It's a new world. He who has the biggest guns makes the rules.
I don't like it, but in the Caribbean [probably throughout the world] these days, you really are dealing with the raw realities of power in a way you didn't have to previously.
I doubt the EU has the stomach to confront Trump. And French Guiana is not Africa, there will be no China coming to save them.
On the same day, more soldiers together with the Chief of the Royal Danish Army, General Peter Harling Boysen, started arriving in Greenland, and Denmark announced that a "substantial contribution" of its armed forces would be sent there
On 14 January 2026, Denmark started to send military reinforcements to Greenland[186] to strengthen its military presence.[187] Later that day, it became known that both Sweden[188] and Norway sent military forces to support the Danish Defence in protecting Greenland.[189] The Ministry of Defence on 14 January 2026 announced "an increased military presence in and around Greenland, comprising aircraft, vessels and soldiers, including from NATO allies".[190] After consultations between a group of European countries,[191] Germany announced it was sending a small contingent to Greenland on a reconnaissance mission with other European nations.[192] On 15 January 2026, a French military contingent arrived in Greenland.[26]
- ibid.
Several European leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron advocated using the EU's Anti-Coercion Instrument, a security and trade policy tool known as the "trade bazooka", to target the US in retaliation.[258][259][260][29][261] Under the not-previously-used instrument, the EU may adopt countermeasures, sometimes described as sanctions, including tariffs, restrictions on public procurement, and measures affecting trade and investment.[252][262] Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament Committee on International Trade, supported its activation.[263] By 21 January EU countries were described as being increasingly open to using the ACI against the US, with Germany stating it will ask the Commission to explore its use.[264]
1. Who is "they"? Isar Aerospace and Arianespace are distinct entities.
2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this. Arianespace and the Ariane rockets have heavy state/ESA involvement.
3. It is the first launch to orbit from geographically European soil. French Guiana is politically part of France, but geographically obviously part of South America.
4. Why would everyone have to launch from the same place, in your esteemed opinion? Why are some US payloads launched from California, some from Florida, and soon some from Texas and Louisiana?
5. Are all launch locations equally suitable for all orbits? Are all orbits equally suitable for all missions?
6. Norway is a lot closer to the rest of Europe than French Guiana is.
7. Why was SpaceX newsworthy, particularly on a startup-centric site, when NASA already exists?
> 2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this.
Sure. But that's different from "Europe now has sovereign access to space." don't you think? If anything, a state-owned manufacturer is more "sovereign access" than a private company who can decide who they do business with. (Even though state regulates exports but they could decide where to manufacture things.)
> 3. It is the first launch to orbit from geographically European soil. French Guiana is politically part of France, but geographically obviously part of South America.
Sure. Though Norway has been part of Europe for a while and their space port isn't from yesterday either. A milestone? Sure. Never seen before sovereignity? Um...
I don't have answers to your other questions as I'd ask them too.
To me the "Europe now has sovereign access" line by the CEO is a bit of hype, though technically it is true if you view Europe geographically, as he seems to do.
Andøya Spaceport has been a place for suborbital/sounding rockets, this is the first time a rocket has been launched into orbit from there.
> 2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this. Arianespace and the Ariane rockets have heavy state/ESA involvement.
To go even further: ~60% of Ariane Group revenue is from the french state, for their nuclear launch system. The whole ariane space rocket is their side show, a way to reduce cost for France by getting the market to pay some of the R&D.
And that's with still quite a lot of coal and ever more gas in the grid, both for the plenty of times the intermittent don't deliver and for grid stability (see also: Spainout), which means we have the 3rd worst specific emissions in the EU (down from 4th worst last year), and the highest total CO₂ emissions in the EU.
After about €1 trillion spent on our "Energiewende", our "green" energy transition.
> In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up.
That turns out not to be the case.
Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.
They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.
And they run for a long time, if you don't do stupid shit like ban nuclear power. The US has so far extended the operating license of every nuclear plant that has applied to 80 years, and they now thin 100 years is a realistic option.
> There's a reason they're mostly run by govts.
Most nuclear power plants in the US are privately run, last I checked. So were the nuclear power plants in Germany. In Germany, the Greens tried to force nuclear power to become uneconomical by ever stricter regulations. They failed. Nuclear power had to be outlawed.
