The myth of King Arthur has a prelude where King Uther really wants to sleep with this other dude's wife. Turns out Uther looks less like the king on playing cards and more like a real monarch, so he gets
rejected. Being a monarch though, he has an army. Unfortunately, the woman's husband has a castle with big walls. This leaves Uther with blue balls. A knight in service to Uther
finds Merlin the wizard, who promises the king his night of pleasure in exchange for his unborn son. King Uther, saliva dripping down his concave chin sculpted through decades of royal incest, agrees, and Merlin
becomes the greatest businessman in history. He has become the proud owner of the next king of Britain at the cost of ten mana for a polymorph spell.
Sorry about the dark intro, but uhh... I'm in a bad place you guys. I've been thinking about how much I really don't mess with the United States of America right now.
Seems like they're doing a lot of nasty stuff, and... I was thinking the other day. I was thinking how it would be pretty cool if our politicians here in Finland could say something about that.
But then I saw an article. Some old French guy woke up one day and couldn't log into his email account anymore. Photos he saved in the cloud were just gone. He went to the store to buy some groceries,
but his card declined. Rough day for that guy, Nicolas Guillou. Has to use cash now when he buys stuff. His friends think he's dead cause his facebook account is gone.
If you didn't catch on yet, this was one of the people who get sanctioned by the US after they approved the arrest warrant for old bibi.
Important to note that the US always had this power. It's just that more moderate, well-adjusted men never used it. Now people in Brussels are like, "Wait, they can do that?". Yeah.
The issue is how deeply and thoroughly US companies are entrenched in European infrastructure. The duopoly of VISA/Mastercard looms over all of the western world.
If your card says "VISA" on it, then you're in the same position as this Guillou guy or whatever. That's not your card or your bank's card. Your payments go through a US intermediary.
You know, for email you've got a bunch of European providers too, like Proton. But for payments you got nothing. Try asking your bank about it. You could also ask them why
your investment in "OP-Eurooppa" is managed by J.P. Morgan. That sounds like an American name you guys.
What do the people working at these domestic banks do exactly?
If you want to buy food here in Finland, you have two options: cash or American. The list is longer than that, including the likes of Google- and Apple pay.
But it's all American. Gone as quickly as those NATO security guarantees when the lip in Washington whispers IEEPA.
I was brought up thinking China was the one with draconic laws on censorship. Those guys have their own payment platform called Union Pay so they're laughing their asses off right now.
There's a light at the end of the tunnel though. The trunk grows thicker when you cut it. When the US seized all of Russia's financial assets after the war in Ukraine began, that was an axe swing.
Everyone was on board of course, but you could still feel the cold wind on the surface of your skin. Some European countries are now moving their gold reserves out of the US.
See, you can only swing the axe a couple times before it dulls. There's this thing called SEPA now that facilitates payments across Europe.
No Wero here in Finland yet, but we have Siirto, which you can use to pay your friend when you lose a bet.
No groceries today, but maybe tomorrow.
Web search is another frontier. There isn't a European search index in case you didn't know. It's all Google, Bing and Yandex. Don't bring up Mojeek or I'll force you to actually use it.
That's an incredible amount of soft power that the US has over Europe. Imagine trying to find out about recent events without using any US-based social media platforms or a US-based search index. You better
remember the URLs to your favorite sites, and those sites better not be hosted on US infrastructure like AWS or Azure. Qwant and Ecosia have partnered to
create a European search index, but Ecosia is tight with System1, an American advertising conglomerate, and Qwant
sells your data to Microsoft; so don't hold your breath.
So we're really late and progress is slow. Don't actually contact your bank by the way, that was a joke. Your local politician though... now that might be worth a shot.
And look, it's real easy to use what they give you without looking, we're all guilty of this. But read the privacy policy. Look into the provider and where they're based.
Support domestic initiatives and voice support for more. Because the more we're bound to US tech, the less power our politicians have when Washington calls.
I don't want to go to the Middle East guys... I really like it here.
I might make a second part to this with some practical recommendations, this was just me airing dirty laundry. This blog is still hosted on github, a Microsoft subsidiary, so
I'm not exactly done with my swaps yet either. See you then.
