Here's an interesting, related European history tidbit;
Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.
The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.
This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.
longfingers · 1h ago
I apreciate getting an explanation for the Belgian Comics. Lua and Brazil seems like a fascinating one to me too. Financially independent clouds seems very straight forward but I'm not sure what the regulatory environment would look like to have whole different programming language ecosystems emerging.
ho_schi · 3h ago
How about regulating Big Tech? Which was done with AT&T before Reagan and caused UNIX, C, Open-Source and Open-Documentation.
And encouraging and requiring open-source software development in Europe, founded by non-profit organizations and government. With requirements and control. The base for solution is readily available with Linux and BSD. Our politicians and CEOs only think in short terms. As consumers do :(
We can ban or tax things, like shipping Laptops with proprietary operating-systems. Declare, that the pre-installed operating-system must be open-source with {GPL, MIT, BSD} and fulfill standards. If not? Fine. Ship it without an operating-system.
And teach kids at school about scale of software and vendor lock-in. Every monopoly starts with being lazy and just grasping the first solution...
ecb_penguin · 3h ago
Literally no to all of this. All these bad ideas are exactly why Europe can't compete. You bring no positive ideas except requiring exactly what YOU want, and if you can't, then tax or ban it.
Stop looking for the nanny to take care of you, because this anti-consumer, anti-business viewpoint will help noone.
sshine · 1h ago
> this anti-consumer, anti-business viewpoint will help noone
It helps regulators.
And it does protect consumers, in some ways.
Although it protects the common good more, which people may disagree about.
It just also removes a lot of choices, because the level of compliance makes production not affordable.
For example, the EU imposes a lot of rules on electric kettles; safety, eco design / power limitation (saving 4.8--8.7 TWh per year), restriction of hazardous substances.
These are perfectly reasonable requirements. Perfectly reasonable death by bureaucracy.
You can't easily buy a toxic kettle that might explode and will keep water constantly boiling in the EU.
But also, it functions as a market barrier. I'm not sure what factors contribute exactly, but it's practically impossible to get an electric kettle with anything but a bimetallic thermometer, which eventually wears down. Doesn't matter the price. Whereas kettles in China have all kinds of fancy materials (e.g. glass) that don't respect eco design and can be programmed in all sorts of eco unfriendly ways.
sublinear · 1h ago
How are those ideas anti-consumer or anti-business?
For a very long time now the operating system has been an app delivery platform for both businesses and consumers, not an innovative technology in itself. Most apps are already built on more open source than proprietary code. Most infrastructure is already running linux. The purpose of regulation would simply be to better maintain these relationships with foundational pieces of software.
I don't think even AT&T ever owned copper mines. Imagine a world where the quality of copper in your city was so terrible that you couldn't make a call ~15% the time because of hand wringing about cost or pseudo-philosophizing about big bad government overreach. That's the world we're living in right now with cybersecurity incidents, businesses unintentionally reinventing the wheel, consumers being duped into scams, etc.
hammyhavoc · 3m ago
It's almost certainly someone attempting to debate via an LLM.
intellectronica · 3h ago
Bannig things as a default solution to everything is what got Europe in trouble in the first place. Zero-sum, back-to-the-trees mentality.
moomin · 3h ago
I never understand this idea that Europe is somehow in a bad place compared to America. Go ask people, it’s really not.
ews · 3h ago
I am originally from Europe and I must ask : how many startups of global reach has Europe produced in the last 30 years compared to the US as a whole (or even just the SF Bay Area). What is Europe doing in AI compared to the US or China?
arp242 · 8m ago
The entire notion that startups must have "global reach" to be relevant seems odd to me.
There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital.
Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.
plantwallshoe · 3h ago
How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> How has living in the same country as a crop of successful tech startups made the lives of an average American noticeably better?
Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe.
This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.
toomuchtodo · 46m ago
60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life. I disagree with the way this is argued. Materially wealthier how? Home equity? Household net worth? Absolutely of no value based on the currently observed outcomes.
If you ignore the wealth metrics, Europeans live objectively better lives than a majority of Americans.
> 60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life
Define that “basic quality of life” and map it to the EU. We define our baselines much higher in America than they do in Europe because of course we do, we’re richer per capita.
Quality of life for the bottom I think 50% of Americans is worse than in Europe, almost entirely due to food quality and healthcare. But for most Americans, it’s materially better for most values worth measuring. (For the richest Americans it’s way better, but that isn’t how I believe one measures a society.)
