Would you be up for making recommendations?

If that were true then people wouldn't worry as much. It's because there is a fuck-you-and-the-world nationalistic theme going on and US tech companies are unable to escape — that makes people worry. No company in the world is a vehicle to pure financial rationalism, and no human or collection of humans are either.

Ahem … large US tech firms, that is.

FWIW we have had two customers (apologetically) terminate service in the past month citing nationalist concerns.

When you ask the extremists, like some of the people in these threads, to list specific concerns about specific things that the USG is currently doing that they're unaligned with, they struggle. The biggest concern is, I guess, that we've banned trans men from womens sports and removed the X option from gender forms? Look, I think its a distraction for either side to be worrying about this so much. Those actions are a very, very far distance from anything remotely resembling human rights abuse. We've been playing world police since WW2 and we're $35T in debt; we have bigger fish to fry.

If you're mad that the United States is asking your country to contribute more to its own defense; or that its no longer going to get that $50M USAID contract for gender fluidity studies or whatever; I don't know what to tell you. Growing up is hard, but necessary. Europe can't keep relying on the US for everything.

If its ending the war in Ukraine; I think judgement should be reserved until we understand the terms of how it ends. Ukraine could lose some territory. Sucks, but again, America voted and does not want to be the world police anymore. Supporting peace at the cost of Ukrainian territory is not automatically "omg Russia and US are allied". Its a sad, horrible outcome of Europe utterly failing its neighbor; but sure, they can blame the US, part of the job of being World Police is also being World Scapegoat.

Most everything else the Trump admin is doing doesn't impact Europe. Its vague generalities about "vibes". You're oversocialized, and those vibes are probably courtesy of Russian/Chinese disinformation propaganda, not reality. Its hard to hear, you aren't going to believe it, but please just log off the internet and orient yourself on what really matters in your daily life.

Here's a particular dutch pension fund that dropped their us stocks: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/dutch-pension-fund-ab...

Do you own anything made in China or have ever used oil and gas from Russia?

I bought this car six years ago paying for the FSD feature upfront, and since then Tesla and their CEO have been constantly lying about it. I’ll never buy another car from this company just for this reason.

I think Musk probably sees the writing on the wall. Tesla’s brand is destroyed in Europe and they can’t ship these promised advanced features in this market. But he doesn’t mind giving up the European market because he’s got a sweet deal at home where his businesses are now part of a 1930s-style union between corporations and authoritarian government. The gains from that arrangement far outweigh the headaches of trying to sell cars globally.

For independent indexes, Brave’s search came from a German company and Yandex certainly isn’t American.

It's a massive opportunity for European-based companies to compete. I expect a lot more funding to start materialising here as a result.

In other words, Europe's weakness and dividedness is a consequence of the soft power the US used to have. The EU has the capital (human and economic) to be a world power in principle, but never needed to.

This has all changed very suddenly. Whether Europe can rise to the challenge I don't know, but it's the first time in a very long time that there is a possibility of it happening.

I find the game theoretic view quite interesting here. Even if we interpret Trump's action in the best possible light, that he knows what he's doing and playing the madman strategy to get others to comply, the destruction of trust that this strategy causes makes it impossible in the long term to build mutually beneficial cooperative structures.

That is evidently not true. You being unhappy, doesn't make the whole world unhappy too.

Doubt it though

They will care very, very much when it bites them in terms of higher prices and loss of jobs because of decreased tech exports. Dollar hegemony has benefitted the US economy tremendously over the past few decades; money rushed _into_ US dollar denominated holdings in the 2008 crash as one big example.

Let’s stop pretending that the individuals who voted for this administration actually wanted most of what it is doing. The majority voted off of feelings and will not like the end result. There is a lot of explaining away the stupidity and I find it really annoying.

It’s not a difference of opinion that Tariffs will cause a rise in prices, no matter what the current administration says.

Max Hastings: The trauma of Trump: can we still do business with his America? - https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-trau...

FT: US tech will pay a price for Donald Trump’s approval - https://www.ft.com/content/2347e5d3-cbc2-4128-a108-bb89558e3...

FT: How Washington plans to defend the dollar - this is about Crypto - https://www.ft.com/content/bfafb8f7-bd1c-48bb-85f4-8ba25475c...

FT: Donald Trump considers tarriffs to counter Big Tech service taxes: - https://www.ft.com/content/558b5a20-c25e-483d-8fdc-bbfd2923a...

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems clear to me now, that the dependency on US tech needs to be reduced _a lot_, and I sincerely hope this current political storm will bring renewed interest in protocols and European tech

It has many links to articles with an European viewpoint.

But you have to read between the lines as EU media does not like to write "this is too crazy to be happening, what are they thinking?".

E.g. a title like "Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump". How bad do you think it has to create a EU summit solely for handling the new US relationship?

tldr: large increase in EU military and which has to be EU made. US is seen as ending "rule of law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law) and has become an unreliable partner, great loss of soft power and prestige.

Technology, services, social media... the US export A LOT to Europe. Any iPhone sold in Europe is money that goes to the US, any app sold in Europe is money that goes to the US. Any Ad seen on the web/social in Europe is money that goes to the us...

"Apple recorded sales of over 101 billion U.S. dollars in Europe during FY 2024, reaching an all-time high across the continent. " [1]

If Europe would start tariffs on those, it would be a lot of money.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/349086/apple-net-sales-i...

