I have never worked with companies that chose OVH or Hetzner (or Scaleway or any other EU provider) for something else than doing things cheap.
They don't care at all about the provider being a local or European company.
They just want the cheapest option.
Which usually means using the same server to host dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the server.
Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid as much disaster as possible.
But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on AWS...
That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.
Locally (in my country) managed virtual machines, or managed hosting services (1990-2000s variant of "git push" (ftp) your PHP app somewhere and have the website running, that US companies re-invented as "git push" to deploy, while somehow managing to invert the "app" hosting vs VM cost relationship at the same time, making managed hosting more expensive).
At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our product to US customers, but little else.
Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our world is 10 mil. people.
The EU is a pretty capitalist organization (I mean the single market is a big part of it). I think they have trouble competing with US tech companies because of our economies of scale, and widespread use of anti-competitive business practices, general inertia, and the tendency of the US to brain drain the rest of the world. I guess, fortunately for you guys, we’re trying to throw away many of our advantages.
There are enough tech people that are ready to brain drain from here right now - some well placed money would go a long way right now if Germany, France, the Netherlands, or another tech hub was ready.
I mean, isn't the US saying that taxing imports is an ideal source of revenue?
But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little information.
Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have critical infrastructure local.
Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just gives a stronger hand.
The British government only fairly recently decided it needed to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites. They were complete happy to, for a long time, to give that power to a country that is an actual fascist dictatorship.
Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK for the next few years so keep it cheap
The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even consumer systems. If another country can brick all your vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you.
As a point of fact, China is not, in fact, a fascist dictatorship. North Korea is not a fascist dictatorship either. Neither is or was Cuba, or medieval kingdoms with actual kings and warlords.
Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia.
It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship," "violent government," or similar.
I agree that it is important to use the word fascist accurately, but it is also not not as well defined as you say. There is a reasonable case for calling China fascist. It has a cult of personality, state control of the economy, nationalism, racism, elimination of minority cultures. It is far more like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s than it is like Stalinist Russia.
All of those apply to Ancient Egypt too, only more so.
I did not give a definition for fascism. You can look ones up yourself. However, critically:
1. China is not right-wing. That's prerequisite.
2. China has very little fascist-style state / political violence, and virtually no paramilitary elements. You're at no risk of being beaten up or having your windows broken for having the wrong political views. Police officers didn't even have guns until recently. There aren't Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, are groups like the fascist right-wing militias in the US. Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
3. China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
4. China does not try to eliminate minorities if they play ball. Indeed, China is very supportive of non-Han groups (who were, e.g. exempt from One Child). Rather, what you see is forceful "modernization" and cultural assimilation, leading up to violence if there isn't compliance. If the Muslim minorities in China decided to give up their religion, culture, and desire for freedom, and started to act like Han Chinese, they'd almost certainly be left alone. You saw the same directed at Han during the Great Leap Forward. For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
5. Control of the economy is limited and directed. A lot of the Chinese economy is also like the Wild West.
.... and so on.
Note that I'm not passing a value judgment on which system of government is better or worse. However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
One of the key things in China is that if you (personally and collectively) go along with the government, for the most part, you're very safe, and life is quite peaceful. Another is that most control is "soft." The wrong post online will simply be hard to find, load slowly, or not show up for other users. Or you'll have a harder time moving up in life.
It's very little like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s, where you had armed groups walking the streets, breaking windows.
Define right wing in this context. Its historically communist, but it not really so any more, as you your self admit "Control of the economy is limited and directed"
> China has nationalism, but is very much not ultra-nationalist.
It is very nationalist and believes its culture to be superior to minority culture which is why they are assimilating it.
> For Jews in 1930 Germany, assimilating was very much not enough to be left alone.
True, but I said "fascism" not "nazism" which are not the same thing.
> Rather, the state violence you see there is institutionalized violence, through proper administrative and bureaucratic channels.
is that a necessary trait? The Brownshirts were got rid of once the Nazis were in power. Once you control the state you no longer need the paramilitary.
> However, "fascist" is not the same as "totalitarian."
I agree, but I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
> I think China has a lot of traits in common with fascist states. it might not tick all the boxes in a definition, but it ticks far more than the typical dictatorship.
It's very hard for me to see how. Even taking everything you said about China at face value (some of which I might take issue with):
- Almost every dictator tries (with mixed success) to create a personality cult.
- Almost every totalitarian state tries to build nationalist fervor to keep people in-line
- Almost every totalitarian state uses state violence to maintain control
- Almost every culture believes itself to be superior, and most successful politician try to exploit that (with the exception of a few on the far left)
... and so on.
I think a necessary and requisite element for fascism is an army of thugs and a pervasive level of fear. That's different from, for example, an army of educated bureaucrats deciding to stick problem individuals in a gulag. The brownshirts were never gotten rid of, but rather were institutionalized into the SA and to some extent, the SS. They were still thugs and relatively indiscriminate violence.
China lacks thugs. If you don't stick your head up, I don't see many people fear the government. People generally keep their heads down, fall in line, and lead normal lives.