Keep in mind that I’m counting the whole EU. If we restrict ourselves to its richest members, sure, QOL is higher in Switzerland and Norway than in Mississippi.
toomuchtodo · 42m ago
Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc.
It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US, more so as upcoming Medicaid cuts occur.
> Unburdened by housing costs, affordable and accessible healthcare, transportation, child care, groceries, etc.
Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states.
> It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US
It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.)
In your fantasy world, maybe. The truth is that even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European.
JumpCrisscross · 45m ago
> even the loaded people die earlier and live up worse than the average Southern/Western European
You repeated this misinformation in another thread.
slowmovintarget · 2h ago
That's a non-sequitur.
Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there.
I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...
mertbio · 3h ago
Why do you think that Europe has to race with the US in number of startups? Shouldn’t we focus on the quality of life instead?
The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe
One, a search isn’t a source. Two, the medical source in your results [1] doesn’t support your hypothesis:
“Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.”
The wealthiest 25% of Americans have mortality similar to the poorest 25% in Northern and Western Europe. And the wealthiest 25% of Europeans as a whole outlive the wealthiest 25% of Americans.
The richest Americans, where I mean top 1 to 5%, on the other hand, match with the richest Europeans because of course we do, we’re accessing the same global pool of health services. But there is zero evidence rich Americans are outlived by poor Europeans, even if we restrict ourselves to its wealth West and North.
I am originally from Europe as well. And still living there (not sure if that’s why you phrased it like that) but how many innovations from the us are really adding to the value of life vs just forcing eyeballs to screen.
Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender.
I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value
Esophagus4 · 2h ago
Huh?
That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market:
- the light bulb
- the mass produced car
- the airplane
- the artificial heart
- the gold standard in Covid vaccines
- the personal computer
- the smartphone
- the internet
- email
- GPS
- MRIs
- consumer grade LLMs
- the world’s largest public cloud providers
- TCP/IP and BGP
- the web browser
- the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world
I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over.
This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector.
inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”
queenkjuul · 1h ago
Lmao. Germany invented the car, most modern automotive technology (fuel injection, front wheel drive, all wheel drive, and more) were invented in Europe, the web was started in the UK, personal computers were also made in Europe by European companies to fairly widespread success, not to mention such fundamental innovations like engines and railroads
No country has a monopoly on innovation, you're being absolutely ridiculous
Eta: the tape recorder was invented in Europe. The compact cassette and compact disc were developed by Phillips to unimaginable commercial success. I'll keep coming back as i think of more :)
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anthk · 1h ago
The web was British. The computer owes a lot from German designs. The car was a German invention. The smartphone had European pre-designs. And, on 'the cloud'... that just rehashing more than 50 year old mainframes' design. Were's the actual innovation? Again, as I said, Bell Labs/MIT with Unix and Lisp which were groundbreaking aren't hip any more.
Even 9front with namespaces has tons of European collaboration.
saubeidl · 1h ago
> - the gold standard in Covid vaccines
Huh? Wasn't that BioNTech, a german company?
surgical_fire · 2h ago
Interestingly enough, I am not originally from Europe, but chose to move here over the US.
In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.
labster · 1h ago
Sir, are you aware that this very website is run by VCs as an advertisement for hustle culture? You are, in fact, “anywhere near” this particular vast wasteland.
dietr1ch · 2h ago
I think this is just because law and taxes are more forgiving in the US for companies to strive and gain advantage against companies in Europe.
Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.
Ralfp · 3h ago
Ask your uncle who lives in old country, what he values more. EU-developed startups or universal healthcare that cured his child without bankrupting his household?
drcongo · 1h ago
That's a bizarre metric to judge a continent on. I mean, I could throw it back at you with : how many people's lives are ruined because of bankruptcy from a routine medical procedure that millions of Europeans get for free?
lawn · 2h ago
That's a weird statistic to single out.
I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.
15155 · 3h ago
Invariably someone will roll in and say "ASML" (despite this being a US-financed venture.)
jbverschoor · 2h ago
Doesn't matter.. The US is financed by the rest of the world / China.
Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East
anthk · 2h ago
How many startups in the US have actually been both sucessful and useful to the society?
The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.
zmxz · 2h ago
European here. You're spot on with your question. Europe is an extremely hostile place to start a business compared to USA.
USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular.
I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims.
We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this).
There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it.
I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work.
Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)?
Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you.
Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.
satyrun · 1h ago
I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing.
