Buy European

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/22971124

Know and like any Norwegian brands/products you'd like to share?

Hej!

I know there are a lot of Norway enthusiasts as well as Norwegians / people living in Norway in this community and would like to ask if you have any product/brand recommendations to share with us at !buyeuropean@feddit.uk.

You can post directly to the community or comment here and I can pass it on as well :)

I hear you guys have some awesome wool sweater brands... please share!

There are quite good quality paper notebooks in Europe, these are the ones I know:

Rhodia/Clairefontaine/Oxford - French, with one of the best quality paper I know. Not very expensive, Rhodia is the most expensive one, and Oxford the cheapest, often used at schools.

Miquelrius - Spanish, quite good paper, quite good price

Moleskine - Italian, the most expensive of the lot, and very famous, its paper quality is not good if you use fountain pens

Leuchtturm - German, similar to Moleskine and in several product lines, quite good quality paper.

Dingbats - British, very good paper, and they give a percentage of what they earn to projects related to nature protection. A bit cheaper than Moleskine and Leuchturm

Online - Another german brand, decent paper. In the Rhodia/clairefontaine price range

Do you know any other notebook brands from Europe? would like to try some more (bit crazy about stationery)

Filen – Next Generation End-To-End Encrypted Cloud Storage. Get started with 10 GB of free space.

Filen is a German cloud storage service with additional services. It encrypts all archives and comms, has an option to write notes (text, markdown, code, lists, etc). And you also can make contacts using the app and chat with them via text, encrypted as well.

They have free accounts with 10 GB space, and you can refer other new users (you will get an additional 10 GB for each referral with a 40 GB limit), and the one referred also gets 10 GB more.

Also interesting lifetime option, 100 GB for 29,95 and smaller and bigger plans with monthly payments.

I have this one and have stopped using Dropbox or Google Drive. Very happy.

HMD Global is a smartphone and tablet company that surged from Nokia and now has smartphones and tablets. They outsource the manufacture mainly to China and India, but they are now starting to maufacture its 5G models in Europe: https://www.hmd.com/en_ae/press/hmd-begins-manufacturing-5g-smartphones-in-europe

There are even lots of models that can be sent in to be repaired.

If you find a Finnish product or deal with a Finnish company that displays the avainlippu - Finnish for Key Flag - go for it: it'll be more expensive upfront but you'll get more than your money's worth.

Unlike other BS Made in Somewhere signs, the avainlippu really does mean quality: the Finns who display it really are proud of the products and services they offer. I can personally testify to this.

If you buy a product with the little flag affixed to it, it will be made better and last longer. Even if it's not obvious rightaway, one day years later you'll realize that thing you bought years ago that you're taking for granted is still around and still doing what it's supposed to do just fine after years of use and abuse.

I remember being recommended to look into ESP32 microcontrollers but it's not European and was wondering if there are other European ones.

As you know, Goodreads is owned by Amazon, so if you want an alternative in Europe here you hace a couple:

• Bookwyrm (www.joinbookwyrm.com) is the fediverse federated books discovrery and communities alternative to Goodreads. There are many european instances, so you just have to search for one that covers your interests and join.

• The StoryGraph (https://www.thestorygraph.com/) - It is headquartered in London, and isd a platform for discovering and reviewing books, with several social features.

Do you know other alternatives to Goodreads in Europe?

I was horrified by the contents of one of my Finnish mutual funds when I looked into it after years of disinterest: USA is overweighted, and I hate some of those companies I've ended up owning.

I'm especially disgusted by UnitedHealth Group Inc - the health insurance company whose mass murderer CEO got shot recently, sparking nationwide cheers.

As a passive investor, you'll forget your money into the wrong hands when the bank won't remind you of developments in the political situation.

Ålandsbanken promises:

"socially sustainable"

You may assume your bank is civilised, but you should have a closer look. I'm a customer of S-bank in Finland. In this case, the fund ended up under a different bank twice due to buyouts, and the management of the fund ended up in a Canadian bank branch in the UK.

My other bank didn't recommend selling my Russian investment when Putin's reign had started going overdue after his full term as a president. Luckily I was awake and sold everything.

Investments drift out of balance over time. Within mutual funds, there are limits, but the funds grow at different rates. You should re-balance your diversification once in a while to avoid excessive country risk.

I don't know if fund managers are bribed to distort the balance within the fund's limits for the benefit of a third party.

My fund is managed by that guy. I sold everything. Will reinvest in Europe.

How should you invest?

Profit comes with risk.

high risk, high reward (on average)

Don't take more risk than you can carry. For example, if you'll surely need at least 100% of your money back in a few years, don't put all of that money into stock (shares), because they are unpredictable in the short term.

In the stock market, even the duration of a "short term" is unpredictable. For example, if you invested in Japan right before the 1980s bubble burst, you would have had to wait 20 years to recover from the crash.

Japan bubble peak 1990

Owning your house is an undiversified, unhedged investment in real estate. What if there’s a bubble about to burst? What if the house is hit by a disaster that insurance won’t cover? If I owned a house, I’d probably take some debt and buy foreign shares not related to house prices.

Easiest way to invest safely:
Hire a fiduciary to craft a passive (cheap) investment strategy suited to your needs. My bank offers free advice for crafting a strategy.
(Don't buy actively managed funds with costly fees - it's a waste of money, except in a few special cases. The bank will happily sell you an expensive service.)

