4 ms·

> You say that like "tech giants" are a good thing. What you see is that - if the Czech Republic would have their own tech giants - they wouldn't propose such

> You say that like "tech giants" are a good thing. What you see is that - if the Czech Republic would have their own tech giants - they wouldn't propose such an aggressive taxation towards it. It's why Germany was against such taxes because they fear repercussions towards their own industry. > But a predatory attitude focused only on their own growth and "to hell with everyone else". Such a predatory attitude also gets punished through free market forces. A company like Microsoft got severely punished for their predatory behaviors. One of my favorite tech giants is 'Robert Bosch Stiftung' from Germany. > Aside from that there are plenty of European tech companies (ASML, Logitech, Skype, Spotify, just to name a few) ASML is the meager remnant of the once almighty Philips. Logitech is Swiss. Switzerland indeed does a better job providing a healthy climate for innovation. Skype is owned by Microsoft. Spotify is indeed a lovely company (worth protecting for sure). > Europe lacks such a powerful "hub". This is indeed a problem. San Francisco provides an excellent climate that attracts innovation. An important factor was perhaps that there was so much room to grow. The right city at the right time. In Europe most of the land is already accounted or planned for something. China got to grow so quickly exactly because the government decided to embrace free market forces. > This is why the UK probably has more EU immigrants than many other countries Many wealthy people migrated from France to the UK when Hollande proposed his tax plans. https://www.businessinsider.com/small-business-owners-explain-why-france-is-a-nation-in-decline-2014-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/small-business-owners-explai... Now we see France giving all kinds of tax breaks to lure UK companies to France after Brexit.

finchisko 7y ago
>if the Czech Republic would have their own tech giants - they wouldn't propose such an aggressive taxation towards it. Wait, if the company was in Czech rep. it would pay taxes there already. Or what am I missing?
- bartimus 7y ago
  The Czech tech giant would be operating globally. The Czech government would be less inclined to tax foreign tech companies if there exists a risk of foreign countries introducing tax repercussions for your own tech giants. Then if you apply specific "personal data taxes" they would come on top of the regular taxes already payed by your local tech giant. If such a tech giant would exist. The way this should be balanced out is by stimulating counter-innovation coming from Europe. Not by taxing innovation coming from foreign countries.
blub 7y ago
Well if Czechia had their tech giants they would lobby (read buy influence) against this as if their life depended on it. It's good that bigcorps don't have their claws in every country on the planet. Your "free market forces" argument comes straight from the 70s. How much more abuse are you willing to tolerate before it becomes blindingly obvious that market forces don't punish companies except if they don't make money. Microsoft was punished by the government, i.e. the law, not the market. And how did the market forces punish Facebook for the colossal fuck-ups? Because even after expecting a 5 Billion fine their stock was up. Saying that market forces punish predatory attitudes is beyond the pale. It's gaslighting and ignorance rolled into one. Skirting laws (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon), giving worker protections a runaround (any gig economy company) or destroying privacy (Google, Facebook, MS, many more) is not the kind of innovation this planet needs.
- bartimus 7y ago
  > Microsoft was punished by the government, i.e. the law, not the market. I wholeheartedly disagree. There has been a huge active community rigorously battling Microsoft's dominance offering alternative technologies and innovations. They deserve all the credit for maintaining the balance. Not government. > And how did the market forces punish Facebook for the colossal fuck-ups? Facebook has become less and less popular in recent years. Exactly because people got concerned with those colossal fuck-ups. So you see Facebook on the fence of those things and trying to improve their company ethics. > Saying that market forces punish predatory attitudes is beyond the pale. It's gaslighting and ignorance rolled into one. This is perhaps the popular opinion in Europe. Do you completely deny the existence of corrective forces? It seems to me a the US is doing a far better job at embracing them and has a lot of its innovative success to thank for it.
  - omnimus 7y ago
    So not taxing companies would be the best solution? Let's not forget that tech giants often don't pay any taxes to eu countries. Like zero. This is real problem for system based around taxes. It also puts smaller players that have to pay at disadvantage. This is just way how to tax the giants. I thin soon this is going to be normal and probably even higher.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
Okay, but you didn't really reply to anything I said in any meaningful way. Instead you just hooked in to out-of-context fragments to insert your own points. For example on my point about Europe's fragmentary nature due to the different languages you reply with some observations about ... France's tax rates? Okay... This is not really how conversations work.
- bartimus 7y ago
  I'm sorry. I can rant on about this for hours and hours and I feel like I'm already dominating this discussion too much. I don't believe language barriers are such a big problem. Most tech people speak English. What's ironic is that those language barriers are exactly solved thanks to translation innovations coming from the US. I'm now able to communicate much more easily with fellow Europeans. I truly believe we have a problem in Europe where there's too much focus on welfare and government control at the cost of free market and innovation. Too much "system thinking" as opposed to creative engineering. This used to be different a couple of decades ago.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    That okay, we all get carried away sometimes. I think you are underestimating the language and cultural barriers inside Europe. When I still lived in the Netherlands (my native country) we got a British employee at some point. Everyone in the company spoke English reasonably well, but not quite fluently. So what happened was that lunch conversations started out in English but quickly evolved to Dutch. I felt bad about it, but it was just so much easier to joke around in Dutch. This also mirrors the experience of my British ex-girlfriend, who lived and worked in the Netherlands. After this I lived in the UK for two years while working remote for an Irish company, and it took me a while to truly communicate efficiently with native English speakers. I knew the grammar and vocabulary, it just wasn't always obvious how to use it. People have made entire charts about miscommunications[1]. I also wrote a bit about this elsewhere[2]. It's one thing to argue in English on HN or watch Star Trek, but quite another to actually work in English every day. Perhaps it might actually be easier is everyone is a non-native speaker, but then you quickly run in to the "large group of natives speaking their own language"-problem I described before. In addition, actually living in a foreign country is also a bit harder if you don't speak the language. Either way, the barrier is certainly higher than in the US or China, where everyone just speaks the same language. [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0jvF8NIMAAFIn6.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0jvF8NIMAAFIn6.png:large and https://merican.vickihollett.com/wp-content/upLoads/anglo-dutch.gif https://merican.vickihollett.com/wp-content/upLoads/anglo-du... [2]: https://lobste.rs/s/xnjo8g/add_downvote_reason_unkind#c_imbov9 https://lobste.rs/s/xnjo8g/add_downvote_reason_unkind#c_imbo... > too much focus on welfare and government control at the cost of free market and innovation. Too much "system thinking" as opposed to creative engineering. This used to be different a couple of decades ago. Wasn't there much more welfare several decades ago? This certainly seems the case in my own country of the Netherlands, and it was also true in the UK (until Tatcher came in). I can't speak to other countries. I'm not convinced these things are strongly correlated to creativity or innovation. It seems to me that the primary reason people create things is because humans are just creative; it's part of our nature. Certainly if I look at my own motivations the amount of money going to the taxman is pretty far down the list of why I do things. Additionally, not everything is about economics. I have some amount of sympathy for libertarianism/free market thinking, but too often does everything get reduced to merely an economical argument. The world is more than just economics. In Germany they've been having a large debate about the ethics of driverless cars, for example, whereas in the US they've just put the cars on the road without first having a public debate. It may be more "innovative", but is it also the right thing to do?
omnimus 7y ago
It's worth noting that Czechia is small 10mil citizen country. So are many other eu countries. The language/culture/policy difference is a real decentralizing showstoping force. What it means is that many countries have their startups just filling vacuims of small local services (their ubers, airbnbs, craigslists, groupons etc.) companies you've never heard of. At best the countries find "niche" in tech. For example for Czechia it's been security - AVG, Avast, Eset and Kerio. Tooling - InteliJ, Netbeans. And gaming - apart of big merger+acusition which led to 2K czech you have many smaller players like Madfinger. Also kiwi.com is czech so it's not like there completely no tech scene. Education is great. It's just mindset is not so much go big or go home. People in europe seem to be ok with moderate success.
- finchisko 7y ago
  and porn hub (not the site) :) And btw ESET is from Slovakia.

