14 ms·

I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden. We

by yoha 13y ago

I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden. We have the example of the attempt of a French Silicon Valley [1] while there is no incentive for entrepreneurs to build a company (sure, after some hassle, you can still set up your start-up, but if your idea gets success, your best hope is to be bought by an American company like Google). Another more recent example is the "cloud à la Française" where the government catch the buzzword for cloud-computing and wanted to have its own Amazon super-star company. Basically, what they did is try to make a big company out of thin air [2] while just ignoring all that already existed in the domain. The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden might be due to this situation, but I doubt it would have been a lot better with the other major party (UMP, more right-wing oriented), who has been in majority most of the time without improving the administrative maze of entrepreneurship. I don't know about much the other countries of Europe (although I have heard that it was not so much better) but the situation of France is very frustrating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Antipolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Antipolis [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt (fr)

netcan 13y ago
As someone from the periphery of the eurozone I get the impression that France is like concentrated Eurojuice generally that embodies all of the vice (and many of the virtues) of europe generally.
- sentenza 13y ago
  Being from Germany, I want to add that in some (good and bad) ways, Germany is more like Europe than France. 1. Decentralized. Germany is 16 states yelling at each other, while France jumps when Paris calls. 2. Lots of high-tech, no Silicon Valley. There are _a lot_ of successful software companies in Germany, but most are set up like traditional companies, not startups. Also, they mostly serve pre-existing niches, such as the financial industry around Frankfurt. The same holds for Europe. 3. Unsexy. Yeah. While I don't actually care much about the public image of Germany, I am saddened that the European idea has lost its appeal and continues losing it. I mean, what could _possibly_ go wrong? All in all, I'd say the hodge-podge muddle-through way of things you see in Europe comes more natural to Germany than France.
  - netcan 13y ago
    We're getting pretty abstract. I think germany lent the eu its regulatory approach so its definitely got that in common. France's chaotic mix of abstract ideas (egality..), arsenal of widely divergent interpretations of them and populism is closer to the eu's politics. Germans build roads to have road. The French build roads as an expression of some confusingly abstract political idea.
    - twobits 13y ago
      "Germans build roads to have road. The French build roads as an expression of some confusingly abstract political idea." The common theme is always who is to be f*ed and pay the bill, the taxpayers, and who is to get the profit and benefits, the big, connected, private interests.
  - sirkneeland 13y ago
    All true thoughts, although I am happier the "European idea" (which in your case I take to mean as a federated superstate, do correct me if I am wrong) would be replaced by a looser, EFTA type arrangement. I mean, wouldn't that lead to more decentralization (and thus innovation, and competition, and yes, yelling at each other but that's how you get the best ideas, not "the center declares an idea and everyone else implements it") As an added bonus, it's more democratic.
    - sentenza 13y ago
      Yes, I'm one of those superstate people. I understand where you are coming from, but am much more pessimistic about the viability of a EFTA-type agreement. In fact, I'm almost convinced that the EU, as it is today, cannot survive if it is not further integrated. Both these statements of mine hinge on my observation that the strength of a political entity can only be determined at a time of crisis. For instance, the internal economic imbalances of the EU will always make some countries overall net-winners and some net-losers with regards to trade balances. This will inevitably lead to crises. The USA have just as much imbalance between their states as we have between our member states, but they have one thing that we don't: Federal redistribution. If you live in Alabama and recieve social aid, get farming subsidies or are employed by the military, that is paid for by the whole, not just by Alabama. So it doesn't matter if Alabama is bleeding money in all directions. In the EU, this is not the case. I would thus expect an EFTA-EU to fracture or implode when the economic interests of the "big" countries are not aligned for a prolonged period of time. Nobody wants to live as a net-loser in perpetuity. Also, the EU actually has built-in decentralization! If you look at the contracts, there is ample mention of the "subsidiarity principle" and when you take a look at the legislation, it becomes clear that they actually mean it. There is even some grumbling from the highly-centralized EU states, such as France or Poland, about the increasing significance of the sub-national organizational structures (regions). The democracy thing could be fixed, if the will was there. Assuming, hypothetically, that things continued to go the way they have gone for the last decades, the EU actually will become progressively more democratic. After all, the EU parliament only came into the power it currently has with the Lisbon treaty. If the political will to unite Europe dissapears, the EU will collapse like a house of cards, for all the institutions and legal frameworks it has right now can't hold it together alone.
nolok 13y ago
> The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden might be due to this situation Could you possibly be more cliché ? You might want to stop drinking the kool-aid.
- yoha 13y ago
  maybe read until the end of the sentence?
  - nolok 13y ago
    Not only do I disagree that this is how people in France think overall (nor even a majority of the government present or past), but I also believe the asphyxic bureaucracy we suffer at the moment in France is neither an effect or a cause of the ideology you describe, even if it happened to be true. We have the same amount of useless paper filling for everything including claiming social services, most other aspect of our reglementation that have nothing to do with creating a company are also suffering from that maze effect. What we need is a cleanup of our laws and rules, our parliamentaries seem to feel like they need to add their own little law on top of it every couple of month, but they never clean the mess.
    - yoha 13y ago
      I am very well aware of the huge amount of paperwork we need to do anything in France, but it does not stops someone motivated enough to go through it. I wanted to highlight that even after having started your company successfully, you won't get very far. Of course, the complexity of the bureaucracy is a deep-rooted problem and I am quite pessimistic on the probability that such a clean-up will be done (when remembering the previous attempts).
tarekmoz 13y ago
I am not sure why you're saying that the Sophia Antipolis tech area is an attempt to build a "Silicon Valley" - It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there. It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs. It was not built to mimic SV. And no one claims that except maybe some rare schools/companies brochures that want to sell the place to students/young engineers. > The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden That's completely inaccurate... There's a huge effort right now to boost innovation in France by the current government - by Fleur Pellerin, through grants for private companies in tech and many other things. Look at all those individuals the french government promotes at the CES ... http://blogs.afii.fr/en/2014/01/france-makes-waves-at-ces-2014-in-las-vegas http://blogs.afii.fr/en/2014/01/france-makes-waves-at-ces-20... - it does not look like a burden to the government :)
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs. Actually, that might be what's needed. Historically, many of the Silicon Valley successes have been started by engineers leaving an established company to work on their own ideas (example: Intel), not necessarily by young people starting from scratch.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there. SV started around the large military research facilities, and the semiconductor companies. Some startups (e.g. HP) came fairly early, but the large startup boom in the area happened after there was an established large concentration of technology people working for large stablished companies.
ataggart 13y ago
>I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden. It's not a recent trend. Frédéric Bastiat wrote about it in 1850 [1]. Humans have an easy time understanding that something is of human action and of human design (e.g., flipping a light switch turns the lights on), and at recognizing that something is neither of human action nor of human design (e.g., today's weather). We are particularly poor at recognizing things which are of human action but not of human design (e.g., the market). Recognizing emergent phenomena (i.e., spontaneous order) takes training/practice (and our language, which emerged within the context of humans' poor grasp of emergent phenomena, isn't great at expressing it). Further, politicians are incentivized to treat every problem as if it is in the first category, to treat symptoms as causal knobs to turn (e.g., price controls), thus placing themselves in the role of designer. To admit otherwise is to admit the inefficacy of politics (or more accurately, the state) to "solve" the problem. And with negligible exception, people of every political stripe refuse to accept that truth. [1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
- BerislavLopac 13y ago
  That's also known as cargo cults.

