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Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

politico.eu

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Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a bit of a brain drain, but it's also compensated by great engineers from poorer countries (Italy, Romania, Poland etc) migrating in If remote works, it won't really be a brain drain anymore, because they'll be paying taxes and spending their money in France :)

Is there any reason why the engineers from poorer countries will emigrate to France instead of the better-paying countries?

Romanian programmer here (I still live in Romania), I would choose another European country over a well-better paid job in the US in almost all cases, the reason being that that way I'd be closer to home, we actually have decent healthcare in Europe and the social contract as a whole is more robust compared to the US (it mentally helps going out on the street and not seeing the multitude of homeless people that I've read one can find on the streets of San Francisco), public transport is decent to exceptional and for me personally there's also the gun-control issue (or lack of it, more exactly), I really don't see myself living long-term in a country as gun-loving as the US is.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Fran also has over 8k homeless in a population of 800k. The overall homeless rate in France is about 5x lower per capita. My opinion on paying taxes changed drastically after I visited the USA 2 years ago (San Fran, LA, Vegas). I was absolutely shocked by the amount of poverty I saw and I had never realised that America had such a drastically different culture to Australia.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... For the 2019-2020 fiscal year, San Francisco will spend $364 million on the homeless. I think there are other major issues besides lack of money from lack of taxes. For one thing, when comparing per capita, you shouldn't just look at the population of San Francisco. A lot of those 8k homeless people came from other parts of the state or even other parts…

That still leaves a 3.5 times higher homeless rate per capita than in France. One third is a lot but it's not the driving force behind homelessness.

>As of 2014, the city was believed to have approximately 7,000 homeless residents.[55][56] As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.

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

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any place where I can read a bit about their history?

This article is in french, but NextImpact did a pretty solid job at showing the _latest_ bullshit: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lan... https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linag... turnover and employee discontent: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-s... Deepl ( https://www.deepl.com/en/translator ) will do a great job at translating those articles…

No problem, I can read french :)

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#154
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're i…

well, the thing is, if you literally only need one server, AWS is ridiculously expensive. the value proposition is just not there. you have to design for the cloud from the start to come out on top.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#155
post #97
post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a very narrow set of products (servers, storage box, web space) which can presumably be serviced by a small staff without a high engineering bar. If they went ahead and started building out complex and highly engineered services like S3 or even more complex ones I'd see that immediately eating into their profit margin. Plus: Hetzner is a privately held company.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#156
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what are those ways?

Off the top of my head... in France, you pay tax as a household rather than an individual. So if you are married with children you get a tax cut for each child up to 3. Private pension contributions are also tax deductible and don't actually have to be used for retirement (you can use it to fund a first house for example) Other things that you can take off your tax bill include alimony payments, charitable donations…

And to add, Randomly out of my mind :

- Owning a flat and rent it to a thrid party. Many fees on it are deductible.

- Investing in medium/small-sized companies.

- Making property/housing more energy efficient.

- Invest in accommodations for disabled/elderly/etc.

- Fees for the studies of your kids.

- Support/Invest in art / creative related enterprise.

- And many other that need to be checked.

That is not exceptional. Many European countries have similar taxes credit schemes.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general i…

>How do they think Google became what it is, With CIA funding, amongst others. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

It was acquired quite early on by Google, but the original Google Earth/Maps project which had been developed by Keyhole had received money from In-Q-Tel, described on the wikipedia page as:

> It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.

I've said it before, it still puzzles me how come the Russians let the Google StreetView car do its thing on the streets of Moscow and other big Russian cities, the Chinese were smarter than that.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#158
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective) France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965. USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions France Income Tax: 50%. So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more e…

> France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness That's a common bashing legend that France/Germany are taxe hell and it is mainly bullshit. I am currently live in France with salary over 100k and my effective taxe rate is under 20%. Both France and Germany (and almost every European country)…

Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20% tax rate?

Because these are definitively taxes that should be included.

If yes, I am really curious to know how this is possible

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#159
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP, for all its many faults, actually has some quite successful products. Australia's banks have been focused on replacing their legacy IBM mainframe core banking systems (stuff like CSC Hogan) with something more modern and non-mainframe. CBA went with SAP, and their project was very successful. (At least it appears that way from the media, and CBA employees who I've talked to tell me that it isn't just some good P…

Counter example: Lidl tried SAP and scrapped the project after they already invested 1 billion Euro.

On the other hand, Aldi Nord now successfully runs SAP HANA/Retail. The at the same time attempted (and internally highly fought against) move from decentral to central organization is probably what killed Lidl's SAP project.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#160
post #9

>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers. Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard? Bit confused about where they're going with this

My bet would be focusing on things like a common interface for Object Storage (everyone is making their products S3 and DynamoDB protocol compatible already) plus a common interface for cloud API operations (creating / managing infrastructure). Those would go a long way. Then you can think about how compatible more niche services like the various message queues etc can be made.
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