the problem so far is UI and incompatibility across devices, OSes etc.
I am a big fan of Passkeys and the idea of using PRF for E2E encryption, but I wouldn't implement that as now, there is almost zero control over where those passkeys are, how I can recover them, how I manage them. Whenever I have to switch computer (mandatory policy at work), or phone (mandatory obsolence) or if I want to work across OSes (Mac for work, Windows for fun), everything falls apart, incomprehensible interfaces, inexistent transparency and control. And I'm a pro user that has actually studied how the standard works.
I'm afraid that it'll take some few more decades before we will get rid of passwords, if ever.
Italian living in Sweden, Malmö, and lived in the UK in the past.
I don't get the obsession you Brits have against IDs, in Europe you are pretty much the only ones. But a lot of what you say resonates with my observations:
- single point of failure: absolutely, but so is the "sign in with Google" or equivalent. It's just too convenient. I'd rather have a public service do it than a private company that can cut you out at any time without any explanation.
- Nanny State: 100% also in Sweden, actually worse here. But historically they have been pretty good at protecting freedoms, so far. The UK (or Italy) may be less nanny, but have got some very illiberal things going on these days (left or right government doesn't really matter, it seems).
- Happiest people on earth: I really doubt the surveys measure happiness. They tend to measure trust in institutions, which is very high in Scandinavia.
- It's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that: exactly the same in Sweden! They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes. I guess that it's the other side of the same trust of the previous point.
- Drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest: At least you've got øl, in Sweden alcohol is taboo. Forests are nice, but become boring quite quickly :)
> They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes.
That must be the swedes. Danes complain constantly, about everything.
Edit: if you need examples.. DSB trains are slow/never on time/bad service/..; Post Nord takes WEEKS to get a letter out/too expensive. Well we switched to another provider now, Dao, so we’ll complain they are even worse! And complain why they are not doing it like in the good old days (see Post Nord); taxes are too high; public service is too bad/slow/low quality; too many cars in the city; never any parking space when I take MY car; the paid first child sick day is not enough we need at least a week (just for child sick days mind you, we need the 5 weeks paid vaca for relaxing on a Beach in Spain); btw our weather sucks; unacceptable that garbage collection service is not functioning during show storms; .. i can keep going all day
Denmark is like the Netherlands - where I'm originally from - and in some ways like Sweden - where I live. More like the Netherlands, really, Swedes are less likely to vocalise their dissatisfaction because they're more 'konflikträdd' or 'scared of conflicts'. Descartes may have claimed that 'Cogito, ergo sum' is one of the foundations of western philosophy but as far as the Dutch go 'Queror, ergo sum' often seems just as fitting.
> I don't get the obsession you Brits have against ID
I'm not British but to me it's extremely clear why they are against IDs when e.g. the Danish aren't. Media like 1984, animal farm, V for Vendatta etc. all came from the UK for a reason, they've always had a government entrenched in a strong class system with authoritarian tendencies.
That said, if you're Italian you should probably be wary of IDs for very similar reasons.
To me the most interesting aspect of all of this Trump shitshow is that the US, always brought as an example of "well designed democracy with it's checks and balances" is showing very clearly that it's a banana Republic
The checks and balances do exist, they're just not being used. It took some extreme circumstances and decades of work for a single party to seize control of all the levers of government, and active collusion to continuously enable this level of dysfunction. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people scattered across the various branches of federal government, both elected and career bureaucrats, who could put a stop to this at any time but choose not to. An extremely vocal, and not-insignificant sized chunk of the populace fanatically supports these actions. This is not a broken system, this is a fully functional well oiled machine being used skillfully to do horrible things.
it remains quite telling that in the wake of world war 2, when the us military designed the postwar japanese government, they based it on the westminster strong parliament system and explicitly avoided the us strong president.
but rules for citizenship are all different and are being made harder and harder because, well, that's what sells today. Also some countries (cough, Germany, cough) have incredibly stupid rules where you have to give up your own citizenship in order to get a new one.
I think it's perfectly normal to expect someone to give up their old citizenship when becoming citizen in a different country. When you become a citizen, that country is responsible for getting you out of international conflicts and arranging passports (which are essentially documents that say "you should let this person in because of the good relationship our two governments have"), and in turn you're expected to turn up for the draft and decide in national policy.
There are certainly countries where gaining citizenship is a challenge, but the Dutch terms for EU migrants the minimum requirements ("speaking the language somewhat fluently, having lived there legally for five years, filling out paperwork") aren't that difficult. Getting through the process takes effort, for sure, but it's not the challenge most people in the world will face (the "living in the country legally for five years" part, mostly; without student visas or special deals between your old government and the Dutch government, you're not likely to get a work visa as any random person on earth).
It's clear to me that you don't have the experience of being an immigrant.
There is nothing "normal" in expecting to renounce to a previous citizenship if you gain another one [1]. As an Italian citizen living in Sweden I obtained the Swedish citizenship (fortunately before the current government makes it way harder) but I'd never give up my Italian one. I "feel" Italian and owe my country a lot and my happily go back at some point, but I also feel like having the Swedish citizenship is useful, and allows me to vote in a country where I have chosen to live for a good chunk of my life.