I think they absolutely will, yes. It will cost some money, just like spending more money on defense will, but from what I can see, no one in the European politic elite imagines a world where we can go back to buying gas from Russia.

How fast can Ukraine scrap the parts of the pipeline going through their own territory?

Even those countries that would quite like access to Russian gas, may just not have a choice in the matter.

And given we've already seen some spectacularly poor decision making by whoever fires the various missiles[0] that end up hitting multiple different nuclear reactors in the area, there's a non-zero risk of the entire border region suffering catastrophic (though likely not Chernobyl-1986 level[1]) radiation leak incidents.

This also makes it somewhat of a moot point to consider any mineral wealth besides oil, or even a return to normality for food output, at this point.

[0] Zaporizhzhia: both sides blamed the other, and irregardless of who did it, the nature of the damage says it was done by shelling; more recently Chernobyl's outer barrier was also hit.

[1] I think Russia still has some reactors with positive void coefficient in Kursk (near where Ukraine's counter-invasion was), but Ukraine itself has decommissioned all their positive void coefficient reactors.

So it's not impossible for another Chernobyl, but it's really unlikely.

US to EU gas trade is insane right now due to pricing and a 20% tariff won't change anything.

America is voluntarily stepping down from the international stage by imposing tariffs, ignoring treaties, demonizing foreigners, bowing out of powerful organizations and then saber rattling about the rise of China as the world looks elsewhere for leadership. It's clearly an intentional agitation and eventual war footing by naive self-destructive idiots.

They end up achieving the opposite of their aims. They say they're going to lower egg prices, which is caused by the H5N1 bird flu epidemic, but instead they think it's from DEI hires and defund the USDA and organizations tasked with controlling the spread of bird flu and then egg prices go up. They then think "aughh! more wokeness! it's everywhere!"

This is happening everywhere, with every bugaboo they care about. They blame it on nefarious acronyms and then dismantle the institutions trying to fix things. This is really the time to leave. Start packing the bags folks.

EU has lagged US due to systemic issues like over regulation and limited investments. See Draghi's report.

Something like 40% of the humanitarian contribution in the world came from USAID, and Thanos just fingersnapped it out of existence last Tuesday.

Until that gap is filled, there will be tons of unnecessary suffering. A "more humane" way would have been to slowly wind down over a period of months/years, giving the market time to react. Even better would have been to work with foreign powers to spin off USAID-backed initiatives and transfer control+funding responsibility to them, but I'm just a girl with a unrealistic dream at that point

Wow. So hard power -- literally killing others -- is OK, but "manipulating" them is not?

The fact is, power is power, "soft" or "hard," and we are discarding ours for nothing.

Also, alliances are not "manipulation." Working together against a common foe is not manipulation. Trade agreements are not manipulation.

I don’t know about people usage of tech.

But it’s now really clear that the US is not a reliable ally. ( not even getting into politics, just stability wise : it’s clear that a change of regime can have the country do a 180 in term of foreign policies. And it’s not a good look )

The USA has a culture of startups because there you often get financially rewarded for winning. Startups are mostly a loser's game in New Zealand (Disclosure: I'm a very minor winner at the startup game over here - I have at least some skin in the game and some practical learning).

Improving regulations would help - however governments seem to lack the skills/incentives/motivation to choose good compromises.

> receive money from people like Marc Andreessen.

Money doesn't actually have morals: the point of money is it allows all of us to choose between morally conflicting choices based on prices and our bank balance. Money is a fungible representation of limited resources. I've never met Marc, but his writing seems fairly disagreeable to me.

Part of the reason Europe is economically losing is that Europe doesn't play economics to win.

Systems have their own emergent properties and Europe seems hell bent on regulating their systems so that European countries gift control to the USA for critical things.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099056

I am a real transatlanticist - I was on the green card path (5 yrs with H1Bs), but returned to Europe for family reasons.

I don't want this split - I want to know, if people see it as an issue and I want to know the possible consequences and workarounds and how we can work together.

Meanwhile our President also keeps threatening to invade sovereign territory (Greenland) of a NATO ally (Denmark) and using language w/r/t Canada that is almost indistinguishable from how Russia talked about Ukraine a decade ago. And Canadians are fucking pissed about it.

It's very, very different than his first term or even Iraq.

This time it is diplomats that are raising the flags. It actually has not yet arrived in the public sphere as drastically as it has in the policy side.

In the first term Trump was unprepared, now they had 4 years to prepare and it seems they are very methodical in dismantling US global influence, and but also dismantling structures internally.

As far as I'm worried about security of Europe or Far East allies (Japan, SK, Taiwan, Philippines), I'm worried about future of US itself.

Europeans see this as treason, and it is.

We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)

We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?

And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.

Now we have a dim view of Americans.

There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.

And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.

Example: Using starlink as extortion of Ukraine to allow USA to colonize them to retroactively pay for support.

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-acces...

Extortion and classic colonialism and imperialism.

Ukraine has been fighting for their life the last 3 years. And now USA opportunistically join with a new front.

I wish I was kidding.

I can tell you that the media cycle and conversation here (The Netherlands) has been very much about how we can move forward without the United States. People around me have been pulling out of American social media, dropping WhatsApp (which has been the biggest chat app here for a long time), and stopped using American exports.

It's even overshadowing the German elections, which would otherwise be the biggest news topic, as the election in Europe's largest economy.

A lot of people here have lost a huge amount of trust in the US, and I don't know if it can ever really come back.