5 ms·

Great idea and I think they should 10x it, but... the person in charge according to the article is EIB President Nadia Calviño. She is a Spanish career politici

by alecco 1y ago

Great idea and I think they should 10x it, but... the person in charge according to the article is EIB President Nadia Calviño. She is a Spanish career politician and a socialist lawyer with background in media and broadcasting. They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. It's so sad to see the EU crumble due to a cast of career bureaucrats squeezing it to its last drop. There are so many great universities and researchers to build things.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. Because most of the time, the point of such government "investments" is to be another hidden wealth transfer from the taxpayers into the pockets of those with government connections (your Siemens, T-Systems, Capgemini, Thales, etc). That's a feature, not a bug. Imagine Dell, Zuck, Jobs, Page and Brin back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government to fund their companies, instead of VCs. None of their companies would exist today. Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects, you can't rely on them to build you the consumer focused private tech industry the US VC industry did. It's not something achieved through central planning, and the EU refuses to get that, so it keeps throwing money into the "maybe it'll work this time" bonfire.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  > Imagine Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government instead of VCs. The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. You're ignoring my point or arguing in bad faith, since I already addressed this to the comment you're replying to. The EU also spent a lot into defense and R&D, the difference is the US gov didn't spend money in the start-up consumer market, but they let private entrepreneurs commercialize some of the solutions that trickled down from the defense tech into the consumer sector to make money (CPUs, 3D graphics, radios, etc). This is where the EU is deficient and you can't fill this entrepreneurial visionary void with government bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money around to their friends. What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech. Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > US gov didn't spend money in the consumer market The U.S. spends obscene amounts of money on crap from Microsoft and Amazon and Oracle and Google.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        So does EU on Siemens, Thales, T-Systems, Capgemini, SAP, etc plus hundreds of other politically connected body shops peppered around Brussels. What's your point here, where are you going with this? That all governments have their preferred go-to monopolies for services? What's that got to do with the start-ups I was talking about? And Amazon got off the ground from Bezos selling books online from his bedroom then pivoting to webs services, not from receiving government handouts to start a e-commerce business. These are the kind of scale-up success stories the EU lacks and can't be done thorough direct government intervention.
      - breppp 1y ago
        Government buying from a monopoly is a bit different than government financing an early stage startup as OP described
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      Your point: > Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects My point: well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape you seem to imply can’t be spurred by a government and still routinely fund very generously companies which then become industry behemoths. Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants, federal research grants or supplying contracts. This money then irrigates the whole fields as companies do business with each other. It goes all the way to the VCs. Take a look at the list of the US biggest investors and see how many of them got rich through companies having the state as their biggest customer. Heck, Siemens and Thales which you seem to despise are basically acting like dozens of American companies which are entirely funded by the DoD but on a smaller scale.
      - 1y ago
- mistrial9 1y ago
  the USA venture system has built the most addictive and invasive tech system yet -- ads + phones. Hot on their heels is an invasive and controlling behometh called China. None of these are clear winners, in fact it remains to be seen how long this is stable. Its not intellectually honest to claim victory for the USA based on VC practices IMO
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Yeah! Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
  - ty6853 1y ago
    So I used to buy all those publicly, slowly I started divesting from any public utilities to the extent I could. Everytime I switched from public to private, I didn't see all the bad stuff happening people seem to think would happen. I switched sanitation to a private septic system. I bought a share of private well to avoid public water systems. I built my own roads and live in a community where all the roads are private easements so no tax money (you can drive for miles and miles without ever hitting a public road). Medicine, I made friends with a private practitioner that was educated at a private university. There are basically no police here, so I learned todefend myself. I send my kid to private school. Out of your list, the only thing I benefit from tangentially is public roads but they are way worse value than our privately funded ones (I first built mine with nothing more than a hatchet and a shovel for $0 and then later learned how to operate a backhoe). I'm well aware I still use some public services, even if indirectly, but when I compare the costs they are all much more efficient when I have switched to private infrastucture vs trusting politicians not to squander it. My local taxes are now down to next to nothing, and when I look at what exactly I am getting for the ~30% I pay out to the state and federal the only thing I seem to be getting on ok deal on is the US navy protecting trade routes, maybe contract law courts, and nukes for mutually assured destruction.
StrauXX 1y ago
You are using the word "socialist" as if it implied "bad". I find that to be a very unreflected point wothout further elaboration. Most of Europe is built on socialist-democracy. Wether it works "better" or "worse" than the USA way can be debated. But it is definetly not "bad" per se.
- alecco 1y ago
  You are twisting my words. I informed correctly she has zero experience or credentials to manage this project. She was picked because she is part of the Spanish Socialist party (currently ruling) instead of being picked for being the right person for the job. I would've mentioned the equivalent if it were a politician from Macron's center-right party, for example. Socialists milk the funds for their NGO friends, and likewise the center-right politicians divert the funds to their corporate backers. Two sides of the same coin.
miltonlost 1y ago
[flagged]