As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
>
I am an American but the idea of Germany not having a competitive LLM right now is pretty sad and embarrassing.
> As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard.
I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".
6510 · 59m ago
I think the hype train was the polymath omniscient oracle. With agents sanity seems pretty much restored.
With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.
aleph_minus_one · 50m ago
> With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.
This approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste ...
anthk · 1h ago
Europe backs up tons of hardware design which without that the software companies in the US would crumble like dust.
ITB · 3h ago
Bad place to build successful companies compared to America.
ryandrake · 3h ago
Who cares?
I’m really, really starting to question how much of an Ultimate Flex “good for companies” is, when it comes at the expense of: standard of living, worker’s rights, privacy, a safety net, and everything else America lacks due to its single minded focus on being “good for business.”
dragonwriter · 3h ago
> Who cares?
Capitalists (the class, and the ideological faction devoted to promoting the interests of that class.)
ecb_penguin · 3h ago
> Who cares?
Me, who enjoys higher salaries, more jobs, better benefits, better healthcare, better schools, more diversity, and higher purchasing power.
Also it's more fun to work for US tech companies than Nokia :).
queenkjuul · 1h ago
You don't have better healthcare, and most Americans don't have any of those things
bethekidyouwant · 1h ago
Are you claiming that if you have the money, America doesn’t have better healthcare?
saubeidl · 1h ago
As somebody who has money and lived in the US, absolutely.
The system is a joke. It takes forever to get MRI appointments. Everything has so much bureaucracy. You fill out forms and make calls and get letters and all this bullshit.
Meanwhile, I can just book stuff online instantly now that I live in europe.
And it's visible in outcomes, too. Life expectancy in the EU is around 5 years higher than in the US.
djaychela · 3h ago
I think it might depend on how you define success?
davkan · 3h ago
Profit for the founders and the shareholders is the only definition anyone cares about in the states.
The idea that a business could be considered successful by just providing a living wage for its owners and employees or contributing to the community is not a consideration.
People in this country see a single person startup making a few million dollars to be a greater success story than providing for the lives and well being of 20 employees for a decade.
pj_mukh · 3h ago
Controversial opinion: Strip out the colonial wealth compounded, Europe may look like South America in terms of Economic and Exportative output over the last 50 years.
I have seen no evidence that European states would’ve developed the comfortable pace of work, welfare state, retirement and vacation systems independent of their amassed colonial wealth.
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spacebeer · 3h ago
It worked for China, when they banned or restricted what Google, MS, Apple, Facebook can do there
remir · 2h ago
It worked for China because they were in position of power. The US wasn't established in China and they needed Chinese users to grow their global user base and influence. Meanwhile, China had the wealth and power to say no and instead fund and develop their own homegrown tech equivalents.
Europe doesn't have that same level of power. If tomorrow morning you banned Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce in Europe, you'd destroy their economy.
What Europe needs to do is create the conditions for tech companies to emerge that could truly compete against US big tech. As long as European will prefer working for US corporation, there's no chance for Europe to compete. Simple as that.
longfingers · 1h ago
I don't get your argument. Those companies provide overpriced crap to go along with domain specific code that is either open source or written by a more specialized company. If companies suddenly had to make intelligent choices and people would get fired for buying IBM, a bunch if companies would show up with better integrations than these since worse just isn't possible.
If a rush to get anything non-US were the priority the market of converting Chinese solutions would already deliver better solutions.. US tech (of this office sort) looks a lot like US steel plants a couple decades after other nations built replacements, that's why it is comical that Europe is not only using it but often using the very worst of it.
moomin · 3h ago
And clearly some people believe it will work for America, given the TikTok ban.
rrr_oh_man · 3h ago
A ban that is not being enforced or complied with is not a ban.
ronsor · 3h ago
China did it early and made growing their domestic industry a priority. Europe has not. This is like trying to close the gate after the horse has already escaped.
spacebeer · 3h ago
So not just EU, but any other region in the world, like Africa, South America, Central Asia should just give up and not try to make a business that could disrupt existing giants?
togetheragainor · 3h ago
They should try fostering more competence and competitiveness, rather than trying to regulate themselves to success.
ClumsyPilot · 3h ago
Most US industries are owned by 1/2/3 oligopolies.
The only way to compete is to create your own monopolies.
