Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you accept Irn-Bru as a Cola replacement then Germany already isn't a Cola country anymore. The vast majority of sodas consumed is rather of the Cola-Mix kind (there are two very common products named "Spezi" and a ton of smaller brands) and Apfelschorle. CocaCola dominates the Cola market only, the sum of all the other sodas is far greater.
Where are you getting those numbers from?
Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
511–520 of 640 posts
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
The occupation of Germany ended with the two plus four treaty coming into force in 1991. It is not occupied, and there is a formal treaty.
That is the unification treaty. If you accept that as a peace treaty then you need to at least accept that Germany, and as a consequence Europe, was vassal state until 1991. Thus the idea that Europe were equal partners with US is false.
> That is the unification treaty.
Yes, among other things. It is the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", and thing it finally settles is WW2 and the subsequent temporary arrangements.
> If you accept that as a peace treaty
The ~1955 treaties between the respective occupying powers and West and East Germany separately, which ended most of the powers of occupation but could not formally end the Potsdam arrangement because the Western allies weren't going to formalize the situation with East Germany and the USSR wasn't going to do the same for West Germany, effectively (but not completely formally) ended the occupation and were essentially peace treaties (but obviously neither addressed the whole of Germany or the whole of the belligerents against Germany in WW2.) Between 1955 and reunification, each of the Germanies was technically occupied as a consequence of the Cold War. But West Germany was generally treated as as much of an equal partner as other major Western nations with the US.
I only pointed to the 1991 treaty because it is simple and irrefutable and the most straightforward, uncomplicated way to rebut your originally clearly-wrong claim that Germany was currently occupied without any peace treaty.
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Government deficit. And where does that come from? Obviously, it should come from the people of the country or its natural resources. But we don't like to say that, do we?
> But we don't like to say that, do we? Because it not true. The only body emitting currency is a government
a currency is backed by value generated by the people and the natural resources of a country.
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#514Help me understand this: European companies have already been interested in choosing for European alternatives instead of AWS, Azure, etc. for years . Sure, this interest has recently gone up significantly, but it already was there, especially in the area I've been working in (hospitals / medical devices). But here's what I can't wrap my head around: Why do the European alternatives suck so much? - Pretty much all cl…
The alternatives part is not right. Lot of them are Swiss but i don't think that matters.
Cloudflare - BunnyCDN, KeyCDN and quite a few others with not so complete offer.
Google Workspace / MS Teams - Infomaniak, Mailbox.org, Proton.me
Search engine - Qwant, Ecosia, Startpage
Search engine is the one where best alternative is Kagi which is US. But rest of the categories has been viable for years. Many of the companies are older than Google. Yes, UX/polish might be not same but unlike the Googles/Microsoft of the world which have been going down these companies are getting a lot better.
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the unification treaty. If you accept that as a peace treaty then you need to at least accept that Germany, and as a consequence Europe, was vassal state until 1991. Thus the idea that Europe were equal partners with US is false.
> That is the unification treaty. Yes, among other things. It is the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", and thing it finally settles is WW2 and the subsequent temporary arrangements. > If you accept that as a peace treaty The ~1955 treaties between the respective occupying powers and West and East Germany separately, which ended most of the powers of occupation but could not formally end the Po…
How can you be an equal partner if you are occupied?
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is the unification treaty. Yes, among other things. It is the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", and thing it finally settles is WW2 and the subsequent temporary arrangements. > If you accept that as a peace treaty The ~1955 treaties between the respective occupying powers and West and East Germany separately, which ended most of the powers of occupation but could not formally end the Po…
How can you be an equal partner if you are occupied?
West Germany wasn't, practically, occupied post-1955. It was formally occupied because the Cold War meant the USSR had no interest in signing off on the Western settlement with West Germany, just as the Western powers didn't with East Germany, and given the Potsdam Arrangement actually formally ending the occupation required that.
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US isn't just a "partner", it does the vast majority of spending among NATO countries, even though NATO is an alliance that Europe benefits from way more: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/... I'm not in principle opposed to this sort of altruism in US foreign policy. I just don't want to have an altruistic foreign policy towards people that resent me. For people who resent me, I want fa…
This is not altruism. This strange american "look how we suffer for you"-thing is just utterly weird. Why do you think the US has global power projection capabilities? Why do you think they can control world trade? Why is the dollar still the reserve currency? The military "altruistic" peacekeeping is a major benefit, from better access to trade agreements to bases everywhere and military support from dozens of count…
>The military "altruistic" peacekeeping is a major benefit
Sure, but I think they are waking up to the fact that they cannot afford it, at least for now.
>much harder stand in future negotiations.
Well, from what Trump is saying, it seems that US didn't get the better end of a lot of deals, so it seems that it is spending resources for this peacekeeping but not getting any of the benefits in return..
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen this once before a few years ago with Huawei stuff. Shouting to the Board of Directors at any company about security risks and geopol implications usually meant screaming into a void. "But their HQ is here." "We have a solid security annex in the contract!" "Their sales person was here and he promised me." Classic lawyer C-suite talk. But when the attitude started shifting billions were thrown around to mov…
Herd behavior in CEOs is a very strong problem. It's one thing to make a mistake, but if you make a different unorthodox choice and something goes wrong then it looks especially bad.
If everyone’s email is down then the ceo might grumble at the golf course and have a nice dinner to apologise from the sales reps next month.
If only your company is down then you’re made and fire the cto
If only your company is up then nobody notices as “the internet is down”.
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#519It's one thing to visit the website, but I would be interested what % is actually migrating? For me personally, I had to install the "Go European" browser extension [1] before I actually started switching, due to more frequent reminders, from using mostly chatGPT/claude to LeChat by mistral (which feels at least as good). My Take-away: User stickiness is hard to break due to providers' walled gardens, even for me who…
For privacy reasons, I've already started slowly switching away from US providers before all this insanity happened. I've switched my Email to Proton (Swiss), cloud files to Filen (German), most LLM usage to Mistral (French), and search to Ecosia (German). [Edit: I've now switched to Mojeek; see comments below.] But in the past two weeks, I've done the things I've previously put off because they require real work. I'…
> Vaultwarden for passwords
Just a note for anyone looking for alternative password managers - 1Password is Canadian!
Re: Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Companies operate in these sorts of conditions all the time - always have done.
Buy off the junta that runs the place and you can do what you want. Oil companies, mining companies, clothing companies, all the same.
Normally the company is bigger than the people you’re bribing though, and that makes the USA unique, and more akin to working in North Korea rather than Nigeria.