Comment by rambojohnson
18 hours ago
Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.
Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.
Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations.
For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.
There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding.
The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy.
With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even has an industrial strategy.
Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU politicians owned shares of US tech companies.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money; about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term be
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
So it’s like Europe is ungoogling itself from the US?
> my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
> to a declining, unstable empire
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet.
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]
China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.
[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
It's about time that Europe take independence seriously.
I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.
That's extremely condescending and naive. I'd say Europe citizen are in much better situation than the usa citizens, don't care about tech sector or shareholder revenue.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.
> Usa still don't even have universal social security
It does though. There are several programs, some administered by the federal government, and some by the states. We don't have "single payer" but we absolutely have "universal social security."
> and medications are overpriced 10 time more.
If you use the sticker price. Sure. It looks that way. If you use the actual pharmacy receipts the story is far different.
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