"Question. For many years, you’ve been trying to get U.S. technology companies to process the data of European citizens according to EU standards. Is that possible with Trump in the White House?
Answer. A legal system has to be stable precisely in situations where you have a crazy president. If everyone were nice and friendly, we wouldn’t need laws. A big issue is how much the whole data economy has become part of this trade war. One of the only things that Europe can retaliate [against] is going to be the digital industry. It’s one of the things where [Americans] make shitloads of money. It’s the financial industry, digital industry… and that’s about it.
The [EU] Commission just fined Meta and Apple… and the former responded with a very Trumpian press release, saying, “Oh, this is a tariff.” You broke the law and you knew you were doing it, so now you can’t just say it’s a tariff. It’s like someone driving their Porsche at 180 miles an hour and, when they get fined, they say, “Oh, you just hate rich people.”
Q. Is the European Commission right to fine two tech giants in the middle of a tariff war?
A. The EC is taking things slowly, because it doesn’t want to be the first to throw a stone. But at some point, you have to enforce your law. We must address the issue of technological dependence. In the U.S., there’s even been talk of American companies not offering their services in Greenland and Denmark. It’s crazy, because then no one would trust those companies again… but we also thought no one would ever start a trade war."
I have a garage for my car. My car is dear to me. Why the hell would I pay money to park it in someone else’s garage? We are all easily manipulated because everyone bought into the idea of the “cloud” when all it is, is someone else’s disk space. Is this why most people in the world are wearing Blundstone boots? This is scary.
It’s precisely because you don’t have a car and buying one requires you to be a one man pit crew. That’s why you park your car in someone else’s garage. It comes with a pit crew.
It is more like renting a car when you need it and not having to pay for it for the rest of the time, with the added benefit that it is someone else’s job to maintain it for you.
Pretty much this. I’ve run into some hotshot truckers in the past that just rent a 1-ton Chevy or Ford or whatever for months at a time, instead of buying their own. The rental cost at the time was something like $2000/mo, but apparently the money they raked in was worth it over buying their own truck and having to pay the maintenance/repair costs for it, on top of a monthly loan payment…
Well, if you are just talking about disk space, then there are upsides to not administering a bunch of hard drives locally.
But I’m sure you must not mean just storage.