'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/magazine/overview/europe-must-ban-american-big-tech-and-create-a-european-silicon-valleyOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca577
Comments113https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/magazine/overview/europe-must-ban-american-big-tech-and-create-a-european-silicon-valleyOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca
yes, but also facepalm this is still missing the point
^ taps the sign above my head
THAT is the problem, yes the US version is one of the more aggressive cancers but recognize that the US is a product of the US mindset that worships big tech.
People are running out of water for their families because a category of techbro running my country consider the power hungry datacenters powering this AI "techboom" more important than human lives.
points at the sign
In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.
A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there's a reason it's as broken of a system as it is.
who has run out of water due to a data centre?
secondly that sounds like a local government issue
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/09/big-tech-datacentres-water
Nothing about this problem is local.
what about it?
this has to be stupid tech story of the year
wow they’re building a data centre in the uae call the police
You’re just some joker who wants to watch the world literally and figuratively burn, fuck off
if the data centres are powered by renewables then there is no impact, go fuck yourself
Giant fucking if, and what about anybody anywhere says that they’re going to make the investment for renewables, they’re lying
They still need to be cooled you dumbfuck.
And there's the issue: you CAN cool them with renewables, but it's cheaper to just use insane amounts of water.
Wow! What?! No one involved, not the people building the data centres, the planning commissions, the approvals, the local and federal governments, it seems everyone involved completely forgot that except you, a guy who reads the guardian.
here's your imaginary trophy, smartest guy in the thread🏆
No Eurotechbro stuff, thanks.
European tech? Sure. But only if fully decentralised, peer to peer, FOSS, copyleft and all that.
And oh also, bars out fascists.
Then it has to be tax funded and will never be self sufficient unfortunately. That means if political winds change, these products will die.
This is just me being a realist. I would of course prefer all of Europe to move to FOSS for the public sector.
No. Standards might be tax funded and adherence to them enforced.
A market of resources (to provide services via standard way) is possible - standard format search, standard format service tracking, standard format storage service, and what not.
Only if they'd want that, of course. They literally say what they want - a Silicon Valley. With all the dystopian shit.
I understand your tempered position. I really do.
But allow me to go on a bit of a rant here...
All the big tech companies in Silicon Valley have aways been heavily subsidised by the U.S. government without the U.S. taxpayers having any stakeholders' position afterwards. These should have always been partially within the public owned infrastructure given how they were funded by the public. Amazon is probably the most ridiculous case in the world in how long they weren't profitable and remained subsidised by the government to even be able to exist.
So, in regards if FOSS should be tax funded... yes. Because of the very reason I just mentioned. All big tech was and still is tax funded. With them taking even more money from people as costumers after already having taken money from them as taxpayers. While also just selling everyone entirely as a profile to get ad revenue from or as a surveilled citizen to serve on a platter to whichever government they want to influence further. This is insanely corrupt as a system. It should've not been allowed to even establish itself.
I think everyone who supports FOSS and open protocols is very aware of the pitfalls and uphill struggles to implement them against the current system. But I find that the general apathy and the further complacency of the general public is the true paramount adversity.
When you say "this is me being a realist", it is you accepting the reality that was imposed onto you by the people who are benefitting from its' imposition. Even more than the typical manufactured consent of capitalism, this is enforced submission to those rejecting the manufactured consent. Because from the rest of your comment, and the fact that you are here on Lemmy, you clearly do not consent to this reality, but you've accepted it as an inevitability. Which it isn't, as we are not in the grounds of that reality having this exchange right now.
Taxpayers should fund FOSS and open protocol software because it protects them long term. One quick example would be how to this day nobody can close protocols on email and how anyone can create their email and host the server if they so desire. It obviously requires skill and knowledge, but if one has them, nobody can prevent them from doing it for themselves or even others if they so desire. This is an absolute insurance that the system can't dictate one's individual terms.
And while the Fediverse may be very small in comparison to the general establishment, it is large enough as proof to present anyone who doubts that there is a way to get back to the true promise of the internet and that we can indeed get back our sovereignty from the conglomerates that destroyed that promise.
And the political winds can change in whatever direction they may, it doesn't matter, as it can't and won't destroy the resiliency of the concept. I just joined piefed.social after the Lemm.ee shutdown, and it doesn't matter because this is a resilient concept. And that is also the reason it cannot be contained or controlled by anyone over anyone.
