Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.
Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.
Does changing the messaging ever cross the mind of Democrats? No, why would it? The people who vote against them are just stupid, obviously. I mean why do we even let these rubes vote?
Your argument is coming up everytime when right-wing populists gain votes, and it's always a fatal trap. Merz in Germany claimed to beat the AfD (who is loved by Bannon and Musk and was loved by Epstein btw, all "wonderful" people), and it failed he barely made it to become chancellor. It also failed in the 90s during the first wave of racism in Germany after re-unification.
What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.
If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?
Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.
Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.
The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.
Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.
To your earlier point: Boston racism is now legendary (see Celtics fan)
Well it fucking is. But thinking that current king can fix it is a lunacy
You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.
Haha, oh no no! Apparently they don't vote for those things either. I mean maybe now that they are actually made to feel the consequences of their own 2024 votes some of the Republicans have changed their minds. If they had looked into Trumps economic policies they could have learned that tariffs are paid by the consumers of the country issuing the tariffs for example. But they didn't look into it and if they had, they wouldn't have believed it and most of all they wouldn't have cared.
Because after looking at the polls I feel my thesis confirmed that in their personal cost benefit analysis these personal sacrifices are worth it because Trump does deliver on his racist and revenge policies he promised. Republicans are so racist and sexist, that they are willing to pay the price as long as the people they hate are made to suffer more than them. You can downvote me but I know it's true. The USA has a racist white culture, maybe not in the cities but in the rural areas, and it's so unhinged that more and more countries, companies and people around the world just don't want to have anything to do with the USA anymore. It disrespects European laws, with rich companies pressuring to declare economic war on Europe. The USA is not an ally anymore towards me and my country, it behaves like an enemy. And the root cause is racism and insane billionaires who think no law applies to them.
It's the Epstein class that rules the USA.
I feel sorry for the upright and sane citizens in America and I wish them the best of luck and lots of love. My country was on that insane path once and it ended in ruins not just for itself but the entirety of Europe, that's why I know they will need strength, persistence, luck and love.
And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.
The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.
People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.
It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
But you can see:
> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)
Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.
Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.
If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.
If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton
Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.
(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)
But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.
Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.
Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.
America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.
Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software.
Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree 100%! US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.
I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.
The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
pelagicAustral•1h ago
Banditoz•1h ago
muwtyhg•54m ago
jl6•33m ago
macspoofing•1h ago
clhodapp•1h ago
sigmoid10•56m ago
thewebguyd•21m ago
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
orochimaaru•9m ago
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
boringg•54m ago
soco•52m ago
- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
x0x0•23m ago
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
boringg•55m ago
PeterStuer•5m ago
tartoran•47m ago
dgxyz•34m ago
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
kenjackson•22m ago
pjmlp•16m ago
delecti•10m ago
e12e•15m ago
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
dijit•12m ago
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.