Arianespace has been for decades an extension of the French government, which needed at max several launches per year and didn't give a damn about its market share. As a result, it is seriously behind in reusable rocket development. The space port in Kourou may be the most underused space port in the world, even though its location is unbeatable.
I am not sure if this gap can be closed. Maybe some of the smaller startups like Isar Aerospace can do it, but the giants are ossified Molochs. Not that Boeing is any better, ever since absorbing MacDonnell Douglas and its pathological management structure.
Nonwithstanding the incompetence, maintaining the French Guyana so far away from France costs much than maintaining Cape Canaveral in the homeland. I wonder whether salaries aren't be cheaper on our aircraft carrier than in this remote land, where everything needs to be subsidized to maintain legitimacy for the rocket launchpad.
If capability is intellecutal capability, then no.
If you mean systematic capability, then yes, exactly. There are enough smart europeans to build anything. But it is rather
- a lack of risk taking (i.e., culture),
- a lack of incentivizes (i.e., if you take a risk, and it plays out, you benefit rather than everyone complaining how you can be rich at the expense of others),
- a lack of funding risky ventures,
- a lack of allowing risky ventures (i.e., politics don't allow you to do stuff because any kind of rare bat might live in close proximity). These rules make it way tougher than necessary, take longer, more compley, costly you name it...
That is the reason why europe is falling behind. System. Not people.
Reminds me of this article. Everyone knows that Europeans could compete, and the world stage would welcome it, but they have put themselves into a bind where taking back any social service or loosening regulation and allowing markets to operate would take their air of superiority over stupid Americans and they would rather kill off any chance at becoming world technology players than that. Also it is just political and cultural suicide, ask Paris right now.
Who expressed favoritism? This is just a description of life as it is. I suspect that most people will favor whatever society they were raised in, and many who don't will move. Silicon valley is full of immigrants, who apparently hate life?
The above said that the markets in Europe don't operate. A sibling post refers to Europe as the laughing stock of the world. Multiple people are saying it would be impossible for Europe to build alternatives to foreign services because they have consumer protections.
Europe is full of immigrants too, are they all rushing to live in a stagnant society on the verge of collapse, knowing their families abroad are just laughing in astonishment at their decisions?
I'm not sure it comes down to where you were raised. I was in a car with a Texan and a Californian at the weekend, driving up to Amsterdam, and they were laughing all the way about how safe the roads were, how friendly the police were and how considerate the other drivers were. Like, "they actually tell you where the speed traps are!? The cops aren't out to get me!?"
Not me anyway, but many people in this thread have asserted that Europe will never be able to compete because of things like consumer protection regulations. I'd encourage you to take it up with them.
Stopping the stiffling of innovation does not mean trampling over people. Europe has outsourced defense to the US, and in return theyve gotten nothing but a slowly crumbling relevance in the world stage. As a person that believes in Europe and is incredibly thankful for the historic contribution to the western intellectual canon, it saddens me.
No, this article gets its core premise wrong: labor laws are not the main issue. The issue is that if I wanted to found a new company, I'd be confronted with lots very strict regulations with lots of implications and induced overhead. The list is too long for a HN comment.
It's not impossible to overcome, but it is an added commitment for any new company. Founding is not very attractive and that's why we don't get that many crazy wild bets here (Tesla was one initially too).
No, labor laws are fine exactly as they are. Not importing US style at will hire and fire culture is an asset. That's all budgetable and relatively minor. If you are seeing a need to downsize your company early on, the fundamental mistakes already happened way earlier by choosing a path that was unsustainable. Such a company doesn't usually have a future.
> The issue is that if I wanted to found a new company, I'd be confronted with lots very strict regulations with lots of implications and induced overhead
Yes, like for example you have to actually pay your employees for the time they work, and give them a certain amount of paid annual leave
This is something anathemic to USian companies, who see skilled workers as essentially disposable single-use devices.
Is what I wrote confusing? I have nothing against labor laws in the EU. It's that there are a lot of other well meaning regulations that bog down young businesses. They are mostly justified, but they are also pretty daunting chores for founders.
Yes regulatory burden is my best bet as to why Europe has produced almost nothing of worth aside copying uber and doordash. Skype was cool for a moment there.
> Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers
Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.
I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)
Production of innovative technology pushing the frontier of whats possible is the measure. Cost of laying off is one possible non exhaustive diagnosis as to why it might not exist in Europe.
As a software developer in an at will arrangement, i dont quite see the comparison with sweatshops. Look, the US isnt perfect by any means, and Europe has the brainpower. Were waiting for a European Tesla, that should have been your domain. Yet here we are, Skype and Angry Birds being the last big hits. Maybe Lovable is a current exception. Your Nordic countries really doing heavy lifting.
Let's just assume your claim is true, and it is impossible to build software in Europe.
European companies can still build software in different countries. Nothing stops them from building their software in an US subsidiary they fully control. A lot of good software developers are currently looking for a job.
Nobody is going to build any software in US when nearshore is 2-3 times cheaper. American engineers are overpriced and not competitive on the global market.
Nobody wants “dirt cheap contractors who accomplish nothing” literally. That’s the figure of speech that has only one meaning in the context of conversation: that you supposedly think that outside of USA, people have lower qualifications. If you intended to say something different, feel free to elaborate.
My claim is never about lack of brainpower in the EU. Clearly theres talent. Its a bit cultural, yes, but mostly its part of a framework that does not reward innovation. For a place with the best car manufacturing in the world and such a drive towards renewables, youd think Tesla should have come from EU. Or even should be replicated there. Why wont it?
Are you saying EU with its 450M people is lacking "money" and needs 350M US to do it for us? Because somehow "money" is what makes stuff to happen. Not labor.
I mean I hear people clamoring for a paycheck without work. I've never heard someone ask to work without a paycheck. So yes money seems like an important ingredient.
Europes slice of global GDP has gone from ~30% (1980's) to ~17% (2020's), America's has remained at ~25%, and China has been on the rise, tbd if they can pass the US
Population wise, 7%, 5%, and 16%
Another statistic, the EU accounts for almost 50% of global social spending.
instead of 'money', the more precise term would be 'risk capital'. And yes, Europe has a stark shortage of that, which is why Euro startups raise in the US and when they go public, they go public on the US exchange.
SpaceX and Tesla are together worth more than all companies on the entire German stock market put together.
Lotta "Europe could never build this!" points in here, missing that Telesat (Canadian) is already building this, planning to launch in Q1 2028, and will happily sell to Europe.
USA was also close to the EU until it wasn't. Outsourcing critical parts of national security infrastructure to any country is idiotic, friendly or not.
Wasn't there news of Canada kinda, sorta but not really getting into being part of the EU recently? To begin with, the EU is just a bunch of independent countries getting cozy with each other.
There are discussions of "associate membership" but since this is not a thing that exists yet speculation on the matter has ranged from "this is just an economic partnership" to "we are going to become de-facto EU members".
We'll see the details when this becomes a bit more concrete but I imagine it's mostly going to be an economic partnership via trade agreements, maybe aligning some regulations to facilitate trade, etc.
It's certainly wise to diversify as much as possible, a healthy mix of sovereign home-made tech plus US and Chinese tech and from all other countries where it seems fit. The problem right now is the extreme dependence on US tech, such a dependence is always a bad idea no matter what country the tech comes from.
I think the other thing that is not being discussed is jointly developed tech, and jointly controlled systems - if its not controlled by any one party the dependency problem does not exist.
I just replaced a dependency that that fucked all its users with an open source alternative that can not do that in the future. Sometimes what you're replacing it with does make a difference.
The US is becoming to Canada what North Korea is to South Korea.
Yes, hyperbole, but funny/sad.
Also, have you heard Mark Carney speak, and contrasted it with how Trump speaks. It's like The Freeze versus randomly chosen baseball fan (https://youtu.be/WxXypNqiS5A).
Lotta "Europe is already working on it!" points in here, missing the fact that it's been in the work for a long time, and maybe let's wait until it's actually deployed to count the cows. Over the past decades a lot of things have been "in the work" in Europe and never really went anywhere. It's very easy to "put things in the work".
"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.
What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."
Telesat launches are still on SpaceX Falcon 9s. So the non American alternative still depends on American launch capacity to get there.