No comments yet
michaelscott · 3h ago
They can, but OP's point is that a ban on US tech on its own will do nothing to produce a local Silicon Valley. It needs to go hand in hand with a massive push toward local entrepreneurial support, especially in places like Europe where the government exercises more control through legislation
ryandrake · 3h ago
I don’t think you really need to incentivize businesses. If people want to start a business, they’re going to start one, regardless of whatever carrot you throw in front of them. “I’d love to start a business and make a profit, but the government just isn’t giving me enough incentive!” - said nobody ever.
queenkjuul · 1h ago
And "every government software contract owned by a US company is about to be up for grabs" isn't an incentive on its own?
surgical_fire · 2h ago
Citation needed? What exactly did EU ban that got them in trouble?
I personall think it is a great idea to ban US big tech from EU, especially now that the US is essentially an enemy foreign nation.
ClumsyPilot · 3h ago
The greatest lie in the world is that US Gov. wants free market.
It has spent the last 10 years lobbying EU to ban Huawei, Chinese electric cars, Tiktok, etc.. It has banned foreign ships from travelling between US ports, a deal by Japan's Nippon Steel, imposed 300% tax on Bombardier, and imprisoned French executives until they agreed to sell a division of Alstom to GE.
This is why I support Trump as a European - at least he is upfront about the racket he is running. If the pretence cannot be maintained, our politicians will be forced to respond.
Klonoar · 3h ago
You do know you can acknowledge the supposed effect Trump would have on the EU without supporting him, right?
apwell23 · 3h ago
why do they not twist themselves into frenzy like they do in usa if someone proposes protectionist policies.
Trump is like europe lite
joules77 · 3h ago
Chinese tech is possible cause Chinese cash is parked in China.
Meanwhile most European cash (from pension funds, wealth funds, banks etc) flows into Wall St indirectly funding Big Tech/SV etc.
ojbyrne · 3h ago
The fact that the us$ has dropped 15% vs the Euro in the last 6 months suggest that won’t necessarily hold forever.
bestham · 2h ago
I would love to see what innovation could happen if privacy and sustainability was paramount in tech. That the user of the product or service was not the product to be sold or mined. There are only a handful of companies worldwide with that ethos. Many of them are not European. As a European I fully support the regulation of US tech in the EU. We are using US tech, but it has some inherit fundamental humans rights and competition problems that EU regulators want to address. I do not expect that EU will become innovative in a way to compete with US or Asia.
moomin · 3h ago
You need to spend more time looking at your suppliers when they come from politically unstable regimes. That’s international procurement 101. The only real argument is about what, economically and practically, can be done about it.
bambax · 3h ago
> If we take the influence in the field of politics and human and privacy rights truly seriously, a ban on American tech in Europe is crucial, according to this scholar. In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.
This is inconsistent. If Europe must ban American Big Tech because of human and privacy rights (something I tend to agree with) then it should not create anything in its stead, and actively prevent a European Silicon Valley from ever happening.
It's extremely unlikely European business people are better than Americans. Once they become powerful enough, chances are they will be even more evil.
alibarber · 3h ago
Indeed - it reminds me of a story I heard about potential Lithium deposits being found in Sweden. Initially this would be a good thing because it would help Europeans build and drive more electric cars which are a good thing because they are less polluting and rely less on oil from unstable places.
Of course, it was swiftly pointed out that it would be impossible to mine it and meet the stringent environmental standards that we have in Europe, because we're good and care for the world.
Fine to trash the environment in China though.
Similarly, hands have been wrung in Finland because they banned importing Russian timber for obvious reasons, but this meant potentialy cutting down more Finnish wood and failing to meet environmental obligations. Aparently if you cut down trees a bit to the East it's ok for the environment.
brookst · 3h ago
It’s the classic “we must regulate pi=3” problem. They want the benefits of the tech without the capitalistic intent or unwanted side effects.
The European regulatory regime is specifically designed to prioritize social welfare (as defined by regulators) over technological advance. Just look at Spotify: technically stagnant, but a lobbying and regulatory powerhouse.
anonnon · 3h ago
> If Europe must ban American Big Tech because of human and privacy rights
Isn't the EU currently trying to force encryption back-doors?
mihaaly · 3h ago
More and bigger isolationism and forcing a model that worked in very different circumstances (legal, financial, cultural) does not sound smart.
rvnx · 4h ago
As a first step we should make visas more selective for troublemakers and easier to obtain for highly educated people
john01dav · 3h ago
As part of making visas easier for educated people, make them less restrictive. I have looked into moving to various European countries with my programming skills, but unless I'm already at the top of my field I'm tied to a job for years and prohibited from starting my own business. To me, this isn't worth it. Also, I don't see a strong reason for that restriction -- startups are exactly what they need.
alibarber · 3h ago
With all due respect, there's not a huge shortage of programmers in Europe.