Sorry for the very long reply. I hope I wasn't as annoying to you as I feel I am being. If so, I apologise even more.
Cheers.
And without surveillance and that surveillance capitalism that only helps fascists and people from Pinochet to Duterte to Trump to do human right violations. Europe has data protection because it has human rights, and it has human rights because our history has taught bitter lessons about totalitarism. We need a way forward - not back.
Yes, please!
So not monetizable. Will never happen, too many interests, and EU is always weak to bribes.
Can we not? Silicon Valley sucks and imo hasn't done anything innovative for a long time.
I don't think that they haven't been innovative. Moreso, there's a deliberate strategy by FAANG/MIC companies to buy (or bury) smaller startups that are innovating.
Then those bigger companies mothball the tech with no plan to sell or market their acquisitions, nor release the IP rights on what they own.
It's not so much that there's no innovation, it's just good old fashioned tech monopoly behavior.
That can happen, but I don't think that's the point. a) big companies could invest in expensive research like nobody else (aside from state research) b) these hubs are often about having the right companies and universities in one place, which results in employees and graduates spinning out their own innovative start ups, because the region has all the knowhow and manufacturing they need c) most big companies don't do very risky innovation, instead they buy successful startups to build upon them, but that can still be innovative if they buy them early on and finance further research
Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.
what does "socialised software" mean?
Owned and operated by community at large, with the goal of bringing value for people, not for bringing people's money to shareholders
ok, so this is about how you run software, i.e. who owns the server hardware, while free software is about how software is developed, right?
I'm not sure where you're pulling it all from, I suspect you have some kind of supposed gotcha in mind
no i'm just trying to clarify as i've never encountered the term before
I don't think it's a term, really, more of broad idea applied to this topic
The EU should sponsor various projects or provide tax cuts to companies that contribute labor to projects. They don't have to take over the projects, just help them prosper for everyone.
How will it work ? If there is no profit because of open source and socialised software. Then how will companies hire people. Already there are many open source softwares on the market like linus. Open source will not become big like USA silicon valley.
What if the government tells a social media site they have to ban people from criticizing them or they'll lose funding?
Open source sure, that's fine. But someone's gotta pay for running the servers and if the government can cut that funding they have influence over it. That's a level of government control over the media that's a little concerning.
Better to have the the government make regulations requiring companies to make it easy to switch to another company. Like changing to another phone company, you can keep the same number (because of regulations) so people can still call you without even knowing you changed companies even if they have a phone from a different manufacturer using a different phone company.
You can do the same with things like social media, just need to have regulations requiring protocols to allow people to change services easily and connect with other services so there's not a network effect making people stay on shit services because it's what all their friends use. People should own their data, own their contacts and companies should compete by providing better services rather than by making it difficult to leave the services they're currently on.
Handing over your date to the government isn't a better solution than handing it over to a private company. The real solution is to ensure people own their data.
Newspapers predate the internet I've heard, and even European newspapers have online presence now. Why would any of that get worse with a more sovereign EU?
If you're talking social media, then more control is required. This is pretty much the only reason the topic is even brought up at all. I'd much rather have our courts control speech than Nazis.
It's not about a sovereign EU, it's about government controlling the media. There is too much temptation for a politician to use that control to make the media say only good things about them and negative things about the opposition. See Russia for an example of how bad that can get.
Are all of the newspapers controlled by the EU? Do you think it would be better if they were.
Anyway, yeah I'm talking about social media. The primary problem of social media is that it's an oligopoly. Create regulation so people can have choice without being cut of from their friends that are on a shitty platform and people will leave to be on better platforms and companies will have to compete to provide a better product.
Very few people actually like Facebook and Twitter, they just can't leave because they wouldn't be able to communicate with their friends and family if they did. And their friends and family can't leave for the same reason. What if you could go to a Friendica site and still be able to chat with your friends that are still on Facebook and they could see your posts you make and vice versa? How many people would stay on Facebook if there was no longer a barrier to leaving? How many people would put up with Elon Musk's antics on twitter if they could leave and still communicate with the people they like that are still on Twitter?
