[wolvoleo]

In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.

I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.

[tchalla]

Everyone has been going gung ho about Canadian PM speech but the banger one for me personally is the Belgian PM. He said it best “Being a happy vassal state is one thing, being a miserable slave is another”. Europe deserves every bit what’s coming to them.

[trinsic2]

Also the Canadian MP is involved in deploying surveillance[0] on his own country so I am not sure why people are giving him props. He is part of the problem.

[0]: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/72859/carneys-new...

People need to stop buying into propaganda.

[ffsm8]

Surveillance is a different issue to the one he talked about, which is geopolitical and international instead of domestic (surveillance).

all nations around the world are currently increasing their surveillance capability... And it's worth keeping in mind that at least some of us see that as an issue, that's actually not a broadly accepted fact. There are a lot of people that don't see an issue with it.

And you'll be able to find a topic you disagree with with all politicians, if you discredit everything they say afterwards, you're essentially left holding your ears closed to all dialog.

[trinsic2]

No. Surveillance is exactly the main issue that is surrounding all of this scaling up abuse of governance locally and globally.

A man that is in directly involved in surveilling his own people does not have a leg to stand on in the Geo political arena. And to think otherwise is a massive mistake. Stop propping up people that do deserve it.

[yencabulator]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

[trinsic2]

Surveillance underlines this issue so no its not the same. Why would anybody listen to a known bad actor, its directly related to the problem

[yencabulator]

It's about a lot more than surveillance. It's about sovereignty, continuity of government, resisting sabotage, countering influence programs, and so on.

[OKRainbowKid]

Can you elaborate how this statement led you to your conclusion?

[tchalla]

I don’t understand your question. I’m assuming you are asking about the part “Europe deserves”. It’s simple really - for decades now Europe has been relying on US for military support. It’s a cardinal sin to do so if one wants an equivalent seat at the negotiating table. But the EU just can’t agree amongst themselves. Mercosur takes 30 years, India defence agreement has taken 20. The warning signs were there during 2016 but conveniently brushed. EU either acts together for the common good even if they don’t like something or continues to be bureaucratic, irrelevant old person. It’s slow agony at the moment.

[rtsil]

The EU couldn't agree amongst themselves because the US (and its biggest vassal, the UK when it was in the EU) did everything to prevent such agreement.

We'll see what the States that were the most against any form of common European defense will do now that the US has proven unreliable. And if they are still under the delusion that the current US policies will go away, then it's time for Two-Speed Europe.

[terminalshort]

Don't blame this on the UK. UK leave vote was a few months before the 2016 election, so the timing is convenient. But let's not pretend that it was anything but complacency (that was shattered by Trump) is to blame here.

[Gud]

I disagree, Europe has not been ”relying” on US military support.

It is true that most(not all, for example Switzerland, Finland Poland all have excellent militaries) European countries have been underfunding their military in stark contrast to the war mongering nation across the Atlantic, but I would not call that “relying on”, just a delusion that we lived in an eternal peace.

FWIW I served my country Sweden for three years, including a tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. I have been against this recklessness for as long as I can remember.

Also, the EU is hardly irrelevant, stop the hyperbole…

It is subtle, but different

[number6]

Thank you for your service

[surgical_fire]

> But the EU just can’t agree amongst themselves.

Because "the EU" is not a country. It is a bloc. People that speak lf EU here are very delusional about what it is, and seemingly never understand its function.

People speak of the EU as if it was going to be as nimble as a unified country with a single government structure. It is not. It is a bloc composed of 27 countries each with its own government structure, interests, budgets, industries, culture, and so on.

Also - defense. The EU has no army. Each of its 27 countries have their own separated armies, and make their own decisions.

In a post WW2 scenario, where most of Europe needed to rebuild, outsourcing defense to an ally was a correct decision (especially considering that escalating power in the preceeding decades only led to war).

Perhaps the current state of affairs lead to a more federalized EU, who knows.

[petre]

This stuff goes back to Yalta, so just forget parotting these ideas. The US never wanted Europe to be self reliant concerning security, up until Trump and the Paypal mafia. Fortunately De Gaulle gave the Americans the finger during his presidency because he knew better. Not being on the losing side meant that Framce wasn't under US "protection" and could develop their own nuclear program and military hardware, as opposed to Germany (and Japan).

