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Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

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Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#231

Post by JdeBP »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
apexalpha wrote: post #45

At my (enterprise) job there has been a noticable shift in attitude. We've just decided to use Mistral for OCR, even though everything we currently use is embedded in Azure / IntelDocs or something. Usually any push for EU products would be dismissed because of the initial friction compared to SV products. This seems to have shifted significantly all the way to the top. Everyone seems on board to just accept more fri…

Interesting to see this in B2B, which is normally unemotional about choice of supplier. But the business risk is now real, especially when you consider GDPR safe harbour.

It seems to me that this is still unemotional (where really I'd rather say mercenary, as I've seen so many business decisions driven by ego, which is definitely emotion).

Businesspeople have seen the U.S.A. do things like the Citibank account freezes, which is explicitly welching on paying money owed on a contract to companies in its own country, turning off and on supplies to a country at the personal whim of its leader, putting air traffic safety at risk as a means of privatization (using the OCP playbook straight out of RoboCop), and arresting foreigners at its borders.

If they've been paying close attention they've seen civil suit court orders ignored, lawyers having executive writs of attainder proclaimed against them, and rulings handed down about blanket and extensive executive privilege and immunity that take things back to the centuries past when banks could go out of business by lending to monarchs who then just decreed that they weren't going to pay.

Even the dumbest CEO would by now be thinking of the business risks of things like flying in personnel to a business conference or to visit a satellite office; let alone of supply chain reliability, whether U.S.A. courts are still capable of enforcing any civil decisions or U.S.A. lawyers capable of doing their jobs on behalf of foreign businesses, and what this means for loan risks and banking stability.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#232

Post by moffkalast »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #157
moffkalast wrote: post #27

> Mistral AI > Hosted in: Sweden Well that's interesting, I'd have thought they would work with Scaleway for "the cat", is there some Swedish company offering cheap GPU instances?

The privacy policy[1] says it's Azure in Sweden. [1]: https://mistral.ai/terms#privacy-policy

Ah right of course, MS is an investor.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#233

Post by radicalbyte »

concerndc1tizen wrote: post #145
7bit wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe most users here are not in favor of Trump, and these snarky and confrontative remarks are generally a bad tone.

There are plenty of pro-Trump users on HN.

There's a whole pipeline designed to capture young men (Tate for the dummies, Moscow-Lex for those who aren't) who are also a key demographic here.

I understand it too having seen the fallout and overstep of the "social justice left" with the reading comprehension of sewer rats - almost all American - who themselves attack white men for the crime of being white men (I've been on the receiving end a few times and I was supporting them; if my profile was a black woman or a trans-woman then I would not have been attacked).

Actually the average reading comprehension problem is really a thing, and Americans seem - anecdotally at least - to have the worst level in the English-speaking world. That or they outnumber the Brits by 100-1. This isn't just hyperbole - the numbers on reading comprehension have been dropping for years. We had to pay extra special attention to our kids to get them up to scratch.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#234

Post by Propelloni »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #136
pjc50 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've always had a media problem, especially from the Murdoch media and Berlusconi's TV station, but the support for Ukraine is about as organic as it gets when dealing with international events.

On the contrary, everything we have seen and are seeing is neither organic nor caused by "right-wing" media ("left-wing" are no less problematic). It is organised and deeply so. The power ond effectiveness of the shaping of public opinion shows when people think they have not been influenced.

I'm consuming a lot of "quality journalism" in three languages from many countries, including the USA, much of it on paper. They have in common that they report things that move the world. But there is no shared narrative, no planned coordination and no organisation. Many of them are on different sides of the aisle, and yet they all talk about the same stuff, albeit from different perspectives.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#235

Post by flowerlad »

gherkinnn wrote: post #207
flowerlad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your boy trump did do deliver, is the US now GREAT enough for you yet? Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd. Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...

> not by HN crowd Maybe not the HN crowd (though that is debatable, there is no homogenous group here) but a seizable amount of the SV rulers have endorsed him.

SV billionaires did vote for him yes, but not HN crowd.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#236

Post by epolanski »

dmos62 wrote: post #154
iammjm wrote: post #118

Europeans were perfectly happy to buy American tech und military exports, thus earning U.S. money and making EU technologically and politically dependent from the U.S. - it really was perfect for the U.S. But the US decided that it was actually a BAD DEAL and they wanted to extort even more money and dependence from EU. So now EU is investing in their own tech and military, thus reducing the amount of money US is get…

I liked a comment by Sarah C. Paine, about how Communism is a really great system for taking power from within a state (think Mao), and then staying in power, but it's horrible for generating prosperity. When evaluating the choices of certain people, it's clarifying to not think in terms of prosperity, but, rather, power. I think there's a case to be made about Trump seeing advantage in making enemies of his politica…

The same Sarah Paine that speaks about how China lifted 1B+ people out of poverty and created tens of millions of millionaires?