by yoha 13y ago

netcan 13y ago

As someone from the periphery of the eurozone I get the impression that France is like concentrated Eurojuice generally that embodies all of the vice (and many of the virtues) of europe generally.

sentenza 13y ago
Being from Germany, I want to add that in some (good and bad) ways, Germany is more like Europe than France. 1. Decentralized. Germany is 16 states yelling at each other, while France jumps when Paris calls. 2. Lots of high-tech, no Silicon Valley. There are _a lot_ of successful software companies in Germany, but most are set up like traditional companies, not startups. Also, they mostly serve pre-existing niches, such as the financial industry around Frankfurt. The same holds for Europe. 3. Unsexy. Yeah. While I don't actually care much about the public image of Germany, I am saddened that the European idea has lost its appeal and continues losing it. I mean, what could _possibly_ go wrong? All in all, I'd say the hodge-podge muddle-through way of things you see in Europe comes more natural to Germany than France.
- netcan 13y ago
  We're getting pretty abstract. I think germany lent the eu its regulatory approach so its definitely got that in common. France's chaotic mix of abstract ideas (egality..), arsenal of widely divergent interpretations of them and populism is closer to the eu's politics. Germans build roads to have road. The French build roads as an expression of some confusingly abstract political idea.
  - twobits 13y ago
    "Germans build roads to have road. The French build roads as an expression of some confusingly abstract political idea." The common theme is always who is to be f*ed and pay the bill, the taxpayers, and who is to get the profit and benefits, the big, connected, private interests.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  All true thoughts, although I am happier the "European idea" (which in your case I take to mean as a federated superstate, do correct me if I am wrong) would be replaced by a looser, EFTA type arrangement. I mean, wouldn't that lead to more decentralization (and thus innovation, and competition, and yes, yelling at each other but that's how you get the best ideas, not "the center declares an idea and everyone else implements it") As an added bonus, it's more democratic.
  - sentenza 13y ago
    Yes, I'm one of those superstate people. I understand where you are coming from, but am much more pessimistic about the viability of a EFTA-type agreement. In fact, I'm almost convinced that the EU, as it is today, cannot survive if it is not further integrated. Both these statements of mine hinge on my observation that the strength of a political entity can only be determined at a time of crisis. For instance, the internal economic imbalances of the EU will always make some countries overall net-winners and some net-losers with regards to trade balances. This will inevitably lead to crises. The USA have just as much imbalance between their states as we have between our member states, but they have one thing that we don't: Federal redistribution. If you live in Alabama and recieve social aid, get farming subsidies or are employed by the military, that is paid for by the whole, not just by Alabama. So it doesn't matter if Alabama is bleeding money in all directions. In the EU, this is not the case. I would thus expect an EFTA-EU to fracture or implode when the economic interests of the "big" countries are not aligned for a prolonged period of time. Nobody wants to live as a net-loser in perpetuity. Also, the EU actually has built-in decentralization! If you look at the contracts, there is ample mention of the "subsidiarity principle" and when you take a look at the legislation, it becomes clear that they actually mean it. There is even some grumbling from the highly-centralized EU states, such as France or Poland, about the increasing significance of the sub-national organizational structures (regions). The democracy thing could be fixed, if the will was there. Assuming, hypothetically, that things continued to go the way they have gone for the last decades, the EU actually will become progressively more democratic. After all, the EU parliament only came into the power it currently has with the Lisbon treaty. If the political will to unite Europe dissapears, the EU will collapse like a house of cards, for all the institutions and legal frameworks it has right now can't hold it together alone.

