formerly VP Data & CRM at an european cloud service provider
Serial tech founder on startup, currently advisors to a PE fund investing in late stage tech companies.
Mostly data, AI and a bit of AI.
https://bsky.app/profile/florente.bsky.social
I think this is exactly the market Mollie is tapping in at the moment: "as feature complete as Ayden, but no need to run millions by us to be a first class citizen"
Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative.
Adyen is an enormous PSP
Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.
Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)
This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
I've been told by the head of compliance of the largest European banking group that 2.5% is exactly the threshold at which they begin to be very worried/ at systemic risk
Apparently they operate on very low level of tolerable risk (way lower than I thought)
Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.
The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
Except that lemons are picked for "cheap" in Argentina (and oranges in Morrocco or Valencia), industrially packaged to ports (most likely to BCN or VLC ports) and then shipped in containers to Palma.
Pick the oranges in the middle of the island: not cheap, as stated. Squeeze & freeze the juice (likely around Palma): not cheap, not even including transportation. Ship them back to the continent: probably not cheap either.
Transshipment is extremely costly and even more so at a smaller scale, and that's what we're comtemplating here.
Mallorca is a mountainous island in the middle of the med.
Exporting something from Mallorca seems like a logistical challenge to me.
Exporting something refrigerated or frozen, even more so...
Maybe store-shelf product such as gummies or something?
Fresh juice takes 2kg of oranges per ~1l/~1kg. Plus electricity and handling costs...
Still, you'll need a large multiplier on the transformation process: organic EU orange are 1.7€/kg, standard are 1€ wholesale market price (meaning its origin is continental spain or italy I guess).
Frozen orange juice is 3.93€ (Brazil)
He has half a dozen court dates set for other stuff related to corruption/money/....
Assuming he's losing the appeal on this particular case, he will have been sentenced for scheming with a convicted murderer (Lockerbie amongst other things).
If convicted, that person will be guilty of criminal actions together with a foreign dictator and his terrorist in chief.
Not exactly stealing gums.
The case is of particular seriousness and he's a convicted person, repeat offender.
Would something as serious be put under the rug in other democracies? I'm not so sure. If Justin Trudeau is found accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?
(Why do I say "if convicted"? He appealed, so he is innocent until proven guilty. Why is he in jail? In large parts because his political party lobbied for this type of sentences. Leopards did eat his face)
Say someone is legally elected president of France. They serve their 5 years term, doing their job.
They get out of Elysée Palace, draw a gun and shoot a passer by. Do they get a free pass? Wouldn't that victim deserve justice?
That person, not a divine being, a mere mortal like the rest of us, has been convicted of serious offences. He is now serving his sentence as any other person would (well, not exactly, for instance he gets a clean solo room and 24/7 security detail).
If your point is "an elected head of state should not be prosecuted by a standard court of justice" (a point I still disagree with btw), the french judicial system got that covered with "cour de justice de la république".
For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république it is. Not a walk in the park, judges & a "jury" of members of the Parliament. Aggravating circumstances (committing an offense while in an official capacity) means theoritically harsher sentences.
What he's been convicted for was as a private citizen. Standard judicial system. As should be, nothing naïve about this.
(Huge simplification of the french judicial system, the actual nature of his current legal status, etc as this case is utterly complex. Judge's ruling is over 400 pages long, and he's appealing, and he'll mostly spend a month in the lam and the rest under house arrest)
Met him at HAL 2001, volunteered together a bit there. I think he was heading the speakers herald team I was part of.
First encounter with the hacker conference scene, he guided me wisely.
Patient and kind indeed.
He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships.
Very saddened by this news.
So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.
That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.
I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.
It's also not that "user friendly": depending on their locale, users will usually expect for instance DD/MM/YYYY. Sorting by YYYY-MM-DD won't feel natural to them.
I'm on the market for a decent laptop. Don't want to side-line the thread, but is Arch supported decently on, say, Dell or any "enterprise grade" laptops?