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European Alternatives

european-alternatives.eu

351–360 of 526 posts

Re: European Alternatives

#351
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

techposts.eu i reckon

Seems to be US-hosted.

What makes you say that? It was explicitly created as an EU alternative to HN by a person from the Netherlands. They posted about it on HN a few days ago.

I haven't found anything public about where its hosted

Re: European Alternatives

#352

Doing my bit: migrating my small company's db this weekend from AWS RDS to Hetzner VPS + volumes. Fingers crossed! Already done: replaced SendGrid with Sweego. Later: move domains from US registrar to EU based. The difficult bit is the Microsoft Office because we are also using Azure DevOps for code, tickets, wiki and ci/cd.

What EU based registrars would you recommend?

I’ve been using Gandi for quite a few years now without any trouble.

Re: European Alternatives

#353

This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.

You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m. Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high…

"trains exist"

Like Spain's commuter trains?

Re: European Alternatives

#354
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> About European Product Hunt - very good idea. Older members of HN will remember that Product Hunt probably came to life a lot because of HN and the submissions/comments from rrhoover (founder of Product Hunt). He's still active here, but before/during Product Hunt launch he was very active if I remember correctly. Maybe a grander idea is a European Hacker News, that has the potential to spawn the European Product H…

There is one, it starts about 11pm my time at https://news.ycombinator.com :)

=)

Re: European Alternatives

#355
In this thread I've seen

- https://altstack.jp for Japan

- https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives for Canada

- and ofc https://european-alternatives.eu/ for the EU

But I just wanted to point out that https://alternativeto.net/ recently (well, over a year ago) added a flag next to each suggestion so you can easily tell where its from. It's all crowd-sourced and I've both contributed to and greatly benefited from the project myself (especially for finding FLOSS alternatives to popular software). Here's an example

https://alternativeto.net/software/github/

I think the fact that it's crowd-sourced gives it a lot more staying power than a lot of these one-off projects that are presumably maintained by a single person or team.

Re: European Alternatives

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.

When European customers pay American firms, it's "protection money". When American customers pay European firms, it's just capitalism, sorry bro.

You’re twisting words at this point. Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly and neither of them are afraid to use their power to cut off money flows towards entities they disapprove of. It’s an intrinsic risk and a big issue for sovereignty. The situation is very different for pharmaceuticals, a lot of which are American. The short story is, the American healthcare system is broken and very expensive for the results it provides. The solution is to reform your health system. Moaning won’t solve anything because even if you replaced all those evil European companies with American alternatives, it won’t bring prices down because the system still encourages price gouging.

You’d have a point if you had examples of European pharma companies cutting off supply to American entities for political reasons. You don’t, so you don’t have a point.

Re: European Alternatives

#357
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the low taxes and lower cost of living in Zurich (yes, lower than Seattle), and the much higher quality of life, Zurich is a no-brainer.

I'd say if you get a job in the same company, Zurich is competitive. The problem is that if you lose your job at Google in Seattle there are several hundreds of FAANG positions and probably thousands of other 200k$+ SWE jobs you can reapply to. In Zurich you will maybe see a dozen of openings in the small subsidiaries of Apple, Microsoft & Co., and maybe some individual job offers from small AI companies, and applyin…

Ex-Googlers in Zurich have no trouble finding other jobs. For people with the right CV, there are a lot more openings than that.

Re: European Alternatives

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.

This website appears to indicate that Visa/Mastercard fees are about 6x as high in the US vs EU: https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-co... The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made…

> The EU had such a good deal with the US.

There are regulations. Both Visa and Mastercard were happy with those and made quite a lot of money from their business in the EU. They absorbed and merged with local alternatives and competitors. It’s a bit rich to complain after the game has been going on for a while that the rules are as they are: they’ve always been that way and if they were not happy, they could just have ignored the European markets. Now, if your point is that you’re being shafted, then congratulations: realising is the first step towards solving. Now, vote for a government that will actually regulate the sector in the people’s favour, not the big corps. We cannot help you for that.

Re: European Alternatives

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you're mad that your country is too stupid to regulate it's own business? The regulation also forced all merchants to accept Visa/MC without being able to surcharge a fee for it. Both Companies are quite happy with that deal as it boasted the adoption for their cards across Europe

See this illustrates my point. The "soft power" talking point I sometimes see from Europeans is a complete lie. The idea is that giving Europe relatively favorable terms will cause Europe to regard the US well is a fabrication. In reality, giving Europe favorable terms just causes Europeans to view Americans as suckers.

You are deluded. Nobody "gave Europe a sweet deal". Those are the rules of the land. Companies are free to reject them, in which case they just cannot do business here. We did not force them to come. The fact that they are still obviously making tons of money in the EU should tell you how you are being taken advantage of.

Re: European Alternatives

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too. Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...

AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.

That actually changed recently, but The Economist (UK newspaper) whines that Americans will no longer be footing the bill for drug development:

https://archive.is/bWwP4

We're done with Europeans treating us as suckers. Doing nice things for Europe leads to nothing but contempt from Europeans.

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