If there was no major barrier to leaving these sites, they'd have to compete to provide quality moderation, make it easy to find the things you like, improve algorithms so they aren't shoving shit you don't care about into your face, etc. Having a single government entity doing this wouldn't provide this and the site would probably just be constant bickering about what the government should and should not allow on social media.
Germany and UK have a solution for this problem that works quite well for decades. The organisation that distributes the funds for media is not a part of government and does not takes direct orders, but operates on a strict set of rules that are mutually agreed upon, both by the government and by the media holdings. The funds come from the people who are paying small summ every month. Neither the government nor the corporations can just cut the funds if they don't like it.
Yeah I know about TV licenses, but aren't they incredibly unpopular? And a government could eliminate them and replace them with subsidies (which gives them influence) and many voters might agree with that given the unpopularity of TV licenses.
They are as unpopular as any other taxes, people don't like to give their money away, they'd much prefer to never do it.
And yes, populistic enough government can eliminate whatever public good exists, but you need to be real donald trump about it.
One of old lines against left is that it's just people who want free stuff.
Left ideologies are not, in fact, about getting more free stuff (and the "bread and circuses" thing originates earlier than right or left liberalism, and is used just as well by right factions, and Rome is generally loved by the right more than by the left, making a funny comparison to Sparta which is more loved by the left, while Athens is again loved more by the right).
Still, see, in a situation where European nations are gradually becoming less and less democratic, without significant resistance utilizing modern technologies for building a dystopia worse than cyberpunk books promised, and the questions in computing revolve around dependence on governments and corporations in all things done with computers, - in this situation you write about "open source and socialized".
Not about using those same technologies for building a direct democracy before "elected representatives" use them to make us serfs or surplus biomass. Not about using them to track all state officials' locations and their finances (if they don't want that, they can pick another job). Not about revision of patent systems benefiting corporations and in practice making any truly free system of communication on the Internet dubiously legal.
No, about "open source" - which is the "circuses" here, for things to be cool and interoperable, and about "socialized" - which is the "bread" here.
I'm an American who has worked in tech for nearly 30 years and I fully support this, so much so that I'm considering moving to Europe to help build it.
Likewise. Actively trying to figure out how to network out of the United States.
It's good that something is finally being done.
Instead of just copying big tech from silicon fucking valley, we could also improve on it somewhat, such as making the software open source.
GDPR was a good move. Hopefully others are soon on the way.
This is all talk. The EU and European countries are articulating what they know their population and the EU tech sector wants them to do BUT in the end, they will do none of it. Maybe vote a few laws, fund a few cheap FOSS projects that will never truly be applied/ used by EU countries except for a handful of cities, public services. But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.
Talking spaces such as this lemmysub are places where we, the end users and creators can collaborate to pressure them to at least consider things and get out of this Trump/Xi dependency our politicians want for us.
The EU is slow moving. That can be detrimental to techhnological arms races sometimes, but the stability it provides also has a lot of benefits. Currently they are consulting start-ups in a bid to streamline innovation and incentivize venture capital. Germany is now actively trying to make business administration easier. So the necessary steps are being taken, but it will take time to implement as is the wont of the EU and its member states.
All change starts with talk, but I do think that European politicians see the acute need for a new innovation framework that is tailored to the times. Even when that framework is in place it will take several more years to visibly notice results. But then the EU per definition looks at the long game, so it's not a bad thing per se.
I think you have missed a few chapters, it's not slow moving it's glacial age moving. The free software policies have been already talked about since 2003., that's 22 years ago. None of this is new, it did not appear with trump, nor with the Russian invasions. It's way older projects and it all remains as talks, memorandums, conventions. Never anything enforced, GDPR is not enforced seriously, DMA will not be etc...
Let's not kid ourselves anymore with the voluntary inaction of the EU.
You cannot understand how sorry I am about it. I am the result of a intra European wedding, I went places thanks to EU collaborations, I owe my wages and work hours in big parts to EU wide regulations. I still am an EU cheerleader in many wide ranging subjects. But on this one, in which European countries have the most economic, work opportunities , attraction pole, social benefits to reap for future generations. They are too much listening to the FANGS and banks and not enough to economists. It's basic lip service that has been going on for too long.
The EU puts the interests of its elites and bureaucracies above all others. Because the EU is its elites and bureaucracies, that's how it's built.