What is needed is capital, world leading expertise (yes, top of the field - the people who can command the famous $100M sign on bonuses we hear about), and more risk appetite. If you were, say, an investor ready to fund and grow companies with ready captial, I think your options would be more open.
bootsmann · 2h ago
Europe has lots of capital but when it comes to capital “Europe” is not a singular entity. Its surprisingly difficult for a fund in country A to invest in a privately held company of country B. The whole thing about the lack of big tech in Europe is partially caused by this fragmentation. In areas where the EU broke down those barriers (such as manufacturing) Europe is significantly more competitive than the US.
alexey-salmin · 2h ago
There kind of is, in my view. It's easier for me to hire and relocate an engineer from Eastern Europe than from France where I'm based now.
Most baffling to me are the 25 y.o. graduates of engineering universities who can't write five lines of code in a programming language of their choice. All right you want to be a developer, where the hell have you been all these years? You can get to the senior level by that age, let alone learn one programming language.
alibarber · 2h ago
To be fair, I've had reasonably similar experiences here in Finland.
And I agree with your second point too - I don't really know what's going on with education, or more generally, the culture surrounding it these days (old man yells at cloud I know), I'd like to see that improved, because in a lot of Europe this is being (effectively) paid for by the public, and if it's producing people with no hope then what's the point?
michaelscott · 3h ago
There is plenty of capital (eye watering amounts in most family offices in fact) and world leading expertise in many fields across Europe. The only factor here is more risk appetite and a culture for that risk in an effort to push industry forward. Europe is incredibly risk averse and is more interested in capital preservation than growth
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
> Europe is incredibly risk averse and is more interested in capital preservation than growth
There exist quite a lot of people in European countries who are risk-affine, but these are not necessarily good at handling the insane amount of red tape.
Believe me: in Germany, there exist quite a lot of people who would (assuming they could, and this criminal act will never be solved) immediately love to kill the politicians who made these red tape laws, and the bureacrats that enforce them.
alexey-salmin · 3h ago
French Passeport Talent is quite good. Most types aren't tied to the employer and last 4 years. There's the "Création d’entreprise" option that allows creation of a company but it requires you to invest 30k euros into it.
michaelscott · 3h ago
I've been in exactly this position and it's honestly insane, assuming Europe is actually interested in promoting startup growth. It's simply not set up from a legislative position to be able to compete with the US or China
Klonoar · 3h ago
I mean the Netherlands basically voids all your issues here via the DAFT treaty. It’s also a well known visa avenue so I feel like you may not have looked hard enough.
You’re tied to the Netherlands specifically for a few years, but that’s about the only knock I can see.
alibarber · 3h ago
What is Europe offering those we need? Lower salary and more taxes?
The first thing that springs off everyone's lips is 'healthcare' but the types of people we need aren't exactly going to struggle to afford higher quality than most public services here, wherever else they are.
dvdkon · 3h ago
Less mad political culture? Walkable cities? A nicer place to live for your less-wealthy neighbours? I can't think of much else that would impress a rich or soon-to-be-rich person from the US especially.
And I don't think offering anything more is a good idea. There's little else a wealthy person can't already just buy in another country, except for maybe looser labour and environmental regulations, and I certainly don't want that.
can16358p · 3h ago
I have no sympathy for US, and I know I'm going to be downvoted to hell from EU-conservatists, though: Don't expect anything comparable to US big tech with all those innovation-stifling regulations that EU has.
If Europe wants to do anything that can compete with US big tech, they should get rid of those regulations first.
hugs · 3h ago
have a specific regulation in mind?
brookst · 3h ago
Not the person you’re replying to, but the main problem is the “thought that counts” approach. The EU gives you regulations about spirit and intent, and the only way you know if you’re in compliance is either getting fined after the fact or spending many millions of dollars engaging regulators to negotiate features before the ship, and even if you have the time and money to do that, their recommendations aren’t binding (they can still fine you).
It creates a better-safe-than-sorry culture where companies would be crazy to take huge financial risks to ship advanced tech in a market that’s about 15% of the world.