by alecco 1y ago

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

>They rarely put in charge experienced people or at least engineers. Because most of the time, the point of such government "investments" is to be another hidden wealth transfer from the taxpayers into the pockets of those with government connections (your Siemens, T-Systems, Capgemini, Thales, etc). That's a feature, not a bug. Imagine Dell, Zuck, Jobs, Page and Brin back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government to fund their companies, instead of VCs. None of their companies would exist today. Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects, you can't rely on them to build you the consumer focused private tech industry the US VC industry did. It's not something achieved through central planning, and the EU refuses to get that, so it keeps throwing money into the "maybe it'll work this time" bonfire.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> Imagine Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brinn back in the day, waiting for handouts form the US government instead of VCs. The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. Silicon Valley itself was spurred by the DoD spendings.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >The US hands out money extremely generously through federal grants, DARPA and orders which have to be made to American companies through things like the Buy American Act. You're ignoring my point or arguing in bad faith, since I already addressed this to the comment you're replying to. The EU also spent a lot into defense and R&D, the difference is the US gov didn't spend money in the start-up consumer market, but they let private entrepreneurs commercialize some of the solutions that trickled down from the defense tech into the consumer sector to make money (CPUs, 3D graphics, radios, etc). This is where the EU is deficient and you can't fill this entrepreneurial visionary void with government bureaucrats shoveling taxpayer money around to their friends. What did DARPA have to do with Apple's success in the music and phones business? What DARPA money went into the iPod or the iPhone? They were made with commercial off the shelf chips that the likes of Nokia and Ericsson also had access to, not some super secret US DoD tech. Just like many SV companies, Philipps, Ericsson and Nokia also were government founded from selling radars and radios to the military initially before the tech trickled to consumer. Yet Apple is now a multi trillion company(that was nearly bankrupt in the 90s) and the EU phone companies have withered away. Why is that? Is it because of "DARPA and the government"?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > US gov didn't spend money in the consumer market The U.S. spends obscene amounts of money on crap from Microsoft and Amazon and Oracle and Google.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      So does EU on Siemens, Thales, T-Systems, Capgemini, SAP, etc plus hundreds of other politically connected body shops peppered around Brussels. What's your point here, where are you going with this? That all governments have their preferred go-to monopolies for services? What's that got to do with the start-ups I was talking about? And Amazon got off the ground from Bezos selling books online from his bedroom then pivoting to webs services, not from receiving government handouts to start a e-commerce business. These are the kind of scale-up success stories the EU lacks and can't be done thorough direct government intervention.
    - breppp 1y ago
      Government buying from a monopoly is a bit different than government financing an early stage startup as OP described
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    Your point: > Governments are only good at funding infrastructure, education, healthcare and defense projects My point: well, the US government literally funded what became the VC landscape you seem to imply can’t be spurred by a government and still routinely fund very generously companies which then become industry behemoths. Every new promising fields in the US is flushed with government handouts through DARPA grants, federal research grants or supplying contracts. This money then irrigates the whole fields as companies do business with each other. It goes all the way to the VCs. Take a look at the list of the US biggest investors and see how many of them got rich through companies having the state as their biggest customer. Heck, Siemens and Thales which you seem to despise are basically acting like dozens of American companies which are entirely funded by the DoD but on a smaller scale.
    - 1y ago
mistrial9 1y ago
the USA venture system has built the most addictive and invasive tech system yet -- ads + phones. Hot on their heels is an invasive and controlling behometh called China. None of these are clear winners, in fact it remains to be seen how long this is stable. Its not intellectually honest to claim victory for the USA based on VC practices IMO
AStonesThrow 1y ago
Yeah! Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
- ty6853 1y ago
  So I used to buy all those publicly, slowly I started divesting from any public utilities to the extent I could. Everytime I switched from public to private, I didn't see all the bad stuff happening people seem to think would happen. I switched sanitation to a private septic system. I bought a share of private well to avoid public water systems. I built my own roads and live in a community where all the roads are private easements so no tax money (you can drive for miles and miles without ever hitting a public road). Medicine, I made friends with a private practitioner that was educated at a private university. There are basically no police here, so I learned todefend myself. I send my kid to private school. Out of your list, the only thing I benefit from tangentially is public roads but they are way worse value than our privately funded ones (I first built mine with nothing more than a hatchet and a shovel for $0 and then later learned how to operate a backhoe). I'm well aware I still use some public services, even if indirectly, but when I compare the costs they are all much more efficient when I have switched to private infrastucture vs trusting politicians not to squander it. My local taxes are now down to next to nothing, and when I look at what exactly I am getting for the ~30% I pay out to the state and federal the only thing I seem to be getting on ok deal on is the US navy protecting trade routes, maybe contract law courts, and nukes for mutually assured destruction.

StrauXX 1y ago

You are using the word "socialist" as if it implied "bad". I find that to be a very unreflected point wothout further elaboration. Most of Europe is built on socialist-democracy. Wether it works "better" or "worse" than the USA way can be debated. But it is definetly not "bad" per se.

alecco 1y ago
You are twisting my words. I informed correctly she has zero experience or credentials to manage this project. She was picked because she is part of the Spanish Socialist party (currently ruling) instead of being picked for being the right person for the job. I would've mentioned the equivalent if it were a politician from Macron's center-right party, for example. Socialists milk the funds for their NGO friends, and likewise the center-right politicians divert the funds to their corporate backers. Two sides of the same coin.

miltonlost 1y ago

[flagged]