barefootstache @barefootstache@qoto.org

Nobody should touch the EU Digital Sales taxes.

For years Europe has been colonized by US-based digital services that operated in our continent, profited from the data gathered from our citizens, and didn’t pay a dime in taxes.

France and Spain have now a 3% tax on all digital services that operate within the country and have yearly profits higher than €750 million.

Austria has a 5% levy on companies with the same yearly profit that make over €25 million a year in digital advertisements.

Italy and the UK have similar laws.

The principle is straightforward: if you make profit in my country by advertising and scooping up data of my citizens, then you have to pay a fair share of taxes in my country too.

Otherwise it’s just digital colonization operated by companies that pay little or nothing in taxes in their own country, pay no taxes in the countries where they operate, while local companies are expected to pay their higher share of taxation.

The rotten fecal matter that fills Trump’s fascist brain keeps thinking that taxation against American companies is a form of discrimination against America. When it’s clear even to a toddler that it’s not.

If the same tax is levied against all businesses that meet some simple criteria (namely, profits from digital services based on data collection and advertising), regardless of their country of origin, then it’s not discrimination. Quite the opposite - exempting only American companies from such levies would be a form of favoritism that discriminates against local companies and against other foreign competitors.

Trump’s primitive synaptic infrastructure treats taxes the same way as tariffs, ignoring that tariffs, by definition, are a political tool that specifically targets a country or an industry (to either protect the local industry or punish them for misbehaving), while taxes are financial tools to ensure a fair redistribution of the revenue that have no geopolitical aims.

Trump’s bully instincts make him believe that he can retaliate against fair taxes with tariffs unless we exempt American companies from those taxes.

We shouldn’t fall for it.

We should kindly remand the American fascist bully that you can retaliate against tariffs, but not against non-discriminatory taxes. And that he has no power over the financial decisions of independent governments on the other side of the pond.

And we must use this chance to decouple, de-riskify and boycott all American technological products we can in order to build our own ecosystem, foster our own European tech infrastructure and create tech jobs here.

Boycott Facebook. Use Mastodon or any decentralized Fediverse-based solution.

Boycott Instagram. Use Pixelfed.

Boycott AWS. Use Scaleway.

Boycott Microsoft 360. Use Nextcloud.

Boycott Whatsapp. Use Signal or Matrix.

Boycott Slack. Use Mattermost.

Boycott Reddit. Use Lemmy.

Boycott Google, and even DuckDuckGo. Use meta-search engines like Searxng. And use un-googled Android phones when possible.

Boycott all Apple products.

Boycott Amazon. Use local e-commerce portals instead.

Boycott X, Tesla, and anything touched by that sociopath called Elon Musk. Buy European, or even Chinese, electric cars instead.

Boycott American phone makers. Consider sustainable EU-based alternatives like FairPhone instead.

And the list could go on.

And urge your employer, your family and your friends to do the same.

We have so many EU-based alternatives, many of them open-source and more sustainable than the American counterparts.

We have so much talent on our continent that builds the open-source infrastructure that even American companies profit from, and if we prevent them from using those products they’ll be hurt much more than we would be hurt by giving up on their handful of commercial products managed by a couple of multi-billion dollar companies.

And we also have nuclear options like banning American companies from using chips produced down the ASML supply chain.

The only problem to be addressed is that EU institutions never put their wallet where their mouth is, and they pay peanuts to those who build those sustainable solutions - and when I mean “peanuts” I literally mean “0.1% of what the US CHIPS act has granted to Intel alone”.

We have way more leverage than redneck Trump thinks.

We should take these thug threats as an opportunity to foster our industry and kick the American technological colonizers out of our continent for good.

As long as the orange moron sits in the White House, relying on American tech is a liability that exposes us to his childish threats, not an asset.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/03/28/should-european-countries-reconsider-their-plans-for-big-tech-taxes-to-avoid-us-tariffs

Don't think of #AltText as a chore you have to perform.
Think of it more as an art form, like #Haiku or #Bonsai; a fine #wine or a rare #cheese that YOU can hand craft.

Weird how the jobs that AI-boosters say AI is going to replace never seems to include the management or executive class.

Zuck said Meta is in a "partnership" with White House; Google is following suit. They are all that stand between you and Trump admin data grabs.

Law enforcement requests for user data from Apple, Google, and Meta mean Big tech can decide whether US authorities have access to your personal info, like location data.

Meanwhile, Europeans are starting to see US data services as “no longer safe”

Here's a resource collection of non-US services, and more:

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-era-digital-expat/

What happens if the Internet Archive goes dark?

From KQED's new podcast, Close All Tabs, digital librarian @brewsterkahle talks about the challenges of preserving digital history, and why the Internet Archive’s mission matters more than ever.

Listen now: https://www.kqed.org/news/12031980/what-happens-if-the-internet-archive-goes-dark

I guess that "bare minimum" alt-text is better than no alt-text.

But giving people who can't view images high quality alt-text - a chance to enjoy an image properly - is (to me) just part of treating people kindly.

It takes me but a few seconds to type an extra sentence or two.

Bad alt text: "Cat"

Good alt text: "A tabby cat sitting on a windowsill, looking out the window with its tail curled around its body."

(Edit: I am thinking of those who could but don't, not those who can't.)

https://www.rnib.org.uk/campaign-with-us/alt-text-campaign/how-can-i-write-alt-text/

#accessibility #kindness #alttext

Welcome to Colorful Colorado. Turns out that all the colors except blue and brown were taken.