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I'd say the biggest issue with this article is that it only suggests solutions which are already underway. 1. Salary Grants => SEED / EXIST stipends 2. Simpli

I'd say the biggest issue with this article is that it only suggests solutions which are already underway. 1. Salary Grants => SEED / EXIST stipends 2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that? 3. Expand VAT Exemptions => Council Directive (EU) 2020/285 will bring this law: "For SMEs conducting cross-border transactions, a cumulative turnover cap of €100,000 across all 27 EU member states applies" 4. English Language Support => I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this.

luckylion 2y ago
> I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this Not Germany though. I don't think that's as easy to change as VAT changes. And since a bunch of their examples are primarily B2B, they wouldn't care about VAT changes either.
roenxi 2y ago
> 2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that? European leadership and a fair chunk of the population. They're the ones who bought it in, if they didn't think it was worth the trade off they wouldn't have instituted it. It seems like just yesterday we had people lining up to praise their bureaucratic takeover of iPhone charger design, for example. If the EU bureaucracy has time for that, what matter is too small for them to be involved in?
- hkt 2y ago
  The EU is a market optimising machine in many ways, and the bigger the market, the more interested they are. It made perfect sense for them to intervene there because it affected a huge number of people. Similarly, I expect user serviceable batteries to come to an iPhone near you at some point, in the name (quite reasonably) of environmental regulations.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The charger situation is much better than GDPR or CE marking, in that it clearly mandates what should be done. The other two get bogged down because it's so unclear what has to be done to be compliant while actually shipping a service or product.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    The typical formula is: if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way. Welcome to compliance! That is the thing with bureaucracy; it isn't there to help people run just-acceptable privacy violating businesses. It is there to squelch the ones that are unacceptable. If you want the EU to write an acceptable business plan it'd be "don't start this business, it might violate privacy". And there does seem to be support for the EU regulating in that manner. I haven't met many people who are pro-privacy-violations.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      > if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way Sure, and that's why there's far fewer EU startups.
    - milesrout 2y ago
      >The typical formula is: if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way. Welcome to compliance! And the result is that they get exactly what they asked for: people not operating businesses that they otherwise would have, because of onerous, burdensome, complex, bureaucratic and uncertain rules. Any business can "violate privacy" because the EU has made up a definition of "privacy" that is totally absurd. It created from thin air (with no public debate) the idea that information about you belongs to you. I say that is rubbish. Privacy used to have a clear and narrow meaning. It meant freedom from interference with your things. It meant the state could not break into your house, set up cameras or microphones, snoop on your documents, read your mail, or listen to your phone conversations. Somehow we have a world where we are under constant CCTV surveillance by the state (Britain is the worst for this but other states aren't far behind, and are all very bad) and that is supposed to be fine. But if you contact someone's previous employer to ask your opinion of the employee, without the employee's permissions, you have "violated their privacy". This is because a "privacy principle" is that if you "collect" "personal information" about someone, you should collect it from them, directly, except with their permission. Nobody understood "privacy" to mean you couldn't do casual reference checks until 5 minutes ago. Now it is supposedly a fundamental human right! Even if you were confident you were within the bounds of privacy law when you started your business, by the time you get off the ground and start making money they'll have expanded the definition of "privacy" to encompass something new. It is completely reasonable for people to choose not to bother with all this crap, IMO. The fundamental thing behind this is revealed by your comment, actually: >And there does seem to be support for the EU regulating in that manner. I haven't met many people who are pro-privacy-violations. Exactly! The word "privacy" has strong cultural power. If you can put your pet concept into that category by stretching then idea to breaking point, people will support it by accident. People care about "privacy" because they care about privacy (the real, coherent, original concept). They mostly don't even realise how much the term has been twisted and changed over the last 10 or so years. If they did, they either would change it back or they'd stop caring about the term. Because, remember, words are just labels. In the long term, this language twisting shit doesn't work. In the short term, though, you can trick people into supporting things by calling them "privacy" or "human rights" or "equity" even though those terms didn't mean, even 10 or 20 years ago, anything like what they supposedly mean today.

luckylion 2y ago

> I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this Not Germany though. I don't think that's as easy to change as VAT changes. And since a bunch of their examples are primarily B2B, they wouldn't care about VAT changes either.

roenxi 2y ago

> 2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that? European leadership and a fair chunk of the population. They're the ones who bought it in, if they didn't think it was worth the trade off they wouldn't have instituted it. It seems like just yesterday we had people lining up to praise their bureaucratic takeover of iPhone charger design, for example. If the EU bureaucracy has time for that, what matter is too small for them to be involved in?

hkt 2y ago
The EU is a market optimising machine in many ways, and the bigger the market, the more interested they are. It made perfect sense for them to intervene there because it affected a huge number of people. Similarly, I expect user serviceable batteries to come to an iPhone near you at some point, in the name (quite reasonably) of environmental regulations.
pjc50 2y ago
The charger situation is much better than GDPR or CE marking, in that it clearly mandates what should be done. The other two get bogged down because it's so unclear what has to be done to be compliant while actually shipping a service or product.
- roenxi 2y ago
  The typical formula is: if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way. Welcome to compliance! That is the thing with bureaucracy; it isn't there to help people run just-acceptable privacy violating businesses. It is there to squelch the ones that are unacceptable. If you want the EU to write an acceptable business plan it'd be "don't start this business, it might violate privacy". And there does seem to be support for the EU regulating in that manner. I haven't met many people who are pro-privacy-violations.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way Sure, and that's why there's far fewer EU startups.
  - milesrout 2y ago
    >The typical formula is: if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way. Welcome to compliance! And the result is that they get exactly what they asked for: people not operating businesses that they otherwise would have, because of onerous, burdensome, complex, bureaucratic and uncertain rules. Any business can "violate privacy" because the EU has made up a definition of "privacy" that is totally absurd. It created from thin air (with no public debate) the idea that information about you belongs to you. I say that is rubbish. Privacy used to have a clear and narrow meaning. It meant freedom from interference with your things. It meant the state could not break into your house, set up cameras or microphones, snoop on your documents, read your mail, or listen to your phone conversations. Somehow we have a world where we are under constant CCTV surveillance by the state (Britain is the worst for this but other states aren't far behind, and are all very bad) and that is supposed to be fine. But if you contact someone's previous employer to ask your opinion of the employee, without the employee's permissions, you have "violated their privacy". This is because a "privacy principle" is that if you "collect" "personal information" about someone, you should collect it from them, directly, except with their permission. Nobody understood "privacy" to mean you couldn't do casual reference checks until 5 minutes ago. Now it is supposedly a fundamental human right! Even if you were confident you were within the bounds of privacy law when you started your business, by the time you get off the ground and start making money they'll have expanded the definition of "privacy" to encompass something new. It is completely reasonable for people to choose not to bother with all this crap, IMO. The fundamental thing behind this is revealed by your comment, actually: >And there does seem to be support for the EU regulating in that manner. I haven't met many people who are pro-privacy-violations. Exactly! The word "privacy" has strong cultural power. If you can put your pet concept into that category by stretching then idea to breaking point, people will support it by accident. People care about "privacy" because they care about privacy (the real, coherent, original concept). They mostly don't even realise how much the term has been twisted and changed over the last 10 or so years. If they did, they either would change it back or they'd stop caring about the term. Because, remember, words are just labels. In the long term, this language twisting shit doesn't work. In the short term, though, you can trick people into supporting things by calling them "privacy" or "human rights" or "equity" even though those terms didn't mean, even 10 or 20 years ago, anything like what they supposedly mean today.