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can16358p · 3h ago
Basically everything around data in EU. Make one small "mistake" (which would be perfectly OK in SV) and you're done: millions in fines so you either go bankrupt or go to jail. Almost no one, naturally, wants to take risk.
bootsmann · 2h ago
The youngest FAANG company was 15 years old by the time GDPR was put in place.
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
Even before GDPR a lot of data protection rules existed (e.g. in Germany).
convolvatron · 3h ago
can we build software and services without mining people’s identities? it just won’t be as profitable, and frankly a lot of the innovation is consumer hostile. it’s certainly worth trying to dont you think?
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
It was tried:
For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.
Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:
- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)
- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake
- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.
spacebeer · 3h ago
There are good people making good software all over the world. We just need to start using it more instead of this crap being thrown at us by big tech
can16358p · 3h ago
Sure, I'd love to use an open source model locally that's trained on fully ethically-sourced data... once it's on par with ChatGPT or Sonnet.
For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".
I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.
can16358p · 3h ago
It means less data, and let's be realistic, under otherwise equal conditions, means less-accurate inference.
One can try it, but it will never be a fair game.
apwell23 · 3h ago
one of my friends claims his career would be at a different place if he had played politics and back stabbed his coworkers.
I don't know what to make of that.
slowmovintarget · 3h ago
> Van der Sloot: “We now see the political interference by Russia and by Big Tech itself in elections in Europe, the rise of AI, and the fact that Europe is totally dependent on America in this context. In my opinion, the only way to protect our European values is to ban all American technology in Europe within five years, not only for consumers but also for government authorities and companies. At the same time, we need to bridge the technological gap because we remain vulnerable as long as we are dependent on foreign technology.”
So bog standard protectionism is what he's advocating for. He should have a discussion with economists as he's making assumptions outside his expertise, I suspect.
anonnon · 3h ago
Sounds like a great way to turn public opinion in the US against continued US participation in NATO.
saubeidl · 1h ago
NATO is a US imperialist project that solely exists to protect US interest.
If the US doesn't want free power projection, that's fine, but it's not much of a threat against a continent that is full of nuclear or and nuclear-latent states.
jbverschoor · 2h ago
It can't.. However....
What about ASML just bans the rest of the world and creates a global silo, ups the price and adds crazy licensing, and then the EU adds tariffs?
Grab em by the what again, mr Trump?
xyzzy9563 · 3h ago
Europe is lucky we don't consider the entire western half to be a U.S. territory after WW2.
DataDaemon · 3h ago
I can't wait for another startup attaching caps to bottles
deadbabe · 3h ago
If you want a European Silicon Valley, you need American style values.
European investors are risk averse cowards who could never imagine putting down vast sums of money for pre-revenue, pre-profit type companies. That’s why you never get the big wins, and why you’ll never attract the big winners. They’ll just go to America.
throwacct · 1h ago
Only the EU? Most of the world is like that.
deadbabe · 21m ago
That’s why the rest of the world falls behind the United States in tech entrepreneurship.
anticomp2345 · 3h ago
Then America must ban and tariff anticompetitive Europe.
Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.
The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.
This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.
And encouraging and requiring open-source software development in Europe, founded by non-profit organizations and government. With requirements and control. The base for solution is readily available with Linux and BSD. Our politicians and CEOs only think in short terms. As consumers do :(
We can ban or tax things, like shipping Laptops with proprietary operating-systems. Declare, that the pre-installed operating-system must be open-source with {GPL, MIT, BSD} and fulfill standards. If not? Fine. Ship it without an operating-system.
And teach kids at school about scale of software and vendor lock-in. Every monopoly starts with being lazy and just grasping the first solution...
Stop looking for the nanny to take care of you, because this anti-consumer, anti-business viewpoint will help noone.
It helps regulators.
And it does protect consumers, in some ways.
Although it protects the common good more, which people may disagree about.
It just also removes a lot of choices, because the level of compliance makes production not affordable.
For example, the EU imposes a lot of rules on electric kettles; safety, eco design / power limitation (saving 4.8--8.7 TWh per year), restriction of hazardous substances.
These are perfectly reasonable requirements. Perfectly reasonable death by bureaucracy.
You can't easily buy a toxic kettle that might explode and will keep water constantly boiling in the EU.
But also, it functions as a market barrier. I'm not sure what factors contribute exactly, but it's practically impossible to get an electric kettle with anything but a bimetallic thermometer, which eventually wears down. Doesn't matter the price. Whereas kettles in China have all kinds of fancy materials (e.g. glass) that don't respect eco design and can be programmed in all sorts of eco unfriendly ways.
