If a global set of "Don't be an asshole" values could be defined, put into words, shared and progressed, it would have much greater value to a consumer and the world than merely going back to nationalism and protectionism.
I can’t speak for Russia because I have no data, but most Americans don’t carry the opinion of this government.
Almost every state is winner take all in electoral votes.
I suspect there are a lot of discouraged voters who don’t vote, because they live in states where their opinion is overrun by the political slant of the state’s majority.
In a direct popular vote, their vote counts a lot more.
It's egoism, simple as that.
Those things are naturally closer to them which then means they generate stronger emotions. Just intuitively, emotions fuel pretty much all decisions. I mean, if heroin didn’t feel good people wouldn’t do it. If fast food didn’t taste good people wouldn’t eat it. Conversely, negative emotion create patterns of behavior.
Our behavior is complex and choice is a spectrum. I don’t really choose to brush my teeth, it just kind of happens. I can stop, but I don’t. I look around me and nobody stops brushing their teeth. Perhaps brushing our teeth is so popular because it creates positive emotions. Less shame, less worries, more comfort.
I think, those in power harness this quite effectively.!
That's not what people voted for (agreeing with the government). They were given choices and to pick what they felt they preferred.
This assumes they even know what the truth is. We have discovered that a lot of people don't know how tariffs work for example.
I've seen this countless times, I'm from eastern Poland, we had our own MAGA ruling for 8 years, and eastern Poland is where most of their voters come from.
When it benefits these people - they understand enough to know what the mainstream opinion is and they don't oppose it.
When it does not support their worldview - they suddenly stop believing the experts or forget what the expert opinion is.
Ignorance is not the root cause. It's a protection mechanism.
It's fascinating to watch at first, but after 8 years of this I'm just tired.
But the US doesn’t have direct presidential elections. It has an archaic, anti-democratic system called the Electoral College, which grants land in Wyoming greater relative weight than people in Texas.
They didn't physically vote, but by not-voting, they are literally saying "I'm OK with whoever wins."
But also, people can change their minds between elections: https://eu.providencejournal.com/story/news/politics/2025/03...
Besides taking ethical actions, how do you signal that that you share a certain set of political values with your consumers and shareholders, instead of your "somewhat arbitrary" law makers. It is a big shift, and not always an option, to move physical factories, workplaces, etc.
X and Meta are most obvious, and I don't know about google's involvement, but have been trying to convince people to move away from it for years. It's a similar situation with streaming services.
Same thing with Russia. Or Syria. Or North Korea. In foreign affairs, all the citizens of a nation are collectively held responsible for the action of that state.
Which is to say: stop hedging. This is your government. You cannot wash your hands of this mess because you voted for Kodos. It's your mess, admit it, and see what you can do to fix it. The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing.
The history of "rights" is what you're looking for, and this would come in the form of a list of rights.
You would probably get a lot out of reading The Declaration of the Rights of Man (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp), as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...).
Thomas Paine wrote about the philosophy of rights as well, and you would probably get a lot out of reading his works such as The Rights of Man (https://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c1-013.htm)
Something being a right means that law does not grant it. If law granted it, it would be a privilege rather than a right. Governments exist to protect rights, but they don't grant rights. That's the solution to the bootstrapping problem for non authoritarian forms of government and why it is always OK to defend your rights, even if they are illegal under a specific form of government. America's founding document, the declaration of independence, is explicit about this idea.
> shared and progressed
No, this is where you are wrong, you didn't use the word defend, and that's really where the problem with liberal ideas starts and ends. They must be defended, at personal cost, with force.
Defending an idea that can't reward or punish you will not be as profitable or safe as defending a man who can reward or punish you. It is much easier for a man to build an army than for an idea to build an army. It will always be painful to defend your rights in the short term, but if you don't you will never have rights in the long term.
Solidarity, risking your own safety and well being for the benefit of someone else, is the only way to achieve a world you want to live in, but some of the builders of that world won't get to experience it, and that's a hard sell to people who just want to see their kids smile.
As do many Europeans...
Their taxes still support their governments and so do your purchases if you buy there.
Being a cynic, I expect the speeches to start with that then smoothly translate into "and therefore we have to spend more money on waging war in foreign countries". The US is exemplifying some of the best international values right now of trying to find a sharp end to all the meaningless dying we've been seeing for the last few years.
If it takes nationalism to make people serious about avoiding WWIII, so be it. Vote nationalist.
It's not rape if you agree to it.
I could install it from sources but I do not have any guarantee my message sent to my friend is not eye-picked by PRISM on his phone.
