I admit that I was initially on the globalization bandwagon, but in hindsight it resulted in products being made in countries with the cheapest costs which led to a decrease in quality and the destruction of smaller, more local businesses.
Go to a tourist area anywhere in the world and you'll be confronted by the same businesses--Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple Store, H&M, Zara. It's the homogenization and boringification of the world.
Smart wealthy countries understand these benefits and move their own economies to higher value creating activities like deep research, high tech development or financial services. Less smart wealthy countries try to erect trade barriers to force a return of uncompetitive manufacturing...
This was 100% what Europe believed and the Merkel administration in Germany more than anyone. Not to bring politics into HN intentionally, but I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and threats of invading Poland, Finland, and Germany from Russian spokesmen or MPs kind of throws cold water on this theory.
No matter how well meaning you are, you can't expect dictators and "strong men" to ever act in anything but bad faith. It is time the west realizes this and acts accordingly. As an American, I'm sad to see the "de-americaning" happening due to those here who elected a bad administration, but I can't say it is surprising. Ultimately, a less weak and less dependent on the US Europe is a net good for the world. Europe collectively being able to put a check on the US forces the US to not do stupid things, so this is good long term.
Dictators just don’t care however and Europe hasn’t had a ton of those since the 90s sans Putin.
I agree that we badly miscalculated Russia, but not every actor is Russia and willing to tank its own economy for revanchism.
You can try avoiding dealings with any autocracies, but that's really hard given our modern world and it's not like other democracies can never screw you over. I think it's more realistic to demand that we diversify our imports so that we can react to things like Russia's Ukraine invasion better.
NATO is the reason Russia attacked, not because "Germany was soft". Over-reliance on an external parter for a strategic economic input (cheap gas) was also a huge mis-step (all while shutting down self-reliant nuclear plants), but doesn't really dispute the "closer trade lowers likelihood of conflict" argument.
And no amount of denouncing US hypocrisy in defending democracy will make me change my mind. Two wrongs doesn't make a right and if it happens that Pax Americana allows a country to take a more democratic route, then let it happen.
Or as some Ukrainian said :
"We are not Russian doorstep, we are free, independent Ukraine. F** you"
The environmental costs of globalisation are (literally) horrific.
And a surprising amount of it is useless makework - disposable "fashion", faddy toys, and shoddy consumer goods that break after a couple of years.
As for lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?
As for " lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?" - pretty well, thank you. Deaths in armed conflicts have massively decreased since the 1980s with most of them originating from local wars in Africa prior to 2022. (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) - the Ukraine conflict is a return of exactly the kind of imperialist expansion that we've seen in the leadup to World War 1 which happens when isolated countries with territorial ambitions seek to expand.
Regardless of the existence of Manufacturing.
Tax your rich fairly and you will see major shift.
Nowadays manufacturing does not have to be uncompetitive. Advances in automation balance out wage disparities. They also provide more chances for a country to retain its skilled workers. Unions in developed nations can help the systematic power imbalance between capitalists and workers.
Well 1940’s being a wartime era would be a bad time to compare to. It’d be best to compare to compare to just before globalization, probably 1960’s, 70’s, or even early 80’s.
Smartphones and flatscreen TVs aren’t necessities. Sure it’s great they’re cheap but they’d be cheap anyway. Only a fairly small fraction of manufacturing costs are due to labor based on leaked iPhone costs I’ve seen that were like 10’s of dollars.
At the same time housing costs have increased massively in the last 2 decades. Worker wages in most fields have not kept apace productivity gains. It’s worse in affluent areas where “free” money has skyrocketed housing prices. Perhaps it’s not related to globalization but it seems partly due to it.
So, you alone declare that it has led to these things so everyone should isolate and drive up costs and share less? I get that we can't let the free market go unchecked, but free trade seems fundamental to competition and innovation.
I don't go to a touristy city for the shopping. Thanks to the Internet, I can already do that from anywhere, really. Sometimes I go to a touristy city for restaurants, but the presence of McDonald's doesn't take away from the dizzying array of typical food options in these places. Plus, globalization, to some degree, made it easy for a Dutch chef to come to my city to open a restaurant.
Overall I think this is a good thing. It could mean the end of the monolithic closed SaaS era, which is the absolute worst possible model for software if you care about privacy or any kind of personal or business sovereignty.
I work in a research project in a EU country that looks at how educational certificates (diploma's, degrees, credentials) will be done in the future.
A big part of it, are requirements and frameworks imposed, dictated or assumed by governments, commissions, universities, etc. The most important¹ parts of these requirements are:
- it must be self-sovereign. Not decentralized per-se, but technically often one step further than decentralized. My diploma, in my wallet (mobile?) is mine. I hold it, I am free to share it, delete it, copy it.
- it must be separated from the issuers. A person getting a degree might outlive a university, high school, or their servers/services.
- it must be privacy preserving - GDPR and better.
These constraints tell me that the EU, and EC are serious about decentralization and self-sovereign-identities. Which is very different from what local or current governments like and want - At least one EU government is in conflict with its universities and wants to be the gatekeeper of diploma's - they truly want the ability to deny or retract diploma's from people who they don't like.
Which, ironically, makes these constraints and requirements all the more important and critical in e.g. our projects. It went from a "decentralization is nice because in theory someone could..." to "decentralization is critical to ensure no-one, on any end of any political spectrum can take away diploma's as is currently being attempted".
(And for the curious: I work with W3C, openId, IETF and many more standards and -bodies. Verifiable Credentials, OpenBadges v3, OIDC4VCI, VP, etc)
¹ Edit: well, maybe not "most", as there isn't a clear prioritization. And obvious requirements such as "you cannot just fake a diploma" are probably higher in priority.
Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.