Don't forget that US can always strong arm Canada and make it bend to its will.
We are too dependent on them. It's nearly impossible to disassociate with United States due to our proximity.
The timeline has changed before, like the ASIC issues pushed full service into 2028. Also scale and capability obviously differ, but it could be a good starting point.
Regardless, I think Europe is better served focusing on its own tech like IRIS and Eutelsat.
There is a Canadian company developing launch capability[1].
There was some awareness that relying on American launch capability was a problem after the Radarsat-2 kerfuffle. The Americans deemed that satellite a threat to U.S. national security, so it had to be launched by Russia. Now Russia's off the table too.
If Nordspace pans out, Canada will finally have domestic launch capability and won't have to worry about a foreign country refusing to launch satellites.
Telesat is a different product than StarLink. My understanding is that Telestat is for telecom operators and large network providers which cannot run fibre cables to their cell towers.
I think Galileo is an example of how the EU with ESA can create an alternative to a critical US capability. At the same time it is also an example how difficult it is, on a financial, political and commercial level.
The US wasn’t happy with it and tried to put pressure not to proceed. In hindsight , It’s good that it did got into orbit.
ESA tends to favour French, Italian and German big state owned corporations rather than small start ups. So it will always be a political thing and slow.
There just isn’t a company in the EU that can operate like Elon Musk. Even if there was imagine a European company ceo holding that power. How would they use it, can they be coerced by EU countries? Should such a capability be in private hands at all?
Nonetheless, even today, the vast majority of countries are not self-sufficient on defense infrastructure, and this has been true for most of the modern era. The most obvious deficiency is in naval terms: the number of countries who have enough of a navy that they can do something about "my shipping is being attacked by pirates" without help from other people is plausibly at most five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), and I have my doubts about half of those.
I think it's more than that, the UK for instance, but I agree it's shocking how few. What I meant though, was that they were militarily independent before, and could be again.
Europe itself a collection of nations. The US was traditionally an ally and for the better part of a century we've been comfortably building out a host of projects together, from military to science to cultural goods. That the US has apparently stepped away from working cooperatively is genuinely surprising and disappointing, but we shouldn't let it normalise the idea that we can only ever trust others of our own nation. Especially in Europe where you obviously have countries like Belgium that aren't nation states to begin with.
If we're being pedantic, the US is not a nation-state (because the US doesn't really have a coherent "nation"), and I suspect for similar reasons you could claim that Belgium is not a coherent nation either, given the Flemish/Walloon divisions in the state.
That said, a lot of people use nation state as a synonym for sovereign state, and Belgium is as much a sovereign state as the US is.
Belgium actually obeys their constitution, they're capable of reigning in excesses. Yes, the four (not two) language areas (Vlaanderen, Wallonia, the German area and the twin language area of Bruxelles) of the country are a massive complication, but I actually really like how they manage to get along in spite of it.
There are many other countries in Europe (and outside of it) that are multi-lingual and for the most part having a single language is not a core requirement for being a nation state.
Belgium is a state, and not a nation. "Nation state" has a specific meaning, separate from "state". Belgium has two major cultural groups (Walloon and Flemish) who tend to be at odds with each other, hence is not a nation. Contrast Kurdistan, which is a nation but not a state.
This isn't about pedantry, it's about not using a phrase incorrectly and through doing so giving misinformation. Pedantry might be pointing out that "foot pedal" is redundant - all pedals are foot-operated by definition. That wouldn't matter because the meaning is unaltered by the redundancy. However saying that Belgium (or the USA) is a nation state is simply incorrect.
Because until a certain orangutang broke it, the new world order was doing rather nicely.
Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.
Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.
It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.
Not just infrastructure. Europe has depended on the US for its entire defense apparatus for decades. Everyone loves to scoff at the billions America throws away on fighter jets until Putin rolls out of bed and invades your nextdoor neighbor.
Europe has been forced to depend on the US. The UK particularly had a world-leading civil and military aviation industry until the US "suggested" this was unwelcome.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
It's been more carrots than the (non-zero) sticks.
I think it's under selling Europe's agency to characterise the relationship as 'forced'.