[watwut]

USA got military support from Europe. Not vice versa.

USA is pure aggressor here. USA becomming fascist is not fault of Europe, so no, Europe does not deserve to be attacked by USA.

USA asked Europe for help, got it, used it for own benefit and then attacks Europe with lies and threats.

[polotics]

Please do not mix up the mention of the USA with your view on the current administration, and also your view of the many silent servicemember who will have strong opinions about a few things.

[wolvoleo]

If they're so opposed to it, why are they so silent?

[stefan_]

You are just swallowing the Trump line whole. Try being a hegemon without Ramstein and all the other bases.

[627467]

> try being a hegemon without...

The hypothetical should really be on the vassal or it is just rethorics.

This is the time to call each other bluffs and keep revealing the naked emperors

[tmtvl]

Here in Belgium voting is mandatory, so the clowns we have are who the public decided were the best candidates. The only excuse we can make is that single-vote list-PR is worse than ranked voting.

[Spivak]

Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.

[Sharlin]

It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

[kaveh_h]

Well maybe the old adage need to change

[EgregiousCube]

He did change it when paraphrasing, just now :-)

I'm sure it'll be paraphrased to another company in another 30 years.

[briHass]

M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.

There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.

I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.

[fragmede]

> with zero competition

Google Workspace with Chromebooks. No windows endpoints getting a virus or ransomware or some other malware. It's all about the bubble you're in. Mine, windows isn't even needed anymore for games because SteamOS is sufficiently there for the games we play.

[jemmyw]

Not helping with your US/big tech dependence though

[mjevans]

It's roughly the same price (or even more expensive) and doesn't include Outlook... which is THE crack application for all those windows addicts.

You could absolutely nail the document compatibility aspect and it still wouldn't be enough because of freaking Outlook.

[ccakes]

10 years ago I would have agreed with you but these days.. Outlook has been crapped on so much that Google Workspaces are competitive imo

[esperent]

> what's the sell of Microsoft 365

> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap

You answered your own question.

[Spivak]

Look I get that, but the parent was talking about there being just no alternative to 365 when it seems like nearly every product in the suite has plenty of competitors.

It does seem like you can put your money where your mouth is in this case. You can now put a literal dollar value on how much you actually care about being tied to US tech. And it's like $20-40/user/month. Which isn't nothing but it's not untenable amounts of money.

[skocznymroczny]

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?

[mjhay]

Anyone can edit it and it also might get randomly corrupted. It’s crap, especially if some people are on Macs.

[saguntum]

I haven't used any but there are several it seems: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-docs

NextCloud looks ok.

For some reason I thought it was open to the public, but France also maintains a full sovereign cloud office suite for use by civil servants: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Maybe one day they'll open it up publicly.

[Telaneo]

Open-Xchange supports collaborative editing of spreadsheets. Mailbox.org uses that for their email service, and you get access to their online office suite when you subscribe. I can't speak to the quality of the shared editing, but their online office suite is fine for basic stuff.

[Hikikomori]

Zoho.

[Yoric]

And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

[Telaneo]

Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.

[wolvoleo]

> Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

Yes!! Misusing Excel as a database is really part of the problem. It also causes so many issues. Having multiple data elements within one cell. Someone overtyping a formula in a column of 200.000 values leading to one cell no longer being updated. Needing 32GB of RAM just to edit a spreadsheet with a measly 500.000 rows.

All stuff that never would happen with a real database. Microsoft never really put much effort into making Access approachable.

[iberator]

You could do this in Pandas with Python under like 400mb of ram

[astrospective]

Porting involved Excel sheets into web apps has been a decent chunk of my dev career.

[mmooss]

What works best in those situations, in your experience?

Do you recreate a spreadsheet, use an existing online service, and/or create a database with proper logic, etc.? If the latter, how do users handle the UI change, and can they have an ease of creation similar to what Excel provides?

[midoBB]

In my experience it's mostly about understanding business requirements of people using said excel sheets and then replicating it to CRUD WebApps while keeping capabilities of importing said sheets and exporting them so user flows are unharmed till a wholesale transition is mandated.

Good source of money for contractors as OP said.

[terminalshort]

Bad how? Works just fine for everything I have ever needed to do with it. I'm not a power user, though, but my point is neither are 95% of users and the basic functionality is just fine.