OK, I don't even live in an EU country (OK, suppose in like 50 years by some miracle Armenia joins it, and suppose I get Armenian citizenship before that ...).
But - it's not EU's particular problem.
EU is sort of a system built entirely of "liberal democracy best practices" as they were seen in year 1999. And all its faults are highly average and general for liberal democracies.
It's the crisis of liberal democracies as a thing, because modern technologies allow representatives to guide their populations like a Victoria II player does. Like in a global strategy. And it works. It's not even only modern technologies, it's also "political technologies" like what was normal for USA for many years, but to the rest of the world has spread only in the 90s and 00s. In USA those were, until some point around Reagan, balanced by functional journalism and protest culture.
Except the fact that it works in the sense of having necessary feedbacks and controls and computing power is only one side of the coin, the other side of which is that direct democracy can work too. This removes direct democracy's disadvantage of impracticality, and removes representative democracy's advantage of stability (the opposite of what politicians call stability, stability of democracy is the direct opposite of stability of elites, culture, morality, economics, laws and policies).
And the fact that it works in the sense of political technologies means that representative democracy gains a significant disadvantage of not being really democracy anymore. Those unfortunately work. Those can still work when voting for decisions, not people, but it's harder to make a populace support two inconsistent (from the point of propaganda) actions than it is to make them support a politician who'll support both and then make them doubt the inconsistency.
So to adapt for changes liberal democracies must become direct liberal democracies or turn into Russias. I have spoken.
Am American in tech. I would like to come help. Actively trying to get out of this country.
Ah, yes, BTW, people are talking as if immigration doesn't exist.
Once upon a time a certain Eastern Roman Empire was dealt the final blow by Ottoman Turks, and its former inhabitants possessing very valuable competencies and knowledge would be plentiful in South Europe.
Perhaps had that not happened, Europeans would get to the "colonizing the new world" activity a couple of centuries later.
‘It is not enough to import evil! We must manufacture evil here at home!’
Starting with the assumption that the US does many technology related things better, we should just adopt a mantra of making second-best copies of whatever the US does better.
Catching up is always quicker and cheaper than being the first to get there.
Invest in copying.
Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go
Yup. Just make the copying blatantly obvious and protect the new project from copyright/IP claims.
Finally, first real feasible comment about EU catching up to US and China. This is how countries like Korea, despite how tiny it is compared to the EU, still grow so well economically and stay #1 in various areas of competition. They play 'catch up then compete' game so well and are probably the best at it. They become #2 or top 5 or whatever in many things, synthesise them together to become #1. Even integrated solutions of these #2 offerings combined are what makes their packaged offerings so compelling.
Ban American big tech? Okay, makes sense.
Create a European Silicon Valley? I don't know about this one.
The reason China and the US are global leaders in technology is because of their complete disregard for human rights and the environment. Creating a "European Silicon Valley" would simply bring us down to their level, or at least closer. Mimicking America has never worked well for Europe. We need our own European systems born from our own European ideas.
This is absolutely not true. Europeans not investing and selling off every bit of innovation they produce to american vulture capitalists is the reason we are behind.
Also what have tech companies to do with the environment? Sure now the AI BS is a strain on energy consumption, but it's not like EU started lagging only since 2022. China is doing generally much bettet wrt electrification than eg the Germans.
like arguing for slave labor a la chinese labor market, to compete!! we cannot entertain a race to the bottom, that is already being done, as a species
"American silicon valley, European silicon valley, all made in Taiwan"
~Some Ukrainian guy probably
Yes, another Silicon Valley is definitely what we need ☠️
Even if you are American, you should support this movement. The best way to end or reverse enshittification is through competition. The big American tech companies are no longer competing to make good or innovative products. They are competing to see who can monetize the most while risking the least.
Better enforcment of GDPR and DSA may be enought to effectively ban big US tech without passing any new law.
High tech doesn't have to be abusive.
No, but they regularly seem to choose that path.
How about no??
Silicon Valley is an epicenter for the world's most expensive narcicism. For 5k a ticket you'll get first rate sycophancy, the kind Nero would enjoy. There's probably about as many dead sex workers buried underneath silicon valley as there are indigenous corpses underneath boarding schools.