Also, the hyperscalars, for example, have all invested in nuclear. The biggest risk to nuclear is governments, which is why private investors want assurances or the government on board.
> wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...
> Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.
Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE which amortizes capital costs.
> They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.
The are not cheap to run. Indian Point closed ahead of end-of-life because it couldn't support its operational costs - about $31 per MWh - about $500m per annum. Average wholesale prices at the time were around $28/MWh.
> Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE
According to the IEA it is. If you think nuclear LCOE is high, then you probably looked at the Lazard data. But Lazard themselves say that their figures for nuclear are not representative and that they did not try to make them representative.
“We do not, in this study, try to cost out new nuclear” (2:35)
“We think nuclear will be a big part of the future” (2:47)
“the costs of nuclear should go down “ (12:54)
“next five to 10 years the nuclear bar the one that's most likely to change the most in in terms of cost reduction” (14:06)
If you look at other sources than Lazard, for example the IEA, you will find that even nuclear LCOE is low.
However, LCOE is actually not the correct metric, as it only covers the cost of producing electricity from that source. It doesn't capture the cost of intermittent sources, which have very high system costs due to their intermittency.
Levelized Full System of Electricity (LFSCOE) is what you need to look at that, and there nuclear does well and intermittent are generally horrible, and they get worse the more of them you have. So you need to balance intermittent with stable providers like nuclear. And no, batteries are not sufficient, except maybe in the Sahara.
Here is the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
I mean, not building yet, but a lot of new nuclear is in the pipeline.
"The Swedish government has presented a roadmap for new nuclear, stipulating that, by 2035, nuclear reactors with the capacity to produce 2500 MW should have been built, with further increases to 10 000 MW by the year 2045."
Legislation, permits and offers of loans/state aid can result in new plants if the private actors starts to invest, but there is a large difference between that and actually building new plants. With the election going on, it is also very questionable if anything will happen if the flips from right to left, as the new government can easily just withdraw those offers of state aid and change the legislation to make it unprofitable to invest into new nuclear power plants.
The proof is as always in what get actually get constructed, and right now what we do know is that new thermal power plants is currently being constructed in the south that is expected to finish and starting to burn fuel in 2028.
> can result in new plants if the private actors starts to invest
It is the private investors seeking approvals. Why would they do this if they didn't want to build? After all, these types of approvals and application processes also cost money. Are they doing this just for fun?
> but there is a large difference between that and actually building new plants.
Well yes: what is happening now are the required prerequisites to actually building. Can't really start building without having done these things first.
Not sure what you're trying to say here? They can only be taken seriously if they skip the necessary first steps?
> the new government can easily just withdraw those offers of state aid and change the legislation to make it unprofitable to invest into new nuclear power plants.
That was one of the changes: there is now an insurance mechanism that compensates investors if the state pulls the plug on them.
Which goes back to the point of the state being the biggest risk factor for nuclear projects.
> The proof is as always in what get actually get constructed
The proof for construction. The proof for intent and investor interests is now.
Next step happened just today:
Studsvik, GE Vernova Hitachi and Samsung C&T commit to advancing 1.2 GW nuclear power project in Sweden
From TFA: "What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction."
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
I think we have been doing that for a while already. Seems like almost every major company is using LLMs for coding internally and people dont consider that vibe coding.
Culturally, it feels like we've already speedran the pipeline of "vibe coding is using LLMs without reading the code" to "vibe coding is using LLMs for code" to "using LLMs is just a tool for coding". LLMs seems to now be mostly accepted for coding (on HN at least), the discussion has shifted to how useful and in what ways.
Yeah, but the semantic question is whether LLMs being accepted to use for coding means that the software engineer who merely instructs the LLM is thereby also "coding" (similar to how someone who merely writes Fortran, rather than machine code, is nowadays also described as "coding") or whether the only entity that is described here as "coding" is the LLM.
Big difference is that now C level management really tries to push this narrative down to our throats.
People who are writing and claiming thing like this should be held accountable for it. It is easy to try to scare developers that their job is going away. Especially for gaining attention. Currently I don't see difference between these claims and conspiracy theories...
I haven't followed the legislative process, where can I find that the eu wanted a single registry but the country pushed for national ones? Because i have never read it.