Open-source + marketing copy != final product
Just a regular reminder, guys.
what would you say about simplex's UX? https://simplex.chat/docs/guide/readme.html
Wikipedia says [0] it was started 10 years ago. I wonder what's the hold up?
Local circulation and tax payment does make a big and positive difference for many things (e.g., less transport for physical goods). Doesn't require the first recipient to be aligned with your values to have an effect.
It's just unfortunate that it had to be forced for stupid reasons, especially as it doesn't necessarily make sense for everything. This timeline sucks.
We accept that each European country people are equal, we agree to collaborate and not screw each others for land.
Also we in majority are against fascism,racism and discrimination though social media managed to make a portion of idiots to hate LGBTQs and wokes so they want they adopted fascist values. We as citizens we re doing our best to fight aginst this fascists groups.
And before some MAGA will calim that right wing extemists are not fascists, I remind you that supporting assassinations, deportations, killings while at the same time pretending to be Christian is fascist (at least in my country, in USA might be labeled different)
The philosophy here (as I understand it) is to list companies that operate under the EU rule of law.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543155
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39445976, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39414322, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248062
It's not necessarily the perfect end goal, but for those who are at an earlier phase of their privacy journey, GrapheneOS + Molly-FOSS is a massive improvement over stock Android + stock Signal, while maintaining a relatively minimal disruption to their ordinary workflows with e2ee messaging on an android-based smartphone.
What even are "European values"? Is there such thing? Every EU country I know has varying values to the other members, that's why we have separate borders, languages, religions, cultures and laws with autonomy over them.
The EU is not one-nation one-culture like the US, but an org that doesn't impose any kind of universal values across the different diverse members except some laws that ease trade, labor movement and cooperation and that's it, but every country, and even every citizen has wildly different things they value based on culture, economy, history, social class and upbringing.
Well, one might say that we sell weapons to dictatorships (and they would be correct), but at least on paper there are some shared values we more or less share throughout European union. Full list here: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Edit Wikipedia page as well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_values
Yes, protecting democracy and peace also includes punishing those who put at risk the existence of peace and democracy.
For the war part, it kinda tickles your butt having a war on your neighbor's garden, I see nothing wrong with supporting such a war (on Ukraine side's, of course)
Pro-tip: if your democracy doesn't support changing course on foreign policy engagements, you're not a democracy
The Romanian candidate said he had spent nothing for the campaign, but that is not true given the recent developments, and these donations were part of the decision to abort the election results
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/04/declassified-r...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_inter...
You mean just like politicians from Austria and Germany who were Putin's lobbying arm in Europe, then took jobs at Russian oil and gas companies when their political careers ended? Why didn't they get arrested too?
>Yes, protecting democracy and peace also includes punishing those who put at risk the existence of peace and democracy.
And who gets to decides who are those "violators of democracy" when they're popular with the voters? The current corrupt Romanian government with vested interest to stay in power and keep competitors away from challenging the status quo? Because in the case of Georgescu the intelligence agencies making the claims about his connections to Russia have not provided no such evidence to the public. So how do you know that their assessment is truthful? Because the government would never ever lie to you right? Right? Sorry, but "trust me bro, he's guilty" from the Romanian authorities doesn't fly with me. Otherwise JD Vance wouldn't have pointed it out if he were a Russian trojan horse.
>For the war part, it kinda tickles your butt having a war on your neighbor's garden, I see nothing wrong with supporting such a war (on Ukraine side's, of course)
I have a problem when the war gets too expensive and no progress gets made. Biden and EU kept doing this for 3 years already. We're just funneling endless taxpayer money into a black hole at this point while more Ukrainians keep dying. Ending this conflict peacefully ASAP through negotiations and concessions is the way to go. This isn't fighting Gaza or Iraq. You can't win a conflict against a nuclear superpower via conventional means.
I do not believe for an instant than the roman salute making roman candidate isn't a Russian asset, given his salute shows support for other Russian friendly politicians currently sitting at the white house.
Regarding the war, AFAIK Ukrainians would rather be in the conditions to continue fighting than to surrender and sign an unfair peace agreement. I would have no issues with rearming Europe if it meant that, as proposed, we would get a better pipeline for European weapons procurement. Having basically stopped the advance of Russia is a huge win on its own, given that it was supposed to be one of the most powerful armies in the world. Shrugging this off as "no progress" is unjust to the taxpayers as well to the Ukrainians
EU security == Ukraine security.
But would you like your president to make that decision for you? Would it be okay with it you if they asked you to sacrifice like 60% of your pay towards this cause, that too indefinitely?