No joke, Silicon Valley needs to die - in a fire.
True but that is probably not what the vision is supposed to be.
... And it even doesn't do anymore what it did to gain the past glory.
Could we perhaps consider ways of making software that doesn't involve killing hookers?
Why ban? Tax it.
You need to have something shitty to see if the other thing is good. Otherwise we will just build EU-approved Meta that does the same shit from all over again.
And use the tax money to help fund open source alternatives? Yes please
The point is to have a growth sector.
Instead, there seems to be a promise to not tax or fine them, in addition to giving them encryption backdoors on its citizens, and beg to buy overpriced Nvidia chips to give it all to Big US tech owned skynet. Reward is 30% tariffs to US sales on everything.
This brings up a point I've been meaning to make for awhile: I don't think Europe has it in them.
The UK actually did some innovating, I mean Alan Turing himself was a Limey, and back in the day they had the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, and they invented the ARM processor, they're one of very few nations to have a processor architecture to their name. Basically the rest of computing innovation happened in the United States, like the industrial revolution before, we took what Britain invented and ran with it. Meanwhile Western Europe has had fuck all influence in the last 50 years of computing. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, sure...by an Englishman. 35 years later, let's take a look at the top 50 visited websites worldwide and see just what Europe has done with their groundbreaking tech.
Of the 50, 30 are American. The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!. The UK does not place on the list, and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French, Xhamster and Stripchat are...What's the adjective for 'from Cyprus?" Cyprian? Cyprese? Cypriot, apparently. "Honorable" mentions to Canada and India for their only entries, Pornhub and Eporner respectively.
Meanwhile, South Korea makes the list twice for Samsung.com and Naver.com, which is apparently their Google; they do everything from search and email to online payments and ISP. I'm pretty sure that if the US is descendant, the future is Asian, not European.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them, so for the last few months they've been publishing headlines about another township switching their computers from Windows to Linux. At one point there was announcement that EurOS or whatever they were going to call it was going to be a fork of Fedora...because they forgot SuSe Linux exists. They boldly announced they were switching from getting software directly from Microsoft, to getting it indirectly from IBM. For their x86 computers.
I simply don't think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.
Oh great. The rest of the world is apparently only good for getting fucked over...literally.
We need to get our shit together people!
The absolute best Europe could do would be to get machines running a RISC-V architecture running Linux in production and distribution. RISC-V was developed at UC Berkley, GNU at Harvard based on UNIX from Bell Labs and the Linux kernel by a Finnish-American named Torvalds. ARM is probably closer to production ready than RISC-V but you'll have to pay licenses to England and Japan for it.
Oh, and that's all desktop and server stuff. You've got an even deeper ditch to dig to get anything mobile that isn't based on Apple or Google tech. Not even Microsoft managed that.
Even if you did get that done, which you won't, you will have built "European digital sovereignty" upon the crumbs that fell off of America's dinner table. The 21st century was invented in Britain and built by the United States out of parts manufactured in Southeast Asia while Europe masturbated. And this was perfectly acceptable until this year, with the election of Tariff McBlusterCuck. Now you're gonna do it on your own.
Sure.
Nobody is going to be a slave to a narcissistic, fascist nation.
Username checks out.
Especially not me
This picture doesn't survive a request for higher detail.
The only reason the EU is not part of that great modern thing is because it's impossible to match the margins achieved with such a scale that things
have.
I'm of an opinion that some downshifting is desperately needed. It won't happen anyway for surveillance and warfare, but EU-produced electronics are possible - they are doing it with MCs for cars and for plastic cards and for elevators and for microwaves and ... .
Those American things you list, they are not very good.
Do you know who Fabrice Bellard is?
Do you know who, ah, ok, Linus Torvalds counts as a USian by now.
KDE developers are mostly from the EU, I think.
Opera browser, when that was a thing, were mostly from European countries, I think.
Nokia, eh, Nokia, Nokia. Siemens. Sony Ericsson. Bosch. German carmakers.
Minitel, do you know what Minitel was?
Many of the fundamental things used everywhere, like some error-correcting codes for satellite communications, have people from the EU as authors.
Actually, I think if you compare fundamental achievements, and not commercial ones, you'll see that European countries are not that far behind.