[Yoric]

I find the UI clunky and a clear regression from older versions.

A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.

Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.

In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.

I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.

[hmry]

Being good is one thing, being compatible with existing files full of VBA macros is another.

Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?

[Yoric]

Oh, the web version doesn't support them? I hadn't realized that.

[wolvoleo]

It doesn't even support many basic functions of the office apps.

MS was working hard on creating feature parity but at some point they just dropped everything and gave up.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think you're misreading the source of the defeatism. It's clear what European leaders should do if they want to compete with US big tech. They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

But European leaders haven't been willing to do this, perceiving (I think correctly) that European citizens won't tolerate the idea of asking rich CEOs for regulatory advice or making the creation of billionaires a policy goal. So instead they focus on the kind of pointless efforts described in the source article, where government agencies endlessly chase their tails on standards and objectives.

To the eternal frustration of governments and advocates around the world, there's no argument for why you should use domestic products that can adequately substitute for high-quality domestic products people want to use.

[smsm42]

If Europe were capable of doing this, Europe would not need to do this. They'd already have active and vibrant tech scene compared to US one - EU is bigger than US by population, and certainly not less smart - in fact, a lot of people live in EU and work for US tech companies. So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not? They decided their political model must work differently, even at the cost of not having big tech. So now they don't have big tech. And no amount of committee meetings is going to change that, even if all governments would want it really, really hard.

[dns_snek]

> So why US has "big tech" and Europe does not?

Because having "big tech" is a sign that the government has completely failed to enforce anti-trust laws and allowed dangerous concentration of power to occur. It's a symptom of a disease not some desirable goal.

The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech". It needs generous public funding for infrastructure, open source, and it should aim to build upon open standards whenever possible.

We don't need domestic monopolies that are just going to fuck us in the same way that US corporations fuck Americans while we all pretend to enjoy it for the sake of looking superior to the other camp.

[smsm42]

> The EU doesn't need or want "big tech", it just needs "tech".

Why doesn't it already have "tech" and has to resort to governmental action to procure one? I mean, it is obviously very easy to acquire just "tech" without government completely failing to enforce laws and population being fucked by corporations, and it is a testament to how dumb Americans really are that they failed to do that. But Europeans are not dumb, so why they didn't do it by now? Why we are discussing the matter now instead of just pointing to clearly superior open-standard non-fucking European "just tech" as a superior alternative to American "big tech"?

[sunshine-o]

Let's not forget Big tech is also fueled by the rest of the world and Europe.

If you walk into a bank in Europe and have some money to invest they will sell you mostly debt and the "Magnificent Seven" or a funds with those stocks inside.

The EU is ridiculous when it says it want to built an alternative because it's entire financial/banking system end up fueling the saving of its citizen into those companies.

This is also why we end up in that absurd situation where the Mag 7 make up 1/3 of the S&P 500 market cap.

If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it. Not do another fake program where insiders will grab some public money and get nowhere (it has been tried for 25 years).

[smsm42]

> If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it.

Did US government do something like that? If US has some attractive investments and EU does not, why don't they? I mean, EU citizens would probably like to invest in EU companies, much better than in US companies, they are not some self-haters to refuse a good investment just because it's in EU, right? So why don't they invest there? Why do they invest in US instead and there is a need in a special action - not taken prior to now - to enable them to invest in the EU?

[sarchertech]

It’s not really comparable though. The EU isn’t a unified single language market, and its GDP and per capita GDP are much smaller.

[smsm42]

Language is not a huge deal - if the French and the Spanish and the Dutch can use Facebook, they could use Eurobook if that existed, as well. The problem of course would be, if they made a committee to build Eurobook, they'd spend 5 years in meetings to ensure every country and every language is absolutely equally represented and then would build something that no speaker of any language would use.

As for GDP, EU overall GDP is only slightly less than US GDP, so it could very well sustain the industry of comparable size. Per capita GDP is indeed lower, but I'm not sure how that precludes creation of something like Eurobook.

[sarchertech]

EU GDP is about 2/3 US GDP. That’s a very significant difference. Per capita income is probably less important than average and median disposable income, which is much higher in the US and has an obvious impact on B2C companies.

FB was incubated in a single unified market before it really spread to the EU. It’s harder for companies to take off and reach tech giant reach with the much smaller individual markets in the EU.