Manufacturing, imo, makes a lot more sense to be spread based on strengths and weaknesses and the logistics benefits (localize supply chains closer to end product).
The current US admin has certainly exposed some of the pitfalls of being technologically reliant on America. Honestly, the main outcome of this will be lower economic/job prospects for American tech employees. It will soon be that having a branch of Microsoft in Europe is not quite the same as utilizing actual European countries.
I would really like to see this trend reversed, but I am afraid some of the damage is already done and will take a long time, if ever, to recover. It would not surprise me if some of this damage is intentional, since it will actually take power away from west coast tech - a population that tends to vote in one direction.
Outside Trump — not all Republicans, specifically Trump — the USA was as close to being Europe's buddy as I think it's possible for nations to be.
I'm not convinced nations can actually be buddies, but even with my cynicism, Bush's administration was Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, while Trump is behaving like each "deal" is a completely independent Prisoner's Dilemma.
And yes, that's despite how much we mocked GWB (I even got quoted on the national news for doing so!), and despite how America mocked itself with Team America: World Police, that version of the country still saw itself as needing to go through the motions of friendship.
Just gonna leave this here.
But I cannot stop feeling the Internet was the greatest tool of democracy and liberty - and we messed it up by allowing weak minded greedy and insecure types to take over.
It's no surprise that the latest brand of technofascist thugs targeted "data" as the new power-lever. "Flipping" carefully installed defective leaders is a new kind of threat and a new kind of attack we need to think about more in cybserscurity.
I don't think it needs us to be Cassandras for everyone to understand (vigilance is the essence of democracy) that if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily. I'm also quietly optimistic that taking it back won't be such a big deal as we fear. We'll just have a lot of repair work to do when this sad episode is over. I think a Euro-centric rebuild will be a useful step towards a healed global vision again. One day.
The reality is that most people do not care enough about the systems of life to educate themselves, and bad actors exploited this constant lowering of the barrier to entry by flooding these forced-participants with advertising, "free" services, and a glut of cognitohazards. We created a world where authenticity comes not from expertise, but how pretty and usable your website is - and that had knock-on effects our elders tried to warn us about (just look at games like Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, and similar cyberpunk games of the era and how they warned about mass surveillance, forced adoption of technologies, centralization of infrastructure, etc).
> ...if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily.
This is what I've been trying to instill in others for nearly twenty years, since my days of playing SysAdmin in High School and bypassing proxy-based web filters to get to Newgrounds. To truly be participatory in any community, you must volunteer time in bettering it somehow. Maybe volunteer to be a moderator and improve site policies, or donate surplus resources towards self-hosting, or just helping folks move to better, less centralized or more community-supported platforms.
You typed this on hardware made by a hostile state actor: China.
As long as the hardware side of digital civilization is completely dependent on the Chinese communist regime, I certainly don't worry about American tech companies dominating the software side.
There are alternatives on the software side if you want them, meanwhile try to build a computer system without hardware made in China..
Source?
LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....
Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.
If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.
A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.
With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.
List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.
[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)
"The Wall of Shame for the Worst Excel Errors" - https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...
Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice.
Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).
Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works.
I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!
It updates nicely too. I'm managing one for ~4 years now, and it's painless.
Nobody calls for me for support either. I think this is, good?
Citation very much needed :-)
Excel on the other hand is barely usable for anything that involves formulas for us who are forced to used the localized version.
In fact if one is stuck with a localized Excel the easiest way is often to write in LibreOffice Calc and then export it to xls format.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.
Most people working in software understand this as a huge chunk of software projects are "let's get these people off of their spreadsheets!"
But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about.
It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2, 3000x3000, double precision floating point matrices, and a couple of vectors and some multiplication (i.e. in a range of a couple of billions)".
Reminder LibreOffice for most things is better than Office - Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...
[1] "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community..."
[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email?
Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.
A peanuts project of 100 million EUR ( basically one Microsoft Global Customer Contract...) could get something like this or similar going within 24 months:
https://www.collaboraonline.com/
As long as it would not be managed by EU bureaucrats. Otherwise the tenders would take 18 months....
I have yet to see a solution that has a chance at comparison, especially considering performance and features.
Are you expecting people to shuffle around single files to each other every time something is changed? Is that what we consider perfect?
Are most companies having three or four employees working in the SAME document at the SAME time? Maybe while singing Kumbaya over Teams? That would not be very efficient...
Or just use: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
Collaboration can be managed by offline servers that facilitate that. Not everything needs to be in a web page.
Samba existed long before google docs and already did this.
We only use google because of the convenience of having everything in one interface. I think this is the real issue, we are all so lazy we would rather give away our freedom for a little bit of convenience.
The idea that “someone is stealing our technology” is just an idea, similar to “developers don’t give good estimates or timelines”. An idea that will feel like the right idea to all, and will be copied. Copy cat culture exists in war too (why are you fighting them? Because they are fighting me).
This is a contrived problem, and demagogues like Trump seized on it. Was it all Obama’s fault? Not quite. Bush had already created a war apparatus in the 2000s, and there was no turning it off, just turning it around and pointing it somewhere else.
——
We are the storytellers of this history, we lived it. We are the primary sources, don’t doubt your ability to document this history. AI was never imagined in the halls of Research to create a never ending forever digital war.
I’ll paraphrase Jensen Huang regarding China:
You can’t keep a country behind
European Union decided to sing EU–Mercosur Association Agreement, which will make European agriculture unable to sustain in comming years. As a result in case of war, sea routes blockade or Mercosur teaming up with Russia (what is happening anyway) Europeans will die from starvation.
Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service.
Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that the US-centric technology catalog (from hardware to software to services to clouds) cannot be trusted long term, as just a single bad administration will expose how easily the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China or Russia. Welp, now we’re here.
Man, I hate being right.