Yeah, the hardware production thing is generally sad. This wasn't so even in the early 90s, so my own modest honest opinion is that this was killed because of the US creeping patent war. Similarly to other things. A relatively recent development.
I mean, yeah, competencies don't pop up overnight, but frankly there's no magic in making a computer.
There's hardly achievable level of minimization, involving patents impeding competition and very narrow margins, which prevent anything outside of the main "computing silk road" of ASML-TSMC-Intel&AMD&ARM from functioning.
If it were up for me, I'd just say that late 80s' computers were good enough. Or at least early 90s' ones. When that "computing silk road" hadn't yet become as unavoidable.
France is still a great nation.
Y-yeah, that part has changed a lot, because on the other end of the pond there's not much "innovation" now too.
Does it really matter if the American entries are "good" or not? Where's Europe's answer to...any of this?
Oh yeah, Nokia, the company that made dumb phones a quarter of a century ago, failed to enter the smart phone market at all, disappeared, was sold to Microsoft as their phone/tablet division, failed again and disappeared again.
Ah Bosch, the makers of my pain in the ass why the fuck did they do it that way router. Particularly the standard base needs to be jawholed up someone's lederhosen.
German automobile manufacturers, whose motto seems to be "Never use a part when a system will do." Expensive and complicated to maintain and not tremendously durable. Meanwhile the Japanese will sell you a war worthy compact pickup truck.
At what, exactly? The Austrians make better wine, the Italians make better food, the Germans make better cars, the Greeks make better spelling, the Swiss make better chocolate and the British make better television. And apparently the Canadians host better porn. From the news of the last few years, all France is apparently good for is rioting against its own government.
The point still stands that the biggest web presence of the entire EU is hosting porn. In the column under "Type" the United States features search engines, video sharing platforms, social media, marketplaces, news, weather, software, email. Russia and China both feature news, email, social media. South Korea manages "consumer electronics" and "news." These places sound like they're trying to run a society, meanwhile Europe has the second through fifth most popular porn sites.
Globo news out of Brazil makes the list but the BBC and Reuters don't?
Also, Temu is American?
Europe's answer to that cancer? I guess not having it is the best one possible.
First, not "dumb phones", Java phones. As in phones running Java applications. Mostly very good ones. I'm not that young to not remember that time, so don't feed me this bullshit.
Second, they made a lot of other things. They were also a major contributor to QT.
They were sort of Finnish alternative to Samsung, one can say.
That's historical revisionism. It had Symbian, it had Meego and Maemo. A certain Stephen Elop became its CEO after working at Microsoft, dismantled the company and then returned to Microsoft. The company was doing fine before that certain Stephen Elop.
"Disappeared" is an interesting way to say this.
Well, they make nice lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners ... Or made. I dunno, don't have anything new Bosch.
Today - certainly, 20 years ago they were the shit. Bureaucracy replacing competition and having markets fenced from competition do bad things to companies - whodathunk.
One Fabrice Bellard weighs more than all the mentioned. And rioting against your own government does that too.
In other words, social honeypots. I'm serious. I live in Russia, don't tell me about Russian news and social media, it's a vast junkyard of half-propaganda half-schizophrenia mossy crap, and people using those for purposes for which they could mostly as well use the 90s' piece of software called Hotline. And they should, I'm serious. And US search engines, video sharing platforms, social media and such are the same.
It's all one big broken dream of humanity, broken by its passions and entertainment and laziness.
Using the same approaches to human psyche that gambling businesses use, except gambling is held in its dedicated corners of society, while this shit has spilled everywhere.
That's an indicator of a war lost if someone is trying to centrally run your society with that much success. It's death, feeding with your remains probably in the future someone who hasn't lost that battle, or someone born from the ashes.
I don't agree to ban it, since we would go stone age. But there should be incentives to use european alternatives.
How about helping businesses actually stay in Europe. It's almost impossible to scale up in europe due to insane moats everywhere.
Because people already owning shares in important companies or connections to politicians or company bureaucrats etc - they don't need to scale up. That's intended.
I swear, the humanity is stupid. I just can look at everything around me and see all kinds of socio-economic arguments to be right. All of them at the same time.
You absolutely need to scale up. I've been on several european teams who had to reincorporate under LLC just because its impossible to compete in Europe as a new business. There's just too much moat.
