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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

US economy works best at extremes.

Extreme poverty, extreme wealth.

Europe, as a whole, seems to do better with a wider range of middle class.

Personally I lament that we have very little tech industry. No Google’s or Apples- but at the same time the majority of the people living and working here seem better off than their contemporaries in the US. So it’s mostly selfish of me to lament the lack of tech.

Eventually though I guess, the tremendous wealth generated by US tech industries will enrich everyone’s lives in the USA, but, that hasn’t happened historically. So I guess we’ll see.

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The dominance of the big tech companies is a mistake, a failure in market regulation - they are allowed to go too far in terms of company mergers and anti-competitive behavior.

Of course, Europe can't "compete" in exactly that without loosening the shackles in the same way, but that's not something I, for one, would want.

Failure of market regulation, indeed. Look at big tech. Microsoft got big with dirty tactics. Facebook and Google get away with scandal after scandal. You can't compete with crooks. Not in US, nor in EU, nor in world.

It only looks like failure of market regulation in retrospect for companies like Facebook and Google (Microsoft is a bit different) because these companies grew businesses that simply hadn't existed before.

How do you regulate Google buying something like youtube when youtube was a loss maker at the time, they grew it into a titan. Same with android, smartphones in the form of the iphone were brand new, who was to say at the time that Google would win with all the other companies building smartphones at that time.

But Facebook and Google didn't get big because of dirty tactics, did they? They genuinely offered something people wanted.

Facebook, at least, did dirty stuff on the way up. I'm sure there are many more examples I'm unaware of.

Facebook pays teens to download VPN to measure app usage on a users device: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

Facebook backdoor testing after their VPN was removed from the app store: https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/30/facebook-research/

> Since 2016

Facebook won already in like 2012 or something. What was before that - MySpace? - it just sucked compared to Facebook. Terrible UI. Completely useless, siloed without the "real name" policy.

Facebook was a genuine innovation, both in terms of UI, and in terms of marketing (targeting elite schools first was genius, but hardly non-competitive, anyone could have done it).

Facebook's real name policy has been determined bogus in Germany (EU).

I feel like you are fundamentally misunderstanding their entire business model here. The fact that they happened to have popular products is somewhat secondary.

They both got to the size that they got by data mining PII and selling it to the highest bidder in various forms.

Every product requires that people want it. Genuine is a definition up for debate.

Yes, they were better than the competition. Especially Google Search (I remember Altavista et al). However the major innovation is that the user is is the product. (sidenote: ever had to contact Google customer support while being the product?)

If Zuckerberg started Facebook on Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TUE) today he would need to abide by GDPR. Means he can't just start a student DB without consent.

>If Zuckerberg started Facebook on Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TUE) today he would need to abide by GDPR. Means he can't just start a student DB without consent.

What you really mean is that Zuckerberg would not have started Facebook if he would've been in Europe today. Would the world have been better off? Facebook does seem to offer quite a lot of value to millions of people.

As did MySpace.

The two of us are unable to reach consensus on genuine offering value versus the importance of business ethics. I believe we can better cease this discussion.

They created monopolies by buying up potential competitors. They are case studies in the success of M&A. American regulators and politicians turned a blind eye (and continue to beyond lip service) because of their international dominance.

Every other industry has had crooks, much worse than our tech companies today.

The thing that changed, is that some tech companies can scale faster than any other industry before it (rail roads takes a long time to build).

That said, we're at the edge of history, 150 years ago it looked as if the railroad tycoons would own the future.

Even without regulation, railroad tycoons would not be dominating our economy today..

I think they refer to technology innovation rather than the size. Because there is really no shortage of European monster sized companies.

What is facebook innovating at?

Facebook brought on transformation in information distribution and social discourse propagation that previously went mostly over top-down media channels.

I think it turned to be a net negative, but it was a seminal change.

There is plenty of tech innovation which heralds from Europe but comes to fruition after moving to the USA. It is not a lack of ideas or one of entrepreneurial spirit but more one of a lack of VC capital and a more stringent legal framework which keeps Europe from producing "the next Google".

That is so true! If you have a innovation (especial in the IT field) you run out of Europe as fast as possible.

I wonder if it's the appetite for tech investment that causes this.

In Australia (outside of a small enclave in Sydney) the only thing that investors know about and want to invest in is Mining (or occasionally Agriculture).

I can see the same situation in Germany: investors want to invest in what they know, and very few of them know about tech products. There's little pockets of tech-savvy investors around Europe, but on the whole there's not that many.

But California has an abundance of investors who know tech and are willing to invest in it. So it's easy to see why a Euro tech company that wants funding would migrate there.

>But California has an abundance of investors who know tech and are willing to invest in it.

Yes i think that's it, i can make a bet that more Windows Servers run in Europe than in the US, Europe is in that field (the mindset) at least 6 years behind the US and China, but some exceptions exists like Estonia.

What are those shackles you think that are preventing it?

Well, it does help when 320+ million people speak the same language. That's a huge consumer advantage that any US startup has.

Translating and regionalization is cheap compared to adhering to 28 different sets of laws.

