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Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

theregister.com

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Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#151

Post by pembrook »

Just some food for thought. The percentage of GDP generated by centrally managed government spending vs. free market participants [1]:

- US: 35%

- China: 33%

- EU avg: 50%

The disparity is again similar for interstate integration (in the US) and inter-province integration (in China) vs. inter-country integration (in the EU) being the outlier.

Europe needs deeper inter-country integration and more decentralization of capital to private market participants (less taxation).

Europe can play Soviet-protectionism and build the digital-equivalent of the Lada all it wants, but the above issues are the root cause of why Europe is lagging behind the other two in terms of growth and innovation.

You can't build a tech industry without venture capital and a big cohesive market to sell into, and you can't build a venture capital industry without deep pools of decentralized, risk-tolerant private capital.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#152

Post by immibis »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #89

It always surprises me that people only act when a problem becomes undeniable, rather than preventing it in the first place. In a country with a voting system and power structure like US, where a single person can abruptly shift the entire nation's direction, this has always been a security flaw for others. It's the same as relying on Russian gas, people pretend the worst can't happen because it would be harmful to e…

I always think of how people treated Musk after he did the Nazi salute, versus before.

Before, there were all these people saying "Elon Musk is a Nazi" and the response was always "you're overreacting" or "show me where he killed 6 million Jews"

Then he did a Nazi salute. And now, in the minds of the average public (excluding his devoted fans), he's undeniably a Nazi. Just with that one simple gesture.

It seems like you can get away with a lot of bad things as long as you don't telegraph them.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#153

Post by bloomingkales »

stego-tech wrote: post #12

Called it, again . Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service. Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that…

Obama just made a random decision to make a China pivot. We had a large force in the Middle East and instead of just bringing them home, we created this weird apparatus to shift the strategy over to China. This is similar to if your company decided to introduce Agile. That extension of your company will never go away, and will have ideas.

The idea that “someone is stealing our technology” is just an idea, similar to “developers don’t give good estimates or timelines”. An idea that will feel like the right idea to all, and will be copied. Copy cat culture exists in war too (why are you fighting them? Because they are fighting me).

This is a contrived problem, and demagogues like Trump seized on it. Was it all Obama’s fault? Not quite. Bush had already created a war apparatus in the 2000s, and there was no turning it off, just turning it around and pointing it somewhere else.

——

We are the storytellers of this history, we lived it. We are the primary sources, don’t doubt your ability to document this history. AI was never imagined in the halls of Research to create a never ending forever digital war.

I’ll paraphrase Jensen Huang regarding China:

You can’t keep a country behind

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#154

Post by crote »

egorfine wrote: post #109
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it’s possible in Germany. What problems do you have in Poland?

> Oh, it’s possible in Germany Of course. How do I fire an employee? That's right, I don't. Otherwise sure it's possible.

Oh, you can. You just need to provide a valid reason, that's all.

Firing someone because they are stealing from the company, harassing a coworker, consistently underperforming, or because you're shutting down a business unit? Easy!

Firing someone because it's a Tuesday, or because they got pregnant? Sorry, can't do that.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#155

Post by myrmidon »

maciejw wrote: post #83

Europe's problem in this area seems to be inability to build a mechanism to realize large, unprofitable projects. It looks like the whole continent operates on thin margins, and has no resources set aside to pursue strategic initiatives. US is building its pile of resources by capitalising on its current advantage, but also by pushing larger and larger parts of society into poverty. Europe is maybe more fair, but ult…

> Europe's problem in this area seems to be inability to build a mechanism to realize large, unprofitable projects.

I don't disagree with this take completely, especially in regards to IT infrastructure, but I don't think that this explanation captures the main problem.

There are clear counterexamples for large European no-profit infrastructure (CERN, ITER) or even currently ongoing projects (e.g. railway infrastructure like the Brenner base or Fehmarn tunnel).

My take is that there simply was no strong enough incentive to spend a lot of money/effort to duplicate American offerings just to stay independent, but the current US admin is providing sufficient incentives to start spending on this, and while independence is nice in general, I think this is overall just a huge waste.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#157

Post by olalonde »

copx wrote: post #149
stego-tech wrote: post #12

Called it, again . Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service. Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that…

>the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China You typed this on hardware made by a hostile state actor: China. As long as the hardware side of digital civilization is completely dependent on the Chinese communist regime, I certainly don't worry about American tech companies dominating the software side. There are alternatives on the software side if you want them,…

> hostile state actor

Source?

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#158

Post by madsbuch »

pembrook wrote: post #151

Just some food for thought. The percentage of GDP generated by centrally managed government spending vs. free market participants [1]: - US: 35% - China: 33% - EU avg: 50% The disparity is again similar for interstate integration (in the US) and inter-province integration (in China) vs. inter-country integration (in the EU) being the outlier. Europe needs deeper inter-country integration and more decentralization of…

Numbers do lie - it would be nice to have a breakdown of this.

Maybe the difference, 16% points, is what affords the European a fair treatment upon illness where half of that is "shareholder value" in the US.

Feel free to link the study you used so we don't just have to trust some internet rando.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#159

Post by [deleted] »

baq wrote: post #136
belter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS. LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

[deleted]

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#160

Post by hylaride »

bayindirh wrote: post #143
baq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

Genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?

I don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world. Excel still "supports" buggy issues from versions in the 1990s as to not break financial models.

IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.

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