> what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?
The problem here is, what if the demand for dollars increases?
In principle the US would get more gold and mint more currency, but gold is a finite resource. "All the gold ever mined" is around 200,000 metric tons, ~32k troy ounces per metric ton is ~6.4B troy ounces.
In 2022 (just before the recent gold rally) the price was ~$2000 per troy ounce, i.e. "all the gold" was worth ~$13T. Meanwhile the M3 money supply in the same year was ~$20T. What happens if you try to buy $20T worth of gold to mint currency when only $13T worth has ever been mined, and not all of that is even on the market? The answer is that you can't, so instead the result is deflation, which is bad.
Or to put it a different way, what do you think the economic effect of the recent gold rally would be for a country whose currency was still pegged to gold? It just got way cheaper to import foreign products than buy domestic ones, and way more expensive for foreign countries to buy your exports, so how's the unemployment rate looking? The amount everyone owes on their mortgage hasn't changed but the nominal value of their houses just got cut in half so now they've lost their jobs and are underwater. What happens when they start to default and foreclosures don't allow the banks to recover the principal?
The primary function of money is its trade value, to "lubricate" the real economy to let goods and services flow. When the value is unstable, people are inclined to not spend or not accept that currency, which contradicts the free flow of it and in severe cases harms the economy.
Crypto'currencies' have the same problem. By nature, they are no currency but investment for which instability is required. No crypto bro would hype their 'currency' because there would be no pumping. Arbitrage trades are considered being for fools or insiders.
Programs adding entries to the hosts file is still pretty normal, e.g. if something that uses a local webserver as its UI and wants you to be able to access it by name even if you don't have an internet connection or may be stuck behind a DNS server that mangles entries in the public DNS that resolve to localhost.
Programs like that should just be shipped with good documentation. And applications built to be used by normies should almost certainly never be built that way in the first place.
That seems like a pretty reasonable way to write a small cross-platform application which is intended to be a background service to begin with. You only have to create the UI once without needing to link in a heavy cross-platform UI framework and can then just put an HTTP shortcut to the local name in the start menu or equivalent. Normies can easily figure that out specifically because you're not telling them to read documentation to manually edit their hosts file.
There are also other reasons to do it, like if you want a device on the local network to be accessible via HTTPS. Getting the certificate these days is pretty easy (have the device generate a random hostname for itself and get a real certificate by having the developer's servers do a DNS challenge for that hostname under one of the developer's public domain names), but now you need the local client device to resolve the name to the LAN IP address even if the local DNS refuses to resolve to those addresses or you don't want the LAN IP leaked into the public DNS.
Or the app being installed is some kind of VPN that only provides access to a fixed set of devices and then you want some names to resolve to those VPN addresses, which the app can update if you change the VPN configuration.
> If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.
There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.
However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.
Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.
Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.
There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs.
And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.
why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece.
if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.
(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)
think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.
some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?
The physical cable that goes to every house is a natural monopoly. Really it's even more like the conduit the cable is installed in. Doing that part more than once is both fairly inefficient and tends to market failure.
The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.
Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:
Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.
Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.
im saying we shouldnt give them subsidies at all. if they cant make it work in the marketplace, if they arent up to the task, then the competitive marketplace is a failure in that instance. and thats ok.
no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.
its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.
a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.
1) You can have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, but then anyone can route around censorship because you don't know if they're discussing geopolitics or distributing DeCSS.
2) You can't have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, which is >99% of all connections because even different cities have different laws, which is an Orwellian panopticon and the destruction of all privacy.
I'm going to have to insist we stick with the first one.
I am fine with encryption, but there should be a legal process that can stop the violation of laws such as by disconnecting nodes that violate laws or preventing linking to nodes that violate laws.
I think you're missing the concept here that laws change as a packet travels from one switch to another, not to mention what happens after they go under the ocean.
Are you prepared to be held accountable for breaking the laws of repressed countries that sentence people to death for leaving a religion or insulting authority?
I assume not, but then it's an arbitrary game of whos laws and when. The only logical continuation would be if we had a standard of law worldwide, but that's a separate problem in itself and not anywhere near reality today.
Suppose there is a shared server outside your jurisdiction which is hosting a wide variety of content none of which is a violation of the law in their jurisdiction, but 2% of the content is a violation of the law in your jurisdiction. Or isn't hosting any content at all but also isn't a jurisdiction that does the same censorship as yours and then people can use the connection as a VPN.
If people in your jurisdiction can make a secure connection to it, e.g. to get the 98% of the content they have which is lawful in your jurisdiction, then they can also get the content you were trying to ban because you can't tell which one they're doing. Preventing this is all or nothing: Either they can connect to the server that isn't subject to your laws, or they can't. And the latter is heinous and tyrannical.
> It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.