Fair point. With that said, both are expensive for lean startups without outside investment. Many Dutch startups always look at the Dutch market first, before they fan out to a few European countries and only then do they look at Europe. And if that all succeed, only then do they dare to look at the US and perhaps the world.

Case in point: takeaway.com

This is very true. On the other hand, The Netherlands is a country that easily adopts new tech ideas and products compared to other European countries.

Single market really makes this much less work than you’d expect.

It isn't that cheap if you have to consider different branding and marketing campaigns when you want to expand to neighbor regions. The cost of covering the EU market can increase really fast.

Edit: it's also an ongoing cost, so the earliest you start to support additional locales the more expensive your general product development becomes. Once start to translate your UI you now have to keep it up-to-date all the time. The more translations you have the more expensive that process is when developing new features, both in actual time/energy to be sure that your UI/UX work well in your supported locales, and expenses for translators.

FWIW, you have to adhere to couple dozen sets of laws as well, on top of translation and regionalization, when building EU-wide products. The EU works to harmonize a lot of these laws, but it's still made of sovereign nation-states.

Doesn't almost everyone in Europe speak pretty good English in practice? Couldn't English become the language of business and tech?

To your first question, definitely not. Like, not at all. Generally speaking countries in northern Europe are very good at English, it's used often in cities and if you live in a major city you can do almost everything in English. I lived in Berlin for 3 years and you can do virtually everything (but administrative stuff) in English (in fact that makes it difficult to learn German by immersion, people switch to English as soon as they notice that you have a foreign accent or speak a bit slowly or with difficulty).

But that's it. Local languages are dominant for any other situation. And while English is the main language used for business, the majority of people don't speak it fluently.

That varies a lot per country, for example Sweden and Norway are really good at teaching English, Austria, Germany and Belgium are ok, France, Spain, and Italy are bad.

You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index for some comparison between countries.

Even in Germany. There's the "Berlin bubble" where (as you say) English is common. But go outside that, especially to areas like Bavaria or Saxony on the eastern side, and no-one speaks English at all.

It'll be interesting to see what happens after Brexit. My guess is that English will remain as the common language in Europe. It's too entrenched now. And the Irish still speak it (for now).

Anecdote from my personal experience in daily life, as a German in Germany.

While I can speak English mostly without any special effort, it sometimes surprises me that I need time (up to 2 seconds maybe) to switch, when someone is asking me something. As in at first it doesn't even register as English, more like thinking what was that?. Then, delayed I suddenly understand. Of course it depends on the situation (environment, other sounds, other speakers, and so on, too) and the accent/dialect of the speaker. In other cases no problem at all, like instant switching without any hassle/thinking about it.

It depends/varies in strange ways :)

I sometimes experience something similar with English (my first language, and I'm monolingual, unless we're being extremely charitable). I'll ask someone to repeat themselves, then momentarily afterwards, what they said suddenly clicks, before they've gone ahead and repeated the message.

I think of it like this: we have an interpretation subsystem to interpret messages carried in sound (in whichever language). It's a soft real-time system. Typically it succeeds in interpreting good inputs, making its deadline, and it decisively rejects invalid inputs (on account of mumbling, overwhelming background noise, etc), also within the deadline. Occasionally it succeeds in interpreting a sound signal but misses its deadline.

There's also a request-repeat subsystem, which may fire any time after the interpretation subsystem has either rejected an input as invalid, or missed a deadline. When it fires, we say something like What was that? to request retransmission of the previous message.

When the interpretation subsystem misses a deadline but then succeeds, it races the request-repeat subsystem, so there's a chance of a What was that? being uttered immediately before successful interpretation of the previous message.

You make it sound like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

I have the same, but in reverse. I can get the gist of German speech, if I'm expecting it and have some clue about context. If it's out of context, then it just comes across as a mess of sounds. I find it so strange that a sentence made entirely out of words that I know is so incomprehensible out of context.

IMHO the fact that the EU doesn’t have the UK anymore is a very good reason to define it as our main working language. That will of course never happen, but it would make sense to have a language that doesn’t advantage one country member over others given that we all have English as our secondary language.

In fact my personal wish would be the standardization on European English, at the same level as UK English, US English, Indian English, etc. and define it as our common EU language, bound to the pan-EU identity.

But I’m dreaming :)

The UK will be gone soon but Ireland is still a member.

> That will of course never happen, but it would make sense to have a language that doesn’t advantage one country member over others given that we all have English as our secondary language.

Don't forget that English is indeed a secondary language in the Republic of Ireland - their first official language is Irish. So what they said still holds true including the Republic of Ireland.

> European English

Doesn't European English as a separate dialect have a lot of problems?

The English that Europe uses is so mangled that English speakers can't understand it. It often means the exact opposite of what is intended, sometimes dangerously so (see 'so-called' for example.) This leads to less understanding, rather than more.

https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...

I see it as a different flavour of English. Every single flavour of English has its own distinction and incompatibility with the others, that's what defines it as its own thing.

A US or UK English speaker will face issues when talking with a Indian English speaker, or an Australian English speaker.

