I’ve been trying for a few months to get rid of any stuff made out of EU (even before it was mainstream lol), and here are my conclusions at the moment:

Groceries: It’s pretty easy. I try to go to local stores, but if I need to go to a supermarket, I go to Carrefour, Mercadona or Froiz, all european, and I’ve reached to the point that EVERYTHING I buy is european (mostly spanish, portuguese, french or italian).

Clothes: This has been tricky. To buy sneakers has been more dificult than I thought it would be. There are a lot of european brands that actually make it’s products in China, Bangladesh, etc., so I had to look very close. Finally, I buyed Victoria sneakers and I’m very happy with them. For shoes and boots, Pikolinos is a very good brand also. Miguel Bellido shirts are very good as well.

Furniture: Well, Ikea is the obvious choice, but I do preffer to buy on spanish and portuguese stores that also have prety good quality for a good price, like Lufe.

Sports: Only sport that I play is climbing, and my last pair of climbing shoes are Tenaya Ra, and I couldn’t be happier with them. La Sportiva has amazing products also, being italian and as far as I know, still manufacture in Italy.

Technology: Oh man, this is a pain… I don’t want to throw away my iPhone 13 mini until it’s done, but when the time comes, I don’t know if there are going to be any alternatives. Fairphone, probably, but the components are also from China, right? And anyway, I will struggle with a big phone, which I hate. In PC I can move from Windows to Linux, but the mayority of the PC parts would be made in USA.

Good news is that the only USA page that I actually visit is Reddit, as I don’t have Instagram, facebook or any other social media. Bad news is that it will be virtually impossible to leave Whatsapp.

Well, this is it, I guess that all of you are struggling with the same, being the technology the real issue, cause the rest is pretty easy to find alternatives even better.

My faith in Europe has risen since few months back, and I hope it’s not too late for us to being able to compete in this new world that is emerging, where if you depend on any way on USA or China, you’re lost.

A hug from Spain to all of you, european brothers. And sorry for my poor english.

Originally posted on Reddit

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago
    Very little is actually made in the USA tbh. I'm from the USA. The issue is not what is made in the USA it is American venture capitalism. Unfortunately this means you would need to look a lot deeper into every country and product along with their supply chain in particular. There is no real money in workers and assembly. We are all about the same and barely scraping by at the bottom regardless of where we are from. The real money is much higher up the chain. Places like access to global distribution networks at scale is where the real money resides. If you are making shoes in Spain and I come along like some American VC ass-hat and want to buy a 51% stake in your company, I am offering you both the access and capital required to sell 100 times more product because you will access a much larger market. I am going to cut the price of your shoes by 40%, you will make 20% more than you have ever made and I pocket the rest. What you don't know is that I just bought 3 other companies making similar shoes and will merge or close your company in 2 years after I control the whole market.

    The thing is, once businesses get larger than around 20 people, you need access to money and credit in most cases. You are going to have times when you need to cover expenses, make investments and spend money you do not immediately have on hand. In a perfect world this would not seem like sound reasoning, but if your competitor has access to capital and you do not, you will find yourself out of business and closing the doors within a year or two. This is where banks are more predatory than venture capital seems on the surface. VC gives you access to money on more reasonable terms but at the cost of access to intellectual property and the inner workings of the company. Venture capitalists are often called Sharks because they will use this information to exploit any weaknesses and devour the company because each company is just another fish in the sea.

    Americans, Chinese, and Russians are not the real problem in the world today and any hate for these is grossly misplaced. Almost all of us are just humans struggling to survive. There are a few tens of thousands of humans that are in control of everything on the planet, and these individuals are the immediate problem.

    Unfortunately, the big picture is that venture capital is a trade off. It only really exists because of the exponential growth of silicon technology from the 1950s to now. Prior to the 1950s the world economy was lead by military spending. The exponential growth of silicon is over now. We are presently 10 years away from the last silicon fab node. The actual silicon design process takes 10 years. That means that the people that work on the edge of the science are already at the end. No other technology has ever outpaced military driven growth of an economy. The future will look like the past eras that lead to the Great War, World War 2, and all the conflicts that came before them. You see, you are concerned with what venture capital is doing in the world, but venture capital is no longer relevant. We lived at the end of what some call the Pax-Americana (American peace era devoid of large scale conflict), but in reality it was the Pax-Silicon. Military funding was not capable of keeping up with the growth potential of silicon. In a way, venture capitalists were an extension of the US military. The move that won the cold war against the Soviets was the economic growth that accompanied this move to venture capital with silicon. It is impossible to overstate the big picture importance of silicon, venture capital, and what drives economies.

    The thing that matters most right now is actually freedom of information. The power to control information is the pivot point of the next great conflict and it is more important than ever while being the weakest it has ever been in centuries. There is nothing wrong with trying to hurt VC, but you will find it everywhere while it is nearly entirely irrelevant at the brands and location of manufacture. It has nothing to do with the average person in any region of the world.

  • RetroGradeBE@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    You are almost in exactly the same boat as I am, the biggest bottleneck is consumer tech. I’ll definitely keep my iPhone, but have switched for all my subscriptions to European alternatives. (Pcloud for cloud storage, Surfshark for VPN) Installed Linux on my pc instead of Windows. Unfortunately, some services like Whatsapp are difficult to get rid off.

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    4 hours ago

    If you can’t buy from Europe (like with a phone), buy used.
    Then your money doesn’t go directly to a US company, but to a private person in your country.

    The Gigaset GS phones are made in Germany, and cheaper and lighter than the FairPhone.

  • redlemace@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Thanks, nice status report. And agreed on the whatsapp. too many contacts don’t care at all so it’s that or being cut out of many loops. Well played Meta :(

    • tfm@europe.pubOPM
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      4 hours ago

      SMS/RCS? Groups are tricky. I got my family to transfer over to Signal (yeah I know still American but at least open source, privacy focused and low barrier) so I got this group over. The others I don’t care that much. I still get updated on important stuff and people slowly move over.