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So you don’t have to click through: “ The goal of the EU’s $43 billion Chips Act of achieving a 20% world market share for European producers by 2030”

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption. Anyone remember the glorious 5-year plan to build a European Google? I think they named it Quaero.
- logifail 3y ago
  > One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption Well, one doesn't need to look very long at Von der Leyen to work out it's probably both. Look at what she did before becoming EU Commission president ("Among friends and foes alike, von der Leyen’s stewardship of the [German] defense ministry, which she [..] headed since 2014, [was] regarded as a failure."[0]), and look at how she ended up with the job of EU Commission president. The best (worst?) bit is that she wasn't even a candidate for the job she got. I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biography-career-inconvenient-truth/ https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets. What a dumb joke, besides the RAF being British, I wonder if your friends had made the same joke if she had been a man.
    - logifail 3y ago
      > besides the RAF being British Umm, my ex-RAF friends worked all over the world, including being stationed in Germany, and participated in NATO exercises. "Der Spiegel reported that there are only enough missiles to make only four [of 128!] Eurofigher jets ready for combat" and VDL has seven kids. https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jets-combat-ready-report/a-43611873 https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jet... https://www.dw.com/en/german-troops-wait-8-years-for-new-combat-boots/a-50191037 https://www.dw.com/en/german-troops-wait-8-years-for-new-com... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/german-foreign-minister-abandons-australasia-trip-after-plane-problems https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/german-foreign... https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-baerbock-abu-dhabi-problems-with-government-planes/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-baerbock-abu-dhabi-p... https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-flight-woes-continue-on-way-to-djibouti/a-68076943 https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-flight-woes-continue...
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That doesn't make the joke less dumb.
        logifail 3y ago
        It's not my joke. Perhaps the joke makes some people feel uncomfortable. Jokes can be like that. If a NATO member had only 4 (four!) fighter jets ready for use out of a fleet of 128 (one hundred and twenty eight!)[0] we should also feel uncomfortable. That's not something to joke about. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-luftwaffe-hat-nur-vier-kampfbereite-eurofighter-a-1205641.html https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-luftwa...
        jacquesm 3y ago
        It's you posting it here, not your friends from the RAF. As for flight readiness: that has nothing to do with how many children von der Leyen has.
        logifail 3y ago
        > As for flight readiness: that has nothing to do with how many children von der Leyen has Indeed not. Perhaps that's the reason the joke is funny? We could sanitise the joke to become "Germany's defence minister had more fingers than working fighter aircraft" I suppose. Would that be better? The real issue is VdL's history of failure, not the jokes about it.
        hnbad 3y ago
        No, the problem with the joke is that it doesn't just make fun of her, it also uses the fact that she is a woman and mother to make that joke. This plays into sexism and misogyny by implying that both of these things made her unfit for office by default. Note how the "sanitized" version using fingers instead of children doesn't really have any oomph to it - the sexism is not just window dressing, it's what makes the joke work. Jokes are not "just jokes". Jokes play off culture and reinforce or challenge it. People having a low number of fingers doesn't do either of those things so at that point it stops being a joke and becomes a dry empirical claim ("they have at most ten working aircraft"). Stand up comedy is an art form and takes considerable effort, creativity and repetition. Dismissing jokes as "just jokes" as if they are shallow brain farts is like saying poetry is "just words". Jokes are worth analysing and being dissected just like any other artform and even if they're genuinely created by "amateurs" they're informed by the culture that surrounds them. VdL is a terrible politician, I strongly oppose her value system and I think she does indeed have a history of failure. But that's not how the jokes are framed, that's merely the setup to the jokes. The jokes wouldn't work with a male politician because the punchline is that she's a woman and mother. You can agree with the punchline but denying that it's sexist or misogynist (in the sense of "women and mothers are unfit as politicians") is silly even if you don't like those labels being applied to your sense of humor. Jokes are inherently political because culture is political. It's why reactionaries will say progressives aren't funny and why progressives will roll their eyes at jokes about trans people and say "that's just the one joke". Clever comedians will actually use this and drop off-color jokes on audiences in the middle of a show to reveal their own hidden biases when they "accidentally" laugh about a joke they'd normally claim to be appalled by. But there's a fine line between doing that to lampshade dishonesty and just telling those jokes. And even then it requires a cooperative audience. As an example you can look at Chris Rock who felt he had to retire his routines that used the n-word because it emboldened racists rather than making fun of them.
    - dmpk2k 3y ago
      I find it funny.
- mkl 3y ago
  It wasn't to compete with Google: "Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero. Its budget was also less than 1% of this chip initiative's.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  I think you mean Qwant ? https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/alternative_search_providers_protest/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/alternative_search_pr... We just aren't serious about this. If we were, Google and Microsoft would be banned in the EU. (Including other companies which are receiving a lot of money to prioritize Google or Microsoft software, like Mozilla and Apple.) And it's not like there aren't other reasons to ban them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption. Anyone remember the glorious 5-year plan to build a European Google? I think they named it Quaero.

