341–350 of 729 posts
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In what sense is china bureaucratic when it comes to business?
Tax breaks, operations of state owned industry, other incentives etc are guided by five year plans implemented by a party bureaucracy.
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You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
> Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...] But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
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> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look. There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
In politics things work differently: you have people that "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers and the spitting never happened.
That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.
As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."
1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/250909...
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You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
> Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...] But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
I see this differently. For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it. The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.
If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content.
Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you:
"yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they do not cooperate."
In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
(and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up.
Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate.
The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
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Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way. So now what? How do w…
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography. This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it. Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is…
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
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Contradictory regulations is one of the symptoms of overregulation. I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws. US has less of those.
All US companies selling to European customers have to comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR. It’s all about who your users are. Not where your company is registered.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.
I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…
> And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations. There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
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> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their…
> like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now. The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius? But if the answer is true (as obl…