It’s much harder to build a product that appeals to everyone from the Irish to the Bulgarians, and to advertise to them than it is to do the same for everyone in the US. And it’s not just the tech companies, the individual content creators on the platform have the same comparative problems.

[com]

There were Eurobooks and they were pretty well bought out by Facebook. Hyves and so on. The online CV networks were bought by LinkedIn.

[api]

The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy.

Complexity is a regressive tax. It disproportionately penalizes small ventures and entrepreneurs who don’t have whole departments of people to deal with it. The effect is to prevent the formation of new companies. Large incumbents are able to deal with it, so it actually protects them.

[f30e3dfed1c9]

"The answer is simple: simplify and streamline all the bureaucracy."

Well, that sounds easy! I wonder why no one else ever thought of it. Good thing there are geniuses like you around.

[api]

People think of it all the time. But there’s a giant system full of people whose careers and incomes are linked to the complexity, not just government bureaucrats but also lawyers, accounting firms, expensive consultancies, etc. It’s a hard sell because it would decimate whole industries that revolving around servicing the complexity.

But it’s one of the thing the EU could do to win in new industries.

Honestly if the EU became more innovation and entrepreneur friendly I think they’d kick America’s ass. Tons of smart people, and the positive side of the social safely net is that it derisks entrepreneurship. America is full of would be founders who can’t afford to take the leap since they could lose their health care, etc.

[mmooss]

> making the creation of billionaires a policy goal

Concentrating wealth to the degree of the US is not at all necessary for innovation. As an extreme example, Bezos would have done the same thing for a tenth or less of the current lifetime income.

In fact, when many leading entrepeneurs started, the wealth concentration wasn't nearly as high, yet they were still motivated. Now with wealth concentration much higher, my impression is less motivation and opportunity for startups, innovation, starting a business in your garage, etc. In more economic terms, I think it's well-established that such high concentration of wealth reduces economic mobility.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The causation is in the other direction. Innovative entrepreneurs cause wealth to become highly concentrated, and cause their companies to distort the societies they're embedded in, by the act of producing goods and services that a large number of people want to buy.

Bezos is actually a great example, because he made almost his entire US$250B fortune from unrealized stock appreciation rather than salary or new awards. Even the most extreme wealth tax proposals I've seen wouldn't get him down to US$25B. The US could only have achieved that target by restricting how much Amazon is allowed to innovate and grow.

[IrishTechie]

I disagree. They could for example make it mandatory to grant more stock options to employees so the wealth they are generating is more broadly spread beyond the founder/CEO. I’m sure there are plenty of other approaches that would still handsomely reward innovation and growth but prevent where we ended up today.

[Intralexical]

> They should sit down with corporate leaders at Spotify, Ericsson, ASML, etc. and talk though what reforms are necessary for Europe to start minting unicorns as rapidly as the Americans can.

The EU should ask established incumbents how to best create lots of new upstarts, some of which will no doubt end up competing with them or disrupting their business models?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Yes. They shouldn't take their words as gospel, of course, they'd want to find some current upstarts as well. But the idea that successful businesspeople are just snatching pieces of the pie and have nothing useful to say is exactly the attitude that's incompatible with an innovative tech sector.

[wolvoleo]

No, the last thing we should do is transform Europe into a neoliberal stronghold like America. It's not all about making money. It's about creating a civilisation for citizens, not business. Business is just a means to an end.

The current polarisation in America is a direct result of billionaires controlling policy, and the anger of a huge disadvantaged minority being taken advantage of by populists (which ironically are mostly oligarchs)

[qmmmur]

I would hedge most businesses don’t need the full offering of 365. You could get away with an email provider, a way to author documents and some file storage which are abundantly offered on other platforms like infomaniak.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

They might not need it if they started today. But once you have a few hundred TBs of data in Sharepoint, you've foreclosed any alternatives.

[Telaneo]

I'd imagine this attitude would start to disappear as soon as alternatives start being used. It's already happening to some extent, but it needs to trickle down into the general populace. The relevant names just aren't in people's minds yet (although there definitely are areas where there aren't exact 1-to-1 replacements available).

[gerdesj]

"In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude."

