Cloud’s cute until there’s a network outage.

I think SEPA mitigates that dependency on Visa/MasterCard. Not being an expert I think the main issue is banks resisting change (and most likely getting kickbacks).

Electronics come from China and Taiwan anyway (i’m considering Intel/AMD CPUs as “advanced electronics” and even on that there are EU-babysteps towards advancing RISC-V).

I prefer to buy used. Less ewaste. Also they’re expensive, even w/o turdtax.

I prefer second-hand Lenovos to any new Lenova.

That seems to be the biggest hurdle: e.g. quite a few EU-countries have paypment processors similar to PayPal but there’s so such solution for cross-border (although wero seems to be used is 3 countries and SEPA instant transfers are a thing).

There’s some push for linux, headed by the penguins, but no agreement on which distro and some even proposed us-based distros for some reason.

Etc.

Slow and unique.

Those gas pipes never stopped being used.

They have been preparing? You sure about that?

Way ahead of you on that…
https://www.goeuropean.org/
https://europeanmade.eu/
https://buy-european.net/
to name a few, plus blogs, lemmy comunities and mastodon accounts…

I’m sorry but that’s wishful thinking (IMO).
Don’t get me wrong, there still may be a humanity when we reach a point when that’s technically possible, but it’ll be one more of the cyberpunk dystopia kind.

This current iteration of “AI” is just autocorrect on steroids, so… no, no AGI yet.
There’ll be a lot of work fixing the effects of vibe-coding and similar practices, for sure.

You’ll pry my kitten pictures from my cold dead hands!

You answered yourself: ThinkPads. Beware of soldered RAM (and other "improvements) in newer models.