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And I've seen what solidarity (without the scary quotes) did to Sweden (and other Nordics), Germany, etc. as societies for the working class. A union is not a

by piva00 4y ago

And I've seen what solidarity (without the scary quotes) did to Sweden (and other Nordics), Germany, etc. as societies for the working class. A union is not a guild, it's not about creating barriers of entry like in law or medicine, unsure why you conflate those concepts. Perhaps it's from ignorance, or perhaps from the fears that the ruling class instilled into you.

johngladtj 4y ago
And yet it's exactly what it does.
roenxi 4y ago
If we're going to copy the Nordics, someone is going to have to start by translating their laws into English so we know what it is they are actually doing. I don't like arguing based on what they are hypothetically doing and I don't think many of the people pointing at them as an example know either. They're tiny, homogeneous and Norway has obscene oil wealth. It isn't obvious we can copy them piecemeal, even if it does make sense which I doubt it does. And although it isn't exactly fair, note that Germany is a wasteland for tech. In the centre of a tech desert. The EU can't do tech. Copying their policies we can do, but it'll probably involve a lot of jobs heading to Asia. All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.
- lozenge 4y ago
  The US also has oil wealth, but it goes to shareholders instead of to the public purse. Which is funny because none of them created the oil.
- piva00 4y ago
  I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that. > All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there. Because USA's wages are the massive oddball here, not the standard. And to be honest, shouldn't be replicated anywhere else, having such a vast part of your population living how the bottom 50% of the USA lives is not really a goal for most developed countries, it doesn't create a healthy society (as you can see yourself by living in the USA). Comparing purely on a wage basis is a reduction of what societies actually are. Great, you earn a lot more in the USA but now has to deal with all the stresses of living in the USA. Is that really what the average person in an advanced economy should be under? If you believe so, the USA is for you, I don't believe in it. > The EU can't do tech. The EU has a large language and cultural barrier that is nonexistent in the USA, it's not only a purely economical output. ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? Tech couldn't exist without ASML... On the point of tiny "homogeneous" Nordics: Each US state is also pretty tiny with a few exceptions, isn't that the model of the USA? Why can't each tiny state also have their provisions for labour protection? Because it's not part of the culture.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW) Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD? Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it from here? Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil. Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China. US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition. >Tech couldn't exist without ASML... False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either. Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence versus their Japanese competitors. Longer story: "The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA. Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details. The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1] [1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319 https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319
- tfourb 4y ago
  Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc. While certainly not perfect and lacking in many ways, it is a system that is at least in theory aimed towards providing a decent standard of living to all, instead of allowing a lucky few (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) to juice the income statistics by earning insane amounts of money and giving the middle finger to the rest of society.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck. Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.
    - tfourb 4y ago
