And quite averse/backwater (choose your version) on using debit/credit cards. Which is mindblowing from my Easter European perspective. I didn't use cash in a decade.
But not how you think, in this instance. I think Berlin has more places of questionable legality which require cash for presumably tax avoidance reasons.
Remember International Criminal Court sanctioned for investigating Israeli and American role in the crimes being committed on the Palestinian territory?
Or sanctioned Francesca Albanese, a UN Special Rapporteur, for her work related to human rights abuses in the Palestine.
She can't have bank account (or other financial product), own a property or work in many sectors in countries holding meaningful bilateral relationships with the USA.
The hardware is produced in Asia but American controlled. its still a dependency on being supplied by American companies.
"Only services" covers a lot of critically important things. Clouds services and payment systems, for example. Even just one American company like AWS could turn off a huge chunk of European economies.
Yes, but services are easier to replace than hardware. And control is something you have, and then you don't have if the country in which you operate decides otherwise (or US presidents throws another tantrum).
Companies use AWS because it is there and others used it, so they got ball rolling. It doesn't mean one couldn't replace it with another service, most probably more pricey one. If there would be some kind of war, then one doesn't need to have servers in US, and European ones are right there.
You can't easily replace e.g. lithium or other metals.
Fuel is problematic, but there are places that are closer that could sell them (middle east, if we ignore current Russian state of mind).
As for machinery, it is hard to guess what kind. Germany produces a lot of it, and I would guess China also.
Not sure about pharmaceuticals.
Generally US is not our greatest import partner, China is. And we have a big internal market also.
That is the kind of discussion where people end up saying "Oh okay, but we can FIRE ZE MISSILES".
AWS will never willingly stop serving the EU, and oil corps will (unfortunately) never willingly stop selling oil. The US govt could force it, but that would be the end of US-EU relations, and probably cause a breakdown of internal us politics.
The US is pushing its hand as much as it can right now.
After decades of globalization, everyone is just extremely dependent on everyone.
I think hardware is a bit complicated by the way. A lot of hardware is also not US controlled. For instance ARM Holdings is British, Japanese, or global depending on how you look at it and quite a lot of vendors rely on ARM's reference designs. Europe also has a lot of important chip designers, but they are more focused on embedded systems and support chips, like NXP and ST Microelectronics.
"Only services" covers a lot of critically important things. Clouds services and payment systems, for example. Even just one American company like AWS could turn off a huge chunk of European economies.
Why European governments and increasingly companies are trying to move away to European alternatives. It all starts small, but e.g. a bunch of governments are already disentangling from Office. The sale of the maintainer of the Dutch DigiD infrastructure to a US company has been blocked (would have happened without any blockers a few years ago). Countries are reducing US arms purchases in favor of European alternatives.
It's like turning a mammoth tanker, but it is slowly happening.
Let's just hope we have critical mass before the right-wing populists take over, big tech has been intensively lobbying them in recent years [1]. So much 'for the people', like they always proclaim.
Arm is important, but for R & D. The impact of not having Arm will take a long time to be felt. The same for a lot of the others you mention. Not having a supply or Intel and AMD CPUs would be felt much faster and would be harder to find replacements for.
> It's like turning a mammoth tanker, but it is slowly happening.
Is it really happening? As has been mentioned on HN multiple times the EU's age verification app will only run on American controlled devices. Some countries are moving some things away from US suppliers, buts its very much one step forward then two steps back.
> Let's just hope we have critical mass before the right-wing populists take over, big tech has been intensively lobbying them in recent years
Unfortunately, not only them. As the article says the existing European Commission is already going in the direction big tech want, just not as far. The current British government (a historically left wing party) has also been cosying up to big tech. One of the organisations mentioned in your link has a lot of info on EU lobbying in general: https://corporateeurope.org/index%2Ephp/en/lobbying-the-eu
Arm is important, but for R & D. The impact of not having Arm will take a long time to be felt. The same for a lot of the others you mention. Not having a supply or Intel and AMD CPUs would be felt much faster and would be harder to find replacements for.
ARM doesn't just do R&D, they design full CPU cores. Until recently, Qualcomm's cores were ARM's reference design with their own extensions on top. It's only since Oryon that their CPUs are more dependent (the tech was acquired through their Nuvia acquisition).
This is only part of the question though, the other question is is it actually good for the EU to continue growing and becoming more heterogenous indefinitely, which to me isn't at all clear.
You could make a good case that the EU is still trying to deal with issues from the 2004 expansion for example. Doesn't mean it was a bad idea, but it's not cost free
I was wondering, what could I play with it. But besides Half-Life Alyx (never played any of HF games), No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous, I couldn't find anything bigger (well, there is also SUPERHOT: VR).
I wonder why there are not that many 3D shooters, or 3D RPGs that use VR. The idea sounds great. Never used any of VR headsets and I was wondering if I should try out Steam Frame and if I don't like it I assume I could resell it later.
Also I wonder how well it would work with my headless linux gaming rig that I use for Game on Whales/Moonlight playing on my 3060ti card.
On the other hand, I still have Steam Deck that I used to play about 3 games total, it is unused besides that. But the initial investment is pretty high (well, it is AFAIR +50% from the Steam Deck 512GB price when I bought)
I'm quite opposite. I avoid any places that don't accept card payments, because it usually means they are avoiding taxes. And I don't have cash on me, or wallet. Only phone or sometimes only my garmin watch (with garmin pay).
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