Saw this post on Reddit and thought it was interesting to see someone’s experience.
I’ve been trying for a few months to get rid of any stuff made out of EU (even before it was mainstream lol), and here are my conclusions at the moment:
Groceries: It’s pretty easy. I try to go to local stores, but if I need to go to a supermarket, I go to Carrefour, Mercadona or Froiz, all european, and I’ve reached to the point that EVERYTHING I buy is european (mostly spanish, portuguese, french or italian).
Clothes: This has been tricky. To buy sneakers has been more dificult than I thought it would be. There are a lot of european brands that actually make it’s products in China, Bangladesh, etc., so I had to look very close. Finally, I buyed Victoria sneakers and I’m very happy with them. For shoes and boots, Pikolinos is a very good brand also. Miguel Bellido shirts are very good as well.
Furniture: Well, Ikea is the obvious choice, but I do preffer to buy on spanish and portuguese stores that also have prety good quality for a good price, like Lufe.
Sports: Only sport that I play is climbing, and my last pair of climbing shoes are Tenaya Ra, and I couldn’t be happier with them. La Sportiva has amazing products also, being italian and as far as I know, still manufacture in Italy.
Technology: Oh man, this is a pain… I don’t want to throw away my iPhone 13 mini until it’s done, but when the time comes, I don’t know if there are going to be any alternatives. Fairphone, probably, but the components are also from China, right? And anyway, I will struggle with a big phone, which I hate. In PC I can move from Windows to Linux, but the mayority of the PC parts would be made in USA.
Good news is that the only USA page that I actually visit is Reddit, as I don’t have Instagram, facebook or any other social media. Bad news is that it will be virtually impossible to leave Whatsapp.
Well, this is it, I guess that all of you are struggling with the same, being the technology the real issue, cause the rest is pretty easy to find alternatives even better.
My faith in Europe has risen since few months back, and I hope it’s not too late for us to being able to compete in this new world that is emerging, where if you depend on any way on USA or China, you’re lost.
A hug from Spain to all of you, european brothers. And sorry for my poor english.
Yeah, it’ll take a long time and lots of investment. I think it’s possible though, and, as you said, ASML is a proof of concept for EU-based manufacturing of high-level tech.
Sorry, but ASML is actually proof of the opposite and here’s why:
The EU has been a place for a long time where tech is expensive to produce. The high wages and cost of living is mainly why.
Cutting edge tech can flourish here. IMEC, ASML, medical device companies, robotics and industrial equipment (abb, Schneider, etc…) Because these industries have waaay more margin and are B2B sales, not B2C.
Consumer electronics have much more competition and are competing with the wages and working conditions of workers in China and India, along with the sheer local tech supply chains, proximity to Taiwan, and manufacturing scale.
ASML is a titan specifically because they are an almost complete monopoly and closely guards their trade secrets. Their margins are absolutely massive because they can be. The price of labor isn’t a dealbreaker for them because each machine sells for multiple millions of euros.
If phones and smart watches were actually produced in the EU, they would be double the cost and absolutely nobody would buy them as there is no technical benefit besides being made in the EU.
Just look at fairphone. It costs about 50% more than its spec competitors because it uses European engineering and software development and a little better material sourcing while still being produced in China.
Ugh, that sounds like sensible analysis… I wonder if this isn’t the sort of thing that can’t be subsidized.
In Portugal, every (not every, but most, at least) children received a free laptop in middle school for personal and academic use. This didn’t last long for a variety of reasons, as we were (and still are…) a very corrupt country, but I wonder if some sort of national/EU-level policy surrounding tech literacy, for example, couldn’t do something about this.
Give people EU tech from the start as part of social programs, strengthen EU manufacturing through subsidies/PPP… IDK just spitballing. Well, I guess there’s the other option…
We have the means to do it, but I think we lack the market and the necessary demand. There are already 2 initiatives from the EU under the EPI, for 2 chips. One is a general data-center CPU based on the ARM arch, called RHEA 1: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/general-purpose-processor and the other, EPAC, based on the RISC-V arch, is a fusion of accelerators which can be used for specialized tasks like AI training etc: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/european-processor-initiative-announces-the-successful-bring-up-of-the-epac1-5-acceleration-chip Despite the initial funding and the goodwill, not a single unit has been produced from the RHEA1, while they have already a design for RHEA2. The EPAC has had sample shipped which can boot Linux. Overall on the consumer side we have nothing to compete. The EU ceded any kind of consumer silicone tech to the US, which now can use it as a bargaining chip to their benefit.
heh