I'm the “European elite” you're thinking of. Well, not “elite” in the sense of being rich, I'm not rich, but I'm also not stupid.
It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.
The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.
But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.
Employment stats in the EU are a complete joke and don't reflect at all real work/value creation. It's all about moving numbers from one box to another.
Just because you made one more bureaucrat bullshit job does not mean you are creating any value, quite the contrary.
You seem to conveniently forget that all of this was "possible" only with heavy borrowing, and it looks like many countries won't be able to even pay the principal soon enough.
When you take this into account, the "growth" has been negative for over 10 years, and it was barely stagnant for quite a while before.
We exported the growth and manipulated money, now the truth appear. You can only pretend for so long.
The reality is that the value creating has been quite low in most of the EU and now that the economic engine that was Germany has stalled, everything is grinding to a halt.
Germany had heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for its chemical industry and premium car market, both are getting disrupted massively. It's actually a perfect example on why we should avoid too much reliance on other countries. The hilarious part is that in the meantime, Germany was giving "ecology" lessons to all their neighbors and the world at large. In typical arrogant German fashion, they had everything figured out, until they didn't, that is. They actually hold a lot of responsibility for their terrible leadership on the EU.
Mercantilism doesn't work, there's plenty of evidence that the current policies are really bad for the US and the global economy, there's no silver lining to them, not even the temporary "boosting profits", which won't happen.
If the future can't be predicted that's because one can't predict when Trump and his imbeciles will be stripped of power.
Self-hosting hundreds of GBs of data isn't feasible, you also need backups and it's a terrible idea for most people. Hetzner does provide managed Nextcloud instances.
> Self-hosting hundreds of GBs of data isn't feasible
Why wouldn't it be feasible? Storage is cheap, backups are cheap. It's not for everyone, obviously, but for 20 EUR/month you can get a VM with a couple hundred GB of storage and 1TB of backups on a storagebox in hetzner.
Or have a raspberry pi with a 1TB SSD in your home, or both!
The amount of storage isn't the issue unless you're taking about 10++ terabytes.
The things that's interesting is how you're accessing and writing to it - depending on that, it might indeed be infeasible to do everything yourself as an individual.
A "cloud" storage like next cloud with only 1-3 users? That's not gonna become a problem, while the base configuration with backups will likely take you a weekend, it's not that hard.
There will be other unintended outcomes from this. If the US can't be relied on as a military ally, then why should US clouds or the software it exports be trustworthy?
Couldn't the US government also kill all Windows workstations, iPhones or AWS servers? Of course they could.
Smaller companies or individuals may not care, but governments or bigger companies that are risk averse? Of course they'll care.
> we've seen that permanent residents can have their permanent residency canceled
If you're talking about Mahmoud Khalil, that was probably unlawful, and you should wait for your judicial branch to pass judgment before reaching the conclusion that fascism is lawful.
There have been other cases of permanent residents, and even naturalized citizens losing their residency or citizenship. Ironically many of those cases are about actual Nazis.
Also, DMA specifically targets monopolies and it will most likely encourage innovation. I mean, let's be honest, legislation isn't the reason for why Apple's AI sucks.
Nevertheless, US's Big Tech can either comply or GTFO.
Australian businesses have to provide GDPR protections to EU citizens, regardless, just as EU companies operating in Australia have to obey Australian law.
I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.
It can't be trusted because it is incorporated in Australia which has draconian digital survellience laws.
Operated by trustworthy individuals is a moot point when they are compelled by law to build in a backdoor if asked. Even a warrant canary is forbidden.
You're repeating the same information as in the comment I'm replying to.
The surveillance laws, no matter how often you repeat the word "draconian", are irrelevant because…
Email isn't safe, and most of your email probably ends up on Google's or Microsoft's servers anyway, in which case US companies can be coerced by the US government to give them everything they have, while not being able to tell the public about it. And they do just that, a fact that came to light with Snowden's revelations. Australia cannot be worse than the US.
For emails, the government surveillance is irrelevant, as it happens anyway. And solutions like Proton Email are just privacy theatre that also happen to interact poorly with established standards (e.g., SMTP, IMAP).
I also fear Australia much less than I fear the US these days. I have always feared the US, especially due to their massive security apparatus, but at least I considered them valuable allies. These days we'll just add some extra fear points due to the techno-fascists in charge, voted-in by the people with a popular vote.
Whenever I see such comments on popular forums, such as HN, I lose faith in humanity a little, either because people don't think about the threat model (this being vibes-based) or the consequences of boycotting the underdogs, or because they are disingenuous about it.
Fastmail is a fine service, built and operated by trustworthy people, which also contribute to standards (e.g. JMAP) and to open source. A service that's also not monetized by ad-tech, unlike what the Big Tech email services are doing.
> Fastmail is a fine service, built and operated by trustworthy people
Yes, but their data centers aren't because they're operated by someone else in the US.
Fastmail is slightly better than using a US-based e-mail provider but it's still de facto US-based e-mail even if the company you sign up with sits in Australia. They don't control their own data centers and their data centers are in the US (whether they have additional data centers elsewhere doesn't matter if they're not transparent about which data center your data will go to).
“Warrantless surveillance” was yesterday's concern, back when Snowden's revelations were in the news.
Today the concern is war, both economic and literal.
From that perspective, I'll gladly use Australian, or Canadian online services, while avoiding using US ones for as much as possible. Note, I don't think it will be long before services like Fastmail will start moving their servers. Again, yesterday the US was an ally, whereas today the writing is on the wall.