finchisko 7y ago

>if the Czech Republic would have their own tech giants - they wouldn't propose such an aggressive taxation towards it. Wait, if the company was in Czech rep. it would pay taxes there already. Or what am I missing?

bartimus 7y ago
The Czech tech giant would be operating globally. The Czech government would be less inclined to tax foreign tech companies if there exists a risk of foreign countries introducing tax repercussions for your own tech giants. Then if you apply specific "personal data taxes" they would come on top of the regular taxes already payed by your local tech giant. If such a tech giant would exist. The way this should be balanced out is by stimulating counter-innovation coming from Europe. Not by taxing innovation coming from foreign countries.

blub 7y ago

Well if Czechia had their tech giants they would lobby (read buy influence) against this as if their life depended on it. It's good that bigcorps don't have their claws in every country on the planet. Your "free market forces" argument comes straight from the 70s. How much more abuse are you willing to tolerate before it becomes blindingly obvious that market forces don't punish companies except if they don't make money. Microsoft was punished by the government, i.e. the law, not the market. And how did the market forces punish Facebook for the colossal fuck-ups? Because even after expecting a 5 Billion fine their stock was up. Saying that market forces punish predatory attitudes is beyond the pale. It's gaslighting and ignorance rolled into one. Skirting laws (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon), giving worker protections a runaround (any gig economy company) or destroying privacy (Google, Facebook, MS, many more) is not the kind of innovation this planet needs.

