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Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

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Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#221

Post by omnimus »

Daril wrote: post #112
Kelvin506 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the U.S. and doing the same. While EU laws don't protect me as well as they would someone on the correct side of the pond, I do still benefit from better integrity and transparency. Would you be up for making recommendations?

Sure ! Here you can find a list of alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/ I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en Protonmail ( https://proton.me/mail ) or Tutanota ( https://tuta.com/ ) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen ( https://filen.io/ ) for encrypted Cloud Storage

Filen is becoming pretty awesome not only as worde alternative but as best sync storage period (and its e2e). They dobt have teams/bussines yet but its comming for sure.

Infomaniak is great email.

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#222

Post by omnimus »

qq99 wrote: post #144
croemer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware if you want to use Hetzner's s3, they had a massive repeated outage over the past few days and don't offer any reliability guarantee, not even something like 99.9%. Maybe you're thinking of something else, or don't care if you can't upload/download for a few hours here and there - just wanted to warn as I was surprised by this as a user.

Around the time where Hetzner was all the rage ("Just host your own server for $8 a month!") I was trying to sign up. They had a multi-day outage that prevented even signing up. I think I was lucky to experience that before I started using them.

Its great service. I cannot say a bad thing after years of use.

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#223

Post by kristopolous »

aluminussoma wrote: post #220

I don’t think most Americans care about how Europe sees us. Instead, there is a thought that Europe uses America to protect its own interests instead of putting its own resources on the line. America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve Ameri…

Economically that's really foolish. America is an increasingly unimportant market. Most countries have domestic versions of things (such as cars) and they are extremely lousy and noncompetitive.

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

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

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

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#224

Post by cldellow »

le-mark wrote: post #28

Is the backlash worse than the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003? Is it worse than the first Trump administration? Genuinely curious. The reality is the 50% of voters who DID not vote for the current president are just as shell shocked as the Europeans. Only we KNEW it was coming.

I'm Canadian.

We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)

We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?

And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.

Now we have a dim view of Americans.

There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#225

Post by 827a »

abenga wrote: post #214
827a wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reality. Most people even in the US don't 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 eithe…

> The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Really? The biggest concern? Not wantonly cutting long-running programs (even international commitments) with no regard to consequences, just to see what happens?

Well, that's the thing; I don't know what peoples' concerns are. I hear a lot of complaints about vague generalities (like what you just said) and ominous future-fear about a dictatorship, but I struggle to connect any of those concerns back to specific orders. Much of them just sound like an expression of a generalized anxiety disorder tbh.

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

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

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#226

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #223
aluminussoma wrote: post #220

I don’t think most Americans care about how Europe sees us. Instead, there is a thought that Europe uses America to protect its own interests instead of putting its own resources on the line. America itself has its own problems. America is spending too much money. America has an inflation problem that led to one of the most unpopular presidents ever getting elected again. Many Americans think it’s time to solve Ameri…

Economically that's really foolish. America is an increasingly unimportant market. Most countries have domestic versions of things (such as cars) and they are extremely lousy and noncompetitive. America is voluntarily stepping down from the international stage by imposing tariffs, ignoring treaties, demonizing foreigners, bowing out of powerful organizations and then saber rattling about the rise of China as the worl…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#227

Post by ojhughes »

miklosz wrote: post #55
rvnx wrote: post #2

Tesla FSD wont be authorized in Europe, this will be one direct consequence of all of that. In addition, tariffs will be put on cars coming from the US. Plus, US is now recognized as a very unreliable partner in terms of defense, that Europe regrets buying their systems.

There's already 10% tariff on cars from US imported into Europe. But somehow I have feeling that even if it would be reduced to 0%, it wouldn't make a big difference Cars of US brands are generally terrible, not sure how they fulfill EU emission standards, have poor MPG which with EU gas prices are very expensive in maintenance. Maybe Japanese, Korean or EU brands manufactured US could do better.

Fords are very popular in the UK and my Mondeo hasn’t missed a beat in years. the European models aren’t made in US which speaks volumes

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#228

Post by subsection1h »

Sakos wrote: post #60
Daril wrote: post #8

For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy,…

I don't know how to degoogle at this point. 90% of my registered accounts across the internet are with my Gmail account because I didn't want them tied to my private email.

My family has .com that we registered in 1996, but for email, I mostly use my own mail-related domain name (mail.com), which I use for all pseudonymous accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#229

Post by Redori »

madspindel wrote: post #50

I've sold all my holdings in US companies to instead invest in STOXX Europe 600 alternatives. I know others here in Sweden that have said they have done the same. In Sweden, Russia has always been the enemy. My prediction is that France and Germany will soon join the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and it will be the end of NATO. UK will probably join the Maximator intelligence alliance. The death of Five Eyes and NA…

Enjoy underperforming the markets

Re: Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?

#230

Post by ineedasername »

I think tech firms for the most part are just saying what they need to in order to not get too much scrutiny from US leadership. In their eyes, medium or even long term damage to foreign market interests is secondary to a more existential risk faced at home.

As for the US dollar, floats against the euro and yen are still roughly in historic high territory, though not at peak, and recently edge up. If the US actually tries to default maybe there’d be significant flight to other currencies. Otherwise any large institution is probably going to wait out 4 years, possibly find the next bubble to pump up during likely deregulation of markets, and probably have it pop in time for the political right to blame it on progressives if/when the public pendulum swings the other way and they hold office again. The other way the dollar fails is if there is general wide spread world chaos in & out of financial markets, but in that case I’d expect little in the way of an alternative world reserve and more in the way of regional reserves, more insular and isolated.

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