For a very long time now the operating system has been an app delivery platform for both businesses and consumers, not an innovative technology in itself. Most apps are already built on more open source than proprietary code. Most infrastructure is already running linux. The purpose of regulation would simply be to better maintain these relationships with foundational pieces of software.
I don't think even AT&T ever owned copper mines. Imagine a world where the quality of copper in your city was so terrible that you couldn't make a call ~15% the time because of hand wringing about cost or pseudo-philosophizing about big bad government overreach. That's the world we're living in right now with cybersecurity incidents, businesses unintentionally reinventing the wheel, consumers being duped into scams, etc.
There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital.
Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.
Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe.
This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.
If you ignore the wealth metrics, Europeans live objectively better lives than a majority of Americans.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
Define that “basic quality of life” and map it to the EU. We define our baselines much higher in America than they do in Europe because of course we do, we’re richer per capita.
Quality of life for the bottom I think 50% of Americans is worse than in Europe, almost entirely due to food quality and healthcare. But for most Americans, it’s materially better for most values worth measuring. (For the richest Americans it’s way better, but that isn’t how I believe one measures a society.)
Keep in mind that I’m counting the whole EU. If we restrict ourselves to its richest members, sure, QOL is higher in Switzerland and Norway than in Mississippi.
It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US, more so as upcoming Medicaid cuts occur.
https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-...
Nice. Where can I get that salary in Spain?
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states.
> It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US
It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.)
[1] https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map...
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-sta...
You repeated this misinformation in another thread.
Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there.
I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...
The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?
Source?
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%...
“Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.”
The wealthiest 25% of Americans have mortality similar to the poorest 25% in Northern and Western Europe. And the wealthiest 25% of Europeans as a whole outlive the wealthiest 25% of Americans.
The richest Americans, where I mean top 1 to 5%, on the other hand, match with the richest Europeans because of course we do, we’re accessing the same global pool of health services. But there is zero evidence rich Americans are outlived by poor Europeans, even if we restrict ourselves to its wealth West and North.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender.
I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value
That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market:
- the light bulb
- the mass produced car
- the airplane
- the artificial heart
- the gold standard in Covid vaccines
- the personal computer
- the smartphone
- the internet
- email
- GPS
- MRIs
- consumer grade LLMs
- the world’s largest public cloud providers
- TCP/IP and BGP
- the web browser
- the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world
I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over.
This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector.
inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”
No country has a monopoly on innovation, you're being absolutely ridiculous
Eta: the tape recorder was invented in Europe. The compact cassette and compact disc were developed by Phillips to unimaginable commercial success. I'll keep coming back as i think of more :)
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Even 9front with namespaces has tons of European collaboration.
Huh? Wasn't that BioNTech, a german company?
In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.
Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.
I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.
Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East
The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.
USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular.
I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims.
We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this).
There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it.
I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work.
Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)?
Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you.
Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.
As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
> As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard.
I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".
With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.
This approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste ...
I’m really, really starting to question how much of an Ultimate Flex “good for companies” is, when it comes at the expense of: standard of living, worker’s rights, privacy, a safety net, and everything else America lacks due to its single minded focus on being “good for business.”
Capitalists (the class, and the ideological faction devoted to promoting the interests of that class.)
Me, who enjoys higher salaries, more jobs, better benefits, better healthcare, better schools, more diversity, and higher purchasing power.
Also it's more fun to work for US tech companies than Nokia :).
The system is a joke. It takes forever to get MRI appointments. Everything has so much bureaucracy. You fill out forms and make calls and get letters and all this bullshit.
Meanwhile, I can just book stuff online instantly now that I live in europe.
And it's visible in outcomes, too. Life expectancy in the EU is around 5 years higher than in the US.
The idea that a business could be considered successful by just providing a living wage for its owners and employees or contributing to the community is not a consideration.
People in this country see a single person startup making a few million dollars to be a greater success story than providing for the lives and well being of 20 employees for a decade.
I have seen no evidence that European states would’ve developed the comfortable pace of work, welfare state, retirement and vacation systems independent of their amassed colonial wealth.
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Europe doesn't have that same level of power. If tomorrow morning you banned Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce in Europe, you'd destroy their economy.
What Europe needs to do is create the conditions for tech companies to emerge that could truly compete against US big tech. As long as European will prefer working for US corporation, there's no chance for Europe to compete. Simple as that.