And now that the US is increasingly seen as unreliable, Europe is (slowly?) decoupling - which is what you'd expect as a mutually beneficial relationship sours.
It might have given a reason, but it’s not like that will actually create anything in Europe.
The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps. They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
> It might have given a reason, but it’s not like that will actually create anything in Europe.
Oh we absolutely are building replacement stuff for a lot of American things. IRIS2 for example is our Starlink alternative. OVH, Hetzner and a bunch of other smaller players can provide hosting. Mistral is our AI model. Cars, trucks and farm equipment can be/are made in Europe. We have our own nuclear weapons, warplanes, navy, tanks, satellite based surveillance, and sooner rather than later (via Ukraine) viable replacements even for missile defense. That is the last thing we truly are depending on the US, but eh, after Trump wasted the entire US stockpile on the Iran clustercuck they again left us no choice, and the Ukrainians are busy by necessity developing something useful.
A lot of the major players in software are Europe-based too. SuSE, GnuPG, KDE, LibreOffice and I think also Samba are German. VLC is French. MariaDB is at least partially based in Finland. Spotify is Swedish.
The only thing we do lack is a fully integrated hardware and software manufacturer similar to Apple, but I think we could set up something based off of the open source parts of Framework and Raspberry Pi should the need arise.
> The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps.
Have you walked alongside the Isar river at least once in your life? I personally am happy to no longer see plastic bottle caps littered around, and the magnetic ones can be picked up easy enough with a magnet. I don't see the problem.
> They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
The laughing stock of the world is the US President who regularly shits himself in his diapers.
In a normal world, this would be treason by an illegal immigrant to the US. In today's world it's a blip in news. Sad state of affairs :(
Europe will absolutely build alternatives. They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do. Quality of life, life expectancy, and many factors have outpaced US in the last few years. The tech industry in the US is still important, but the importance will start waning soon.
We’re also fighting a war for another country and the president’s son in law is brokering deals with foreign nations for personal gain. I don’t think treason is being prosecuted anymore.
In a just world, Musk would get the Ilhan Omar treatment - and he actually broke US immigration law, a breach for which thousands of people are being deported by the current administration.
Not necessarily. Under current US federal law, naturalization can be revoked for a variety of reasons. But entering the country illegally or over staying a visa don't automatically void naturalization.
Citizenship can be lost via revocation of naturalization, with the main reason being that it was obtained illegally or fraudulently. If you break immigration law and the government is not aware of this during naturalization, then they can definitely take it back.
I'm pro Ukraine but treason has a specific definition in the us Constitution, so until Congress declares Russia an "enemy" and not just an "adversary" it's not treason. Would be very strange to have ISS missions and rideshare agreements with an "enemy".
Iran has also supplied ballistic missiles to Russia. Ukraine attacked a Caspian ship of Iran's that was allegedly carrying arms over the summer.
Assistance has been mutual, though lately the flow has been more from Russia to Iran. Drone improvements, targeting intelligence and missile tactics to avoid Patriot interception.
OK but that's not an act of war any more than supplying Ukraine with intelligence and drones is an act of war against Russia. Words mean things, especially and most of all in legal settings.
It pains me to say this but one of the best possible strategies for the US from a realpolitik standpoint is to pretend to be friends with Russia (to avoid nuclear war), and quietly hand over intel and resources to Ukraine, and maximize meaningless digs at Ukraine, and periodically "claw back" support possibly substituting other forms of support in some cases. If this were happening, this would would on its face be indistinguishable from what we see now. I also don't think Trump is that smart, so to whatever degree that is happening, I think it's by accident
Should be "Elon Musk Just Gave Europe yet another Reason to Replace American Technology"
Arianespace has been for decades an extension of the French government, which needed at max several launches per year and didn't give a damn about its market share. As a result, it is seriously behind in reusable rocket development. The space port in Kourou may be the most underused space port in the world, even though its location is unbeatable.
I am not sure if this gap can be closed. Maybe some of the smaller startups like Isar Aerospace can do it, but the giants are ossified Molochs. Not that Boeing is any better, ever since absorbing MacDonnell Douglas and its pathological management structure.
That is the reason why europe is falling behind. System. Not people.