With that kind of argument sewers are also clearly unconscionable, after all they cost money you didn't donate. In that hyperbolic case where the EU throws 60% of it's productivity for the war effort, Ukraine would win in 6 months. That's an absurd amount of equipment, and more importantly with that kind of money you can set up a foreign legion that would vacuum every half-decent soldier without better prospects from Ethiopia to Perú. This will not happen of course, a wartime economy is not necessary to retake the invaded territories. The "WW3 totally gonna happen guys!!!11" is also exasperating, no, nothing is gonna be nuked unless someone attacks Moscow, which also will not happen.
60% is excessive though, and would make it impossible for people to pay bills. That's detrimental for the future of Europe :)
Would you still support to fund this and make this conflict go on and on, possibly until someone becomes so desperate that they do something stupid?
Not without a discussion, of course, and I may disagree with the decision after the discussion, but on the whole I have been happy enough with the parliamentary systems where I have lived within Europe that I can say yes to this.
What would upset me and concern me to no end would be if the premiere went rogue and made these decisions unilaterally while ignoring all other branches of the government.
So what I am trying to say is that may be some people are acting from this point of view (which makes a lot of sense to me, if you are realistic), and is actually not unsympathetic to Ukraine.
I don't. Unfortunately I don't get a voice.
Also human rights, democracy, anti-corruption stuff. Now, as we've seen with Orban, Europe's mechanism for actually _enforcing_ this is basically defective.
And peace. Like, the original stated intent of the Coal and Steel Treaty (the EU's ultimate predecessor) was to prevent another European war (largely by making it economically impracticable).
And has a war broken out amongst ECSC/EU countries?
By size, they provide a lot of both European and Asian values.
How is this measured actually? By what the media and public institutions say?
Is there poll targeted at the common working man that says the same? I highly doubts so.
Of course, there are AfD and Fidesz, but they occupy the minority position even within that spectrum.
No no, that is not what is being said here. To match with it, the poll should ask if they would like someone like Trump to be their leader, not if Trump in US would be bad for their country.
Should we dig up USa stupid proposals? Or dig up actual laws like the USA laws for snooping on people that were revealed by Snowden?
A bit offtopic , is it a lw or rule that you are not allowed to call Trump a felon ? And is that constitutional?
I'm well aware, as I was involved in the effort to block it (on four separate occasions now, and undoubtedly will again).
> Should we dig up USa stupid proposals? Or dig up actual laws like the USA laws for snooping on people that were revealed by Snowden?
The topic of this thread is European values and whether Signal embodies them or not. It's hopefully obvious to anyone interested that the prioritisation of individual freedoms that Signal embodies is not reflective of current European values, given the ever increasing levels of State surveillance across the continent.
That these are also not US values, even though their populace and politicians endlessly claim they are, is not relevant to this discussion.
extreme free speech with ZERO consequences is not such a value
my initial comment was clear, but some USAians will try to add that free speech is more important then any of our values, we can disagree on that and I will keep my opinion that kissing up to fascists is a good value to have, having them in leadership role is a disaster but USA will learn it the hard way.
And let’s not forget — the actual consequences for genocide were delivered by the Americans, Brits, and Russians, not by internal bans or laws.
Reminder for USAians that in USA free speech has limits and you can also get fined for your speech. USA decided that the public needs to be protected by boobs and Europeans decided that nazis cause much more damage then boobs.
A list with very interesting tech entries (I had no idea Poland had an actual RAM/storage factory, not just distribution).
This has been the case for many years, and it isn't a judgment on either the site or the cause—it's just about the scope of this forum.
They're still pretty good products, though - as the name suggests :).
It's the other (republican) half which is in power every 4 years which makes cooperation on these issues almost impossible, and you can't just ignore the US every 4 years. We need independence, and the US needs to think about where they want to be as a nation in 20 years.
I'm American, an army vet, and proud. Yet, I fail to identify anything other than the US acting in their own self interest since WW2. The list is long, but to name a few, Vietnam, War on terror, mass surveillance network, etc...
People are waxing poetic about an America that never was.
It doesn't matter if the product is great because of those values if there is a lack product (bc politics and bureaucracy make it infeasible to produce). Makes you think if those values might contribute to the bad politics and bureaucracy. And if so, how.
A consumer product created in the Netherlands needs to be adapted to be marketed across 27 different countries, sales teams need to know how to approach each of them, manuals, UI, etc. need to be translated into the customers' languages, so on and so forth.
Is there bureaucracy? Of course, some of it is to uphold values, some might be unnecessary but it's not the main obstacle faced by European companies to grow themselves into the whole of the EU.
