That's no better. The USA is merely on its way to being a dictatorship; China's been there for decades.

ARM (UK). ASML (NL). Siemens (DE). Airbus (FR/UK). All pretty major tech companies.

Nobody needs a new Twitter. Social media is a stupid distraction and not a critical part of a country's infrastructure.

I'm talking about critical things like cloud computing, email hosting, operating systems, etc... all the things that make a country and an organization run. There are non-American alternatives for all of those things; they're just not widely-known or widely-marketed.

I've actually worked with European organizations who provide this sort of infrastructure, and they are competent and not sclerotic at all, and the people who work for them have no intention of leaving Europe. The issue is more the network effect: Everyone uses Microsoft, so everyone develops for Microsoft. That's what needs to be broken.

Countries other than the USA have the following choices:

1. Continue being dependent on American technology and being subjected to the whims of American companies and administrations. Lose control of your data. Live with a national security risk if the US ever decides you're not being cooperative enough. Or,

2. Decouple from American tech companies and develop home-grown replacements, or at least open-source replacements that you can maintain for yourself in the worst-case. Massively difficult and massively painful, but in the long run, a much better choice than (1).

Generally speaking, if a large tech company warns "Don't do $THING... it'll stifle innovation" it means that $THING is a very good thing that should be done to protect consumers' interests.

Governments taking over private enterprises... huh. I did not have "GOP becomes Communist" on my bingo card 15 years ago.

But the regulations preserve people's privacy and stop tech oligarchs from abusing consumers so much. I think that might be a reasonable tradeoff.

They were not US citizens at the time they invented the things I mentioned.

Sure, a lot of people move to the US for money. It's that way for Canadians too, or it used to be. Nowadays, people are having second thoughts, with (for example) a world-renowned cardiologist turning down a position in the USA.

Actually, if you compare the downtown of an average European city to the downtown of an average American city, the European city is a whole lot livelier and more fun. I'll take places like Amsterdam or Stockholm over car-dependent hellholes like Phoenix or Dallas any day.

I don't live in Europe or the USA, but if I had to pick one to live in, it certainly would not be the USA.

Yeah, it's a good thing that Linux, Skype, Python and the World Wide Web were invented by good ol' Americans.

Oh. Wait...

If you measure "winning" by per-capita GDP, then yes. Europe is way behind the USA.

If you measure "winning" by happiness, healthcare affordability, and leisure time, then Europe is way, way, way ahead of the USA.

I nuked my LinkedIn account a couple of weeks ago. The slop on that site is unbelievable. And being retired, I no longer need to care about recruiters or job ads, so meh...

Though... being retired, I did skewer the slop-producers on that site without worrying about watching my tone or language. That was kind of fun, but in the end, it's empty-calorie fun.

Well, we know AI is going to put a lot of people out of work. So how about we hire some of those people to donate their body heat to generate electricity for the machines? They'd check into a big building and go into little relaxation pods that collect their heat.

We'll give them VR headsets to keep them amused. Eventually, the technology will be so good we'll be able to plug directly into their brains and they'll think they're out and about doing something while their body heat is powering the machines.

The next step is to feed nutrients into the relaxation pods so they can work there 24/7. Eventually, we'll have a huge population of people who think they're out and about doing things while in reality, they're in little pods powering the machines.

That's what you call a win-win!

In the long run, this is good news for the planet. There will be a fair bit of medium-term economic pain, though.

Agreed. I ran an email security company for 19 years and our product was mostly written in Perl. I use the product to this day.

Perl is still my go-to language for either quick scripts or bigger projects that don't need the speed of C or some other compiled languages.