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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> EU already lacks big tech compared to US, China and Russia

US has next to zero privacy protections, and unlimited investor money with zero expectations for a company to ever turn profitable. E.g. all of YCombinator's "top companies" lose hundreds of millions and billions dollars a year.

China and Russia have cheap labor and yes, zero privacy.

Edit: the same people who clamor for Russia and China-style big companies will immediately shout for government to step in if any company ever gets to the size and influence of Yandex or AliBaba.

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I love privacy, but the majority of people in the world seem not to understand it's importance.

No, there are no "zero expectations for a company to ever turn profitable". If you ever tried to get investor money you'll know how hard is to prove to them you have a good path to profitability. Even if all of YCombinat companies except one lose hundreds of millions, the last one can turn into a Facebook, worth hundreds of billions.

dmitriid, you seem to not understand the simple fact that if one of a hundred startups an investor financed turns into a big success he can make big profits overall, despite 99% of the companies lost him money.

That literally means "no expectation of profitability". Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012114

sure, no expectation of profitability on a single investment, expectation of profitability by distributing investments over a large amount of companies.

> No, there are no "zero expectations for a company to ever turn profitable". If you ever tried to get investor money you'll know how hard is to prove to them you have a good path to profitability.

And yet, YCombinator's top companies lose billions for years and keep getting the money. What's the "proven path to profitability"? The flimsy belief that "just wait a bit and we'll have a next Facebook?"

Most of the companies that get mentioned as "big innovative companies" in HN threads have been around for 5+ or even 10+ years, lost incalculable amounts of money, never turned a profit, and we're led to believe that there's an expectation to turn a profit in any of these scenarios.

> US has next to zero privacy protections

One in five US citizens is protected by a regulation that looks an awful lot like GDPR. And if history is any guide, it won't be long before that number gets a lot closer to 100%.

You mean California. And California laws do not apply to companies located in, say, Delaware.

EU laws apply to all member states and even entities just dealing with EU members (which is why Privacy Shield is dead again, USA lied).

> You mean California. And Californiaaws do not apply to companies located in, say, Delaware.

They do, in fact, when it does business in California. (Also, California is less than 1/5 of the country, so the reference is not just to California law.)

The problem here is that having remote customers does not count as "doing business in". So it only applies to brick and mortar located in Cali.

Otherwise it's illegal as due to fun laws only FED can regulate interstate commerce.

> The problem here is that having remote customers does not count as "doing business in". So it only applies to brick and mortar located in California

Physical presence is not a requirement for commerce clause nexus (though it definitely satisfies it.) I’m not sure it ever was viewed as a requirement outside of sales taxes, and the precedent establishing it as a requirement for sales taxes was overturned by the Supreme Court in South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018).

> Otherwise it's illegal as due to fun laws only FED can regulate interstate commerce.

The “fun law” is the Constitution's Commerce Clause, and that’s not actually how it works.

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