I don't know if it's core to fascism, but expansionism and imperialism is also rather lacking in China. There are some disputes, mind, you, about places which China thinks should belong, namely Tibet, Taiwan, Mongolia, a little bit of Russia (formerly Manchuria), a few mountains near India, and a few islands, but critically, those ambitions have not changed in nearly a century.
I would actually argue that China is closer to national socialism rather than fascism precisely because Han nationalism is such a strong element of their ideology. Pure fascism is "state above all", while CCP I think sees the state as more of instrument, a necessary means to another end, more like the Nazis. The difference with the latter is that they are pragmatic national socialists rather than the more rabid Hitlerite variety (which is also why their nationalism isn't so blatantly racial).
What they have to show us is two decades of not wasting time on problems someone else has solved. Capitalism at its finest.
Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand, and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose. But at least they've stopped tying their future to an unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.
That's basically it isn't it? Try going to any institutional investor asking for money to build a sovereign replacement for Google Docs or whatever in the last 15 years.
For decades, the technology center of the universe has been Silicon Valley. No matter where you lived -- Canada, the UK, Germany, India -- if you wanted to be serious, you moved to the US. And if you had a company, being acquired by a Silicon Valley company was basically the goal. In the same way that you had to move to LA if you wanted to do anything serious in the entertainment industry.
So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American". The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by foreigners and acquired foreign businesses.
We're using Hetzner and BunnyCDN, never store any data on US servers. The decision for it is independent of the current political situation, mostly to avoid the US legal system as best as we can and to ensure GDPR-compliance.
There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.
Hetzner isn’t really a full-service cloud provider. They provide machines and storage for rent. It’s the first rung on the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they’ve got a long way to go.
That’s a cute pithy statement, but it’s not particularly relevant.
For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services. Some would consider those to be table stakes to run their application. Does it add complexity? Potentially. But we accept some additional complexity if it yields incremental value.
If you don’t value the additional functionality cloud providers offer, that’s fine. But lots of people do.
Certainly, unnecessary complexity should be avoided. But it’s a bit naive to associate comprehensiveness with complexity. They’re not entirely identical.
> For example, Hetzner doesn’t even offer database services.
I am totally OK setting up my own database software on Hetzner. I understand that some people are used to "cloud" spoon-feeding them what they need and even what they really don't, but I perceive this as a nuisance.
What you call “spoon feeding” is what another calls “value adding.” Additional security, automated failover, automated backups, and automated version upgrades are key features, and a lot of people value them. It often means their customers don’t have to hire expensive domain experts (or can hire fewer of them) and can instead focus their resources on more direct value creation.
Like, of those, which provide managed services like storage (blob and smb), ampq message queue, databases in a fairly cohesive way and easily accessible from C#?
Most companies I know (and/or have worked for) pay a lot of attention to where exactly their stuff is being hosted, partly due to GDPR. It might not be a Europe-native hoster but in most cases it will still be a data center in Europe (operated by AWS/Azure/GCP).
Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US, if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.
Wow propaganda bullshit straight on Hackernews. This what it has come to.
After over a decade here I didn't expect to see the deterioration coming, but it's not surprising considering the state and division of your country.
Elite marathon runners are in no way, shape, or form sprinting. It’s just that both are inconceivably fast to the average untrained person. Usain Bolt’s top foot speed was 44.72 km/h in the 100 meters. The fastest marathon was 20 km/h.
I am a dev who took a remote job with the US gov a few years ago.
My options are:
- Tear up my life in my hometown and relocate my family closer to an office so I can go there and do zoom calls
- Take this deal
I struggled with this, and ultimately took the deal. I know it might be a scam. But at this point I know I will eventually be laid off for refusing to relocate. Neither option is good, and making this choice was one of the most stressful experiences of my life.
Marcus Aurelius wrote extensive personal reflections in his "Meditations". Seneca wrote detailed letters to friends and family discussing philosophy, life, and death. Epictetus discussed death extensively in his Discourses, but sure, they were philosophical teachings rather than personal goodbyes.
They focus on acceptance and equanimity rather than formal farewells.
That said, "control what you can and forget the rest" is indeed stoicism, albeit simplified.
If they've written "many many words over thousands of years" for the merits of their philosophy, they are also perfectly capable to write multi-paragraph goodbye letters. That's the bearing it has on the parents claim. And many did.
Why you felt the need to add your comment, is a more apt question.
> If they've written "many many words over thousands of years" for the merits of their philosophy, they are also perfectly capable to write multi-paragraph goodbye letters. That's the bearing it has on the parents claim. And many did.
Eh, not really - "multi-paragraph goodbye letters" here refers to the overly dramatic fad that internet denizens sometimes engage in when they leave communities, and they tend to have a lot of whining.
Those types of goodbye letters are not the types of goodbye letters stoics would write.
> Why you felt the need to add your comment, is a more apt question.
If you were able to pick up so swiftly what the person I replied to was implying, you too should be able to have picked up that I replied because I disagreed with that implication.
I doubt this, but would be curious to see a source.
> You could then just say that you disagree and state your case, without rudely asking why they posted it.
I didn't find it rude at all, and your reply was far less productive than my IMO neutral question. You took offense on behalf of someone else and inserted yourself when it was unnecessary and entirely reliant on your interpretation and perception. Now we're discussing your perceived slight instead of anything of substance.
