Comment by kioku a day ago
> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play.
The woes of LLM contrasts…
In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.
Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
> Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure is already present in China's internet, and just like any cloud provider present in China it's presence is a partnership with local cloud providers.
Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid of Boeing and Airbus.
The most interesting part is that they do not rely on Western software solutions (Russia still needs hardware, China may reach full autonomy soon enough). If they could do it relatively quickly, EU can do it too. And EU now has exactly the same incentives.
While they ditch Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle: we still use Linux, Sel4, ASML and ARM.
There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.
Linus Torvalds is very pro–corporate, pro–tivoization, he thinks GPL3 was a terrible mistake.
All of the things OP mentioned are non-US tech. I think the OP was speaking from a US perspective, though it’s not clear.
True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.
> The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different
Much worse for the EU, both strategically and economically. You’ll be able to buy Chinese services and give them your data and money, but you won’t be able to operate in their market. Germany is feeling the pain there. [1] Strategically they’re a Russian ally and are actively supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine and further aims against the EU.
Something like Russia -> China -> US as worst to least worst partners.
The EU should invest in technical and military capabilities and divest from reliance on other countries and echos the US American position very closely.
[1] For example https://www.autoblog.com/features/germanys-auto-industry-is-...
Are you asking a rhetorical question or making a statement?
I’m not sure he’s getting it yet. Maybe he’s just not personally affected yet.
Was that not an imperative statement agreeing with your cathartic comment? A little weird there isn't an explicit "this is why", but asking questions with a poorly conjugated why along with bad punctuation isn't usually a native speakers habit.
> why Europe should start treating us like Russians
Because your CEOs have become power players in your politics and that’s generally a Russian/Oligarch thing.
Like Apple trying to wiggle their way out of the DMA and when their bs arguments fail in court they send peach daddy with tariffs and what not.
The massive sanctions he's placing on Russian oil make that impossible to believe.
Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.
So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?
If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way
The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.
> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
> isolationism is a death sentence
The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
Well said.
One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.
> I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.
Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but there are also the recent treasonous talks between representatives from the Trump administration and the Alberta separatists.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alberta-separatism-9.70...
Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for Putin.
> like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics
That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.
The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).
> The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.
If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.
If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.
The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.
Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.
If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.
That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.
Self hosted ms installations have no instant kill switch, only a slow one.
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.
The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.
My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.
Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.
I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.
This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).
It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.
We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.
We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)
> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.
Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.
> more international lawyers
I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.
> isolationism is a death sentence.
The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.
Didn't the rest of the world form their own WTO without the USA in it?
Which seems completely pointless if they don't also revoke the USA's "Most favoured nation" status.
>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"
I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.
As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
Yeah, human brain is amazing. After I reading many AI replies, this kind style just stands out, even though I can't precisely describe it.