use Apple Maps which is decent these days (not the dumpster fire it was at launch - and even so, I used it back then, if only to de google a bit). If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.
I'm a US Millennial and my impression is that the US has spent my adult lifetime destroying its soft power, and this week is really just a culmination of that. US tech firms do not and have never (at least in my time working for them) cared about anything other than a pathological pursuit of profit that borders on nihilistic paperclip-optimization. I believe that US firms see European tech companies as slow/lazy and…
If that were true then people wouldn't worry as much. It's because there is a fuck-you-and-the-world nationalistic theme going on and US tech companies are unable to escape — that makes people worry. No company in the world is a vehicle to pure financial rationalism, and no human or collection of humans are either.
I think it depends a lot on what happens in the elections 2 and 4 years from now. The world may forgive or may be very well justified in their turn. I’m in the enterprise space and there’s not a lot of open acknowledgement of changes yet. I don’t think my particular company thinks there’s a way this is good for them. To some degree I think it’s being treated as yet another line item in the long list of things that ne…
People keep mentioning elections in two or four years, I guess assuming that the MAGA mafia could lose and be ousted. I think it’s 100% wishful thinking. There is no way they’ll let go of power peacefully. But my bet is they won’t even technically lose, thanks to an arsenal of massive disinformation, voter suppression, gerrymandering, intimidation, up to jailing opponents and so on.
As an European I can confirm this is partly true. I wouldn't say it's completely destroyed it's soft power, but politically we do feel betrayed so whenever possible people would be looking to switch to non-US product. However, in business we're so intertwined with the US that it's hard to tell right now if there ever will be a justified switch. In terms of pensions - I think 99.9% of us have a huge chunk the S&P, so…
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I think it's not talked about enough that some of the new president's policies are going to lead to actual people dieing. Not just overseas, but in the US too. Maybe the folks cheering him on don't realize this, or maybe they just don't care.
There's a big difference between sending a foreign country vaccines and organizing protests in foreign countries to further a political or economic agenda. I'm all for the former, not the latter.