jesus fucking christ, £60 per month is beyond insane for a neoliberal magazine
when did this price hike happen? i thought most journals were about $5 monthly, 60 is absurd
Europe does have ASML, which creates a lot of the expensive and critical equipment for advanced semiconductor fabrication. That’s about it, though.
yeah ASML is probably the one piece of high tech that Europe has right now that’s a critical technology.
What alternatives?
Oh, hey maybe if they ask nicely Russia will let them use VK.
VK
Or just give rednote and Weibo a try.
Yeah but those aren’t European. The topic was European alternatives, and i’d say Russia is sufficiently European to qualify. The EU is gonna disagree of course because they’re racist POS, but as they say, “fuck the EU”.
Forgot to say Mastodon is European.
Jokes aside though, the only realistic path Europe has here is to start massively funding open source platforms. I read there’s a bit of that happening, but really it should be done on a far bigger scale. Stuff like Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, or even Odysee, can easily become as good as any commercial offering with even modest state backing. Meanwhile, stuff like NextCloud can completely replace Google services. LineageOS could be developed as a standard mobile operating system, and so on. It wouldn’t even be that hard to do because a lot of these projects are already fairly mature and proven. Imagine if the EU spent a fraction of the money burned on Ukraine doing this stuff for the past three years.
No chance in hell with how EU is basically corpos in a trenchcoat and most of them are either US or walking in US leash.
Yeah, I can’t see it happening either. It’s just sad that it’s right there and it would be one unambiguously good thing the EU could do.
Imagine if the EU spent a fraction of the money burned on Ukraine doing this stuff for the past three years.
It’s a good idea but I think the EU would still be faced with Trump tariffs reducing their competitive edge in their big export market. They already are struggling with rapid deindustrialization due to high energy costs. It all spells long recession.
I don’t see Twitter, Google etc pulling out of the EU any time but I guess it’s possible.
The EU are just going to fold. Their retaliation is not meaningful. They are economically weak.
The trade surplus they had with America is eventually going to be invested back into the US to restore their manufacturing. They’re going to just pray it all turns a profit. It kills their own manufacturing jobs but they don’t give a shit really. The capitalists survive and that’s all they care about.
The only hope Europe has of breaking its subservience to the US is to not just make nice with Russia, but to totally embrace it. That is not likely to happen anytime soon, so Europe is just going to be America’s punching bag until they get it.
Honestly the EU could do a lot of stuff if they had their own interests in mind.
They could sell EUV lithography machines to China while there’s still a market for it.
They could invest in building their renewables even quicker so their energy costs can come down and they can afford to manufacture stuff in the future.
I think they won’t do that though. Warms my heart to see Europe go down the drain due to their own subjugation to America. Screw them for their geopolitical shenanigans.
First Russia then that gives us China. But we will never.
True. Though i’m a bit wary of some of these alternative platforms as well. Like i think i just read something about some top guy at Rumble becoming the new deputy director of the CIA? That doesn’t happen unless they were already deep in the intelligence apparatus, which makes you think…how many alternative platforms are similarly infiltrated?
Rumble isn’t open source though as far as I know. It’s just an alternative to youtube that’s run by US right wingers.
Odysee is open source and decentralized. Journalists who expose U.S. Government wrongdoings should use it.
yeah it’s a really solid platform I find, doesn’t get enough attention
