If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content.
Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you:
"yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they do not cooperate."
We talk about the country (France!) which already requires you to give your ID card or take a selfie of your face to be permitted to look at porn sites.
In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
(and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up.
Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate.
The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.
Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).
Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).
You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?
Any company opting for building digital sovereign systems should build a redundant and decentralized organization so that in worst case the company can split up its operations geographically to avoid being in the crosshairs of any host countries government.
Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new company:
"Storm" -> "the European end to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"
Now, an US court, requests data from that project to protect an imminent attack where people are going to die.
He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?
Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
It's not the first time something important is built in a garage:
for example, the Apollo 11 lander; a lot of people were thinking it was made from aluminum folio and cardboard in a garage, but actually it was kapton folio and professional-grade cardboard.
One employee as a stocker/chef can support higher throughput in automat style than in counter style fast food service because you have a much more focused task (put food in empty cubby, repeat) than the normal process of "Take order, take money, get order, give customer, deal with mistakes"
They can have an entire wall full of panels for the same item, so that purchases are heavily parallelized. There's usually only a single digit number of items available.
Automats seemingly died because inflation made it hard to accept payment, but that has been a solved problem in vending machines since then.
Japan and some other places still do a lot of vending machine food, but the specific "Wall of items" Automat format enables great logistics that you don't get from vending machines. Weirder still, there are places in asia I have seen that have a AutomatWall style setup, but cook food to order, so you end up waiting!
You can't use an Automat for beer though, without some sort of external system to only allow use by "adults". But surely that's true of a vision system?
I've been FASCINATED by Automats ever since I watched Bugs Bunny as a child. The idea that you could just walk up, look at what looked good, and buy it seemed indescribably awesome.
Do you have any actual evidence that these types of services are being offered for that type of price point, though?
The reason I'm asking is that I actually believe the price point is much lower. It's probably much easier to get on the front page of HN of you time the submission + upvotes well enough.
Like Apple, SpaceX or Tesla.
(though I suspect that Apple hired some MBAs to work on Liquid Ass)
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