If a rush to get anything non-US were the priority the market of converting Chinese solutions would already deliver better solutions.. US tech (of this office sort) looks a lot like US steel plants a couple decades after other nations built replacements, that's why it is comical that Europe is not only using it but often using the very worst of it.
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I personall think it is a great idea to ban US big tech from EU, especially now that the US is essentially an enemy foreign nation.
It has spent the last 10 years lobbying EU to ban Huawei, Chinese electric cars, Tiktok, etc.. It has banned foreign ships from travelling between US ports, a deal by Japan's Nippon Steel, imposed 300% tax on Bombardier, and imprisoned French executives until they agreed to sell a division of Alstom to GE.
This is why I support Trump as a European - at least he is upfront about the racket he is running. If the pretence cannot be maintained, our politicians will be forced to respond.
Trump is like europe lite
Meanwhile most European cash (from pension funds, wealth funds, banks etc) flows into Wall St indirectly funding Big Tech/SV etc.
This is inconsistent. If Europe must ban American Big Tech because of human and privacy rights (something I tend to agree with) then it should not create anything in its stead, and actively prevent a European Silicon Valley from ever happening.
It's extremely unlikely European business people are better than Americans. Once they become powerful enough, chances are they will be even more evil.
Of course, it was swiftly pointed out that it would be impossible to mine it and meet the stringent environmental standards that we have in Europe, because we're good and care for the world.
Fine to trash the environment in China though.
Similarly, hands have been wrung in Finland because they banned importing Russian timber for obvious reasons, but this meant potentialy cutting down more Finnish wood and failing to meet environmental obligations. Aparently if you cut down trees a bit to the East it's ok for the environment.
The European regulatory regime is specifically designed to prioritize social welfare (as defined by regulators) over technological advance. Just look at Spotify: technically stagnant, but a lobbying and regulatory powerhouse.
Isn't the EU currently trying to force encryption back-doors?
What is needed is capital, world leading expertise (yes, top of the field - the people who can command the famous $100M sign on bonuses we hear about), and more risk appetite. If you were, say, an investor ready to fund and grow companies with ready captial, I think your options would be more open.
Most baffling to me are the 25 y.o. graduates of engineering universities who can't write five lines of code in a programming language of their choice. All right you want to be a developer, where the hell have you been all these years? You can get to the senior level by that age, let alone learn one programming language.
And I agree with your second point too - I don't really know what's going on with education, or more generally, the culture surrounding it these days (old man yells at cloud I know), I'd like to see that improved, because in a lot of Europe this is being (effectively) paid for by the public, and if it's producing people with no hope then what's the point?
There exist quite a lot of people in European countries who are risk-affine, but these are not necessarily good at handling the insane amount of red tape.
Believe me: in Germany, there exist quite a lot of people who would (assuming they could, and this criminal act will never be solved) immediately love to kill the politicians who made these red tape laws, and the bureacrats that enforce them.
You’re tied to the Netherlands specifically for a few years, but that’s about the only knock I can see.
The first thing that springs off everyone's lips is 'healthcare' but the types of people we need aren't exactly going to struggle to afford higher quality than most public services here, wherever else they are.
And I don't think offering anything more is a good idea. There's little else a wealthy person can't already just buy in another country, except for maybe looser labour and environmental regulations, and I certainly don't want that.
If Europe wants to do anything that can compete with US big tech, they should get rid of those regulations first.
It creates a better-safe-than-sorry culture where companies would be crazy to take huge financial risks to ship advanced tech in a market that’s about 15% of the world.
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For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.
Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:
- SuSE was bought by Novell
- DLD (company: Delix; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Linux-Distribution ) was bought by Red Hat
- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)
- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake
- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.
For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".
I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.
One can try it, but it will never be a fair game.
I don't know what to make of that.
So bog standard protectionism is what he's advocating for. He should have a discussion with economists as he's making assumptions outside his expertise, I suspect.
If the US doesn't want free power projection, that's fine, but it's not much of a threat against a continent that is full of nuclear or and nuclear-latent states.
What about ASML just bans the rest of the world and creates a global silo, ups the price and adds crazy licensing, and then the EU adds tariffs?
Grab em by the what again, mr Trump?
European investors are risk averse cowards who could never imagine putting down vast sums of money for pre-revenue, pre-profit type companies. That’s why you never get the big wins, and why you’ll never attract the big winners. They’ll just go to America.
Tit for tat.