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The problem was that the people that benefitted most from free trade never do the work to ensure that a fair share of the profits went to the working class who were now being displaced. If you can no longer get lifelong middleclass job with a high school diploma, but you need a degree, then the degree should be paid for by the state... or you see what you see, a race to the bottom and then a backlash.

Nah protectionism is really important. Globalization introduces dependencies and therefor allows countries to easily exploit others. Globalization is not as good as you describe it.

It's crushing Hong Kong was handed over, as they had about the free-est import/export burdens and regulations in the world. Everyone everywhere wants to kill the golden goose and it's mind boggling that the only people that seem to understand this right now is a few emirates and Singaporean quasi-dictators.

Hoppe might have been right about democracy.

> Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.

It worked until emotions entered the picture. "I don't like making chips. I prefer producing steel. Why do you get to have all the fun?" they've said for decades and with increasing furor.

If you could move freely about the world without any restrictions so that those who enjoy steelmaking could easily move to where the steel is made maybe it would have had a better chance, but even then people generally prioritize location (to be close to family, friends, certain amenities, etc.) above all else so it is likely they would still seek a varied local economy despite the benefits of a global economy.

Globalism or imperialism 2.0 perpetrated by America? I'd like to see that kind of utopia, but unclear how we can overcome greed, corruption and bad actors.

Turns out capital without borders ruins prices for scarce things (like housing) everywhere.

European here.

To be frank, it’s more about the rest of the ”west” updating our list of friendly countries. It is the US that has chosen to take an ever more adversarial position lately, pretty much worsening daily.

The trust among the rest of the west feels like it instead is strengthening. I interpret both ”buy European” and ”buy Canadian” as more of ”don’t buy from USA” with a thin layer of politeness.

Depends on the perspective.

A "Rules-based world order" has been the rationale of the West for decades: WTO, U.N., free trade, democracy, countries' sovereignty, etc. But this "global community" was lipstick on a pig. From a 3rd World perspective that was just hypocrisy.

The "rules" were always chosen by the rich countries: free trade but keep farm protectionism against 3rd world's cheap produce, sovereignty but not for Palestinians, democracy but not if Chile, Iran or most of Africa or Latin America choose to have socialist leaders (Allende, Mossadegh, etc), ...

And now that even the rules are not advantageous to the rich anymore (e.g.:China's and Mexico's manufacturing, India's and South America's farming) the rich countries are scrapping the rules.

I know that it's not in the cards (yet), but I hope the UK and the EU can be a single market again (even if the UK does not rejoin the EU). Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible! We love the UK and you are part of the European family :hugs:.

> Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!

Always.

hug

Who do you host with btw? I'd love to avoid the big US SaaS providers if I can but would like something a level above a VPS, especially for database.

Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.

Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!

We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.

I'd love to use this, but notice it's hosted in the EU, is there any way of ensuring we go through UK servers only?

There are other listings like that, e.g.:

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

> This would allow you to avoid displaying the cookie banner.

That isn't actually true (or at least is only allowed in the "it's a small enough violation of the law that the enforcers have bigger fish to fry" sense).

Cookie banners are required to gather informed consent, which is relevant for two EU legislations: the ePD, which requires it to access or store _any_ data from terminal equipment, and the GDPR which requires it for personally identifiable data. Most people only consider the latter, but the former is a much bigger hurdle to pass.

Despite Plausible's claim of not requiring cookie banners, their processing still accesses data from the terminal equipment. That was made very explicitly clear in a 2023 guideline from the EDPB[1].

The one saving grace for Plausible is that the ePD is a Directive, so the actual implementation into law differs by Member country. The claim might be true for some EU countries, but certainly isn't for all.

I've written a longer analysis of this in the context of Plausible for anyone interested[2] (although it might be worth skipping the first section, to get to the meat of the issue).

[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guid... [2] https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compl...

folks mess "cookie banner" with "consent banner". many people do conflate them, but in some jurisdictions (e.g., the EU under GDPR), a "cookie banner" typically includes a consent mechanism.

if you're tracking users for analytics using cookies, fingerprinting, or any other method that identifies them (even probabilistically), you generally need explicit consent under GDPR and similar privacy laws. The key point is that it's not just about cookies; any persistent tracking requires consent.

They are used for different things. If you are doing paid marketing or other more or less complex marketing Plausible doesn’t cut it.

Only if you’re not using cookies for anything else.

It might be worth noting that this is not specific to the EU, it's the whole of Europe. So for example it includes companies from Norway, Switerzland and the UK.

So asking how much tax is paid or how much supply chain is in the EU doesn't necissarily make sense here.

>There's nothing european about this. / "Yeah but it's a european company so!"

You are contradicting yourself. There is something European about it.

Anyway, as long as it's not from the USA, it's a win.

These days, from a Canadian perspective, non-US is already good enough.

Yeah, China sucks. But the US sucks even more.

Deepl is amazing as it is way faster in translating than LLMs

How does it compare to 4o? I used to use deepl but not since the later chatgpt versions came out.

I like DeepL, but without Catalan, it has less value.

Amazon is probably the easiest for me to ditch. It's not really that much cheaper, and when you include shipping it's certainly not cheaper. Shipping times are horrible, search is broken, half of everything is a scam and again, it's not that much cheaper, if at at all.

I can see that being very dependent on what you're buying though.