Is it? Isn't Section 512 the takedown section that applies to infringing works (e.g. notices require "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed", 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)) and Section 1201 the separate anti-circumvention section which has government-imposed criminal penalties but no private takedown provision?
> The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows).
Copyright (e.g. over iOS) and patent (e.g. over iPhone hardware) are explicitly government-granted monopolies. Having that monopoly is allowed on purpose, but that isn't the same as it not existing, and having a government-granted monopoly and leveraging into another market are two quite distinct things.
> Compare the games console market.
Okay, all of the consoles that require you to sell you to sell through their stores shouldn't be able to do that either.
> but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
Wait, your theory is that a console with ~50% market share has market dominance but Apple with ~60% of US phones doesn't?
There’s no such thing as “having a monopoly on iPhone” in law. You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market. It is not a monopoly in the smartphone market, to the best of my knowledge.
> You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market.
Products and markets are not a one to one mapping. For example, if you sell low-background steel, that's part of the broader "steel" market because anyone who needs ordinary steel could buy it from you and use it for the same purposes as ordinary steel. But low-background steel is also its own market, because the people who need that can't use ordinary steel. Likewise for sellers of products with higher purity levels, products that satisfy particular standards or regulatory requirements, etc. It's only the same market if it's the same thing. Clorox bleach is the same as other bleach; Microsoft Windows is not the same as MacOS.
And iOS is not the same as Android. I mean this really isn't that hard: Are they substitutes for each other? If you have a GE washing machine, can you use any brand of bleach? You can, so they're in the same market. If you have an app that exists for iOS and not Android, can you use an Android device? No, so they're not in the same market. Likewise, if you've written a mobile app and need to distribute it to your customers who have iOS devices, can you use Google Play? Again no, which is what makes them different markets. They're not substitutes, any more than a retailer in Texas is a substitute for a retailer in California when you have customers in both states -- or only have customers in California.
> It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
You seem to be ignoring the part where you can't install the Chome and/or Firefox browser engines on iOS and the apps with those names on that platform are just skins over Safari. Notice in particular that the iOS version of "Firefox" can't support extensions.
> Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS.
> Go ahead, I'll wait.
You can't get even macOS from the store without Safari, which is the thing Microsoft was doing, but what Apple does on iOS is far worse than what Microsoft was doing and talking about only macOS is kind of burying the lede.
For MacOS this is just as dumb of an argument as it was for Windows. The web engine is used to render system dialogs. You can easily choose a doffeeent browser on Macs. Chrome has quite a large market share on Macs
What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
The argument for Windows is that you pay for Windows, and used to pay for Netscape Navigator, but now you have to get Internet Explorer if you want Windows. You can't say that you want to pay e.g. $160 for Windows without Internet Explorer and then $40 for Netscape, your only option is to pay $200 for Windows + Internet Explorer. It's tying. It's not really about whether you can remove it, it's about whether you can not pay for it when you don't want it. Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
The inability to remove it is just the dodge Microsoft attempted to use to claim that they're inseparably the same product, and was clearly a load of self-serving nonsense. Operating systems had system dialogs before there was any such things as browser engines.
The dynamic looks weird from the frame of reference of the modern browser market because the answer the market found to Microsoft's tying was to "pay for" the browser by allowing the vendor to choose the default search engine. No surprise then that the browser that ultimately supplanted Microsoft's was the one from the biggest search engine company. But that workaround came with negative consequences, e.g. Google now crippling ad blockers in Chrome.
And the tying problem is still there even if markets with low marginal costs are often weird. Okay, so the way we pay for browsers now is by letting the vendor choose the default search engine, but now we have Google paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine in Safari, and Apple quashing Firefox ad blockers on iOS, instead of that money going to Mozilla or Ladybird or anyone else who has to compete by making a better browser instead of "competing" by tying use of their browser to an operating system, with correspondingly fewer resources and market share for competing alternatives.
> What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
Making Asahi Linux get there by full reverse engineering actually is kind of a dick move? Intel publishes hardware documentation.
And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
And that argument is dumb in 2026. What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
> Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
Were you around back then? Absolutely no one paid for Netscape even before IE. And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Netscape was trying to make money selling web servers also. Should Linux and Windows not come with web servers? Should Apache not have been free?
People seem to forget that Netscape sucked around the time IE came out. It was so crash prone on every operating system it ran on that people use to brag on .advocacy groups about how good their operating systems were by how well they handled Navigator crashes.
And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
> And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles. Apple doesn’t sell operating system, Apple sells computer products. What do you think should happen? Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers? Force Apple to sell Macs without operating systems? Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
Are you suggesting that iOS shouldn’t come with a browser? Should ChromeOS also not come with a browser?
Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
> What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
> And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows 95. The Netscape release before they attempted to rewrite was released in 1997. The rewrite was a failed attempt to make their browser good enough that people would pay for it when Microsoft was already bundling IE with Windows.