      According to wikipedia, 9 of the 10 richest persons are white men from an upper-middle-class or upper class social background. Even people like Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim, while not born in the U.S. or Western Europe, have parents that were part of their countries' academic or business elite. Do you have any conception of how lucky you have to be to be born into such circumstances instead of being raised in the slums of Nairobi? Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Here's a few EU and Europe technology companies I could find information on, including their market capitalisation: ASML (Netherlands, Market cap: $262.07 Billion) Accenture (Ireland, Market cap: $171.21 Billion) Deutsche Telekom (Germany, Market cap: $118.43 Billion) Schneider Electric (France, Market cap: $91.00 Billion) Dassault Systèmes (France, Market cap: $54.24 Billion) Adyen (Netherlands, Market cap: $48.95 Billion) NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands, Market cap: $47.24 Billion) Orange (France, Market cap: $31.21 Billion) SAP (Germany, Market cap: $31.21 Billion) Ericsson (Sweden,Market cap: $31.21 Billion) Vodafone (UK, Market cap: $30.67 Billion) STMicroelectronics (Switzerland, Market cap: $45.92 Billion) Infineon (Germany, Market cap: $50.75 Billion) TE Connectivity (Switzerland, Market cap: $39.56 Billion) Amadeus IT Group (Spain, Market cap: $28.69 Billion) Nokia (Nokia, Market cap: $26.18 Billion) Cellnex Telecom (Spain, Market cap: $26.24 Billion) Spotify (Sweden, Market cap: $25.34 Billion) Note that I selected those for being strictly "tech", as in software, electronics and telecoms. That leaves out plenty of big names in other sectors like fintech, or biotech, etc. For example: AstraZeneca (UK, Market cap: $209.57 Billion) Novo Nordisk (Denmark, Market cap: $338.28 Billion) Siemens (Germany, Market cap: $117.07 Billion) Air Liquide (France, Market cap: $85.75 Billion) And so on. Note that the EU is 28 independent countries in a common market being built in the last 40 years or so whereas the US is one country, so the comparison is not straightforward. For example, Orange's $31 billion may not be a lot compared to Apple or Gogole, but France is ~70 million people whereas the US is ~330 million. Edit: info from: https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/
  - roenxi 4y ago
    That list of market caps is comparable to Google, and EU fragmentation as an excuse is grasping at straws - not only is that an example of the absurdist over-regulation in the EU (why are they all so excited about banning trade with each other?) but Google actually makes 30% of its revenue from the EU so it isn't like fragmentation is stopping Google from success. It isn't like the EU is short of great coders, they just regulate their way to oblivion. With good ideas like the one in the article, I cheerfully add. They are making it transparent that anyone with a choice should go work for a US company.
ExoticPearTree 4y ago
Equality is a socialist fairytale and unions is what keeps innovation from happening. All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this, stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on. As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible with no impediments to this. And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things. That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.
- piva00 4y ago
  "When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor" fits really well with your comment. If unions keep innovation from happening how can Sweden be considered one of the most innovative countries on Earth? Or how can Germany be a powerhouse of engineering and building the machines that build machines? Your take is a regurgitation of the usual talking points that the elite class use to keep workers separated. Unions aren't forcing socialism, unions are there to build up labour power against employers, who have a much higher leverage in any working agreement you can think of. Your comment is exactly what I hear for the past 20 years of my work life. Workers are, ultimately, the ones creating value, you are defending the class that has the means to take risks due to their accumulation of capital. The rare oddity of a self-made man is the carrot that those use to push you to regurgitate their points. Technology leapfrogged everyone because it's an immense value, it's immensely useful, not because there weren't labour protections. That's such a sideways view of everything that's a bit laughable...
  - qwytw 4y ago
    High skilled workers in Sweden and Germany and severely underpaid compared to their US counterparts? So either they suddenly become much more productive after moving the US, they are subsidizing their less skilled colleagues or most of that surplus is going to their employers instead? Probably a bit of each depending on the location/sector/etc.. However Sweden in particular has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the word (even a bit higher than the US)...
  - 4y ago
DeathArrow 4y ago
I've seen what socialist governments did in Sweden: income taxes that can reach 72%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden
- SauciestGNU 4y ago
  During the most prosperous times in American history (post WW2 economy), income taxes on the highest earners were even higher than that. I don't like taxes, but capitalism does that too.

