Comment by _heimdall
16 days ago
Self reliance and resilience, at least to certain pressures, would fit. I don't think many people would be willing to give up cheap electronics and only buy stuff we produce here, but those are reasonable goals even if uncommon.
Environmental concerns would actually fit the bill too, if one is willing to consider externalized costs. Its easy to ignore mining damage in other countries and all the oil burned shipping over the oceans. When that all happens at home people would more acutely feel the costs and may be more likely to fix it.
> Self reliance and resilience,
describe how a entirely domestic food chain would be more resilient than one that is global?
Self reliance is a defective meme that breaks down once you want anything other than individual survival. Dependence on a community allows humans to specialize. Humans being able to specialize is the only reason this comment, or this thread exists. More simply, not just the Internet, but modern life couldn't exist without it.
Once you acknowledge that interdependency is a reasonable trade-off for the other nice things about life. A simple infection no longer being a death sentence is a nice thing we've commoditized reasonably well. The only question is, how do you build a robust and resilient system?
EU depends on the US for many things. That was clearly a mistake, and it's now working to work out backup solutions.
Having your government depend on foreign cloud and software was always a bad idea in my opinion, but IT security is not high on the list of the people that make decisions.
Russia depended on Europe, but got wiser after 2014 and certainly after 2022. To the point of having it's own Linux distribution (which I ridiculed along with everyone, and now it turns out they were right). Geopolitics change, friends become enemies and enemies become friends. Barring a civil war, a country will never refuse to work with itself, so it's the most reliable partner possible.
You're describing problems, in fact the exact same problems that you'd have with an entirely domestic source as well. I'm asking about how it would be stronger, or better than a purely domestic source. The EU absolutely should have it's own cloud infra. Couldn't agree more. How does an exclusively domestic IT infra benefit the EU, is the question. If they had their own, and were also able to source from the US, from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, [insert other allies] they'd be faster at adapting to a change in supply.
Russia is a bad example, they're doing stupid shit, the same as the US. Hurting itself in it's confusion. But I guess it's a fair point, if you're willing to cut off your own feet, you don't need to depend on importing shoes. And it might make sense to build exclusively domestic leg stub sock factories, given the rest of the globe doesn't want to cut off it's own feet.
I wouldn't actually suggest that as something the us should strive to emulate.