4 ms·

> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation. There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick

by palata 2y ago

> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation. There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from. As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.

mentalgear 2y ago
Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour. Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).
- aaa_aaa 2y ago
  Regulations by state just brings regulatory capture. It is always the case in EU or US. Both are lost to China now.
  - watwut 2y ago
    China, famously unregulated country full of freedom.
    - spwa4 2y ago
      How is this a mystery? What matters is whether the state provides funding for innovation. The market will never support a first moon landing. The market will not even support something like starlink, where the use is obvious. The US' technological advantage is the result of massive continuous state investment after WW2 and through the cold war. There were periods of such investment in Europe, but they have been over for decades now. The only places where some lasted during the cold war were the UK and France, and both of those are well and truly over. In the US they're only now dropping fast under Trump. The CCP is providing absurd amounts of funding for commercial innovation. Not just money either. Everything from monetary stimulus, tax exemptions (and strategically forgiving outright tax evasion) even "honey traps" (hiring prostitutes to entrap foreigners, even long term), even kidnapping foreigners.
  - intended 2y ago
    This is doctrine. The same way you make sure your planes fly, your code is updated, and you improve your product - you pay attention to your regulators. The SEC was defanged for years. The pendulum swung to low regulation, and lower taxes, leading to greater wealth concentration via asset purchases. These are all rectifiable. At all levels. It just not going to happen if we are listening to zero information news sources and disengage with everything but rage.
- atoav 2y ago
  The right wing propagandist who photoshopped "I hate free speech" over Nancy Faeser standing at a Holocaust memorial and holding a sign with the Text: "We remember"? I guess it is kinda important to not ignore the context of the edited image, especially since Germany for good reasons is not including the rights of holocaust deniers and Nazis in their free speech. Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree. Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case. Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it. Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    Popper's paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Similarly, we should not tolerate the "free speech" of those that seek to silence others (e.g. fascists).
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Popper said we should tolerate the intolerant as long as they aren't violent, so its the exact opposite of what you say. In general intolerance just breeds more intolerance, people are much less tolerant today than 10 years ago due to the massive amount of intolerance towards intolerance that proliferated the past 10 years.
      - lores 2y ago
        Violence is such a nebulous concept, though. There are forms of violence that aren't physical, even though the law typically only recognise those. Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? Is calling for harm upon them? Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? Is it violence if it's through willful inaction? I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.
- spwa4 2y ago
  Regulations in Europe also seem to have had the, I'm assuming completely unintentional, side effect of completely cementing the positions of the top of society in place. And this is nothing new, this actually predates modern democracy in Europe. It's been that way for centuries. In Europe the only time to leave, or join, the ultra-rich is during wars. That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
  - chkuendig 2y ago
    Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Amusingly enough, what the GP stated was true in 1910, but now the US is far more like pre-WW1 Europe in terms of distribution of wealth (c.f. Piketty's capital in the 21st century).
    - hansworst 2y ago
