reddit.com gets a perfect "no US dependencies" score. I guess they have servers around the world and can serve requests from a local-ish server.
Obviously this simple check only concerns the technical aspects of the website and doesn't analyse the business itself but I wonder if all .com domains should be marked down?
I am still with Spotify, but for local playback I like ncmpcpp with MPD. My wishlist is for a native client that, in addition to local playback, integrates well with various streaming services like Spotify, online radio, Jellyfin, etc. But it's a hard problem. When I last checked it seemed Clementine used to be a good candidate for this but the Spotify plugin, at least, was no longer working at the time.
- Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too.
- Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android).
- Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time.
- Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts.
- You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
This might be possible for software, if we assume that being open source can protect software from state or corporate control (doubtful to be honest). For other things I don't really see how it would work. Your hardware has to be manufactured somewhere, your infrastructure has to be located somewhere.
It is not "nationalistic" to prefer things that are made in Europe. Europe is not a nation and very few people feel anything close to national pride about it. I like that we have European alternatives instead of German, French, Swedish, etc, alternatives.
What else would you expect? If the person writing the advice knew how to reliably beat the market they would be doing that, not writing financial advice.
I doubt it would be replaced by a single global reserve currency. More likely there would be a handful of currencies that perform a similar role (USD, EUR, CNY, maybe some others) and which you primarily use depends on whose sphere of influence you are in.
At what price though? There are many people who say they would buy a phone like Fairphone, but not at that price, or not unless it had a 3.5mm headphone jack or a better camera, etc etc. Talk is cheap but sustainable phones are not.
> Food security is the last concern for Europe. How do you get that idea?
Food security is the first concern for every society, because without food we will all die. The reason almost the whole EU budget (hyperbole, but indeed it is a lot of the EU budget) is spent on agricultural subsidies is precisely to protect our food security.
Truism aside, Europe hasn't a lack of fertile grounds nor good climate.
Europe has a pressing need for minerals and energy.
> The reason almost the whole EU budget (hyperbole, but indeed
> it is a lot of the EU budget) is spent on agricultural
> subsidies is precisely to protect our food security.
Protect food security or export status? Case in point, we are overspending on agriculture. Also, it would have been better to trade with African countries wrt the real pressing concern. A missed chance.
> Food security is the first concern for every society, because without food we will all die.
It depends on what you mean by "first concern". Water security is the first concern by that reasoning; nuclear attack security too - without it, everyone dies.
But those aren't serious concerns in any practical sense: In most places in Europe there is plenty of water and food, and attention and resources are rightfully directed elsewhere.
Do you mean the prices are as high as NYC relative to local income? Because if farmers can get NYC prices in their own country I don't see why they would ship their produce all the way to the EU, where they won't even be able to get that (NYC is more expensive than the large majority of Europe).
Argentina is an outlier as their economy is in the dumps, for the rest of SA food is much cheaper than in Europe. But in general you are right that food prices in some countries in SA are artificially high because most of our food is exported, so the domestic market has to pay a premium. We also export the highest quality food. If we fed the domestic market first and exported the surplus food prices would be a fraction of what they are today.
I was in BA quite recently and didn't find it that expensive in restaurants, even in Recoleta. Inflation is so volatile there it can change by the week I guess. But if what you are saying is true about meat being so expensive, I think that just means that meat isn't going to be sold to Europe, because Europeans aren't going to pay that price and Argentinian meat producers aren't going to ship their produce to Europe and comply with all the red tape to get the same or lower prices. Granted, in some poorer areas where meat is currently quite cheap the effects of competition could be more acute.
I flew from Asia to Buenos Aries after on a whim deciding not to return home to the US. I ran out of USD a while ago. Everywhere in the world I can withdraw cash with a small fee and whatever the exchange rate is. In Argentina it was a $10 fee plus the government set exchange rate and max withdraw was 60,000 pesos. So I was paying $10 to get $60 worth of pesos.
I didn't know that, but it's possible because we still have a lot of weird exchange rules.
You can probably have got better exchange rates in some shady corner, if you don't mind the risk of been scamed by a random guy instead of the bank/goverment.
Obviously this simple check only concerns the technical aspects of the website and doesn't analyse the business itself but I wonder if all .com domains should be marked down?
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