Reminds me of this article. Everyone knows that Europeans could compete, and the world stage would welcome it, but they have put themselves into a bind where taking back any social service or loosening regulation and allowing markets to operate would take their air of superiority over stupid Americans and they would rather kill off any chance at becoming world technology players than that. Also it is just political and cultural suicide, ask Paris right now.
Europe is full of immigrants too, are they all rushing to live in a stagnant society on the verge of collapse, knowing their families abroad are just laughing in astonishment at their decisions?
I'm not sure it comes down to where you were raised. I was in a car with a Texan and a Californian at the weekend, driving up to Amsterdam, and they were laughing all the way about how safe the roads were, how friendly the police were and how considerate the other drivers were. Like, "they actually tell you where the speed traps are!? The cops aren't out to get me!?"
GDP growth is very very important.
It's not impossible to overcome, but it is an added commitment for any new company. Founding is not very attractive and that's why we don't get that many crazy wild bets here (Tesla was one initially too).
I will accept your argument that there are additional onerous regulations on top of that. But that seems like the same "core premise".
Yes, like for example you have to actually pay your employees for the time they work, and give them a certain amount of paid annual leave
This is something anathemic to USian companies, who see skilled workers as essentially disposable single-use devices.
Yep, so saying Europe can build software is pretty much like Western factories trying to compete with slave or child labor in some developing part of the world.
I mean most Americans probably don't want to open their own sweatshop garment factories. But it does mean that if we start ww3 that shirts may be harder to come by. I think it's probably a good thing that the entire world is too interdependent to want to start shooting at each other? (G10 at least)
Or maybe, just hear me out, that's an American delusion, promoted to justify the oligarchy here.
European companies can still build software in different countries. Nothing stops them from building their software in an US subsidiary they fully control. A lot of good software developers are currently looking for a job.
> Nobody wants “dirt cheap contractors who accomplish nothing” literally
Yes they do. This is why cognizant, Accenture, wipro, etc. exist
Money they probably don't have.
With us 1.5B Indians, we can concur money is a big factor if not the biggest.
Population wise, 7%, 5%, and 16%
Another statistic, the EU accounts for almost 50% of global social spending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMjDmYqykNI (Stephen Kotkin - World on Fire?) (There are more than 100 armed conflicts going on right now, the most since the 1940s)
SpaceX and Tesla are together worth more than all companies on the entire German stock market put together.
And Canada is a lot more stable than the US lately.
https://team212cd.ca
We'll see the details when this becomes a bit more concrete but I imagine it's mostly going to be an economic partnership via trade agreements, maybe aligning some regulations to facilitate trade, etc.
Yes, hyperbole, but funny/sad.
Also, have you heard Mark Carney speak, and contrasted it with how Trump speaks. It's like The Freeze versus randomly chosen baseball fan (https://youtu.be/WxXypNqiS5A).
I wouldn't trust any country where the citizens somehow think they are bigger, better and stronger than anyone else.
"Going forward a U.S. founder selling into European defense or government now needs an answer to “who holds the switch” before the first meeting; and European founders just got sovereignty as a sellable feature.
What was done in a fit of pique will cost the U.S. both leadership and jobs."
Do you agree or disagree with that?
Don't forget that US can always strong arm Canada and make it bend to its will. We are too dependent on them. It's nearly impossible to disassociate with United States due to our proximity.
The timeline has changed before, like the ASIC issues pushed full service into 2028. Also scale and capability obviously differ, but it could be a good starting point.
Regardless, I think Europe is better served focusing on its own tech like IRIS and Eutelsat.
There was some awareness that relying on American launch capability was a problem after the Radarsat-2 kerfuffle. The Americans deemed that satellite a threat to U.S. national security, so it had to be launched by Russia. Now Russia's off the table too.
If Nordspace pans out, Canada will finally have domestic launch capability and won't have to worry about a foreign country refusing to launch satellites.
______________
[1]https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/nordspace-signs-20-m...
The US wasn’t happy with it and tried to put pressure not to proceed. In hindsight , It’s good that it did got into orbit.
ESA tends to favour French, Italian and German big state owned corporations rather than small start ups. So it will always be a political thing and slow.