> And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
Indeed, Microsoft successfully paid off the Bush administration to settle the case for a slap on the wrist after they'd already been found guilty by the court.
> This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
Ford will happily sell you a motor without an entire car, or a frame or any other part of the car without a motor. Nintendo is forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
> Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers?
This makes it sound like it's someone making Apple do something instead of Apple making someone do something.
What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
> Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
60% of phones in the US are iOS.
> Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
The Firefox ad blockers are extensions, e.g. uBlock isn't from Mozilla, but the ability to use it is a reason to use Firefox. The iOS browsers can't use extensions. Then you can't use uBlock on iOS and fewer people use Firefox.
> Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS
Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
> yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
Chrome is made by the largest advertising company in the world. For years if you opened google.com, gmail or their other services in a non-Chrome browser you would get a huge banner imploring you to install Chrome. This was a successful strategy to overcome the inertia of the default browser on desktop operating systems, but Mozilla never had anything like that available to them, and then the two-front assault from Microsoft/Apple on one side and Google on the other resulted in declining Firefox market share and correspondingly declining revenue with which to improve it.
Mozilla the organization also suffers from significant mismanagement, but that doesn't explain why no one has been able to establish a popular fork or new independent browser, whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
> How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one,
PC vendors have been and do ship any type of crapware they want on their computers.
> or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc. browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
And when they had that choice in Europe - they mostly still chose Chrome…
> Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
And those people can still download Firefox on iOS or Android and sync bookmarks.
In fact Firefox and Chrome Windows users can sync their bookmarks to iOS Safari using extension written and supported by Apple.
> What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
Is that really a reasonable argument when Samsung doesn’t even support its own hardware with drivers for more than a couple of years?
> whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
Just maybe Firefox - which is free to compete with Google on desktop computers just doesn’t make a compelling case for why no one wants it?
This feels like arguing that people wouldn't object to having a shock collar padlocked around their neck because it's not currently shocking them. You don't have to see very many moves ahead to guess what happens if you don't object.
Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.
So cementing a dependency on paperclip-optimizing foreign megacorps to intermediate all your purchases and communications doesn't allow them to influence your behavior?
So getting shadow banned into a depression spiral that causes you to commit suicide because you think everyone in the world is ignoring you, or locking the account that all your other accounts at all other companies and even government services are tied to with no recourse, or constantly spying on everything you do with all of the corresponding chilling effects... is your point that it's actually worse than a shock collar?
If you live in Europe you should care for the EU: not only it's the reason why there hasn't been a war for 80+ years, but if we can have a voice on the international stage it's because we are united instead of 27 small independent countries.
US dependency did bring a lot of value to a lot (albeit not all) of Europeans in past, specifically 1938-1988.
If you were born, raised and lived in that timespan, you might have developed a deep seated and hard to break habit to rely on that dependency for security and lifestyle/wealth.
Also, that same lifestyle is based on ignoring externalities applied to commons and/or events happening “somewhere else”, even when factually proven.
Little wonder and tiny bit ironic that the same principle has embedded itself so deeply, that it holds true even when the damage is inward, just a few indirections away.
On your side, yes, I think that “people in Europe” intuitively understand that, it just needs time to blossom.
The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.
As a point in case, it will lead to reconsidering assumptions on habits that many generations of US businesses and diplomats have built.
Many in this thread point at difference instances of services that should be decoupled.
Connecting the dots, the larger picture looks painfully obvious to me: Silicon Valley never was a partner to be trusted, and certainly not after they built or bent every business to rely on an ad ecosystem that exploits users.
That original sin, on which a huge portion of Wall Street rests, is now at the center of discussions.
Hence, the EU will build tools to address this because it has to, but consumers will flock to them especially from the US, since at this point no one can trust SV companies on data privacy (since Snowdens at least), no one can trust the US administration to protect citizens (since Trump at least), and about half of the US is scared about what’s going on deeply enough (the emotional push needed to break the habit).
They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This will be compounded by the fact that everyone tries to build better LLMs and to get AGI, while forgetting that LLMs work on data pipelines.
> The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.
This barely even seems like the relevant part. If Google was founded in Japan and Apple in Brazil, it would still be foolish to entrench them as a dependency. It would barely even be better to do it with a local company.
> They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This feels like hopium. Network effects are powerful and as long as the internet is actually global, there are really only two options: 1) Centralized megacorps, and then the US ones have both the US apparatus behind them and the incumbency advantage, or 2) open protocols where no corporation of any nation is a gatekeeper.
So for Europeans to get the hooks of the US incumbents out of them, their best chance by far is the second one, and that one is also mostly to the advantage of the Americans who aren't the existing incumbents, which is why it works. Start making phones with open hardware and social networks with open protocols and you can get people outside of your own country to use them because they don't much like the incumbents either, and that's how you reclaim the network effect. Try to clone the US megacorps without the US apparatus to get them established in other countries and they don't because they're wary of foreign central control, which in turn means you don't get the network effect and you lose.