In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges. We just don't recognize it officially.

The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow, which explain why there are some differences.

> This leads to less understanding, rather than more.

That leads to a common language WITHIN the EU, which is what we don't have currently. I mean, again, we do have European English, we just don't recognize it, and it isn't as spread as it could be. The differences with other forms of English are small enough to increase the general communication between EU citizens and other English speakers in the world, but as you said also comes with a few differences that can cause misunderstanding. I work in international environments with people from all over the world, we already face those issues and they aren't a big deal.

> I see it as a different flavour of English.

I think you're being very generous there in painting it as some kind of naturally occurring dialect of a culture.

> The document you share is using UK English as the standard to follow

Incorrect. It refers to and compares against Irish English and US English as well, as people would in fact normally understand it. It's not academic or prescriptive.

> In practice we already use EU English, both in official documents and communications, and in casual exchanges.

You can't convince me people are using contorted jargon like 'financial envelope' in casual exchanges with anyone.

These are the problems in practice:

> the European institutions also need to communicate with the outside world and our documents need to be translated – both tasks that are not facilitated by the use of terminology that is unknown to native speakers and either does not appear in dictionaries or is shown in them with a different meaning

It's not just a case of 'not recognising it officially' - nobody understands it and dictionaries (of any dialect) don't help.

What is the point of a dialect that only people writing reports, not reading them (the actual people they're governing), understands?

Ok, I see that you completely misunderstood what I'm talking about. I don't really care if the EU standardize a EU English based on translation mistakes present in official EU documents. For example the case you point to, "financial envelope" seems to be a direct translation from French (at least that's how it feels as a native French speaker). Drop it if you want, it's just a detail.

I'm talking about the way the language is used by European citizens.

An example of some common differences can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English.

Some of theme are quite funny if you're familiar with European languages :)

> An example of some common differences can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English.

No we mean the same thing. The Wikipedia article you posted even links to the report I posted as a reference for what they mean!

That’s an EU report, by the way, criticising EU English as confusing and not understandable by citizens of any country unless they’re EU officials. That’s not a useful shared dialect!

Again, you're talking about the EU officials, that's not something I would consider. You're also pointing to the report as an authority on the domain, but while it is an interesting document to start a discussion it isn't in itself something that dictates what is useful or not.

The reason to standardize European English would be to give the 400+ millions people living in the EU a common, shared language they could identify with. These people already use in their daily life a form of English that doesn't follow US or UK standards. It is obviously understandable by citizens, otherwise they wouldn't be able to use it. They are right now using this weird, bastardized version of English to do business, communicate with friends, with their families, etc. This European English is already a de-facto language used for communication between EU citizens. Instead of telling them to correct their use of the language because it fails to follow British standards, I would like this distinct form of English, as it is practiced, to be recognized.

And if that offenses British English speakers, then that's fine, they will adapt the same way they already do.

> Again, you're talking about the EU officials, that's not something I would consider.

Not consider? You linked to the Wikipedia article on it saying that this is what you were talking about.

You say "tech" industry. Surely you mean "advertising" industry.

Microsoft, Apple and Amazon aren't really advertisement companies. Most companies are not.

the app store is like a genius innovation in advertising, one that advertisers have no choice but to pay for & where pricing is commission based.

imo the apple has gone bad.

As we both live in the same country I think this is a very interesting observation you make.

One thing that the US is really good at is commercial innovation. Case in point: Silicon Valley. And in addition to that all the innovative companies outside of SV, which are quite a few.

It would be amazing if we in Europe could increase our innovation without creating the same economical divide as in the US.

And some more European tech companies wouldn’t hurt :)

Even though my job is in tech, tech is hardly the only market that innovates

For example banking, finance and insurance is more advanced and innovative in Europe than in US

Other fields of innovation where Europe leads are: green economy and energy production, small and medium sized businesses development, education, human resources, pharmaceutical products (mainly drug development, especially smart drugs as they are called)

They are not equally capitalized as US tech giants, but that just mean that investment in Europe is more widespread than centralised and many smaller companies receive funding instead of a few very big ones

> US economy works best at extremes.

I agree with you, but going on a tangent, I question if it really "works best".

I'm not an economist nor sociologist, but I know there's some evidence/argument that inequality also hurts the obscenely wealthy. As two examples, inequality is linked to crime and terror and lower rates of innovation (e.g., not having a vaccine for Ebola) - both of which can be blind to someone's AMEX limit.

There's also the fact that all people in countries with high inequality are less happy (1), which could be linked with the fact that they are less compassionate (2).

(1) https://hbr.org/2016/01/income-inequality-makes-whole-countr...

(2) https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_inequality...

yes europe does work much better for the average person on street. i do wonder though how sustainable it is. for example a lot of the stability is due to pension obligations many european governments have. the current generation doesn't have that. and for every 1€ that goes in people seem to pull out any where from €1.25-2 from those systems. exactly what that will look like in 20 years is anyone's guess but it'sn't looking pretty.

extreme attracts youth, and USA is a young country.. at least it was

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