      Social mobility index doesn’t really look at how easy it is to become very rich (I.e. get into the 1%). This is also explained in the methodology section of the article you linked.
    - mamonster 2y ago
      I can already tell this index is complete BS as it has Sweden in the 4th place. The ceiling placed at around upper-middle class is made out of cement.
  - palata 2y ago
    The problem with the ultra-rich is not that it's hard to get there, but rather that it is possible. Nobody is personally worth billions, period. The fact that some individuals get there shows a flaw in the system. The second thing that I wanted to say is that even though there are examples of originally not ultra-rich people becoming ultra-rich in the US (e.g. Zuckerberg and Besos), the likelihood of this happening is almost zero. Why is it that people keep hoping that it may happen to them? We should not build a system for a handful to become ultra-rich, but for most to live as well as possible.
- amy214 2y ago
  Regulations are complicated and a double edge sword, they inevitably introduce inefficiency and barriers, so the payoff needs to be greater. For example, regulations about mandating companies to delete your data - wonderful. A great win for California which is otherwise quite an overregulated states. On the flip side, in the UK, you may need a license for that television, or a license for that knife. That's the political thing with regulations. If a politician says "regulations sucks" most would tend to agree as far as that TV license, or getting a permit for a particular fence. Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Yes, I agree: unicorns are, by and large, a failure of capitalism, not an example of success. They result from a system that doesn't value competition but values winning. That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.
- jbverschoor 2y ago
  Exactly. ONLY Proton rings a bell. Made by a Taiwanese person ;-)
  - koziserek 2y ago
    Spotify, maybe?
  - palata 2y ago
    I doubt Proton is written by exactly one person (I actually know more than one person who worked there ;-) ), and I'm pretty certain they were working in Switzerland. Not sure what your point is.
jbverschoor 2y ago
There's no risk capital. There's no vision. No guts, no glory. Just old glory. A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US. It's not in the culture and it won't be.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  Hehe, that's certainly one way of looking at it. Just as well we could say that the religious fanatics, the absolutists, the utopians, and some other malcontents dissatisfied with the enlightenment went overseas to establish their puritan and perfect societies because those boring Europeans just wouldn't see the light and all the violence did not change that. Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.
qsort 2y ago
> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug Cope much? As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  >As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
  - huntertwo 2y ago
    What a free society that would be!
    - palata 2y ago
      I don't get this interpretation of "free". Would you say that one should be "free" to kill someone else? Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you). So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this. If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
      - huntertwo 2y ago
        How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
rcarmo 2y ago
There were quite a few unicorns that (until now) quickly moved to establish a US foothold and hired some of their new C-levels there, because that's where the lobbying and money typically are. Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).
- pjc50 2y ago
  I've just realized that this describes almost half of my career: ten years at a UK startup that almost immediately set itself up with a Delaware corp and a San Francisco office, so it could eventually sell out to Cadence; then several more years at a UK university chip design spinoff that also got bought out by a US multinational. Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> There are few unicorns in Europe I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies. So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich. It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?