> "support local farmers!". ME: "but the price difference is almost double form Kaufland/Lidl/Carrefour/etc for the same thing!"

But it isn't the same thing. Locally grown food tends to taste much better and have higher nutritional value.

Plus, something I didn't expect when I started buying most of my food from my local farmer's market-- these farmers are like friends. Every meal I sit down to eat, I have a direct connection to it's source. Of course I go to "grocery stores" for staples, and it always feels so weird, empty, fake.

If you can't afford it, don't. But perhaps you will find alternatives for some of your purchases.

Thats what every "support local" campaign boils down to - accept suboptimal deals because they are somehow more connected to you. I am glad to sell my services to the US and will buy their services, likewise for EU stuff if it is competitive.

Besides this outrage at the US from EU perspective is mind-boggling, for the first time since I can remember US is moving away from imperialist global polices, and Europe is in a position where they can become an independent global actor after WW2. Sure Trump administration isn't making the process pleasant but Europeans should be happy about these changes. And the tariff situation is nothing the EU has not been doing for decades, Trump did escalate it suddenly, but it is not like EU is not imposing massive tariffs to protect its industry, even at the expense of EU members that have no significant stakes in this industry.

I have stopped using Amazon all together >1 year ago. Prime Video is as shitty as it gets and most stuff ordered on Amazon is Chinese shovelware in the same rankings as Temu. I give exactly zero shit about same day delivery in 99,99% of the cases.

Amazon shines in customer support though.

Search & categorization is entirely broken, the webshop experience is absolutely abysmal. Just order from better online stores. In Germany, I found these (surprisingly ok):

- Kaufland --> https://www.kaufland.de

- Galaxus Deutschland --> https://www.galaxus.de

- Lidl --> https://www.lidl.de (Schwarz IT is building a European Cloud btw!)

- ShopApotheke --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/

- Home24 --> https://www.home24.de/

Then, buying specialized stuff on the actual website is often a decent experience. Just price hunt on sites like Idealo (attention though, Axel Springer!) and proceed to the specific stores from there.

https://www.idealo.de/ --> https://www.shop-apotheke.com/

I explicitly avoided mentioning Otto as alternative to Amazon although it is technically the closest. While their shop is ok, prices and customer experience are horrifyingly bad (especially returns and delivery). For an unbiased view:

https://www.otto.de/

Your arguments ignore externalities. You aren't saving 100 EUR. You pay for it in many other ways. There's no such thing as free lunch, as the saying goes. They're just hijacking your short-term thinking.

In Switzerland amazon never bothered to enter the market, so local competition filled the gap, and it created much better service while doing it.

I speak specifically about galaxus/digitec which often have more and more available stock than actual amazon in EU, any category has 1000s of items, much better organized and findable. Plus it has many great features not seen or usable elsewhere - directly showing evolution of price across the time, reviews which are absolutely not gamed due to tiny market, so I can rely on them very well (while on amazon its tricky at best). You can easily buy used versions of same item at fraction of the price, its showed at top of each product page.

Their guarantee handling is stellar. And for stuff in stock its next day delivery.

Using price comparison services here in Sweden I almost never see a better deal on Amazon, at best they have the exact same price as the cheapest deal, seems to be their MO here to check the pricing data from competitors and set their prices exactly the same as the cheapest on offer at the time.

Such a shame to see Gitlab go for gold in America rather than staying with its European basis. While Codeberg is absolutely fine in itself, I think Gitlab is a much better offering for many companies.

The difference between US and Europe:

- In Europe, getting funding is literally like pulling teeth. Just to get a measly hundred thousands of € in funding you're expected to provide a comprehensive business plan, financials, etc. that would rival M&A due diligence other places. In Silicon Valley you can get more funding by simply meeting the right angel investor, and providing a good pitch - done deal.

- In Europe, the end goal for many startups is to be acquired by some megacorp or market leader, for something like €10m-€50m. In the US you can multiply that number by 10 or 100, or in general have ambitions of developing the startup into a unicorn.

That was at least how things used to be. US has a long, long history of (risk willing) VC investments - while European countries have been lagging far behind.

Good VC cultures have developed in some European countries for the past 10-15 years, and startups have become more ambitious, but unfortunately there's still a culture of nickel and diming startups. And the places that rob you, will fund you maybe a month or two worth of capital.

EDIT: Should be said, that I'm also from Europe. And as someone else have pointed out in this thread, Europeans hate risk.

Unfortunately that’s the case because large US-based companies can leverage their existing global sales / marketing / governance setup to rationalize very high exit valuations. In the EU we don’t have the large software shops that can do that. So for an EU based startup - it’s exit to a US-based company or go all the way to an IPO / profitability.

If they stayed in Europe they wouldn’t have been as successful.

America loves investing in risky ventures, and startups love money so they go to fish where the fish are.

If Europe would invest into local startups instead of propping up the real estate bubble, they wouldn't sell themselves to the US for money. Our downfall is by our own design here.

Governments don't create startups but they can 100% create the right legal, monetary and tax incentives to steer private capital and workers towards them, but as long as they are steered towards protecting the interests of gentrified land owners and those of 100-year-old companies, nothing will ever change and we'll just stare at how US and Chinese companies are overtaking us.

Also see this project for web services alternatives: https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

And: https://www.buy-european-made.eu/

+1 for olimex. They really stayed true to their vision, not looking to go big or go bust, just doing cool, quality things.