6 ms·
It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online ad
by mrtksn 2y ago
It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement.
They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.
It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.
Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
- influx 2y agoWhat's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?
- mrtksn 2y agoDefine success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.
- simplyluke 2y agoI’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
- kube-system 2y agoVacation time.
- RestlessMind 2y agoPfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
- mrtksn 2y agoThe full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".
- satvikpendem 2y agoIf we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.
- kube-system 2y agoThey are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.
- satvikpendem 2y agoI guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
- influx 2y agoI know a bunch of FAANG engineers that retired in their 30s and 40s, so the rest of their life is vacation time...
- mrtksn 2y agoLongevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals. Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers. If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
- RestlessMind 2y ago> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6) [1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former. [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-... [3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-by-country-in-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/
- mrtksn 2y agoI’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
- quentindemetz 2y agoAdyen Revolut GoCardless Shift Vinted …
- gruez 2y ago>Adyen >Revolut Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
- bmurphy1976 2y agoI don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list. Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.
- NicoJuicy 2y agoI bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word. Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too. ASML
- freedomben 2y agoAren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
- NicoJuicy 2y agoExcept Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC. Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML. Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though. Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.
- freedomben 2y agoIf you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones. In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole. But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction. As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.
- gruez 2y ago>They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. Say all you want about "speculative public trading stocks", but I trust public markets' pricing more than private markets[1] or the government[2]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-have-you-made-on-private-equity-who-knows https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-h... [2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/chinas-state-capitalists-celebrate-their-soaring-shares https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/c...
- mrtksn 2y agoObsession with pricing the stock is not healthy. According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-behind-china-nuclear-power-report-says-2024-06-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh... Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc. US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".
- gruez 2y ago>Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy. I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives. >According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh... >Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc. Arguably all of those is more due to government intervention than the companies themselves. Nuclear is impossible to build in the US due to overburdensome regulations, infrastructure/transportation is impossible to build due to NIMBY-friendly planning rules, electric cars are massively subsidized by the Chinese government.
- mrtksn 2y agoRight, China achieve all this thanks to its libertarian low touch low regulation small government and only if the stock prices of the American companies go a bit higher and the government is a tad less regulated they will do even better than the Chinese.
- grumpyprole 2y agoI had always assumed that the UK killed it's tech industry by selling it all off for short term gain. That needs regulation to prevent.
- mrtksn 2y agoIMHO it has nothing to do with the governments, in Europe there's no that kind of money and the investor mentality is very different than the Americans and the European culture is much less accommodating to failure. It's the European way to roll, the Brits are trying to be a bit more like the Americans but its worlds apart. The American spirit is something else, I wish we had it in Europe but maybe its not compatible at all with the European way of life. So, if you feel adventurous, motivated and ambitious you go to USA to make it big.
- mardifoufs 2y agoThere's no speculative stocks in Europe? Seriously? I guess if you ignore all the stock markets in Europe, sure? Also, it's funny that you mention Goebels. It's ironic even when you repeat the same tropes about the US and how it's supposedly beholden to the capital markets and speculators. Europe has its giants. Europe usually does not attack its giants. That's why you get megacorps like Maersk or Airbus or Volkswagen. The entire point is that it only attacks other giants (ie, not homegrown giants), hence the focus on legislation that mostly affects them but leaves European corporations mostly unscathed. Or why green legislation curiously doesn't affect German coal extraction (what a coincidence!) that much. Or all the other double standards Europe and some Europeans love so much. The delusion here is this weird narrative of good, noble Europeans who are somehow only guilty of not being greedy.
- mrtksn 2y agoEurope is far from noble, just different mentality and expectations from life. VW keep saying that next year VW Golf robotaxis are coming and not delivering wouldn't fly, therefore we don't have crazy stock prices. Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check. Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.
- mardifoufs 2y agoSure but that wasn't the main thrust of what I was replying to. Also, I guess it only has its own Wireguards or (if we want to talk about inflated promises instead of outright fraud) hundreds of start up like Qwant that promised to challenge the big American man in (2) more weeks or just a few more subsidies. The only difference is that we hear a lot more about American success and failures as they are sadly utterly dominant in media presence way beyond their own borders. And Europe seems much more likely to just keep its skeletons hidden in its closet, and tries to talk about them as little as possible. (For example,see how the German regulators dealt with Wireguard by going after the journalists that sounded the alarm for years. Or how Europeans love to discuss American issues like racism while ignoring how much worse the issue can be in their own backyard. Or the commenters here that recoil at any criticism of the EU and invent some conspiracy where said criticism obviously comes from. I never see any American accuse Europeans of being behind sentiment that is critical of the US.) Americans love to be very loud about their issues, for better or for worse.
- asenna 2y agoI recently moved to Spain, after having lived in the US for a decade. It's only been a month for me and I definitely see the over-reaching over-regulation of EVERYTHING in the EU. It's so much that it literally pushes young people to have a non-risk taking mindset. I have a friend who has some knife sharpening and tooling skills and she's been figuring how to do something with this (some kind of a business). I suggested why not get a garage and get the machinery you want and get started. She listed down all the regulations and how even thinking about it is not allowed. Starting a business/startups is hard. The EU just adds 10-20 more hurdles to cross to get even with the US startup ecosystem. At least that's been my observation in the few weeks.
- mrtksn 2y agoThat's probably not an EU thing, you should consider an EU country more suitable to your line of business. Or you know, just do your thing don't bother with the regulations and pay a fine if it becomes a problem some time in the future? Apparently Spaniards like it this way, they live long healthy lives in the system they set up for themselves.