nolok 13y ago

> The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden might be due to this situation Could you possibly be more cliché ? You might want to stop drinking the kool-aid.

yoha 13y ago
maybe read until the end of the sentence?
- nolok 13y ago
  Not only do I disagree that this is how people in France think overall (nor even a majority of the government present or past), but I also believe the asphyxic bureaucracy we suffer at the moment in France is neither an effect or a cause of the ideology you describe, even if it happened to be true. We have the same amount of useless paper filling for everything including claiming social services, most other aspect of our reglementation that have nothing to do with creating a company are also suffering from that maze effect. What we need is a cleanup of our laws and rules, our parliamentaries seem to feel like they need to add their own little law on top of it every couple of month, but they never clean the mess.
  - yoha 13y ago
    I am very well aware of the huge amount of paperwork we need to do anything in France, but it does not stops someone motivated enough to go through it. I wanted to highlight that even after having started your company successfully, you won't get very far. Of course, the complexity of the bureaucracy is a deep-rooted problem and I am quite pessimistic on the probability that such a clean-up will be done (when remembering the previous attempts).

tarekmoz 13y ago

I am not sure why you're saying that the Sophia Antipolis tech area is an attempt to build a "Silicon Valley" - It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there. It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs. It was not built to mimic SV. And no one claims that except maybe some rare schools/companies brochures that want to sell the place to students/young engineers. > The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden That's completely inaccurate... There's a huge effort right now to boost innovation in France by the current government - by Fleur Pellerin, through grants for private companies in tech and many other things. Look at all those individuals the french government promotes at the CES ... http://blogs.afii.fr/en/2014/01/france-makes-waves-at-ces-2014-in-las-vegas http://blogs.afii.fr/en/2014/01/france-makes-waves-at-ces-20... - it does not look like a burden to the government :)

ahomescu1 13y ago
> It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs. Actually, that might be what's needed. Historically, many of the Silicon Valley successes have been started by engineers leaving an established company to work on their own ideas (example: Intel), not necessarily by young people starting from scratch.
vidarh 13y ago
> It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there. SV started around the large military research facilities, and the semiconductor companies. Some startups (e.g. HP) came fairly early, but the large startup boom in the area happened after there was an established large concentration of technology people working for large stablished companies.

ataggart 13y ago

>I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden. It's not a recent trend. Frédéric Bastiat wrote about it in 1850 [1]. Humans have an easy time understanding that something is of human action and of human design (e.g., flipping a light switch turns the lights on), and at recognizing that something is neither of human action nor of human design (e.g., today's weather). We are particularly poor at recognizing things which are of human action but not of human design (e.g., the market). Recognizing emergent phenomena (i.e., spontaneous order) takes training/practice (and our language, which emerged within the context of humans' poor grasp of emergent phenomena, isn't great at expressing it). Further, politicians are incentivized to treat every problem as if it is in the first category, to treat symptoms as causal knobs to turn (e.g., price controls), thus placing themselves in the role of designer. To admit otherwise is to admit the inefficacy of politics (or more accurately, the state) to "solve" the problem. And with negligible exception, people of every political stripe refuse to accept that truth. [1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

BerislavLopac 13y ago
That's also known as cargo cults.