Europa the Tech Third World
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maybe there was a huge cultural shift after world war 2. people's psyche got damaged and priorities changed.
as someone who was born in a former british colony. then lived in the us.and now live in the uk.
what I find within european countries is a lack of urgency.
in america for example - something as moving around cities - you can easily secure a place i.e sign a lease etc all within 2 days. hell even do it without seeing the place if your appetite for risk is high.
on both the seller end / buyer end there's always a sense of urgency. of making things happen.
in east asia it is the same. e.g in tw you can sign a lease for an apartment without speaking a lick of chinese. and the landlord going off on your word.
in uk or europe that can be whole bureaucratic mess - that can easily take two weeks or even longer.
social life is the same - in the us / if you meet someone you gel with social wise could be business or pleasure. there is a sense of urgency in making things happen fast e.g meeting up for coffee or setting business meeting really quickly. in europe - there's a sense of rigidness. an extra busyness that doesn't make sense.
maybe due to current political climate - europeans wanna be extra polite.
but then again this is based on my personal experience and interpretation of it.
I just moved into a new home recently, and literally every step of the process has taken longer than it probably should have. Buying the property? Weeks. Getting details updated for energy companies and water companies? At least a week for one, and still waiting on the other. Internet? Oh boy, getting a new line installed is never quick, and OpenReach's efforts to make sure every individual and company can even get fibre internet seem to be going at a rate best described as 'glacial'.
There's definitely a feeling of 'eh, we'll do it when we get around to it' with many companies here.
You're ignoring that many of the large American tech companies provide cloud platforms, which certainly fits the bill of "providing tools to manufacture stuff"
But the biggest American so-called "tech" companies seem to be all about surveillance, privacy violations, selling data of their users and "adtech", unfortunately. And also bypassing laws and regulations while abusing their workers - airbnb, uber and other "innovative" companies like that.
If Europe is lagging behind, because we don't have those "adtech" companies then - good - I don't want us to be ahead. You are free to compete with China to see who will invade their citizens' privacy harder.
And what about actual high-tech stuff like bullet trains, maglevs, etc? How many of those has the USA built lately?
Since that article, it's only shifting more towards making money selling ads to boost your product on its product listing than it is actually selling products.
> ignored the likes of Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
> or Amazon
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17474359
Problem with "spying" is that nearly every company that can, is trying to. I'm not familiar with dassault systemes but wouldn't be surprised if they did too, to "improve their products". The degree of sophistication obviously varies.
The top comment was incredibly reductive and it seems it's going to turn into a pointless flamewar soon enough.
To me, they are almost always going together. Let's see if you like these links then:
Apple Finds Its Next Big Business: Showing Ads on Your iPhone (bloomberg.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461690
Apple developers are frustrated with gambling ads appearing across the App Store (theverge.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33346376
Apple benefits its own ads in the name of privacy (twitter.com/patrickmcgee_)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28897027
Amazon ads are everywhere. It’s only the beginning (vox.com)
Apple News articles App Store results App Store listings
That's it. Apple isn't doing a large, general audience advertising network.
> US and China
Notoriously famous for their awesome work culture.
No, thank you. Another useless tech doesn't worth my mental health. Especially with the ability of working remotely and not being tied to the local market.
How people can (still) be in favor of hustle culture and work for companies that actively prevent unions and live in societies that encourage unequalness to such a great extend is beyond my understanding.
You mean health insurance or pension plans? :-)
> and make 2+ times as much as tech workers in the EU do.
Phew, what is the purpose of this 2x salary, if you don't have time or energy to use it. To raise another generation of busy burnoutees? Or to buy benefits the European takes for granted?
From what I see, Europe actually has the opposite trend for switching to the 4-day workweek, instead of working hard @ buying big houses and cars.
- income (factoring COL, insurance, and other budget items)?
- free-time (time off, work schedule)?
1/ It fixates on venture capital, which is widely proven to be about the most awful way of getting progress. Most VC backed enterprises are either failures, useless (woo yet another SaaS to send emails dynamically generated on your SPA website), or bleeding money. A few, extremely rare exceptions aside (read: where you already know the VCs that will give you the money), venture capital is about the worst option for research.
2/ Uses the Shangai ranking as gospel when it's a completely worthless and arbitrary ranking, that only rewards you for huge universities that do everything. Europe was dragged in this bullshit, and now instead of having hundreds of very specialized, very efficient universities, we have dozens of massive, inefficient mega universities.
3/ Splits the EU into individual countries when it's convenient to make it look bad (share of publications in Nature, where, if added up, the bars would be the same size as China, size of economies as if a country with 70 million inhabitants was expected to match 330m/1b/1.2b), and groups it when it's convenient too ("why can't Europe do X", conveniently forgetting that's it's 28 countries in a trenchcoat).
