alt Hacker News> While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize pretty much the sole motivation behind all this digital virtue signaling is "put my data somewhere Trump isn't."
Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
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Virtue signaling apparently means making decisions based on the current reality instead of a future hypothetical.
> Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"?
Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.
What exactly is missing here?
> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?
The political systems of the USA and the EU are extremely dissimilar. The US, by virtue of their "winner takes it all" mentality, is evidently pretty vulnerable to a mad leader single-handedly destroying decades of progress. Whereas the EU isn't a single entity, but a federation of 27 member states without central leadership. There is no "EU government", and thus no single corruptible entity that could turn "insane".