But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
Relying on open protocols to make all the difference is much more potent hopium than what GP wrote.
Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally.
> It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
But why is it about that? Why isn't it about e.g. governments in Europe funding the development of Linux virtualization so that it's simple to buy some hardware, put it in the back office and have an interface to it which is as easy for people to use as the incumbent cloud providers?
The vast majority of companies don't need "flexible scalability" etc. They have modest and finite loads and only ended up "in the cloud" because for ten seconds it seemed like having 100 VMs in the cloud was going to be a lot cheaper than having 100 physical servers, until it turns out that you can put those 100 VMs on two physical servers in your own possession and it costs less to do that than the cloud providers charge and then you keep control of your data and infrastructure.
> everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
This is pretty wrong. Hardware companies sell hardware. A lot of them will try to lock you into their shitty software if you let them, but that is neither required nor desired. And some of the better ones don't, e.g. there isn't that much lock-in happening with AMD or Intel servers. We just need that to be happening for phones. And smart hardware companies can fully understand "commoditize your complement" as being in their own interest while still making a profit selling the hardware that isn't locked to any particular software.
> It makes no sense to try and fight this here
It's not clear what you're even suggesting.
Suppose you want Europeans to have access to a phone platform that isn't controlled by an American megacorp.
If they release a domestic proprietary one then other countries won't want any part of it. They don't want to be under the heel of a European megacorp any more than an American one, and indeed many will be suspicious of it and actively try to thwart adoption. And then you lose the network effect and can't get traction.
Whereas if you do something like require phone hardware to allow the user to replace the OS, and then fund development of open source phone operating systems and make sure they're required to be supported within your jurisdiction, then they can easily spread outside of your jurisdiction because people aren't nearly as suspicious and oppositional to something where you've precommitted to not putting people on the enshittification treadmill. And then everybody gets out from under the thumb of those corporations.
great counterpoint! (no i'm not an LLM, it is a actually a crucial perspective)
i especially agree with
> But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world"
there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from
* other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this.
I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks"
* in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor)
The other one being content creators.
Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world"
Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available.
Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message.
* EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens.
Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par.
The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system.
Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay).
Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users.
* A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative.
You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that.
There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip.
But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now.
I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements
"We are more innovative than SV"
"We have better freedoms than the US"
> But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
100%
i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short
i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said
my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data)
the legislation is there, since GDPR
it's a matter of tools
since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it")
but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players)
it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back
now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it)
this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open
for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection)
I believe the idea is that friction and resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. After a certain speed, every 10 mph extra starts to really count in your mileage.
The idea is that some green ideologists think that when they don't need to drive a car because they don't leave their city, no one needs to drive a car. Because car driving creates CO2 which means car driving is bad. And they search for ways to implement that or make driving a car as bad as possible. Because they can't make the Deutsche Bahn better, they have to make driving your own car worse.
Because that doesn't play to Germany's industrial and economic strengths (precision machining, metallurgy, basically the whole ICE automobile supply chain).
EVs are just mechanically much simpler, with a shorter BOM that largely centers around Asian (particularly Chinese) battery, REE, and semiconductor supply chains, so hundreds of thousands of good jobs that supported Germany's industrial model are now economically obsolete.
That's the Kodak business model: New thing arrives that will disrupt the old thing, so don't build it. Problem is then someone else will build it anyway and instead of losing 2 jobs making ICE cars and getting 1.5 jobs making batteries and solar panels, you just lose the 2 jobs and get nothing, which is how Kodak went bankrupt.
The problem here is, what if the demand for dollars increases?
In principle the US would get more gold and mint more currency, but gold is a finite resource. "All the gold ever mined" is around 200,000 metric tons, ~32k troy ounces per metric ton is ~6.4B troy ounces.
In 2022 (just before the recent gold rally) the price was ~$2000 per troy ounce, i.e. "all the gold" was worth ~$13T. Meanwhile the M3 money supply in the same year was ~$20T. What happens if you try to buy $20T worth of gold to mint currency when only $13T worth has ever been mined, and not all of that is even on the market? The answer is that you can't, so instead the result is deflation, which is bad.
Or to put it a different way, what do you think the economic effect of the recent gold rally would be for a country whose currency was still pegged to gold? It just got way cheaper to import foreign products than buy domestic ones, and way more expensive for foreign countries to buy your exports, so how's the unemployment rate looking? The amount everyone owes on their mortgage hasn't changed but the nominal value of their houses just got cut in half so now they've lost their jobs and are underwater. What happens when they start to default and foreclosures don't allow the banks to recover the principal?
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