How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?. Trump kind helped accelerate this trend but is this generally good for the collective west?
It's pretty dumb! I want the best software and the best hardware, no matter where it's made. Outside of extremely niche situations (e.g. military hardware) international trade is a positive good for all those involved. If you sleep on mattress from China, wear clothes from Vietnam, drink coffee from Ethiopia, eat food from Mexico, and use software from the United States, everyone involved in all of those countries wins: you win because you get the best product, and the companies win because they are financially rewarded for making the best product -- not for their postal address. C'mon people, this is basic economics.
> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?
Mutt here. It’s annoying how feckless the European pushback is. Half of these alternatives either run significant rails through America or are insignificantly small. Meanwhile, our ambassador to Greece is busy selling her sugar daddy’s natural gas to Albania and Bulgaria [1]. (Nobody is even pretending the folks buying her corruption will be prosecuted. Athens held up Russian sanctions to get one of their tycoons a carve-out.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/at-davos-kimberly-guilfo...
I don't think a good idea to limit yourself to solutions only from your geographical area, but it's also a very ingrained " not from my tribe" human sentiment. It's hard to fight it.
Sure got more visible the recent years but the "trend" isn't new.
When sensitive data was a topic even 15 years ago we built European only solutions because America and it's barely existing privacy laws were not to trust. (Built software for government, universities and other companies back then)
From my POV this has nothing to do with orange guy but it's an ongoing trend of benefiting from our customer and data protection laws.
I’m not sure about sentiment, buying local always made sense, as you invest into your surroundings, to some degree.
> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts
It seems like a provincial mindset.
It's a bit ironic to fight protectionism with consumer nationalism, but good from a consumer awareness perspective.
I'd love to see the Europeans roll their own HN equivalent and region block it (and themselves), but asking them to actually make something instead of complaining or virtue signalling their distaste for American goods is too tall an order.
The irony that they're all on an American website crying about American stuff because they have no alternative really never gets old, though.
Google's, Apple's, and Microsoft's profit first attitude has garnered the same resentment in Europe that they enjoy in the US. There's nothing surprising here. What will be surprising is if the push to move away works in Europe, where it hasn't worked in the US, so far.
I think you're attributing Big Tech's bad behavior to politicians where you should be attributing politicians' bad behavior to Big Tech's lobbying.
I believe that having an integrated global community (not just 'the west') is much better for humanity than regional isolationism.
But I don't blame any country for disassociating with the US. Not just because Trump is our president, but more so that we elected him, twice.
I wish the guy motivating this didn't exist, but I would love for Europe to develop genuinely competitive software products. I don't think it's good even for us Americans that so much software is developed by an American monoculture; we benefit greatly from the existence of Ikea and Toyota.
I’d bet most of those comments are from self-hating American leftists.
I don't feel anything yet because these efforts rarely go anywhere. The average person makes decisions on a multitude of factors but price, availability and convenience are the most important.
However, if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate. Considering how our trade is structured, Europe would experience a lot more pain.
In other words, I think it's cool that you raise visibility to your products. I think you should do it. But you'll lose more than we will if this gets too serious at America's expense.
Optimally we should all develop specialities and maintain a local reserve in most key industries. But all out of war isn't in our interest.