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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?

#561

Post by bsaul »

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.

when all of the sudden europe is flood by ukrainian women leaving their husbands in the country to fight a country under bombs, you don’t really need media to provide you with a particular point of view. Reality and personal testimonies are far more than enough.

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

#562

Post by rimeice »

tim333 wrote: post #547
tored wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Europe is a de facto vassal state to US since WW2. What Europe didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand was the US agenda differs from Europe agenda , always has. But now they start to wake up facing this reality.

>A "vassal state" is a state that has a mutual obligation to a superior state or empire, similar to a vassal in the feudal system, often involving tribute payments Europe is not like that - we don't pay taxes to the US to defend us. The US kindly did so free of charge for many years which is a different thing, more of an alliance I guess. Now the US is kind of switching allegiances we are having to recalculate.

The “tax” is enabling total American dominance economically and politically, not to mention huge leverage over all of Europe's military with vendor lock in.

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

#563

Post by rimeice »

dachworker wrote: post #267
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…

There is a weird attitude among European elites where on the one hand, they point out how European countries have always been in a subservient position within the American sphere of influence, but then, instead of cheering that this era is ending, they seem to be all upset about it and want their collar to be put back on. Help me understand this. To me it seems that maybe the interests of EU elites differ from the in…

Deep down the elites know this is the best thing that could possibly happen for Europe long term. Shed the dependency on the US, build your own defence economy and the myriad of parallel non military economic benefits that come from defence investment. Yes a painful transition in the short term so you have to whine about it a bit to try and limit the damage, but this US adminstration is the single best thing that has happened to Europe and the UK. This is where Europe gets reborn. In 20-30 years Europe will be a proper superpower again.

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

#564

Post by exiguus »

Avoiding Big Tech:

Many people who have been avoiding big tech companies now have stronger arguments for doing so. It has become easier to avoid services like Instagram, Google, Gmail, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Amazon, and X. Convincing friends and family to use alternative communication platforms such as Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, Posteo, or Proton is more feasible. However, moving away from Amazon remains challenging for some. Nonetheless, every small step towards this goal is valuable.

Professional Perspective:

From a professional standpoint, some of my clients are transitioning away from AWS and/or Vercel due to political risks and ethical concerns. Others are moving from AWS to Vercel for financial reasons. Personally, I emphasize ethical considerations and political risks beyond just vendor lock-in. When project requirements and team structure allow, we prefer to build on self-managed Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.

German "Mittelstand":

Generally, the German "Mittelstand" (mid-sized companies) tend to avoid vendor lock-in. They often implement solutions that combine private and public cloud services, enabling them to switch cloud providers quickly.

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

#565

Post by ETH_start »

someNameIG wrote: post #548
ETH_start wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US economy is now 50% larger than the EU's, as a result of this market freedom and enterprise growth.

Only by nominal, by PPP the difference doesn't seem that different. US is $30 trillion by PPP, the EU is $29 trillion.

PPP statistics don't account for the lower value of ersatz products/services. They artificially equate the value of product/service suites across countries, instead of relying on market price signals to gauge value.

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

#566

Post by Aloisius »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #446
iammjm wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>responsible for protecting a bunch of far-away places that don't share their values You mean Europe? There's literally not a place in the world (except for Canada and Australia) that shares as many common values with the US as Europe. Unless the very definition of these values suddenly changed for the US with Agent Orange. As far as "far-away places go", it might take a similar amount of time to get from east to wes…

>There's literally not a place in the world (except for Canada and Australia) that shares as many common values with the US as Europe. I just don't think that's true. Europeans seem much more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist. That's why Europeans express disdain for US policies around healthcare, guns, etc. Europeans express a tremendous amount of disdain for the US online, calling Americans fat, du…

> Europeans seem much more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist. That's why Europeans express disdain for US policies around healthcare, guns, etc.

The US is plenty collectivist. Patriots who put country first and would die for it? That's collectivism. Someone who puts their family ahead of themselves? Also collectivism.

One should disdain the US healthcare system not because it isn't "collectivist" (there's nothing particularly individualistic about insurance), but because it's horrifically inefficient. The US government spends more money on healthcare per capita than anywhere in Europe (or Canada or any developed country), yet only manages to cover half the population leaving the other half to spend even more money for private insurance.