I'm not saying it's not true, it's just that it's so hard to follow these things when one is supposed to have a life as well
"According to the Händlerbund, the European Commission's proposal to abolish the requirement has been on the table since December 2025. However, discussions in the Council of the EU were suspended a few weeks ago after a majority of member states spoke out against it."
"A restricted version is currently being discussed in the European Parliament. According to this, an exemption is only to apply to micro-enterprises with up to 49 employees and an annual turnover of a maximum of 10 million euros. A first reading is scheduled for October 2026 at the earliest."
a) exempt companies with under 50 employees to not kill small business
AND
b) are okay with doing so, ie. there's little consequences from exempting companies from this
Then this is the mark of a terrible piece of legislation. What problem are we actually addressing here by creating another fee collecting, headache inducing registration regime and the 684th enforcement bureaucracy in the EU over yet another trivial consumer issue?
Yes, single use plastics aren't great. Incentivize companies to move away from them by creating positive market incentives instead of creating an anti-productive, full time packaging Stasi.
It's almost as if the people attracted to a career in government can only imagine their subjects responding to the stick, even though the carrot is often far more persuasive. This is the classic downfall of all economic central planning.
The problem with this particular topic is it's a religious one for many in the urban monoculture. They don't ultimately care about packaging waste, they care about punishment and repentance for humanity's existence. We've angered the gods and must repent via punitive measures! To incentivize good behavior is antithetical to that, even if it is more effective at actually doing the thing.
What does "positive market incentives" mean for you? My immediate thought is various subsidies, but given how those usually end up (easy money for companies spending more on lawyers than actual productive work), I'd much rather just have a tax.
The tax won't actually create the desired outcome though. In practice the tax is basically just a wealth transfer from the private sector to the state, who will use that money to dump into boomer pensions and not invest in packaging innovation.
Punitive taxation doesn't invent new technologies. Investment does.
For example, the only reason the electric car market even exists today is because of subsidies 15 years ago.
I agree subsidies can easily turn into a boondoggle, but so can the state itself given more tax money.
Ultimately, I personally think government choosing to focus time and money on this specific thing over other far more important issues is dumb (like say, the thousands of young men dying in Ukraine right now, the social welfare debt spiral, the lack of a capital markets union, the lack of any coherent military strategy, etc. etc.)
But if we're going to posture as if we actually care about this issue, we are going about the desired outcome the completely wrong way.
Meanwhile in a neighbouring conversation thread people are attacking Van Der Leyen as she's at fault for democratic member states torpedoing the good approach.
Apparently it's undemocratic when elected governments of their countries destroy a good solution and then blame others.
It's all about PR. If EU formulates the new law like they are fighting against pollution and plastic garbage, it sounds nice enough to the electorate who are content with greenwashing and won't investigate much. And 99% of population won't ever a hear a word about real issues by the sellers, to them sellers would quietly and imperceptibly start disappearing. But a direct fee sounds more like a tax hike and the same electorate ordering packages from foreign shops would definitely remember that.
It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.
Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.
> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Nope, less power means the current situation will be the default as each country by default will have their own body and rules to govern instead of one rule and one body that handles the whole continent.
Unlike what you appear to believe Europeans are not some libertarian captured by the EU socialist, most europeans do want less wasteful and less harmful packaging.
Do most Europeans want all of their E-commerce to be only handled by American and Chinese megacorporations without local players? Because that is the effect of this regulation. Instead of a SME shipping a cardboard box, it will be Amazon or Temu.
This also negatively affects smaller trading partners, and makes (bi-lateral) trade with the EU much less appealing to them. This means that countries like Canada are less likely to maintain trade agreements which open their market to all sorts of EU goods.
No, we absolutely don't need to give more power to Orbans and other corrupt selfish pricks across Europe to line their pockets at everyones expense and the future of Europe.
> Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Actually they'd have no retroactive way to enforce it at all, and the most they'd be able to do would be to charge an import duty on a per-parcel basis, which would ultimately be borne by the importer.
This would be a huge improvement over the utter nonsense they're implementing!
If I were a small seller I would just ignore this, like many sellers on Temu do.
Before you get into trouble, someone must take notice that you did not register for the recipient fiefdom's protectionism racket. And if that happens, it is not sure that you really are in trouble. As with the GDPR, this kind of regulation is almost unenforcable in practice.