by palata 2y ago

mentalgear 2y ago

Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour. Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).

aaa_aaa 2y ago
Regulations by state just brings regulatory capture. It is always the case in EU or US. Both are lost to China now.
- watwut 2y ago
  China, famously unregulated country full of freedom.
  - spwa4 2y ago
    How is this a mystery? What matters is whether the state provides funding for innovation. The market will never support a first moon landing. The market will not even support something like starlink, where the use is obvious. The US' technological advantage is the result of massive continuous state investment after WW2 and through the cold war. There were periods of such investment in Europe, but they have been over for decades now. The only places where some lasted during the cold war were the UK and France, and both of those are well and truly over. In the US they're only now dropping fast under Trump. The CCP is providing absurd amounts of funding for commercial innovation. Not just money either. Everything from monetary stimulus, tax exemptions (and strategically forgiving outright tax evasion) even "honey traps" (hiring prostitutes to entrap foreigners, even long term), even kidnapping foreigners.
- intended 2y ago
  This is doctrine. The same way you make sure your planes fly, your code is updated, and you improve your product - you pay attention to your regulators. The SEC was defanged for years. The pendulum swung to low regulation, and lower taxes, leading to greater wealth concentration via asset purchases. These are all rectifiable. At all levels. It just not going to happen if we are listening to zero information news sources and disengage with everything but rage.
atoav 2y ago
The right wing propagandist who photoshopped "I hate free speech" over Nancy Faeser standing at a Holocaust memorial and holding a sign with the Text: "We remember"? I guess it is kinda important to not ignore the context of the edited image, especially since Germany for good reasons is not including the rights of holocaust deniers and Nazis in their free speech. Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree. Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case. Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it. Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  Popper's paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Similarly, we should not tolerate the "free speech" of those that seek to silence others (e.g. fascists).
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Popper said we should tolerate the intolerant as long as they aren't violent, so its the exact opposite of what you say. In general intolerance just breeds more intolerance, people are much less tolerant today than 10 years ago due to the massive amount of intolerance towards intolerance that proliferated the past 10 years.
    - lores 2y ago
      Violence is such a nebulous concept, though. There are forms of violence that aren't physical, even though the law typically only recognise those. Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? Is calling for harm upon them? Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? Is it violence if it's through willful inaction? I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.
spwa4 2y ago
Regulations in Europe also seem to have had the, I'm assuming completely unintentional, side effect of completely cementing the positions of the top of society in place. And this is nothing new, this actually predates modern democracy in Europe. It's been that way for centuries. In Europe the only time to leave, or join, the ultra-rich is during wars. That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
- chkuendig 2y ago
  Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Amusingly enough, what the GP stated was true in 1910, but now the US is far more like pre-WW1 Europe in terms of distribution of wealth (c.f. Piketty's capital in the 21st century).
  - hansworst 2y ago
    Social mobility index doesn’t really look at how easy it is to become very rich (I.e. get into the 1%). This is also explained in the methodology section of the article you linked.
  - mamonster 2y ago
    I can already tell this index is complete BS as it has Sweden in the 4th place. The ceiling placed at around upper-middle class is made out of cement.
- palata 2y ago
  The problem with the ultra-rich is not that it's hard to get there, but rather that it is possible. Nobody is personally worth billions, period. The fact that some individuals get there shows a flaw in the system. The second thing that I wanted to say is that even though there are examples of originally not ultra-rich people becoming ultra-rich in the US (e.g. Zuckerberg and Besos), the likelihood of this happening is almost zero. Why is it that people keep hoping that it may happen to them? We should not build a system for a handful to become ultra-rich, but for most to live as well as possible.
amy214 2y ago
Regulations are complicated and a double edge sword, they inevitably introduce inefficiency and barriers, so the payoff needs to be greater. For example, regulations about mandating companies to delete your data - wonderful. A great win for California which is otherwise quite an overregulated states. On the flip side, in the UK, you may need a license for that television, or a license for that knife. That's the political thing with regulations. If a politician says "regulations sucks" most would tend to agree as far as that TV license, or getting a permit for a particular fence. Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

Yes, I agree: unicorns are, by and large, a failure of capitalism, not an example of success. They result from a system that doesn't value competition but values winning. That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.

jbverschoor 2y ago
Exactly. ONLY Proton rings a bell. Made by a Taiwanese person ;-)
- koziserek 2y ago
  Spotify, maybe?
- palata 2y ago
  I doubt Proton is written by exactly one person (I actually know more than one person who worked there ;-) ), and I'm pretty certain they were working in Switzerland. Not sure what your point is.

jbverschoor 2y ago

There's no risk capital. There's no vision. No guts, no glory. Just old glory. A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US. It's not in the culture and it won't be.

Propelloni 2y ago
Hehe, that's certainly one way of looking at it. Just as well we could say that the religious fanatics, the absolutists, the utopians, and some other malcontents dissatisfied with the enlightenment went overseas to establish their puritan and perfect societies because those boring Europeans just wouldn't see the light and all the violence did not change that. Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.

qsort 2y ago

> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug Cope much? As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
>As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
- huntertwo 2y ago
  What a free society that would be!
  - palata 2y ago
    I don't get this interpretation of "free". Would you say that one should be "free" to kill someone else? Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you). So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this. If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
    - huntertwo 2y ago
      How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.

rcarmo 2y ago

There were quite a few unicorns that (until now) quickly moved to establish a US foothold and hired some of their new C-levels there, because that's where the lobbying and money typically are. Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).

pjc50 2y ago
I've just realized that this describes almost half of my career: ten years at a UK startup that almost immediately set itself up with a Delaware corp and a San Francisco office, so it could eventually sell out to Cadence; then several more years at a UK university chip design spinoff that also got bought out by a US multinational. Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> There are few unicorns in Europe I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies. So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich. It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?