Ronny's tech musings

April 2nd is what Trump calls liberation day. It is the day when he introduced Tariffs on almost all countries, including some countries with no inhabitants. While this is already interesting, it is even more interesting to see which countries are not on the list. These are Russia, Belarus, and North Korea. Authoritarian regimes with leaders that Trump is looking up to. The same countries that voted on February 25 against the UN resolution on Ukraine. Coincidence? I think not! All this means that the US, under the leadership of Trump, has switched sides on the world stage.

How did Trump come up with these tariffs? What did he base them on? It is as simple as it is stupid. He is looking at the US imports and exports with every country. If the US imports more value than it exports than there is a trade deficit. The tariffs are based on the percentage of that deficit divided by the imports, with a minimum of 10%. What about when a country imports more from the US than it exports to the US? This is good for the US, right? Would the US then pay a tariff to that country? Well, no, they get screwed by the same minimum of 10%.

The strangest thing however is that Trump based the import and export only on goods, not on services. The US exports a lot of services, if you look at Microsoft (365, Azure), Google (Workspace, Cloudcompute), and Amazon (AWS), they have a trade surplus. I don't have the exact figures, but I expect that for Europe the trade deficit of goods will be cancelled out by the trade surplus of services.

Thinking about services. Now that Trump started this trade-war, now that the US is not a safe harbor anymore for European data, it is time to migrate those services to European alternatives. Governments and companies that are dependent on those services should move out of the US cloud. There are plenty of good (open source) alternatives to choose from. There are datacenters and cloud providers ready to deliver those services. If Europe invests in European cloud then we will not only be sovereign but we will also enable European businesses to grow and invest in improving those services. Services which are now sometimes a little bit behind the current US offerings. Let's break this vicious circle and start spending European.

Make Europe Great Again!

It has been a while since I have blogged, let alone on a daily basis. But I now feel the need to express my feelings, more than the last couple of years. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and loved the platform and even the intimacy at that time. I moved from my blog to this new micro-blog and liked it a lot, especially the interaction with other users and the real world relationships that came out of it. Meeting people IRL (in real life) was a thing at that time. And I think that for the next 6 to 7 years it was my go to platform. I can see, at least, two moments in that time when things started shifting. The first was Brexit and the social media campaigns that tried to influence people to be either pro or against the Brexit. As we later learned, Camebridge Analytica played a big role in this. Most of this was being done on Facebook, but Twitter didn't stay clean from it. This was later followed by the Trump campaign for his first presidency in 2016, which polarized the social media platforms even more. It was at that time when Twitter started to lose my interest, at least as a publishing platform. For news it was, and sometimes still is, a great platform and sometimes the first to read things.

In 2021 Trump got suspended from Twitter, two days after the attack of the US Capitol. At that time the polarization of the platform couldn't have been worse. We were in the middle of a pandemic and had a president that wouldn't want to give up his power. Twitter was not the only platform to ban Trump, he got suspended on a lot more platforms. After these bans Trump went to court to fight the censorship of these platforms, which were against free speech. To stop the moderation on Twitter and enable free speech, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X. This brought a lot of controversy, not only by users, but also by Twitter employees. A lot of them left the platform. This is when Mastodon got more and more popular, and when Jack, the former CEO of Twitter, started BlueSky, both an alternative to Twitter.

Mastodon and the underlying ActivityPub protocol have been around since 2018. The idea was/is to federate social instances that can exchange messages together, without them being all in one platform. This democratizes the protocol and prevents single actors to capture or change the platform.

I have been on Mastodon and on BlueSky, at least since Twitter started to derail. But like said earlier, I have been a consumer most of the time, on any platform. This changes today. Today I will remove my account on X. Not just stop posting or even consuming, no, actually deleting my account. There are two major reasons for that. the first is that the polarization on the platform has grown so much that I cannot handle it anymore. The other is that I sometimes find myself looking at videos for more time than I intended. I cannot proof it, but it feels to may that the algorithms like there are on Tik-Tok and Facebook to grab and keep your attention, also have been moved to X. My timeline is not anymore from the people that I follow. It is an algorithm timeline to grab and keep my attention.

I think I will move my consumption to Mastodon and even start to do some more micro-publishing again. But that what I once liked, longer form posts, will be done here.