I agree and welcome meaningful regulation but in Europe its absolutely being used as a market moat, especially in tech. People who are defending this looking at this issue through the wrong lense of political theory crafting rather than how these tools are used in practice.
The only places in Europe that are actually growing tech now are Eastern european countries that losen up the moat to allow innovation in and dont have strong incumbents that reinforce the moat.
Yes, and that's what I mean.
Representative democracy and bureaucracies are dying, IMHO. In the age of worldwide connectivity they only lead to mafia states.
You are confusing bureaucracies with institutions. Bureaucracies are absolutely on the rise in Europe to the point where people are actively leaving. Germany in particular is notorious in IT markets where people are so fed up and leave for smaller opportunities.
Now good institutions don't need exhausting bureaucratic processes. If anything a good institution should realize the bottle neck here and work to fix it.
Also why would you tie together democracy and bureaucracies in your complaint? They're not even remotely relevant to each other.
By dying I meant exactly this. Dying in the sense of becoming useless for democratic nations.
Representative democracy.
In a hypothetical direct democracy you have the voting population, the bureaucracy and the tasks at hand. The voters make decisions, the bureaucracy does the work but has no deciding power, and in general things are not so bad. Supposedly. If the bureaucracy doesn't obey, then the solutions are different, one of them is not having a bureaucracy - filling all government worker roles by perpetual rotation of citizens, pseudo-randomly chosen from among consenting citizens (maybe with some limitations like, eh, having competencies for those roles).
In a representative democracy you have another group, representatives. Who are supposed to just integrate what their voters would do, but in fact merge with the bureaucracy to form an unholy tumor. That would happen very slowly in the olden days, and the efficiency gain from having professional bureaucracy was notable, but in the modernity with the Internet and modern computing means that'll happen even in a new representative democracy in a few years or months.
That's because the government can manipulate voters with modern tech to get the results it needs, and by it I mean the elite, and by the elite I mean people near the point in society where the bureaucracy, the representatives and the money meet.
So, now I'm going to describe a pipe dream.
If the government (meaning the representatives and the bureaucrats) has very high rotation rate, and every citizen has roughly an equal (ideally) chance of working in every role in it, then that won't happen. Voted in representatives are just not fit for this task because of arithmetic of a vote (ranked choice with positive and negative votes included, attention limitations and ballot size even if it's a webpage of 1001 variants are a thing). Sortitioned representatives are ideally fit, but in practice sortition is hard to do right, one can fake it.
But representatives are not strictly speaking necessary for voting on already suggested laws, this doesn't require qualifications, the only reason they were needed for that was because of connectivity in the old times. For discussions one can elect representatives to councils, which would then only vote on suggesting a law to be decided by all voters, for example. A council dealing with military shouldn't deal with tech, and so on, elected in parallel. Each council member can be recalled by a vote of their constituency, started by, say, collecting enough signatures for that. Since councils only have one level, Stalin's approach to coming to power in the USSR won't work through this.
Now bureaucrats and any qualified work in the government. These, yes, require qualifications, but far less than people loving authority tend to pretend. So other parallel councils (a council for such HR management for military permanent personnel wouldn't be the same as the council for suggesting laws about military) can be elected to then fill technical roles (secretaries, IT support and janitors, but also, ahem, military and such) with consenting qualified citizens. With very firm requirements for rotation, ideally calculated so that almost every citizen would have experience in a few areas of government work and politics when they turn 40.
And maybe similar separate councils for managing finances.
Ideally also the role of councils in lawmaking would be limited to optimization, so to suggest a law one wouldn't need a successful council vote, N citizens supporting it in some incubator would be enough. One could have a fallback for councils of other types the same way, enough supporters for action -> common vote.
Why I'm calling this direct democracy - well, because this doesn't give any exclusive power to representatives. This makes a lot of entities with very little power, using a significant portion of the population participating actively, thus preventing a capture of the government by interested groups.
The arithmetic of voted in representatives is still not good, but at least there's too many of them and for too many different kinds of work and with mandated rotation, so political technologies become less useful. I would also fill half the places in every council via ranked choice vote (with "plus" and "minus" votes like in social media) and half via sortition by pseudo-random selection based on combination of personal identity numbers of all consenting citizens in a constituency.
