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Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!

Added my company (https://mailpace.com) - I’m looking forward to a resurgence of innovation in European tech companies, the talent and education here is amazing, we just need to improve our investment and start treating tech with as much respect as we give to law, finance and other “prestigious” career paths here



I know that it's not in the cards (yet), but I hope the UK and the EU can be a single market again (even if the UK does not rejoin the EU). Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible! We love the UK and you are part of the European family :hugs:.


> Let's make our market as large and attractive as possible!

That would be the rational and sensible solution. This may be why it’s unlikely to happen. I would be happy to be wrong.


If only it was so simple, there are of course many conflicting interests in Europe, with certain countries who are more export oriented for instance benefiting from a weak Euro and others from a stronger Euro etc.


There are. But the good thing is that all these countries get to sit around a table and talk, when there are such disagreements. And things get (mostly) sorted out in a civilised way.


Not sure if you are been to the EU. There is not table where they talk, they just compromis and ignore along the way and then the commission decides everything behind closed doors, which might be your table


A compromise implies a form of discussion. This post is internally inconsistent.


But the EU is a single market.


Well I never argued for or against a single market, the commentator said it was rational and sensible. That's a way too simple clarification, there are many conflicting interests in the EU for it just to be sensible.


A single one on paper but a heavily divided one in practice where every country wants to be king or at least backstab everyone else to get what it wants.


I sometimes wish we could abolish our nations and replace the current treaties with a voluntary merge of all participating countries, making everyone simply citizens, throwing out all national law books and replacing it with a single Continental one.

Won't happen without a war - so hopefully not within my lifetime, but playing make believe is fun sometimes.


How would a war in Europe unite people under one leadership? See the regions that have been ceded and annexed post WW1 and post WW2, they still have beef with the new host countries bickering about regional autonomy. You can conquer land, but conquering people is a lot more difficult.


The trend is the exact opposite way, a federation of smaller and smaller devolved regions.


Labour party manifesto explained in this fresh (5 days old), official document.

It also includes context about ongoing emergency EU security meetings and the Trump administration.

No single market, no freedom of movement, unfortunately.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...



EFTA membership is a non-starter. It's not good for the UK, and it's not good for the other EFTA members. Also, EFTA is part of the Schengen area. But not the customs union.


Whilst a good idea, no politician is going to try and do it under the fear of reigniting the Brexit argument which ends up dominating politics in the country.


Most people who voted for Brexit were mostly concerned about free movement of people, not goods. I doubt a free trade agreement would upset them too much.

If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.


Yet those people are not at all concerned with free movement of non-European "refugees" now.


> If the EU would accept a FTA without free movement of people is another matter.

Absolutely not. This was made clear repeatedly. What became clear in the UK was that we'd rather lose market access in order to appease people with an irrational hatred of our fellow Europeans.

If people think trade and movement boundaries are good, why don't we have internal ones? Why should Mancunians be allowed to take up scarce housing in London?


You are correct.

EU: "The free movement of goods is one of the four fundamental economic freedoms laid down in the EU founding treaties, the other three being the free movement of capital, services and people."

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/free-mov...

> "The single market seeks to guarantee the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people, known collectively as the "four freedoms" "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market

The EU would welcome the UK being closer aligned to the EU, trade-wise. But the UK cannot be in the single market without all four freedoms. Which the UK still rules out.


The UK has a FTA with the EU. What they don’t have is access to the single market or a customs union.


Yeah, that's why I don't think it's in the cards yet. On the other hand, things are very fluid now. Things that were unthinkable two months ago (e.g. Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.


>Germany ending the 'debt brake') are happening now.

Now what exactly they're goanna do with the extra debt is the question.

More debt to fund innovation, infrastructure, defense, education and healthcare is welcome, but if it's just more debt to fund welfare and pensions, like Southern Europe, then nothing will improve.


They will change the paragraphs only wrt infrastructure, defense (and possibly climate things to get the votes of the greens). Meaning that the debt brake will still exist for all other things, basically. (but yes: creative bookkeeping will become easier ;))


It's to fund re-armament.


The other question is why did Germany/EU disarm in the first place when the US didn't, despite not living next-dorr to Russia?


The US did disarm somewhat after the Cold War, but kept a lot in place for pork-barrel reasons and then the absolutely huge waste of money that was the War On Terror.

People believed the "end of history" narratives about Russia, and even that it would become like the rest of the ex-communist states, a normal part of liberal Europe. That should have changed after 2014, but by then the grip of the financial crisis was preventing any increases in state spending.


Oh I think a war with Russia would override those concerns!


> Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!

Always.

hug


Let's get Russian disinformation and influence out of Europe and heal the European relationships. Cannot wait to see Farage begging for food in the subway.


There is also non-Russian disinformation - beware of it.


Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.


Who do you host with btw? I'd love to avoid the big US SaaS providers if I can but would like something a level above a VPS, especially for database.


Clever cloud for containers and database (French)


Great, thanks I will have to check them out.

A UK firm would be perfect as a brit, but just not-US is great.


hetzner has been working great the last 10 years for me. they opened datacenters in the us too.


Thank you for including the UK, we are still part of Europe!

We're all living in Only fools and horses anyways.


Totally agree! The UK will always be part of Europe culturally, no matter what political changes happen. Only Fools and Horses is such a classic - I think every European country has their own version of Del Boy trying to make it big with crazy schemes! Those cultural connections don't just disappear because of politics.


I'd love to use this, but notice it's hosted in the EU, is there any way of ensuring we go through UK servers only?


Our infra is split across France (our API, database, inbound servers etc.), Germany (backups) and UK (outbound SMTP servers).

Unfortunately we haven't seen enough demand in the UK to set up a UK only infra (nor are there any UK cloud providers that would work for us?)


For what it's worth we have to stand up a UK infrastructure for UK customers and EU for EU customers, it really sucks.


That's a shame. There are many UK cloud providers, who would work - what do you need, I'd be happy to make suggestions?


Containers IaaS, plus managed Postgres. So far I’ve only found UK hosts that do VPS, VMs, or bare metal- the abstraction above this is (heroku, fly.io etc.) makes Ops 10x easier for smaller companies


Civo.io have had both for many years and for Katapult.io these are coming in April. Both are british companies, if you need referring feel free to shout.


Thanks for these recommendations - both of these look like the sort of thing I've been looking for and failing to find for several weeks. And @albertgoeswoof - pretty sure we'll be gradually moving a lot of clients over to you soon too.




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