Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

How "energy independent" is Switzerland? Singapore? The UK?

You are too deep in "Big State" thinking. Forget about that.

> If there is a pandemic and all the supply chains breakdown.

Under a localist model, your people can still survive because they do not depend on global supply chain and can still have a functioning economy.

What I am asking you is to imagine a less radical version of an Amish community. Less focus on economic output and more focus on resiliency. Try to keep your economy as local as possible and do not over-generalize. Do not think of industries as something that has "strategic value" and instead let them develop as much as it is required to fulfill the needs of your citizens. This way, your community will have plenty of redundancy and no one will be at the mercy of any other external entity.

> The only way out of that is to improve efficiency.

Or by stopping/reducing consumption of things that we don´t really need and have been shoved on us by the corporations. Stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on getting rid of the disease. Let's get rid of fast food, fast fashion, let North America abandon the failed experiment that is called "Suburbia" and get rid of its car dependency. Let's stop expecting overnight shipping for whatever stupid gadget we want to buy, etc...

If the US reduces its consumption to the average of the developed world, instead of having growth-addicted Corporations and Goverments pushing to make the rest of the world consume like the average American, I can bet that we can improve our overall quality of life even on a smaller GDP per capita.

Also, even if you disagree with that: the argument is not against "improving efficiency". The argument is against optimizing for it while ignoring other costs and especially ignoring the fact that most of these optimizations have diminishing returns. E.g: airline travel is something that has been optimized beyond imagination, but it will never be as sustainable as an economic activity as traveling by train or boats. Between trying to "optimize" air travel even more, I'd rather we just decided to ban short haul flights altogether and reallocated our resources to the (re-)construction of decent rail roads and passenger boats.

That may be true for billing, but Hetzner killed all access to my dedicated server on a weekday afternoon and when I reached out to them within 30 min, the response was “it was done by the networking department, I can’t do anything about it, but they’ll look into it tomorrow..” .. :| wtf?! not okay Hetzner! (My “mistake” was a interface mis-configuration, nothing abusive or otherwise problematic)

I misspoke. I meant to say "do not over-specialize".

> in the previous comment you wanted want the US to be served by others

No, read again with the whole context: what I said was that the focus should be on keeping the industry local, on a smaller scale and more worried about robustness than profitability. Then I said that "even if after that they are still being out-competed, it doesn't mean that they all is lost".

The point was that plenty of countries can be successful even if they are not 100% self-sufficient about key resources. I am not advocating the end of trade. I am advocating for smaller/stronger communities and stronger/more explicit interfaces between them.

> You should be supporting human rights not murdering innocents.

Please stop with this absurd rhetoric. Not only is BS, it could easily be turned on you ("So, you buy things from China? This means that you support the genocide of Uyghurs!")

> The current globalized world cannot just cannot function with your fantasy 150 people limit.

First, this "current globalized world" is precisely the thing that is so full of systemic issues that we should be working to avoid. In a less-globalized and not hyperconnected world, Covid would not even be a thing, so the whole "people died of Covid because they didn't have masks" is complete rhetorical bullshit .

Second, there is no limit on people. The only limit is about the size of a single corporation. I don't know what is so hard about it to understand. You keep mischaracterizing the argument to the point that it is making clear you are not interested in a good-faith conversation, which should be a signal that I am done here.

The only thing I misspoke was that I said "over-generalize" when I meant "over-specialize". Everything else (I think) was okay.

> You want things to be less efficient and more expensive.

There is a difference between wanting things to be more expensive and accepting that this may happen as part of the trade-off being made. Specially so if the idea is that this type of policy could potentially eliminate the concentration of power on the hands of a few conglomerates and create an incentive for automation and to eliminate "bullshit jobs".

> I would love to buy things made locally but that is just not possible with your 150 people limit

Why? Go to any farmers market, is there any step on the production chain that requires 150 people? Do you think (e.g) a municipal ISP to serve 10-20k people can't be operated with less than 150 people? Can't we buy fabric and materials (from small scale producers) and have a small textile manufacturing co-op making clothes?

Also, consider that we are used to having products being completely assembled, but there is nothing stopping companies in a "human scale" economy to work as provider of components that get to be assembled by the final consumer. These components could be made by separate companies. So, instead of having "Google Assistant vs Amazon Echo vs Apple Siri", we would pick-and-choose different speakers, different software providers, different enclosures, etc. The hard work here would be one of coordination - i.e, all these companies and providers would benefit if they worked on a "AI speaker device" common standard - but once that is set in place it reduce the average company headcount. The same logic could be potentially applied to any big consumer industry: clothing, furniture, home appliances...

Finally, let's talk about the software industry. Take any big product from the big companies and you can bet that you can find a small ISV (with certainly less than 150 people) who can deliver and profitably operate an equivalent service. Even though Gmail and Outlook dominate the mass market, smaller email providers still exist and they haven't "ran out of money" and got bought out by the more successful ones. We don't need the big players to serve the population, we could have more of these ISVs acting independently (*). These ISVs would likely invest in opensource as a way to outsource as much as they can to keep their overhead low, which would lead to a even more pulverized industry.

> your ideas sound great on paper but the globalized genie is out now

Again, why? There is no magical force stopping us from preferring local products. There is nothing forcing us to consume indiscriminately. I get that "the system" is too big for any of us and that our individual actions will barely have any impact. But feeling apathetic is not a justification to just accept things as they are. You can not say "I would love to buy things locally" and blame "Capitalism" when you end up buying things at a big-box store.

(*) "Oh, but Gmail/Facebook/etc are free to the user, people won't be willing to pay for it!" Well, the argument could be that these people would either have to find a smaller provider willing to do the service for them (their employer, some non-commercial community, the tech savvy family member who wants to self-host?), or they would indeed have to learn about TANSTAAFL.