Mmm... ditch Garmin, strap a raspberry pi + car battery to your arm, & away you go.
Buy European
Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
This list seems a bit flawed, for instance on the travel line, Trivago is owned by Expedia in the US and Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam.
Also including BlueSky seems a little odd given the intent
Re Bluesky I did some "I am not a lawyer" digging.
Bluesky is owned by "Bluesky Social PBC", a Public Benefit Company registered in Delaware.
Generally speaking it means when decisions about the company are made, they must take into account how that decision benefits their stated public value. I struggled to find the specific value wording, but let's assume it's a reasonable one for the time being.
Unfortunately being a PBC is basically voluntary, especially when you're still a private company. You can become a non-PBC with a simple board vote. (A public company would require a stockholder vote.)
Bluesky's board consists of four members, one of which is Bain Capital, aka the company funding Bluesky.
So Bluesky is absolutely a better alternative to Twitter. If everyone left Twitter and moved to Bluesky that would be a monumental improvement.
However Bluesky is not a non-profit company, as the above graphic states.
This list has some issues, Booking.com is Dutch and Philips' Consumer division is just a name that whitelabels other companies products and is owned by a Chinese investment company.
Booking.com is owned by an American company though
Also, Ecosia and Qwant rely on Bing for their search results I believe
Completely missing are power tools and guns. So please buy Bosch, Festool, Hilti, H&K, Cz., Glock, FN.
Fun fact, Hilti, a Liechtenstein company, has 34000 employees. The country itself has 40000 citizens.
Yes, they produce mostly abroad afaik. Another somewhat known company from Liechtenstein is cable maker Neutrik. If you've even been in a pro audio or broadcasting studio or a scientific lab, you probably have used their cables.
I missed the "and guns" part of your first sentence, which made me think, "Whoa, I gotta get me a Glock power drill."
Good to know about Bosch, Festool, and Hilti, thanks for the info. My ancient Dewalt drill just started smoking, so I now know where to look.
If you want something really good get Makita from Japan. Bosch has two quality levels green is meh to good, blue is very good.
It's a shame it needed someone like Trump to actually get European alternatives more attention. They needed attention way before Trump.
Also the food and drinks alternatives are a bit odd. Many brands on the European side I don't recognize, probably because they're pretty local to whoever made this list.
Yep, several Nordic food, drink and snacks brands there. The burgers at Max are good but I doubt they'll deliver from Malmö Sweden to Portugal.
The list has it's shortcomings but it's a good start.
HERE We Go? Isn't that owned by microsoft?
As a American, I really do love Electrolux appliances.
Also, for headphones, beyer dynamic. Damn they make a great set of cans.
I live in the USA and I will buy foreign as much as possible. Until we make it illegal most likely
And for software like Microsoft and Adobe:
Some more recommendations
Category | FOSS |
---|---|
Media player | mpv |
Drawing | Krita |
Vectorial illustration | Inkscape |
Video editing | Kdenlive |
Music making | Ardour |
Look, I love Audacity which is an awesome audio editor but it is absolutely not an alternative to Logic or Fl, which are DAWs.
One note on Bosch and the European car manufacturers: They're funding the Orbán government among others.
More info on this, please
Imo the best European (specifically German) made OS is OpenSUSE. Its Sway spin is the definition of functionality above form, nearly all tools are designed with that in mind and it comes with good defaults out of the box. Granted it also looks amazing if not a tad dated, the unified design and color language however is nice even if that color is green. Also consider donating to the FSFE rather than the FSF.
You do know that RedBull is owned by a right-wing extremist in Salzburg who tries to undermine Austrian democracy with Servus TV the same way Murdoch and Springer do in Germany and elsewhere?
Consider buying Solovairs instead of Dr martens. They're basically the same, the main difference is that they are made in the UK in a factory that used to make Dr martens before they delocalized their production to Asia
Got me an AMD Tuxedo laptop and some Raspberry Pi's, and my gaming desktop is all AMD too. Fuck Intel and NVidia.
I was avoiding everything made in the States before it was cool
Omg, I'm boycotting USA ... since like forever, I'm so sorry, it was totally by accident, thots and players, I hope everyone recovers financially.
Tho the steaming one I do a bit ... differently.
(Also just boycott big corpos as much as possible, no matter the region!!)
Also: avoid AKG, consider Austrian Audio.
AKG is a popular brand in professional music and audiophile circles. It was bought by Samsung in 2016, who promptly drove the company into the ground, closed their Austrian facilities, and moved headquarters to America and production to SE-Asia. AKG's name is now used for brand recognition on Samsung's generic big tech garbage. Yes, I'm still salty about it.
Austrian Audio was founded by the actual engineers who worked at AKG, currently owned by a Danish audio tech company. They produce high-end professional headphones.
The snacks section could use a lot of chocolates but then again as European it's hard to find American chocolate: Milka, Ferrero Rocher, Lindt, Tony's Chocolonely, Callier... Just to name a few.
I was surprised to see Toblerone on the American side, apparently they're under an American company nowadays! TIL
Also, Logitech isn't Chinese? Huh, TIL as well
I would be cautious to trust an American company just because they are non-profit. We know that if they get sufficiently big they can just transition into being for profit (see OpenAi), chances are regulations regarding this won't become stronger later.
Signal being open source of course helps, but it's usually the ecosystem that people grow to rely on that keeps them in place, not the technology. Just look at how big Reddit is compared to Lemmy for a good example of that. If signal was federal that would be quite different since jumping ship would be easy.
This works a bit for Canada too.