There just isn’t a company in the EU that can operate like Elon Musk. Even if there was imagine a European company ceo holding that power. How would they use it, can they be coerced by EU countries? Should such a capability be in private hands at all?
Nonetheless, even today, the vast majority of countries are not self-sufficient on defense infrastructure, and this has been true for most of the modern era. The most obvious deficiency is in naval terms: the number of countries who have enough of a navy that they can do something about "my shipping is being attacked by pirates" without help from other people is plausibly at most five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), and I have my doubts about half of those.
That said, a lot of people use nation state as a synonym for sovereign state, and Belgium is as much a sovereign state as the US is.
There are many other countries in Europe (and outside of it) that are multi-lingual and for the most part having a single language is not a core requirement for being a nation state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
Belgium has been independent for almost 200 years, and is one of the founding members of the the UN. In what possible way is it not a nation state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_state
Powerful people got together and decided the world would be a nice place if everyone worked together. Their solution for ensuring that happened whilst taking human behaviours into account was global capitalism.
Despite its downsides (some of which we're only starting to see the consequences of) you have to admit that it was doing its job. Countries were cooperating because it was in their best interest. It was always a delicate thing though, and the orangutang broke the trust it relied on.
It might seem naive now, but "bro, of _course_ you can rely on us for service X, why are you even asking?" was an believable response before the orange.
The UK signed an agreement with the US to supply research for the Manhattan Project, in the naive belief the results would be shared.
The US said "Nuh uh - that's classified" and the UK had to develop its own program from scratch.
Then the US lobbied to have that thrown away so the UK would be locked into Polaris and then Trident.
And so on. NATO has very much been a showroom for US arms sales, and competition has been discouraged - not always effectively, but the implied pressure has always been there.
It's been more carrots than the (non-zero) sticks.
I think it's under selling Europe's agency to characterise the relationship as 'forced'.
And now that the US is increasingly seen as unreliable, Europe is (slowly?) decoupling - which is what you'd expect as a mutually beneficial relationship sours.
Because, yes, you get E2EE by having the operator do the encryption :facepalm:
The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps. They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
Oh we absolutely are building replacement stuff for a lot of American things. IRIS2 for example is our Starlink alternative. OVH, Hetzner and a bunch of other smaller players can provide hosting. Mistral is our AI model. Cars, trucks and farm equipment can be/are made in Europe. We have our own nuclear weapons, warplanes, navy, tanks, satellite based surveillance, and sooner rather than later (via Ukraine) viable replacements even for missile defense. That is the last thing we truly are depending on the US, but eh, after Trump wasted the entire US stockpile on the Iran clustercuck they again left us no choice, and the Ukrainians are busy by necessity developing something useful.
A lot of the major players in software are Europe-based too. SuSE, GnuPG, KDE, LibreOffice and I think also Samba are German. VLC is French. MariaDB is at least partially based in Finland. Spotify is Swedish.
The only thing we do lack is a fully integrated hardware and software manufacturer similar to Apple, but I think we could set up something based off of the open source parts of Framework and Raspberry Pi should the need arise.
> The only thing they can do these days is imposing new regulations of bottle caps.
Have you walked alongside the Isar river at least once in your life? I personally am happy to no longer see plastic bottle caps littered around, and the magnetic ones can be picked up easy enough with a magnet. I don't see the problem.
> They turned themselves into the laughing stock of the all world: willingly.
The laughing stock of the world is the US President who regularly shits himself in his diapers.
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index
https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2025_HDR/HDR25_Stat...
Europe will absolutely build alternatives. They'll bicker for some time, but in the end, they build. To Americans it looks like they don't but they do. Quality of life, life expectancy, and many factors have outpaced US in the last few years. The tech industry in the US is still important, but the importance will start waning soon.
He's following Putin I think, it's a special military thingy.
Not a lawyer, but wouldn't an illegal immigrant owe no allegiance to breach and therefore couldn't commit treason?
Same for Melania, but doing it to Musk would be much funnier.
You mean Iran supplying Russia with drones.
Assistance has been mutual, though lately the flow has been more from Russia to Iran. Drone improvements, targeting intelligence and missile tactics to avoid Patriot interception.
The ally of a special military operation adversary surely cannot be my enemy. /s