I would say that it's not just useful, it should be a basic right. In my case as an EU citizen, Swedish citizenship gives me little more than I already have (voting rights, easier to get passport), but for those who come from outside the EU, citizenship is a question that affects all their life and of their family.
Just go and ask any immigrant friend if you have any. Just stop conflating citizenship with any sort of identity or morality, there is nothing like that.
In NL the obligation to renounce is pretty arbitrary. There are a number of circumstances where it is allowed to have two nationalities, such as through marriage to a Dutch citizen.
there should be a uniform system, something like that if you have lived in one country and have paid taxes there (fiscal residency) for more than X years you should be able to vote local elections.
A EU citizen living in the UK for long enough, and with a plan to stay, should have a say on the decisions of that country.
Yes, there is citizenship, but rules are all different and are made every more complicated as we speak (I like in Sweden, where the case is clear).
That is the fundamental flaw of the EU model - a lack of leadership and authority at the top level.
They will have to change that. There were some small steps during Covid to create EU level funding mechanisms.
I'm not saying they have to grow a monstrous bureaucracy at the EU level - in fact they could probably do it less. But they definitely need more regulation to promote self-grown technology.
EU inc is worthless without alignment on a single capital market for fundraising and ultimately going public, sane/interoperable labor laws for hiring, and a single language market over the long term.
The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.
Political tidal forces in Europe have, for quite some time, pointed more toward fragmentation than toward strengthening common structures. What makes this particularly ironic is that this impulse is often strongest among the same voices that most loudly lament Europe’s failure to build globally competitive industries—software foremost among them.
That tension has always struck me as deeply paradoxical. In the post-Brexit era, we have had a very visible case study in what happens when shared European frameworks are removed. The UK has spent years scrambling to recreate institutions, regulatory mechanisms, and coordination structures that had previously been provided at the EU level. One might expect that experience to have clarified the value of those structures. It largely hasn’t.
A significant part of the problem is deep lack of understanding. "EU bureaucracy" is a common target of criticism, yet it is remarkably rare for critics to have any concrete sense of what that bureaucracy actually does. The EU tends to appear in public discourse only when politicians argue, or when a regulation is framed as an intrusion on national sovereignty.
The everyday, unglamorous work of harmonization, reducing friction, enabling cross-border activity, and making markets function at scale—remains almost entirely invisible.
This creates a structural communication failure. The benefits of integration are mostly preventative and cumulative: things that don’t break, costs that don’t arise, barriers that quietly disappear. These effects are hard to convey through headlines or sound bites. Dry institutional reports are a poor match for a public sphere with limited patience for complexity. The result is a persistent undervaluation of the very mechanisms that make large, integrated markets possible.
Language barriers are often invoked in these discussions, and while they are real, their relevance is frequently overstated in this context. In white-collar professions, English proficiency is generally passable to good. This is especially true in software engineering, where English is effectively the working language of the field.
That said, proficiency is often domain-specific: people may read and write technical English fluently while still struggling with more active uses such as negotiation, persuasion, or conflict resolution.
In typical blue collar-type professions, by contrast, language barriers are substantial and unavoidable.
Where the problem becomes genuinely self-defeating is in the insistence that using English as a shared working language represents some form of cultural submission or imperialism. This view, rooted more in nationalist romanticism than in economic reality, adds pointless friction. It is beyond stupid to waste resources publishing official documents in 24 different languages. But eliminating this waste is a hard sell when you ask the muggles.
It brings us back to the central contradiction: the same people who regret Europe’s inability to produce globally dominant software companies often support attitudes and policies that fragment markets, raise transaction costs, and make such outcomes far less likely.
Europe cannot simultaneously expect to realize the benefits of scale and reject the mechanisms that make scale possible.
Trump and Putin are giving a golden opportunity to revive European integration. Alas, nationalistic populism with a badly hidden sympathy for the US (on the right) and Russia (on the left) seems to catch more votes these days.
Definitely agree, this is the classic left/right contradiction that has always existed.
In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone populist on both sides, it's a stalemate.
The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private capital represents a threat to their utopian authoritarian dreams (this truth will be masked with religious appeals to the poor and the environment of course).
The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, since government represents a threat to their utopian libertarian dreams (central planners might kill the unfair arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).
While central planners are terrible capital allocators, strong central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything.
What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-government wonks (basically what the neocons were), but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.
I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.
not gonna disagree with you, but, as a solo developer who needs to reach audiences of all sorts, from mobile to powerful servers, the most reasonable choice today is Javascript. JS, with its "running environments" (Chrome, Node, etc.), has done what Java was supposed to do in the 90s. It's a pity that Java didn't hold its promises, but the blame is to put all on the companies that ran the show back then (and running the show now).
Rookie developers who use hundreds of node modules or huge CSS frameworks are ruining performance and hurt the environment with bloated software that consumes energy and life time.
reply