Imagine for a moment that each US State had its own centuries-old way of living, its own language, and history separated from the US as a nation, there would be much more friction for products to spread around the whole country, there would be much more localised versions of the same market niche, exactly what happens in Europe.
A federalisation of Europe is a slow process, it will take generations to integrate all these different cultures, streamline production pipelines to allow products to be released across many different member-states at once, etc. Ironically the US becoming more insular and adversarial might be a catalyst for European companies to do so, there will be quite a few market gaps opening up in the wake of US's influence retraction.
AWS is nice and all not unique though.
Equinix? US. Digital Realty? US. NTT? Japan. Interxion? US. CyrusOne? US. That’s your top five DC/colo operators in Europe.
Same story with Tier-1 and Tier-1.5 ISPs.
It’s not just software. It’s not even just hardware. It’s the whole stack — down to power grids, land property rights, and regulatory frameworks.
Nationalization? Multidecade supply chain reconfiguration? Trillions in investment to rebuild local capacity — likely still with deep reliance on China for core infra components.
Europe isn’t just "a bit dependent" — it’s completely entangled.
Any long-term, shared investment relies on continuous, guaranteed political and economic unity. Today it’s the US that’s hostile — but how confident can you be that tomorrow it won’t be a PiS-led Poland, or even an AfD-led Germany?
Is Europe less stable than other countries?
I went to this website because i've been looking to buy a non-chinese wireless keyboard and mouse lately. So i looked up "keyboard" in the searchbar and the first company that came up in the search results is Logitech.
And let me tell you, i spent last 2 months driving to every single tech shop and outlet imaginable(in a reasonable distance) and every single Logitech keyboard that i checked was made in china. Every single one. I'd know there were any keyboards not made in china, because i'd buy one on the spot, and i didn't.
I don't understand what's the purpose of this website then. What european values are bing spoken of here? Outsorcing everything to cheap chinese labour? Is this website a SEO backend? Some elaborate corpo prank?
Someone please explain.
My problem with cookie banners isn't their mere existence, but that the scum if the earth make it almost impossible to reject data collection.
"The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities."[1]
And finally, in which way do non-European companies, for example Amazon, violate those values?
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I guess they must follow the EU laws.
Amazon makes their warehouse workers pee in bottles, much respect for dignity there. Oh wait I hear that happens in Non-EU Britain, so that's not a problem! /s
Do you think the population supports that or there an inevitable lag between real-world actions and political responses?
https://www.independants-senat.fr/post/claude-malhuret-situa...
Europeans are much, much more culturally segregated than people from outside Europe seem to think.
EDIT: whoops, either I'm blind or some JS blocking hid it from my eyes...
In terms of plain HTML, all you have is:
"<title>Buy European Made</title>"
And all the meta tags for social media:
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Buy European Made">
<meta property="twitter:title" content="Buy European Made">
<meta property="og:title" content="Buy European Made">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Buy European Made">
US products are great. But suddenly they look just as risky as Chinese offerings for any critical infrastructure.
lol whats with you and personal insults. maybe step away from the screen, take a breather, drink some tea or something.
In the situation we are in currently? It's almost impossible unfortunately due to our political leaders.
Tech is directly affected by policy. Hell, any mention of OSS is eminently political by definition.
The imminent trade wars that the current US administration is set to start will dramatically affect the tech sector. Discussion of region-based alternatives are not only relevant, but important in the current moment.
We can't avoid politics in any sphere of life, that's what makes it so important.
> I think we're all better than that, and we know the tech scene thrives through collaboration, not isolationism.
And there you go, it doesn't matter what we know because the US government is going over our heads and taking isolationist measures. Even when we're "better than that" the reality is that our lives are shaped by the world around us as much as by our own initiatives.
Imagine if East Germany's state security service have the surveillance tech of China. Aha oops, I guess you don't need to imagine, you just have to look at China.
We need to accept this fact as an industry and take responsibility for our work. Whether it's tracking people online, facial recognition at protests, aggregate cellular data used to deanonymize or etc, all of this software was built by people and claiming it's just a tool with no harm no foul is trying to shed responsibility we should bear.
At some point "politics" becomes real and life changing, and ignoring it just becomes naive and spineless.
Since when has the hypercapitalist Silicon Valley ever avoided politics?
Catalogs like this can be a good discovery that some company like this even exist.
How many are hosted on AWS, Google or Microsoft? How many are using Windows or macOS? How many use nvidia, etc.
It's all American below AWS/GCP abstractions as well.
"EU Committee on Kubernetes."
