Launching anything as a big tech company in Europe is an absolute nightmare. Between GDPR, DSA, DMA and in Google's case, several EC remedies, it takes months to years to get anything launched.
At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.
Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.
1. This stuff is available in like Angola and Thailand but not in Germany or France. Oh how the European giant has fallen.
2. ... but it's also not available in the UK. So the long shadow of EU nonsense affects us too :-(
On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…
Dude, we're talking about Google here...
Eh, given that Europe struggles to build anything tech related, I'm going to say it's pretty hard. Far easier to make overpriced luxury handbags and the like.
The anti-European gloating on HN is getting tiresome, and imho is a pretty big blind spot of HN moderation.
I'm also not quite sure it's xenophobia, but it's something other than calm and rational. Whenever Europe comes up in a HN thread, there's a sudden glut of snide comments and gloating, as if people are desperate for themselves and others to believe their layoffs-stricken industry is amazing nonetheless. Maybe to distract themselves from the mandatory RTO bad news?
Rather than calling it xenophobia, let me call it adversarial, and it's always the same side initiating it. Very, very tiresome.
I'm also willing to bet a very high % of the same demo would readily call HN an explicitly American forum and that inclusiveness or being welcoming to others shouldn't be a priority of the site, which I personally find just sort of jarring anywhere on the web, since https doesn't know borders and I grew up in the very overtly international FOSS community as an engineer. You know, where we make that Linux thing you probably have ten copies of on devices around you right now that started in Finland.
> OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury.
Only for a very narrow definition of "tech" that doesn't include the vast majority of engineering disciplines, as well as basic research and the education that enables the "tech".
I will take, for example, BioNTech over most startups posted on HN, and I'd rather we build another ITER than another Twitter clone.
Your bio says you're an R programmer. Are you aware the R foundation is a European (Austrian) org, like most organized open source? Seems those Europeans have quite a bit of time for tech after all.
Edit: grammar.
So was Stadia - restricted to US at the beginning.
Also their are very slow at adding non-English languages to their offering.
you typically see brazen behavior from ignorance.
The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
The bigger company will have inhouse or retainered lawyers who'll deal with it.
Almost all regulation acts as a barrier which protects bigger companies who can pay lawyer fees without blinking.
It's amazing how much of the HN crowd sides with the bureaucracies which are basically pals of the guys with deep pockets.
No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.
Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.
I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.
And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.
===