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Comment by krspykrm | Hacker News Reader

I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech.

Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.

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Would you trade a European collider for a failed commercial alternative like FirefoxOS or PalmOS? Because keep in mind that commercial failure is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the project you’re proposing. I’d rather fail at finding dark matter and learn things along the way than having a state-backed organization make lousy software that nobody uses.

Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seems perfectly happy to try (and fail) at making Google competitors, while nobody in industry is going to do fundamental physics research.

I'd rather distribute that money into all kinds of other research ideas that if successful would help people directly. The poor and the hungry don't benefit from knowing that dark matter exists. We need energy, food, medications and treatments. Those are better places to invest than another accelerator.

Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk

And what's unique about that to Yet Another Particle Collider compared with the myriad other challenging, data-heavy experiments we could be investing in?

It would cost at least 3 times as much to get the same amount of talent working on something like that. Projects like the LHC are able to massively leverage the money spent just because smart people are happy to work on exciting/deep problems for much less.

I think it would be better for the EU to fund existing open source solutions than to create EU-controlled proprietary ones. Fund Firefox so Mozilla doesn't have to take funding from Google any more. Fund Linux kernel porting to mobile devices. Fund LineageOS, Replicant, postmarketOS and the myriad GNU/Linux mobile OSes. Fund yaCy and searx. Fund RISC-V implementations.

PS: it sounds like there is some sort of EU plan for this:

https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20201023-01.en.html

They probably also need to fund an alternative to TSMC.

CERN isn't an EU organisation - it is funded by its 23 member states, and collaborates very closely with its other observers.

I need to mentally s/EU/Europe/ more often, sorry about that.

I'd start from independence in basic electronics. Software is easier IMHO. But, as always, which Europe? It's Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. each one with different and competing goals (the UK will be on its own soon).

The interesting thing about electronics is that the Dutch ASML company is basically have monopoly on producing the machines that silicon fabs use to produce chips. So everyone indirectly depends on the EU for hardware production.

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