By the way, that's exactly what China and Russia did — no AWS, GCP, or Azure there.
Then there is France and the revolution in 1789 which (outside the US) is considered a big thing.
[x]: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands; Norway's also a monarchy but not an EU member state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtLxYde-rw
Quote: "Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other. Norwegians believe in God, Allah, the Universe, and Nothing."
The truth is, a monarch with significant ambition could, if the right situation arises or is engineered, convince the populace that their exercise of power is necessary to save the country.
I mean, traditionally, doing so is bad for his majesty's health; see Charles II in particular, but also to a large extent Edward VIII (the divorcee thing was a handy excuse, but a big part of the reason that the government was so keen to fire him was that he was seen as high-risk for misbehaviour).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_7_of_the_Treaty_on_Eur...
I live in the EU and I often see this cult of people deliberately buying worse things just because it's European. Yet there are many areas where a European alternative is worse than the imported one. I'd say support quality and innovation, not nationality.
Better products == better sales. After all, we live in a capitalist world.
Is it, or is this a strawman?
1) tariffs / trade wars and
2) The big tech's total and swift capitulation to Donal and Elon. They have shown themselves to be totally spineless and pathetic. Why is that a risk? Donald is erratic. What if you prime minister piss off Trump in some way, and he orders US companies to pause business with your country? What happens to you AWS? Or your Google account? Or even Office?
2) might seem far-fetched to you, but there's a million ways this could happen. Cutting off all support to Ukraine seemed far-fetched to me at least, just a few months ago :(
# Low hanging fruit:
- Food and clothes, like Coca Cola, Snickers, Nike, Levis, The North Face etc
- Mondelez. This is hard because they own so much. But obvious things like Oreo and Corn Flakes are easy.
- Social Media I rarely use. For me this was Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, X, Bluesky and Messenger.
# Harder to ditch
- Facebook. Family :(
- Microsoft; Windows, VSCode, MS Teams, GitHub
- Google; Gmail is my primary for 15+ years, gDrive, gCalendar, google.com
- Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure.
- Streaming: YouTube, NetFlix, HBO and Disney+. This will be difficult.
- LLM, Claude and OpenAI-things
- Steam
- Discord
- My Tesla model Y.
# Impossible
- Smart Phone OS: Google Android or Apple iPhone/iOS
- Intel / AMD, hardware in general is difficult
So, this is all work in progress, but I keep this document in my Google Drive (gah!) and I'm adding more stuff every day and trying to shift my habbits.
PS: Did you mean Mondelez? The only thing I ever bought on their list of brands[0] is 'Lu', but I will make sure I don't anymore ;-)
Tesla is directly supporting Elon, and IMO much worse than, say, Netflix. Also probably more risky, as Elon is probably more pilled that the CEO of Netflix and Google
There are plenty of fascists and mean-minded frightened little people here in Europe, just as the body of US America remains founded on liberty.
Trump and the Republican Party wants to get rid of the Entire New Deal legislation and return the US back to a regulatory structure that existed in the Pre Sherman Antitrust Act(1890) days in America when the Robber Baron controlled Crony Capitalistic Trusts had free reign and the US Economy was effectively cornered by the Robber Baron Trusts and hardly free market at all!
The Social Democracies need look at the US as not sharing the same values as the Social Democracies in the world and those Social Democracies should have been taking measures since 1980 to reduce any dependency on the US economically!
The US Should be Actively Labeled a Crony Capitalist Country and one that is Oligarch Dominated and not really a Free Market Capitalistic country!
And Trump/Crony Capitalists are actively trying to destabilize the Canadian economy as well as the economies of Mexico and South America!
Basically we did that already. But the preferred wording is "Don't rely on the USA because they are no longer trustworty."
You mean they were always capable of doing it but choose to fleece USA instead ? Ironically proving trump right.
I am not sure if you are naive or just plain dumb.
To be frank, I love that the US decided to sacrifice its own power, forcing Europe to prop up its own defense industry instead of giving money to the US so it would strengthen itself first and foremost
can you stay on topic and not resort to personal insults.
And you might not be aware, but the EU just announced a hefty package to rearm itself. I wouldn't be surprised if in the comings months the US is out of NATO and those US bases in Europe are shut down.
And it is not really an insult, I still wonder if you are naive or dumb. I am friends with some very dumb people, it's not a character fault.
That is, until the eastern-european countries realize who they're more aligned to culturally at this point, and start leaving one by one.
Do they count on your protection and support (or you,on theirs)?
Do you tell them to just stop begging for your help and protection and ask what have they actually done for you?
I hope nothing. We will try to annoy the US as much as possible.