I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

I remember "Evoluon" in Eindhoven. I lived in West Germany in the '70s and '80s and Eindhoven was a fairly short drive away. That thing was absolutely amazing. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in '91 so I have an idea about how impressive the flying saucer on stilts was as a structure.

I'm a Brit and I find myself writing a love letter to the Neths!

Anyway, the MS365 thing is entrenched all over. I'm the managing director of my own company and I found myself migrating my email system to M365 from Exchange on prem and years ago from GroupWise. However, our MX records are on site and I still rock Exim and rspamd. If MS goes down I still have our inbound email in the queue and can read them. Our uptime is way better than MS's. I also have a Dovecot IMAPD for mailboxes that should stay local.

[wolvoleo]

> I gather that the Dutch government sponsor OpenVPN development and frankly I've generally viewed the Netherlands as a whole as being rather independently minded. You might recall that a few Dutch frigates managed to sail up an English river (the Medway) in Kent and cause havoc back in the day. However we all speak a Germanic language of one sort or another!

The Dutch tax office is currently busy migrating to M365. They had their own functioning solution up until now. Geopolitically this is the worst time to create dependencies.

And yeah the evoluon is cool but that was in a completely different age. All the innovation was shipped to China in the 2000s. Philips that made the evoluon was stripped and sold for parts, the only successful part remaining is ASML but that's a unicorn.

Holland these days is governed by the neoliberals and has been for 30 years, and they want to turn the country into another America. It's the most neoliberal country left in the EU since the UK left.

[ummonk]

It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.

[trinsic2]

What the hell are you talking about? Canada is in a pretty bad state themselves, just as much as we are in the U.S.

[bell-cot]

Back when the danger was natural and physical - how much defeatism was there in Holland about building the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works ?

Why the difference?

[wolvoleo]

Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.

Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder

[PontifexMinimus]

> In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude

The naysayer defeatist attitude is also very strong in the UK.

[petre]

Just wait until he asks for total control of Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.

[lateforwork]

Even if MAGA goes away in 3 years when Trump (hopefully) goes away, the US will remain an oligarchy. Billionaire's interests comes before citizens' interests. This is because of a supreme court decision that allowed billionaires to buy elections. For this reason, even though I am American, I'd like to see European alternatives to US apps and services, because they are more likely to serve my interests.

[okanat]

The big picture isn't that different in Europe. Most EU countries are also oligarchies, just with a lot more bloody histories and national traumas. The social safety net is kept to the level of remembrance of those traumas. Once people start forgetting them, the oligarchs will take away the rights one by one.

The response to US betrayal is weak because our oligarchs own lots and lots of investments in the US. Our banks invest in US treasuries and especially in the US real estate market. They then leverage those US investments against normal people in the EU and consolidate more and more power (and assets) and blame normal people for not having investments or not working enough. They are the ones who take away EU GDP and park it in US investment tools. Forming businesses is more risky in many EU countries due to extremely conservative policies of those same banks who prefer US investments instead.

[mmooss]

I think that's overwhelmingly false. Wealth concentration isn't nearly as high in Europe.

[bethekidyouwant]

Wealth concentration doesn’t make his point false at all

[terminalshort]

This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.

[Esophagus4]

> There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed

Just for anyone else reading this comment, it’s pretty wildly incorrect.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administra...

[terminalshort]

From your own link:

> CBO estimates that as result of P.L. 119-21, U.S. households, on average, will see an increase in the resources available to them over the 2026– 2034 period. The changes in resources will not be evenly distributed among households. The agency estimates that, in general, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.

That's hardly a picture of billionaires pulling the strings

[Esophagus4]

Going down with this ship, huh?

Care to quote the second one? The one whose byline is “Trump giving hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the ultra wealthy”?

Or will you dismiss that too because it doesn’t explicitly say billionaires?

[terminalshort]

Of course I quoted the CBO instead of some attention grabbing drivel from journalists. Of course tax cuts "give hundreds of billions" to the ultra wealthy because that's who pays all the taxes. It isn't evidence of your childish conspiracy theory that we are all governed by a cabal of billionaires buying elections.

[mmooss]

We could argue that there didn't need to be change, because favoring the wealthy was already the policy: Wealth concentration was already at historic highs. Taxes were already very low, including capital gains tax (the primary source of income for the very wealthy - return on capital is the primary income of capitalists), social safety net relatively underfunded including widespread lack of health care, social and economic mobility dropping, access to higher education relied primarily on family wealth and not grades, access to housing dropping, etc. State governments brag about no income tax, which means they rely on regressive taxes to pay for the common good.