4/ Acknoledges that most top AI experts and researchers come from Europe, as a testament to the quality of the universities, only uses it to say hurr durr they work in the US.
5/ Actually, mostly only acknowledges AI as a scientific research subject, ignoring and insulting thousands of researchers.
6/ "Only one of the top 10 tech companies in the world is in Europe", conveniently forgetting that said company is the absolute foundation of every other tech company. Take ASML out, and the tech world doesn't exist.
7/ GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH. ONLY GROWTH MATTERS. Ignore the costs, both social and environmental.
8/ Cherry picks the international math olympiads to broadly say that everyone wants to go to the US. I guess high schoolers are "everyone" now. They're also obviously the best and most well informed people as to the life conditions in the US. I too did want to leave to the US when I was 18. Then I realized it's mostly a shithole I would rather avoid.
Yes, Europe is slow, conservative, risk averse. But my fucking god if that thread isn't a load of bullshit, followed by a few tweets of "but it's not only bad huh hehe healthcare".
People from the US use it monolithically to praise or attack but also people from Europe do so, to not have to specifically defend anything and talk about ideals, or because they might not want to doxx themselves with too much details.
If you're interested in politics you'll see that they are vastly different and people need to talk about the contextual events instead of some idealised version of "how things work on paper".
Reminds me of the GDP comparison between US and EU without the consideration of the debt.
Taxes put tremendous stress on the working class. Socialism oppresses the working class.
The best way anyways to maintain a minimum social level is with persistent and healthy growth.
Where can I read more about those affirmations ?
This one is just logical. As society continues to grow and expand, then there's more available to lift the poor out of poverty.
The other points I made arise primarily out of my experiences living in Germany and US in connection with my understandings. There might information somewhere, but I can't point to them now, sorry.
But I do highly recommend the following book for other very interesting social/political ideas: Urantia. (The social/political ideas start later in the book, not right at the start.)
Thank you.
The market conditions likely have a part to play too. With salaries for high end work being so much higher in the US than Europe (see tech salaries in Silicon Valley vs just about anywhere in Europe for example), the most competent, skilled people tend to be drawn to the US where their skills are rewarded more.
This puts the cart before the horse. There was a time when european investors did invest in consumer facing companies — a german airbnb clone got $90 million of funding, more then airbnb had at the time[1] — it's just those all failed and investors learned their lesson.
> The market conditions likely have a part to play too. With salaries for high end work being so much higher in the US than Europe (see tech salaries in Silicon Valley vs just about anywhere in Europe for example), the most competent, skilled people tend to be drawn to the US where their skills are rewarded more.
How does this explain china? Shouldn't it be an advantage for companies to be able to pay lower salaries? Why are low salaries taken as a fact of nature here? If the disadvantage for european startups is low salary, why don't they pay more?
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/investors-pump-90-million-...
Still better - I pitched with a European pre-AirBNB AirBNB site in 2009 in London. It was called HouseTrip[0]. It was sold to TripAdvisor and the founders did well. There were also similar networks in many countries including Australia, though I can't recall names. And more casual networks like warmshowers and some other cycle-focused ones. However, somehow the mega-capital that goes with a US raise drowned out all of the established networks and replaced them with one brand globally - AirBNB. The model was established, IMHO the main thing AirBNB did was raise. This is the major superpower of the US. Capital.
Also, I'm not entirely sure market cap is truly the most effective metric in valuing technology...
Perhaps because population of EU is 450M and US 340M. Looks like a fair comparison.
> Also, I'm not entirely sure market cap is truly the most effective metric in valuing technology
Sales then? Would be basically the same graphs mostly.
If you want to widen your horizon, maybe you should ask how Europe can produce working mRNA vaccines and level 3 autonomous cars at a fraction of the cost.
CNC machines and industrial automation? Yep Europe.
Overall, I'm not sure if missing the big tech trend is a net negative for Europe in the long run?
Maybe these stupid policies are the reason we built the modern world.
These stupid policies have helped a lot to build wealth in the USA, it's an amazing place for business, not so much for citizenry. If the only metric one cares about is how much money there's to be made, the USA is definitely 1st in the world, if you care about more than just money then you really have to look deeper. At some point these policies can bite the USA in the ass, then it's pretty much good luck on changing a whole society's view in what's valuable outside of pure wealth-generation.
The USA is a rich place but that doesn't make it necessarily the best place for one to live in as a common person, even more if one doesn't care so much about buying ever more expensive cars, homes and clothes.
It's almost crybullying at this point.
Best of luck.