by piva00 4y ago

johngladtj 4y ago

And yet it's exactly what it does.

roenxi 4y ago

If we're going to copy the Nordics, someone is going to have to start by translating their laws into English so we know what it is they are actually doing. I don't like arguing based on what they are hypothetically doing and I don't think many of the people pointing at them as an example know either. They're tiny, homogeneous and Norway has obscene oil wealth. It isn't obvious we can copy them piecemeal, even if it does make sense which I doubt it does. And although it isn't exactly fair, note that Germany is a wasteland for tech. In the centre of a tech desert. The EU can't do tech. Copying their policies we can do, but it'll probably involve a lot of jobs heading to Asia. All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.

lozenge 4y ago
The US also has oil wealth, but it goes to shareholders instead of to the public purse. Which is funny because none of them created the oil.
piva00 4y ago
I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that. > All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there. Because USA's wages are the massive oddball here, not the standard. And to be honest, shouldn't be replicated anywhere else, having such a vast part of your population living how the bottom 50% of the USA lives is not really a goal for most developed countries, it doesn't create a healthy society (as you can see yourself by living in the USA). Comparing purely on a wage basis is a reduction of what societies actually are. Great, you earn a lot more in the USA but now has to deal with all the stresses of living in the USA. Is that really what the average person in an advanced economy should be under? If you believe so, the USA is for you, I don't believe in it. > The EU can't do tech. The EU has a large language and cultural barrier that is nonexistent in the USA, it's not only a purely economical output. ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? Tech couldn't exist without ASML... On the point of tiny "homogeneous" Nordics: Each US state is also pretty tiny with a few exceptions, isn't that the model of the USA? Why can't each tiny state also have their provisions for labour protection? Because it's not part of the culture.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW) Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD? Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it from here? Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil. Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China. US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition. >Tech couldn't exist without ASML... False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either. Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence versus their Japanese competitors. Longer story: "The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA. Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details. The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1] [1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319 https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319
tfourb 4y ago
Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc. While certainly not perfect and lacking in many ways, it is a system that is at least in theory aimed towards providing a decent standard of living to all, instead of allowing a lucky few (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) to juice the income statistics by earning insane amounts of money and giving the middle finger to the rest of society.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck. Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.
  - tfourb 4y ago
    According to wikipedia, 9 of the 10 richest persons are white men from an upper-middle-class or upper class social background. Even people like Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim, while not born in the U.S. or Western Europe, have parents that were part of their countries' academic or business elite. Do you have any conception of how lucky you have to be to be born into such circumstances instead of being raised in the slums of Nairobi? Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Here's a few EU and Europe technology companies I could find information on, including their market capitalisation: ASML (Netherlands, Market cap: $262.07 Billion) Accenture (Ireland, Market cap: $171.21 Billion) Deutsche Telekom (Germany, Market cap: $118.43 Billion) Schneider Electric (France, Market cap: $91.00 Billion) Dassault Systèmes (France, Market cap: $54.24 Billion) Adyen (Netherlands, Market cap: $48.95 Billion) NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands, Market cap: $47.24 Billion) Orange (France, Market cap: $31.21 Billion) SAP (Germany, Market cap: $31.21 Billion) Ericsson (Sweden,Market cap: $31.21 Billion) Vodafone (UK, Market cap: $30.67 Billion) STMicroelectronics (Switzerland, Market cap: $45.92 Billion) Infineon (Germany, Market cap: $50.75 Billion) TE Connectivity (Switzerland, Market cap: $39.56 Billion) Amadeus IT Group (Spain, Market cap: $28.69 Billion) Nokia (Nokia, Market cap: $26.18 Billion) Cellnex Telecom (Spain, Market cap: $26.24 Billion) Spotify (Sweden, Market cap: $25.34 Billion) Note that I selected those for being strictly "tech", as in software, electronics and telecoms. That leaves out plenty of big names in other sectors like fintech, or biotech, etc. For example: AstraZeneca (UK, Market cap: $209.57 Billion) Novo Nordisk (Denmark, Market cap: $338.28 Billion) Siemens (Germany, Market cap: $117.07 Billion) Air Liquide (France, Market cap: $85.75 Billion) And so on. Note that the EU is 28 independent countries in a common market being built in the last 40 years or so whereas the US is one country, so the comparison is not straightforward. For example, Orange's $31 billion may not be a lot compared to Apple or Gogole, but France is ~70 million people whereas the US is ~330 million. Edit: info from: https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/
- roenxi 4y ago
  That list of market caps is comparable to Google, and EU fragmentation as an excuse is grasping at straws - not only is that an example of the absurdist over-regulation in the EU (why are they all so excited about banning trade with each other?) but Google actually makes 30% of its revenue from the EU so it isn't like fragmentation is stopping Google from success. It isn't like the EU is short of great coders, they just regulate their way to oblivion. With good ideas like the one in the article, I cheerfully add. They are making it transparent that anyone with a choice should go work for a US company.

ExoticPearTree 4y ago

Equality is a socialist fairytale and unions is what keeps innovation from happening. All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this, stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on. As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible with no impediments to this. And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things. That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.

piva00 4y ago
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor" fits really well with your comment. If unions keep innovation from happening how can Sweden be considered one of the most innovative countries on Earth? Or how can Germany be a powerhouse of engineering and building the machines that build machines? Your take is a regurgitation of the usual talking points that the elite class use to keep workers separated. Unions aren't forcing socialism, unions are there to build up labour power against employers, who have a much higher leverage in any working agreement you can think of. Your comment is exactly what I hear for the past 20 years of my work life. Workers are, ultimately, the ones creating value, you are defending the class that has the means to take risks due to their accumulation of capital. The rare oddity of a self-made man is the carrot that those use to push you to regurgitate their points. Technology leapfrogged everyone because it's an immense value, it's immensely useful, not because there weren't labour protections. That's such a sideways view of everything that's a bit laughable...
- qwytw 4y ago
  High skilled workers in Sweden and Germany and severely underpaid compared to their US counterparts? So either they suddenly become much more productive after moving the US, they are subsidizing their less skilled colleagues or most of that surplus is going to their employers instead? Probably a bit of each depending on the location/sector/etc.. However Sweden in particular has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the word (even a bit higher than the US)...
- 4y ago

DeathArrow 4y ago

I've seen what socialist governments did in Sweden: income taxes that can reach 72%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden

SauciestGNU 4y ago
During the most prosperous times in American history (post WW2 economy), income taxes on the highest earners were even higher than that. I don't like taxes, but capitalism does that too.