logifail 3y ago
> One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption Well, one doesn't need to look very long at Von der Leyen to work out it's probably both. Look at what she did before becoming EU Commission president ("Among friends and foes alike, von der Leyen’s stewardship of the [German] defense ministry, which she [..] headed since 2014, [was] regarded as a failure."[0]), and look at how she ended up with the job of EU Commission president. The best (worst?) bit is that she wasn't even a candidate for the job she got. I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biography-career-inconvenient-truth/ https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets. What a dumb joke, besides the RAF being British, I wonder if your friends had made the same joke if she had been a man.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > besides the RAF being British Umm, my ex-RAF friends worked all over the world, including being stationed in Germany, and participated in NATO exercises. "Der Spiegel reported that there are only enough missiles to make only four [of 128!] Eurofigher jets ready for combat" and VDL has seven kids. https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jets-combat-ready-report/a-43611873 https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jet... https://www.dw.com/en/german-troops-wait-8-years-for-new-combat-boots/a-50191037 https://www.dw.com/en/german-troops-wait-8-years-for-new-com... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/german-foreign-minister-abandons-australasia-trip-after-plane-problems https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/german-foreign... https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-baerbock-abu-dhabi-problems-with-government-planes/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-baerbock-abu-dhabi-p... https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-flight-woes-continue-on-way-to-djibouti/a-68076943 https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-flight-woes-continue...
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That doesn't make the joke less dumb.
      - logifail 3y ago
        It's not my joke. Perhaps the joke makes some people feel uncomfortable. Jokes can be like that. If a NATO member had only 4 (four!) fighter jets ready for use out of a fleet of 128 (one hundred and twenty eight!)[0] we should also feel uncomfortable. That's not something to joke about. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-luftwaffe-hat-nur-vier-kampfbereite-eurofighter-a-1205641.html https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-luftwa...
        jacquesm 3y ago
        It's you posting it here, not your friends from the RAF. As for flight readiness: that has nothing to do with how many children von der Leyen has.
        logifail 3y ago
        > As for flight readiness: that has nothing to do with how many children von der Leyen has Indeed not. Perhaps that's the reason the joke is funny? We could sanitise the joke to become "Germany's defence minister had more fingers than working fighter aircraft" I suppose. Would that be better? The real issue is VdL's history of failure, not the jokes about it.
        hnbad 3y ago
        No, the problem with the joke is that it doesn't just make fun of her, it also uses the fact that she is a woman and mother to make that joke. This plays into sexism and misogyny by implying that both of these things made her unfit for office by default. Note how the "sanitized" version using fingers instead of children doesn't really have any oomph to it - the sexism is not just window dressing, it's what makes the joke work. Jokes are not "just jokes". Jokes play off culture and reinforce or challenge it. People having a low number of fingers doesn't do either of those things so at that point it stops being a joke and becomes a dry empirical claim ("they have at most ten working aircraft"). Stand up comedy is an art form and takes considerable effort, creativity and repetition. Dismissing jokes as "just jokes" as if they are shallow brain farts is like saying poetry is "just words". Jokes are worth analysing and being dissected just like any other artform and even if they're genuinely created by "amateurs" they're informed by the culture that surrounds them. VdL is a terrible politician, I strongly oppose her value system and I think she does indeed have a history of failure. But that's not how the jokes are framed, that's merely the setup to the jokes. The jokes wouldn't work with a male politician because the punchline is that she's a woman and mother. You can agree with the punchline but denying that it's sexist or misogynist (in the sense of "women and mothers are unfit as politicians") is silly even if you don't like those labels being applied to your sense of humor. Jokes are inherently political because culture is political. It's why reactionaries will say progressives aren't funny and why progressives will roll their eyes at jokes about trans people and say "that's just the one joke". Clever comedians will actually use this and drop off-color jokes on audiences in the middle of a show to reveal their own hidden biases when they "accidentally" laugh about a joke they'd normally claim to be appalled by. But there's a fine line between doing that to lampshade dishonesty and just telling those jokes. And even then it requires a cooperative audience. As an example you can look at Chris Rock who felt he had to retire his routines that used the n-word because it emboldened racists rather than making fun of them.
  - dmpk2k 3y ago
    I find it funny.
mkl 3y ago
It wasn't to compete with Google: "Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero. Its budget was also less than 1% of this chip initiative's.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
I think you mean Qwant ? https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/alternative_search_providers_protest/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/alternative_search_pr... We just aren't serious about this. If we were, Google and Microsoft would be banned in the EU. (Including other companies which are receiving a lot of money to prioritize Google or Microsoft software, like Mozilla and Apple.) And it's not like there aren't other reasons to ban them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II