Regardless, I think the parent comment facts are wrong and there there have been massive changes benefitting the wealthy: There have been massive tax cuts for them, reduction in enforcement of financial laws (e.g., by the SEC, etc.), lagging financial regulation of private equity, destruction of consumer protection (such as the CFPB), massive changes in policy and action to benefit the fossil fuel industry including use of the US military, ... there was a big tax law change to benefit SV founders that was advocated here on HN, protectionist measures increasing prices for consumers and giving the benefits to corporations, etc.

[lateforwork]

> the major corporate money backed candidate lost

Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. Are you saying that had no impact? How do you know this?

[tjwebbnorfolk]

It's widely reported that the democrats spent over twice as much money as Trump. Both parties have their share of big donors, this isn't new, nor is it specific to Elon. It's been this way a long, long time.

[mmooss]

Are those shares equal? It's true that both parties got votes in every state, but that doesn't tell use much.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Ok at this point I don't know what you're talking about anymore.

[anonymousiam]

Zukerberg spent almost twice that much to get Biden elected.

https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/118th-congress/hou...

[terminalshort]

Both sides have their supporters. Everyone knows that. I'm not going to take your bait to prove a negative. In both 2016 and 2024 Trump raised less money than his opponent (massively less in 2016) and still won.

[lateforwork]

That was a different election.

[irishcoffee]

Trump raised and spent less money in 2024. Full stop.

[mrtesthah]

Citizens United is precisely why we have a majority of politicians following the will of the donor class rather than a majority of actual voters. It’s why we lack universal healthcare, for example, despite 62% of Americans supporting it a year ago, with a similar number supporting raising the minimum wage.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Regarding the last national election:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fift...

The Court’s decision and others that followed shaped the 2024 election to a greater degree than any that came before it. Most notably, Donald Trump substantially trailed Kamala Harris in traditional campaign donations, which are subject to legal limits and must be disclosed. Yet he was able to compensate for this disadvantage by outsourcing much of his campaign to super PACs and other outside groups funded by a handful of wealthy donors. While such groups had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in previous cycles, this was the first time they successfully took on many of the other core functions of a general election presidential campaign, such as door-to-door canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Their activities unquestionably would have been illegal before Citizens United.

[terminalshort]

We didn't have universal health care before CU either. It wasn't included in the ACA, before CU. It failed when Clinton tried in the 90s, and it failed every other time anyone tried before that too. You are just using Citizens United as a bogey man for a policy you don't like. You can complain about Trump all you like, but Harris didn't have much less dark money than he did. And Clinton / Biden had double what Trump did in 2016 and 2020. https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

[mrtesthah]

Universal health care wasn't as popular back then as it is now, so that's to be expected:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx

This isn't about who wins campaigns -- this is about who influences the issues they campaign on. Since the Citizens United decision politicians have had to switch to the Super PAC model to be competitive, which gives drastically more power to dark money donors. And unsurprisingly, as cited in that study, the influence of average citizens on politics has been completely surpassed by businesses and economic elites:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[terminalshort]

2000 - 64% 2025 - 64%

Doesn't matter anyway because the poll doesn't mean shit. Most people are idiots and will answer the poll completely differently if you actually give them a realistic question like "would you accept a major tax increase to get universal healthcare?"

[Archelaos]

The problem are not Trump or the billionaires, but the majority of the American people who support them. They knew what they were getting.

[lateforwork]

No they didn't know what they were getting. They didn't and can't look beyond the price of eggs at their local Kroger. To a large extend this election was decided by the price of eggs.

[trhway]

"The price of eggs" was direct result of the screwed response to the pandemics, all that panicked senseless running around like beheaded chickens and the total dismissal of reality.

Populists come to power when the ruling elites bankrupt by corruption and ineptitude the trust that the populace had had in them.

[mrtesthah]

A permanent cult-following minority does want a white christian nationalist dictatorship.

Everyone else are low information voters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...

[Hikikomori]

It likely isn't over with him. Trump is just the frontman and possibly fall guy for project 2025/federalist society. They are his entire cabinet and their plan was to replace all government workers with their own loyal people.