alt Hacker NewsI'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do. The whole history was similar. France, for example, was neither the first to build high-end luxury products nor was it the first to embrace the Industrial Revolution. It managed to catch up in any case.
EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
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China still does not have many companies on the level of American technology firms. Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough for most places to compete; their domestic markets and investment levels are too underdeveloped to produce globally competitive companies.
The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).
There are two main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:
1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.
2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.
The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.
Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.
> We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
Which wouldn't do Europe a lot of good at this point. EU needs a TSMC and an Anthropic/OpenAI.
>EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I guess you mean EEC in 1958, because EU was officially formed in 1993. And normally people would count the period of the two World War and starting to count by the end of it. Either way it is a lot more than 30 years.
Agreed. Someone has to actually do it though. Talk is cheap.
> EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.
> I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
You can do it even today. But you can't bring back manufacturing from China. You gave them your techology and the market.
times change. past greatness is not a reliable predictor for the future. Mongolia is rather unlikely to be the largest empire ever again, don't you think?
> We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
I don't want the problems those kind of companies bring. The world would be better without Facebook and Instagram in particular.
The euro bashing will stop when the pointing noses down at USA for being uncultured or unrefined or whatever stops.
> I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do.
I'm from the EU and glad to be a part of it. I just wish it was easier to do multi-national projects (I think anything aerospace or military related shows how little the countries want to collaborate) or even just tackle large projects and undertakings better.
Hell, in regards to chips I'd be happy with at least 2020 level performance chips for servers, desktops and laptops, even ARM ones. Okay maybe that is aiming too high cause my current Ryzen 7 5800X is from 2020 and so is my M1 MacBook Air and I don't see the need to upgrade, even 2016 would be good enough. Just more domestic production, CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, everything else.