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#237

Post by thrance »

flowerlad wrote: post #126
iammjm wrote: post #118

Europeans were perfectly happy to buy American tech und military exports, thus earning U.S. money and making EU technologically and politically dependent from the U.S. - it really was perfect for the U.S. But the US decided that it was actually a BAD DEAL and they wanted to extort even more money and dependence from EU. So now EU is investing in their own tech and military, thus reducing the amount of money US is get…

> Your boy trump did do deliver, is the US now GREAT enough for you yet? Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd. Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...

Farmers are not stupid. Read up on petty bourgeoisie and why they tend to support reactionary movements. Hitler too famously found a lot of support in farmers and small businesses. There are very good material reasons to this.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#238

Post by irjustin »

pjc50 wrote: post #114
irjustin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mmmm these two things are very deeply linked in that politics creates trust and bad policy very easily removes global trust just like personal relationships (literally what we're seeing in the US). i live in asia - indonesian vs vietnam foreign policy (despite problems in domestic policy) has shown how vast the difference in policy can generate foreign trust which lead to manufacturing which lead to a lot more money…

I'd be very interested in hearing about that difference - Indonesia is a country of 281 million people (!) that's almost invisible on the world stage, while Vietnam is a manufacturing success despite being nominally Communist still.

I'm far from an expert, but you can look at Sembcorp which was a joint effort by Singapore back in '96 with Vietnam to boost foreign manufacturing[0].

What's not really shown in the Wiki is that the VN government really protected and ensured smooth efforts for these projects. You can tell it worked because of how many follow on projects they did.

The counter is Sembcorp's Indo project[1] which is in the same wiki. At a conference I was lucky enough to listen to a Bain consultant who directly advised on these policies with the VN and ID government in the early 2000's, so a bit after they got going. The Indo government setup quite similar projects with Sembcorp as VN. The problems start because the project was setup with the "federal" government (country level), but local state government wanted their piece too and started "taxing" the raw materials coming in through their ports. Obviously this new tax wasn't part of the original program. Things like this, bribes, permits (more bribes), material blocking at ports (even more bribes), etc kept creating small but material roadblocks. Complaints to the central government were heard but not enough was done. Overtime, the foreign manufacturers got fed up dealing with local politics.

Bintan today is a shell of what it was expected to be in terms of its manufacturing powerhouse. It's mostly a resort town now for Singaporeans who want a weekend away.

VN has quite a bit of domestic problems in policy and corruption (they're rightfully working on it overall), but despite all that, it shows that you really can create foreign trust via policy that benefits the country greatly. Politics and trust very much go hand in hand.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sembcorp#Vietnam

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sembcorp#Indonesia

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#239

Post by pbhjpbhj »

highwaylights wrote: post #88
apexalpha wrote: post #45

At my (enterprise) job there has been a noticable shift in attitude. We've just decided to use Mistral for OCR, even though everything we currently use is embedded in Azure / IntelDocs or something. Usually any push for EU products would be dismissed because of the initial friction compared to SV products. This seems to have shifted significantly all the way to the top. Everyone seems on board to just accept more fri…

IMHO this is the big story here. Large companies aren’t driven by opinion/ethics/politics except where there’s a branding incentive, so the motivation here is cost/risk. That these same companies are actively trying to nope right out of the US tech market where they can shows that they’ve priced in very real costs to both Trump’s unpredictability and the very predictable response to tariffs in their domestic markets.…

>Large companies aren’t driven by opinion/ethics/politics except where there’s a branding incentive

The USA tech corps are falling in with Trump, presumably so as to get favourable tax situations and such. That makes them subject to his vagaries.

Surely, Trump might rug pull your IT services if you're competing with someone who gave him a bribe is a massive reason to move.

Companies need to operate under the rule of law which is now vacant in USA.

With threats, no matter how stupid, to invade allies. What are European companies going to do when Trump has their compute switched off? Or trade embargoes are put in place because Trump tried to takeover Greenland?

These seem to be real risks to business continuation that arise out of Trump's politics.

Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?

#240

Post by radicalbyte »

concerndc1tizen wrote: post #138
flowerlad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your boy trump did do deliver, is the US now GREAT enough for you yet? Not our boy. Trump was elected by uneducated farmers, not by HN crowd. Almost 78% of farmers endorsed his most recent presidential run. https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...

Europeans had to fight for our rights and freedom. In this sense, it is your civic duty to ensure order in your own country. The critique is that too many Americans have become complacent and allowed the political system and media landscape to evolve as it has. The Democrats are also corrupt and need to be replaced, but it requires a sacrifice of wealth that people aren't willing to give, for selfish reasons. But you…

They have also been the main target of Soviet/Russian/CCP information operations designed to cause the current mess and live in a democratic system where the (ultra)wealthy have had far too much power.
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