bartimus 7y ago
> Microsoft was punished by the government, i.e. the law, not the market. I wholeheartedly disagree. There has been a huge active community rigorously battling Microsoft's dominance offering alternative technologies and innovations. They deserve all the credit for maintaining the balance. Not government. > And how did the market forces punish Facebook for the colossal fuck-ups? Facebook has become less and less popular in recent years. Exactly because people got concerned with those colossal fuck-ups. So you see Facebook on the fence of those things and trying to improve their company ethics. > Saying that market forces punish predatory attitudes is beyond the pale. It's gaslighting and ignorance rolled into one. This is perhaps the popular opinion in Europe. Do you completely deny the existence of corrective forces? It seems to me a the US is doing a far better job at embracing them and has a lot of its innovative success to thank for it.
- omnimus 7y ago
  So not taxing companies would be the best solution? Let's not forget that tech giants often don't pay any taxes to eu countries. Like zero. This is real problem for system based around taxes. It also puts smaller players that have to pay at disadvantage. This is just way how to tax the giants. I thin soon this is going to be normal and probably even higher.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

Okay, but you didn't really reply to anything I said in any meaningful way. Instead you just hooked in to out-of-context fragments to insert your own points. For example on my point about Europe's fragmentary nature due to the different languages you reply with some observations about ... France's tax rates? Okay... This is not really how conversations work.

bartimus 7y ago
I'm sorry. I can rant on about this for hours and hours and I feel like I'm already dominating this discussion too much. I don't believe language barriers are such a big problem. Most tech people speak English. What's ironic is that those language barriers are exactly solved thanks to translation innovations coming from the US. I'm now able to communicate much more easily with fellow Europeans. I truly believe we have a problem in Europe where there's too much focus on welfare and government control at the cost of free market and innovation. Too much "system thinking" as opposed to creative engineering. This used to be different a couple of decades ago.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  That okay, we all get carried away sometimes. I think you are underestimating the language and cultural barriers inside Europe. When I still lived in the Netherlands (my native country) we got a British employee at some point. Everyone in the company spoke English reasonably well, but not quite fluently. So what happened was that lunch conversations started out in English but quickly evolved to Dutch. I felt bad about it, but it was just so much easier to joke around in Dutch. This also mirrors the experience of my British ex-girlfriend, who lived and worked in the Netherlands. After this I lived in the UK for two years while working remote for an Irish company, and it took me a while to truly communicate efficiently with native English speakers. I knew the grammar and vocabulary, it just wasn't always obvious how to use it. People have made entire charts about miscommunications[1]. I also wrote a bit about this elsewhere[2]. It's one thing to argue in English on HN or watch Star Trek, but quite another to actually work in English every day. Perhaps it might actually be easier is everyone is a non-native speaker, but then you quickly run in to the "large group of natives speaking their own language"-problem I described before. In addition, actually living in a foreign country is also a bit harder if you don't speak the language. Either way, the barrier is certainly higher than in the US or China, where everyone just speaks the same language. [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0jvF8NIMAAFIn6.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0jvF8NIMAAFIn6.png:large and https://merican.vickihollett.com/wp-content/upLoads/anglo-dutch.gif https://merican.vickihollett.com/wp-content/upLoads/anglo-du... [2]: https://lobste.rs/s/xnjo8g/add_downvote_reason_unkind#c_imbov9 https://lobste.rs/s/xnjo8g/add_downvote_reason_unkind#c_imbo... > too much focus on welfare and government control at the cost of free market and innovation. Too much "system thinking" as opposed to creative engineering. This used to be different a couple of decades ago. Wasn't there much more welfare several decades ago? This certainly seems the case in my own country of the Netherlands, and it was also true in the UK (until Tatcher came in). I can't speak to other countries. I'm not convinced these things are strongly correlated to creativity or innovation. It seems to me that the primary reason people create things is because humans are just creative; it's part of our nature. Certainly if I look at my own motivations the amount of money going to the taxman is pretty far down the list of why I do things. Additionally, not everything is about economics. I have some amount of sympathy for libertarianism/free market thinking, but too often does everything get reduced to merely an economical argument. The world is more than just economics. In Germany they've been having a large debate about the ethics of driverless cars, for example, whereas in the US they've just put the cars on the road without first having a public debate. It may be more "innovative", but is it also the right thing to do?

omnimus 7y ago

It's worth noting that Czechia is small 10mil citizen country. So are many other eu countries. The language/culture/policy difference is a real decentralizing showstoping force. What it means is that many countries have their startups just filling vacuims of small local services (their ubers, airbnbs, craigslists, groupons etc.) companies you've never heard of. At best the countries find "niche" in tech. For example for Czechia it's been security - AVG, Avast, Eset and Kerio. Tooling - InteliJ, Netbeans. And gaming - apart of big merger+acusition which led to 2K czech you have many smaller players like Madfinger. Also kiwi.com is czech so it's not like there completely no tech scene. Education is great. It's just mindset is not so much go big or go home. People in europe seem to be ok with moderate success.

finchisko 7y ago
and porn hub (not the site) :) And btw ESET is from Slovakia.