Easy way to invest somewhat ethically:
Put your money into ESG-compliant or highly EU SFDR-rated index funds (with really cheap fees) that don't invest in countries, industries, and companies you disapprove of.
(In some cases, switching between funds in the same bank allows you to avoid paying taxes from your previous winnings in the fund you want to get rid of, because the sell/buy -action is interpreted as an internal move.)

More ethical easy way to invest:
If the “responsible” ESG-labeled funds are too lax for your thirst for good, find a tailored fund / bespoke portfolio where you can set tighter criteria for ethical behaviour.

Do it yourself the right way:
Buy shares of companies you approve of - the most ethical companies trying to stay clean in a dirty economy. Makers of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, cable, bicycles, electric vehicles (trains and trams!), sustainable forestry, etc.
It's easy nowadays through many banks’ websites. Upkeep cost can be minimal.
A lazy strategy:
Store your money in various low risk financial instruments.
Once in every ~5 years, invest part of your savings in a diversified portfolio of 30 companies (and other high risk financial instruments) in at least 10 countries on at least 2 continents in at least 3 unrelated industries, and forget for 5 years.
Be sure to diversify in time by buying at different times to avoid accidentally investing everything on top of a global bubble.
If you’re feeling extra active, maybe prefer to buy in a depression and sell on a bubble, but you can't predict the future any better than all the other investors trying to outsmart you. Price/earnings ratio measures investor optimism that bubbles are made of.
Between investment sprees, save into a regular savings account.

Types of risk relevant in diversification and hedging:

If all your investments are subject to the same type of risk, they could crash at the same time.

Avoid participating in disaster capitalism with a moral hazard where companies doing disaster recovery cause disasters to pump up their share value.

If you think a company isn’t enriched by you buying previously issued, pre-owned, existing shares from someone else on the market, you're wrong, because the company sees the increased demand on the market and issues more shares, making more money from investors after you. Same as when you buy a stolen item, the thief reacts to increased demand by stealing another one.

If you think donating to charities is more ethical than investing, I somewhat disagree: it's good, but it's also unsustainable. You can grow more charity power by growing money in benefit corporations that are effectively profit-seeking charities. Example: Mozilla.

I think crypto money is a waste of computation that could be used for something productive, like protein folding. That said, Wikipedia: Proof of stake # Energy consumption:

In 2021, a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the proof-of-work based Bitcoin was about a thousand times higher than that of the highest consuming proof-of-stake system ... Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake was estimated to have cut its energy use by 99%.

(This post was originally in You Should Know. It was justly deleted for pushing an agenda, which is banned there. Thanks for all the comments that led me to write the above investment guide.)

I know Afri Kola (not much, only have had it a couple of times in Germany) and Fritz Kola (moree common in other countries, delicious, also other flavours, orange and apple are very very good).

This is a list with some european alternatives to Amazon and eBay, at least in part. It is oriented to small shops that would want to list its productos in them, but list the web of all of them.

Just one thing: the number 5, Rakuten PriceMinister, is not european animore because was bought by Rakuten, that is Japanese, but anyway, its origins are French I think.

What othe marketplaces and online multibrand shops do you know? I will add to this ones PCComponentes (www.pccomponentes.com), a Spanish Technology and Electronics one, that also has presence in Portugal, France, Italy and Germany. In Spain is quite big and well known.

A list of European services and products on Github, collaborative, meaning that you can add services there. Is even bigger in some categories than the one we have pinned here.

Trump has said that he is going to impose reciprocal tariffs... and he already considers European VAT a tariff. So we,d better start finding substitutes from Europe mainly to product and services from the USA..

This web has european alternatives to many online services from other countries: email-providers, domain registrars, machine translators, CDNs, web analytics services, cloud computing services, hosters....have a look, I find it very useful

Is anyone able to recommend any european email hosters?

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/15957486

Linux-first laptop vendor NovaCustom contributes 10 000 USD to Heads firmware - Together with this, NovaCustom launches Heads firmware for their V56 series

genialokal.de is backed by over 750 owner-managed bookshops across Germany. Since 2015, the joint umbrella brand has stood for the goal of strengthening the local book trade, with 80% of users using the delivery option "click&collect" to pick up their order from their local book store.

I want to avoid paying american credit card processor fees. Because their leadership is being hostile to their neighbours.

The payment processors Mastercard, Visa, Discover and American Express are all american. I would prefer supporting the economies of friendly european countries instead.

I see my favourite artists on there but the selection seems more limited and I can only stream the songs of the albums I like. They also have lossless audio.

Does Qobuz pay the artists more?

I suppose I will switch over to create the increased demand and write letters to the artists to ask for more albums to be made available on the platform.

Description from their page:

TUXEDO Computers are customizable Linux notebooks and Desktop PCs optimized in the first place to run with Ubuntu-based Linux operating systems. Literally Linux hardware in a tailor-made suit.

I've been wanting to buy a laptop from them for awhile, but I like to assemble my own PCs and honestly don't need a laptop. At this point I'm just looking for an excuse to support such companies...

This company started as a Ukrainian startup in 2014 and funded their way into mainstream via Kickstarter. I've personally bought at least one Christmas gift per year from them for a few years. Especially the wooden mechanical apparatuses are really cool.

And yes the quality is good. They even add extra pieces for pieces that they suspect might break during assembly for more complex products.

Sorry if old news, I didn't know!