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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Such a tiresome and self-defeating mindset. If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just corruption.

Of course politics and lobbying will play a role when we're talking about hundreds of billions of euros, but that doesn't mean that it can't end up being a net positive for the union.

Ask for transparency and keep tabs, don't assume that it's already lost.

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Can you name examples of EU initiatives on that level that delivered the desired results?

EDIT: I am asking because I seriously want to know. I haven’t made up my mind yet what to think about the whole thing. I am not familiar with successful EU initiatives. I’m open in believing this can work if there were successful examples in the past.

I thought Airbus was one.

You mean that resource wasting shop, that is sending huge airplane parts all across Europe for political reasons? I don’t even want to start about the subsidies considered illegal by the wto...

Well, it seems to be competitive with Boeing & no one else really stepped up doing it the "proper" way so far.

Well, Boeing is doing the same things. Transporting 737 fuselages through the US and illegal subsidies. And I'm not even mentioning the 737 debacle.

Maybe those are just table stakes in this sort of market

Isn’t that the kind of outcome you would expect from such a monopoly (/duopoly)? Even if a company could be more efficient it would not make sense for them to try to compete

> I am not familiar with successful EU initiative.

The EU Cohesion Fund is one. Since 2007, ~133 billion € got invested in the poorer countries of the EU to improve trans-european traffic infrastructure (TEN, aka road, rail, waterways) and environmental projects (e.g. villages hooked up to proper sewage pipes with treatment plants at the end, instead of dumping sewage to the groundwater / into rivers and seas).

EU funds for improving infrastructure is the only money that actually is not mostly money down the drain. Unfortunately programmes that don’t have such concrete outcomes (like this one) are entirely different.

Yet after spending 133 billion € the vast majority of Romanian, Bulgarian and many more countries villages do not have sewage pipes for example

Is this actually true?

I've visited several small towns in Romania, and all plumbing was in good order. It's not like a country stuck in 15th century. Are you talking about 'villages' of like 5 people?

Even if that’s true (which I wouldn’t know), I don’t see how that can be sufficient to declare a project that aims to improve things a failure.

Let’s assume that project was for the poorest 10% of the EU. That would be 44 million people. €133 billion divided by 44 million is about €3000 per inhabitant.

I don’t think one can expect such an amount to bring roads, rails, bridges, and sewage treatment systems up to standards of the richest parts of the EU.

I don’t know how much the EU spent, but over here EU money payed for a frankly crazy amount of fiber optic cable. Completely common for a house far from any urban centre to have fiber internet.

Which I found that very amusing, because Germany is suffering from really bad and expensive cable/copper internet all over the place.

That is the intentional result of Helmut Kohl's government many decades ago. Kohl wanted cable TV instead of fibre... because cable TV could be used to broadcast programs that were not "left mainstream". Wish I was joking, private TV stations in Germany are a thing only because the state TV was too left (in reality: not right-wing enough) for the freshly appointed Conservative chancellor.

See https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

In Croatia, they did, just saw a big sign in the hood when I went there for a funeral in the summer (which is what actually inspired me to write this comment).

I think the Erasmus initiative is an outstanding EU programme, which helped collaboration between EU universities and to build a EU identity for young educated students. It's not an economic initiative per se, and it's hard to measure its effective results objectively, but I believe it's been an absolute net positive for the EU.

Airbus is the obvious one; successfully broke a foreign near-monopoly. TSMC would be playing the role of Boeing, here.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I do think that something needs to be done by _someone_, even if not Europe. TSMC having a global near-monopoly on high-end fab is obviously not long-term viable. That's a bad situation for _everyone_.

> If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just corruption.

Well, surely there are other ways to try to improve things besides doing nothing and bureaucratic grant schemes.

This mindset is born out of seeing how the game is played and where the money goes from past initiatives. Why would this one be in any way different?

To quote a very rich and slimey asshole I’ve interacted with who’s income is largely from such initiatives. It’s just money for papers.

Almost any "federal government" branch in any national or transnational entity works that way. They still get results good enough to push technology forward by encouraging parallel private investments.

I mean the whole USA tech sector was basically bootstrapped by federal money/grants/investments given in no different way of what EU is doing right now.

And even earlier, in chemical and advanced manufacturing space - just how many of the well-known US companies started as small shops that got their hands on government grants during WWII?

> … government grants during WWII

Seems like we're missing some "proper" motivation/focus/constraints now like war on this scale can provide… not just the EU, but this kind of diktat-innovation is increasingly more present everywhere…

Probably goes hand in hand with the ever present bailout olympics for those deemed TBTF…

I used to believe the "proper motivation" - like winning the war - mattered. Then I read "War Is a Racket", a 1935 short book by US general Smedley Darlington Butler, which in many places argues that even during an active war, companies will happily steal and squander the war funding. So now I'm not sure how much you can expect from such motivation.

Probably it's best to assume that some amount of graft will always happen, just dump the money, and hope something good comes out of it...

Well i'm not sure gunboat diplomacy and banana/global policing wars provide sufficient motivation compared to total wars… can only steal and squander so much before your factories get bombed and supply chains crippled.

I would agree if only the money dumps stopped ending up going mostly in the same places… lol

> USA tech sector was basically bootstrapped by federal money/grants/investments given in no different way of what EU is doing right now

There are MANY different ways to channel money into business or non-profit R&D. I doubt you can ignore all the differences and declare that what the US and the EU do or did is the same.

I am not saying it doesn’t exist, but I am personally not aware of any similar multibillion declaration made by the US.

Why don't you instead quote a source that proves that it's a pointless giveaway? Without it, your post seems like mud slinging.

Ask for transparency and report slimey assholes. If you want the change, be the change.

Yeah sure lemme go against a guy with half the government in his pocket. Life is not a movie.

Reporting corruption only works if there's someone to report it to who has both the power and the political will to actually do something about it. That simply does not exist within the EU as an institution. I don't think it's possible to easily explain exactly what's wrong with the EU's accountability and anti-corruption structures; endless column inches have been spent on the problems, mostly in somewhat niche publications and read mainly by people deeply interested in EU politics. (Which may also be part of the problem. Even before Brexit, few cared, and the political polarization around Brexit has pushed the idea that the EU has structural problems outside the realm of mainstream discourse. Take a look at the comments in this HN discussion for example!)

We can do more than one thing at a time, so the EU can be both useless and corrupt.

Because what the EU countries need to do is to get out of the way.

aaand here's a typical representative of said companies "positive for the union", "ask for transparency"...

> If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just corruption.

Wrong.

Its not about "doing something", its about doing the right thing. And they don't.

Even if done inefficient (to which standard?) the current state of doing things can be a net positive.

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