OK, too long a post. I hope it explains that I meant entrenched elites where none are intended by design.
I am old enough to remember Siemens SL45 mobile phone and Symbian but European politicians focused on killing those. If we see Big Tech in Europe it will be Social Credit System and Chinese style surveillance. Europe politics is corrupted to the ground. They say they hate corporations and take money from them after that.
European politics is far from perfect, although it is arguably better and less corrupt than in the US now. But it was not politics that killed European mobile phone industry - it was competition along with mismanagement and miscalculations of the European mobile phone manufacturers. Symbian was just a weak and clumsy platform compared to iOS and Android, it could not compete in a changing market.
lol, android and ios was as clumsy as symbian, difference was that android and ios was backed by us gov contracts for apps and phones for gov administration and that's why they could improve basically for free, where symbian got to compete without gov money. But no people don't see big gov contracts behind those "great" silicon valley companies because those articles are not main stream. There is no public money public code. Blind dumb fucks. European politics just sell gov data and tech contracts to us companies for last 10-15 years instead of backing EU companies. Keep living in lies.
Yes. Also Silicon Valley is a wrong example.
Old Nokia is a good example, Acorn, ARM of old.
Except what those people want is exactly a second Silicon Valley, just loyal to them.
you don't have to have a silicon valley
Ban might be a bit much, but we're using tariffs and taxes as a confrontational trade war measure. Might as well use them in return and funnel the proceeds into homegrown solutions that can compete legitimately.
And please hurry.
So you all are hiring soon? Lol
Breaking news: oil found in Europe.
There's plenty of oil already found in Europe.
lol
"We must ban bad thing from somewhere else so we can do bad thing here
Will not happen. Companies in EU are not underregulated.
That choice was made years ago. This is like native Americans realizing that they have to invent rifles.
Citation needed. Who has the knowledge to create social networks or neural networks in Europe? Who is going to make them popular?
Lemmy would be promoted much more if people cared about creating European data, with a neccessary debate about copy rights.
That's one part of the process. Others can buy ASML machines but only TSMC has the best processes to build the most efficient chips and yet again other companies know how to design those chips.
This is USSR playing catch-up with Western digital technology all over again. It's a bit arrogant to think that Europe can do it simply by dedicating resources to it. Those in power have ignored those who knew what was coming. How are they going to know to whom they should listen now?
I believe when preceding a vowel-prefixed noun you should use "an", sincerely an hero
Europe is an exception to the rule as are others. As a native speaker I'd never even noticed this; but An European immediately sounds wrong; just like putting 'an' instead of 'a' UFO/unit/one etc... sounds wrong.
English eh, Why would it be consistent?
Isn't it consistent though? It's pronounced "juropean", so it does not start woth a vowel-sound, which is the (consistent) rule as I've learned it. I believe this only has to do with the ease of which it is pronounced. Preceeding "an" to any vowel-sound makes the pronounciation flow better. Same with "a" before any consonant-sound.
@cyberwolfie @javiwhite but then you say "an EU diplomat", and not "a EU diplomat", right?
"An EU" follows the rule @cyberwolfie put forward.
when saying EU; the word starts with an E sound phonetically... Indicating it should be An rather than A.
I wasn't aware the rule was based on phonetics; I was one of the many under the impression that the actual lettering that is the defining article (much like OP). I think it's due to being monolingual. English being the only language I know.... a lot of the languages rules are known subconsciously.
IE: I knew it's 'a one'; rather than 'an one'... But couldn't have told you why, other than it doesn't sound right.
Edit: why was this downvoted? Is admitting you didn't know something considered bad now?
It's not so much whether the word is spelled with a vowel, but whether it makes a vowel sound.
In English, the y sound is considered a consonant when at the beginning of a word but a vowel elsewhere.
Europe makes a similar y initial sound as, e.g., yurt, young, yellow, yell, youth, etc. so in those cases the words take the "a" article instead of "an".
A yurt, a youth, a yell, etc.
Likewise Euclidian, European, Uranus, ewe, union, user, universe, unit, usage, all take the "a" article instead of "an".
And in the reverse, words like hour and heir become "an hour" and "an heir" because the initial sound is a vowel even though the first letter is a consonant.