5 ms·

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrast

• zabzonk 3y ago
  are you saying that europe has a structure that supports much better military tech than the us?
  • ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    had
• HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  This just sounds like "might makes right" with more words. Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
  • alexey-salmin 3y ago
    The topic (for better or for worse) was not ethics. The question was why some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
    • kwhitefoot 3y ago
      > some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
      • alexey-salmin 3y ago
        Of course, and everything turns to dust and entropy in the end. This doesn't make it any less interesting to study the current affairs.
• alexey-salmin 3y ago
  Things seem to change in France though. It's relatively easy to open a startup and get tax discounts for research and innovative work. Then you fly-in employees (I'm one of them) on passeport talent which is very easy to get and lasts 4 years. Average IT salaries in Europe are much lower than in US, which is unpleasant but allows to run an IT startup with less funding and healthier economics. However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • eastbound 3y ago
    So you say the best thing about France is that we can hire someone else than French people. And you are kind of right: We have a thing against companies with large high-low salary difference (something like a rest of revenge against the rich), and make them simply not possible, hindering the ability to build megacorporations. Apple wouldn’t have been possible here. We simply halt growth at median size and earn a good second spot on the market. That was true at the time of Dailymotion (second of Youtube), that is true in the times of AI.
    • alexey-salmin 3y ago
      Silicon valley was largely built by immigrants too. I believe in this concept, people who have enough determination to move are already above some potential energy threshold. And this threshold despite being relatively low still cuts off a huge part of local population who didn't have to pass it. I've seen it at work both for internal and international moves.
      • eastbound 3y ago
        By focussing on immigration, you missed the main point. I’ll simplify as: French people eat the rich.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  >Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it. Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
  • raverbashing 3y ago
    > Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
    • roenxi 3y ago
      There are roughly two perspectives on that. "Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible".. "This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere". Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
  • yobbo 3y ago
• raverbashing 3y ago
  I think you need to look into what favoured the creation of MS or Apple in the first place MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment. And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments. If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
• sharpneli 3y ago
  Another issue are non competes. Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
  • rurban 3y ago
    > gray area that stifles innovation Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Innovation by theft is how Hollywood got its start. too far from New Jersey for the patent protections of Thomas Edison to be enforced, independent filmmakers were able to make movies without paying royalties
    • relistan 3y ago
      Many other places would like to be an outlier like California. Paying more attention to what makes it that way is probably a good place to start.
    • sharpneli 3y ago
      And that is why we use products made by companies in California. Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
  • snowpid 3y ago
    In Germany there are practically no non-competition agreements. Im not sureb
    • Rinzler89 3y ago
      In Austria non-competes are legal and often found in employment contracts.
• troupo 3y ago
  > Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
  • ratg13 3y ago
    The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today. Yet, here it is the top comment. It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
    • hulitu 3y ago
      > The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America Depends how much they pay.
    • 7bit 3y ago
      Well, it gives the USA tremendous power, no? Imagine Microsoft would prevent Europe to access Azure and M365 tomorrow... It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good. So of course people will defend that. In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
    • Aerroon 3y ago
      It reflects the importance of software. It's not like Europe foregoes using this software. No, we just use the American/Chinese software instead and become dependent on it.
• Gud 3y ago
  Not every European country is the same, the rules and regulations vastly differ. It is true that the EU is "well regulated", but other countries with other legal frameworks and business culture do exist. Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different. My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
• silvestrov 3y ago
  The Elephant in the room: all the different languages in Europe and it is only recently (past 10-20 years) that English proficiency has become high enough. This made communication difficult and still makes it very difficult to get people to move to another country. (edit: you need to know the local language to get any kind of social life). Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture). So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products. Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale. There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company). Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
• thrance 3y ago
  Honestly, I really don't see the point of having such megacoroporations here. What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...
  • TMWNN 3y ago
    If you don't think any other country (not just in Europe) wouldn't kill for the next big American big tech company to have been founded within its borders instead, I don't know what to tell you.
  • kenutusabhik 3y ago
    so terrible product, that the whole world use them and apple is the largest tax payer in the world. These are some of the most innovative companies out there.
• eric-burel 3y ago
  I am mesmerized at how much the comments analyze Europe under the perspective of the United States, eg we need a Silicon Valley otherwise we don't exist from a technological standpoint, we should become an homogeneous market etc. We are not the USA and I feel fine with it, we are still able to figure the most advanced technologies on our own