It is enforceable and the financial punishment is severe. There's no US’s LLC equivalent in EU, you basically only have C-Corp/Inc. equivalents (much more expensive to start and operate, both because of accounting and corporation income tax), so most small sellers in EU end up fully liable with their own wealth for the ridiculous up to 200,000€ penalties.
Chinese sellers don’t care, sure, but if you live in EU you do care.
That said while the financial penalties are in practice still not common they are chilling nevertheless.
However, EU is also now starting marketplace level enforcement, so in practice even those Chinese sellers will not be able to sell anything without registration.
> much more expensive to start and operate, both because of accounting and corporation income tax
Assumption. It depends on the country. I know in the UK I opened my limited company for £20 and there is no requirement to have an accountant prepare accounts at my size (and it's simple enough to do yourself).
Ok UK is no longer EU, but as I understand Ireland LTD, Latvia SIA, Estonia OU and Poland sp. z.o.o. are similar and can be ran as a non-resident.
You need to do double entry bookkeeping and prepare annual financial statements for all of those you've mentioned including UK.
In addition, you cannot register LTD in Ireland yourself, the Company's secretary must be a different person. So either you are now in business with a friend or you pay someone.
For any other member country you also run into a language barrier.
Polish "Sp. z o.o." has ~1150€ (5000 PLN) minimal capital requirement.
Registering entity with corporation tax requirement in any other country also means you would need to defend its tax residency (practically impossible if you don't actually do business there) or you have to pay corporation tax in the country you are actually operating in. It's doable but now you are dealing with two different tax authorities and potentially pay taxes in different currency and you can't have books in multiple currencies so get to have lots of fun.
It's much easier to just register US LLC instead at this point. However if you want to do anything physical not digital you end up having to register and do taxes in your resident country anyway. But you can avoid corporation tax at least and keep limited liability.
> It's much easier to just register US LLC instead at this point. However if you want to do anything physical not digital you end up having to register and do taxes in your resident country anyway.
How does remaining digital help here? My understanding was that you'd still be operating a foreign company so the country you reside in is able to claim taxes, regardless of what kind of business you do.
Yes, you need to pay personal income tax in your tax resident country but that's much easier than formalized bookkeeping and corporate income tax (assuming your LLC is DE which is the default). Also for other taxes like VAT you have to register for and pay those regardless of where your company is registered.
US LLC has no formal bookkeeping requirements but you still need to report distributions and contributions to IRS annually (via fax or certified letter), submit annual statements to your state (but those are just hey I'm still alive not financial statements, they are even free in some states like Montana) and maintain registered agent but that's like $50/year. It's crazy just how easy it is.
The digital part is just about what your business can realistically do without it having local or at least EU based presence in some form.
For once you'll have issues with dealing with local businesses and EU marketplaces rather than government.
For example eBay account is basically impossible without having US address and resident VPN. And you'll constantly worry about getting banned, which is already a worry even if you are legitimate local based business since they too big to have to care about customer support like most big corps.
If you're just selling software or something like that it's much easier. The more you go into physical goods or services realm the more hurdles you will have. You can't hire people for example without having a branch or similar. Same for real estate or some equipment like cars.
Also for some services every local business you invoice will potentially have tax withholding to deal with. This is in particular a problem in Poland which has the strictest tax withholding regulations.
I wasn't talking about income tax, this one is almost easy. The country you reside in can claim corporate taxes on your foreign business. You end up having to deal with bureaucracy in both places... Otherwise all freelancers would have their company in Estonia (for easiness) or the member state that has a lowest corporate tax, while living in the one that has the best social security.
Yes that was my criticism exactly, but US LLC by default has no corporate tax (unless you opt-in for some reason) while still having limited liability. It's why it's so unique.
There's no other country in the world that has anything like that.
People don't realize how insanely business friendly US is compared to rest of the world.
That’s cool I didn’t know about EURL. I have researched it before AI and must have missed it or dismissed because of the French language, so my mistake.
Sadly you can't run them as a non-resident afaik. The member state in which you resides will come after you for taxes if you operate a foreign company.
In France the micro-entrepreneur status makes you partially liable, and running a SASU/EURL does require ~200€/m of accounting.
This looks like strong evidence against the claim that local models will never be competitive, because hosted frontier lab models will always be better.
The frontier models may be better, but who cares if the last generation of models are plenty good enough for what you want to actually do?
And the best local models are quite competitive with those older lab models.
Who then gets to decide? You?
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