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

#567

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

tored wrote: post #544
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this gets to the point others have made in this thread. Your reasoning implies that you should be happy if the US pulls out of NATO and leaves Europe, since Europe would no longer be "occupied" and would thus be an "equal partner". Europeans are just impossible to satisfy, from my perspective. They will complain no matter what the US does.

[flagged]

Of course Europeans can hold different opinions, and this is part of what makes them impossible to satisfy. But I notice that their method of registering their opinion is always to complain about the US. Instead of saying "Good riddance", you could say "I'm glad we have a shared vision for Europe", since you and I are in alignment.

Furthermore, my strong suspicion is that there is actually a great deal of overlap between the Europeans who used to say "America is exploiting Europe through its presence there", and the Europeans who now say "America is exploiting Europe by pulling out". There seems to be a surprising amount of continuity behind Europe's anti-American thinking, even when it points in diametrically opposite directions. The "de Gaulle was right" Europeans never actually argue with the Europeans who say "the US needs to stay", even though they would appear to be taking opposite sides of the issue. Somehow, anti-Americanism is a far more powerful force than the major underlying policy difference between these two camps.

Anyway, I appreciate your comment. I'll try and link to it elsewhere to explain why we're leaving. Hopefully it will help clarify for some people.

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

#568

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

ojl wrote: post #556
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US paid by far the most for defense and so had by far the most influence and power in the world That's the thing, Americans have become very skeptical of our own influence and power, for good reason. Look what we did to the Middle East. Look at the shenanigans we were funding with USAID. There isn't actually a constituency for this imperialism stuff in the US. US voters don't like it. In any case -- if we had so…

> unsuccessful in influencing the EU to fund its own defense We did cut down too much on our defence, especially after the Cold war (not all European countries though, like Finland). But, many European countries have bought plenty of expensive US military equipment like fighter aircraft, helicopters, anti aircraft systems, etc. It’s not like those were a gift.

Yes, I agree the US should service those contracts. But Europeans shouldn't feel obligated to buy from the US over any other vendor.

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

#569

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

xorcist wrote: post #558
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But remember: Power is rarely taken but mostly given. I don't care about the US being a powerful country. I'm tired of being the world's police. I'm against so-called "American imperialism". I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone. Switzerland has a much healthier relationship with the rest of Europe, without toxic dependency. That's my metric regarding whether an approach is "productive" or…

The comparison with Switzerland is stretching things a bit thin. Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in…

>Switzerland never threatened Germany to become the 27th canton. They didn't threaten military allies with military intervention. They also do not keep permanent military bases in other countries, in practice autonomous zones where there are intermittent scandals where Swiss law protects rapists. No other counties dutifully joined any Swiss invasions in the Middle East.

>Europe did not have to shoulder orders of magnitude (look it up) more refugees from these wars than the instigator of the wars. The Swiss do not regularly use their economic power to force other countries to share passenger data for all transit, they do not force far reaching intellectual property legislation of all sorts on other countries.

Exactly. We are in violent agreement. You're doing an excellent job of explaining why the US should be more Swiss, as I've been saying.

>there is zero chance another coutry could occupy this particular nation state evolution niche.

Of course we won't do exactly what the Swiss have done, e.g. we will continue to have a major software industry. My point is we should have a more Swiss approach to foreign policy.

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

#570

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

surgical_fire wrote: post #543
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But remember: Power is rarely taken but mostly given. I don't care about the US being a powerful country. I'm tired of being the world's police. I'm against so-called "American imperialism". I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone. Switzerland has a much healthier relationship with the rest of Europe, without toxic dependency. That's my metric regarding whether an approach is "productive" or…

> I want to be Switzerland. Ally with no one, trade with everyone. Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start. But you will get a lot more of the "anti-americanism" you were crying about some comments ago. Better get used to it, it has merely started.

>Imposing tariffs and threatening annexation of former allies is not a great start.

I'm against annexation of Greenland as I stated elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43460070

The US, as a sovereign country, has just as much right to levy taxes on imports as any other country.

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