It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requirement makes it uncontrollable by the consumer, so I do understand that some consumers or, the possible more security aware US, will not trust it. But for the same reason China and other countries might not trust Apple or similar.
Trust is something that needs to be earned and which has to go both ways, if a company doesn't trust their users, and prevents people using their bought products however they like, then why should their users trust the company and let their uncontrollable software record their private lives and possible report back to them?
Look at the difference between iRobot and Chinese robot vacuums on Amazon - the difference is night and day.
I was just talking about my experience with DJI. Where you buy a product, can use it for a bit, and then it stops working, because you haven't connected it to the internet or created an account.
It is often the 'market leaders' that are so afraid to loose customers and their market position to implement customer hostile processes into their products.
This whataboutism ignores one very important point.
When you connect a device to an American company they might do things that we consider privacy violations, while still staying generally within the bounds of the law. We like to joke about data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.
Contrast this to Chinese companies where by law every company is part-owned by the government itself. The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers, but their job is to find and exploit intelligence on foreign individuals and businesses.
Reverse whataboutism is still whataboutism.
For example this predicate
> while still staying generally within the bounds of the law.
Completely ignores the fact that US companies have been found lying and deceiving to circumvent the barriers posed by the law.
But not only US companies, remember the diesel gate?
This other predicate
> (In China) by law every company is part-owned by the government itself
It's completely false, while this one
> The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers
It's pure intellectual dishonesty . Every sufficiently advanced intelligence agency has spies. With the USA agencies being the largest employers for spies on the entire Planet.
This is one of those 'It's not a problem until it is a problem, and then it's a big fucking problem' scenarios.
I'd really like you to try and define this term in a way that doesn't exclude the US
The Chinese government has said multiple times that it believes rule of law is a western imperialistic concept, so it isn't like this is even a goal for them.
You seem to be worried that an unfair judicial system poses a threat to everyone connected to the internet, well I got some news for you: Uber received $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and they are planning now to invest $40 billion on AI. Why are US companies accepting money from a bloodthirsty dictatorship then? A dictatorship where the actual dictator, Bin Salman, among other things, detained three members of the royal family (his family) for unexplained reasons, ordered the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that, even more worrisome, had spies in Twitter and McKinsey that helped him track down dissidents and silence critics. McKinsey and Twitter are still actively working with the Saudis and nobody has nothing to say about it... Not surprisingly the Saudi Prince Alwaleed is the second largest investor in twitter ATM through the Kingdom Holding.
Maybe we should refocus our priorities on the issues at large, not just those issues that are beneficial to the US in their war for the global supremacy.
I understand this is how modern pro-wrestling news addresses issues, but assembling a mass of emotionally-inflammatory things doesn't buttress your point.
Specific countries have greater or lesser individual rights and adherence to law.
Why doesn't it make sense to take that into account when extending trust to specific pieces of software running on your device?
>data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.
They didn't build the Utah Data Center because of their extremely limited amount of data.
We all like to joke about our data going to the NSA because our data has been repeatedly been caught going to the NSA.
I love that people point to one of the smallest NSA data centers as if its going to prove some sort of point.
Regardless, this is exactly the kind of whataboutism that I am talking about. Every government collects all the data it can. The difference is that the NSA targets foreign governments and terror organizations. The Chinese government targets the same but also goes after their citizens, foreign citizens, foreign corporations, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_global_surveillance_discl...
Sorry, but you seem a little naive. I recommend reading up on the US domestic surveillance program that the government was caught red handed engaging in.
We have almost a million people holding a TS or higher clearance, and have on average one incident a year of someone attempting to spy on a spouse or love interest, to which they get rolled up in their regular poly. So basically not a problem at all.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
I never denied that the IC spies on foreign governments and terror organizations. In fact, we are really fucking good at it. You can't query or access domestic communications or those of USPER without review by the FISA courts and high level approval.
Thanks for the laugh, this was one of the funnier things I've read in awhile.
I don't mean this as a political issue, but in your comment I see one of the reasons Trump appeals to people. He promotes a mindset of "stop handwringing and just fix the damn problem."
Here we know the following:
1) DJI devices have an always-on connection
2) Chinese government is unfriendly to US and exerts strong control over Chinese companies
3) China regularly blocks US companies for whatever reason they decide.
So yeah, we can say "but banning DJI won't solve the general problem of bad companies; we shouldn't just focus on China; is a ban really fair? etc etc. Or, we can just say "screw it -- China treats US companies like shit and we're not gonna just hand over all our drone info"
Here [1], CISA assesses China-made drones as a national security risk. That is a non-partisan agency. But your response is:
* American tech companies are just as data-hungry, if not more. -> irrelevant, this is about foreign cyberattacks or foreign data mining
* China produces more user-controllable devices than American brands. -> irrelevant
* Boogeyman -> Scare word
* Ignoring the much larger and complicated problem -> Deflects and says we can't do /anything/ unless we consider all angles and do /everthing/
This leads to endless handwringing, and is one of the reasons the left has support of only 50% of Americans, when it should be (in my opinion) a huge majority. Because we're endlessly caught up in the attitude of "nope, we really can't do anything in the face of obviously problematic issues." Gosh, it feels racist to ban a Chinese tech company (even though the Chinese government does actually target our cyber infrastructure). Gosh, what about the bad American companies?
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24362988/cybersecurit...
The same cannot be said of the Chinese government who may be happy to get extensive drone footage of everyday US infrastructure which can be used in a future war.
Meanwhile, China won't even let Google provide a valid map of the country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Google_Maps_in_Chi...
But tell us all more about how we should be more concerned about a US company requiring an internet login.
On one hand I understand we'll need to move to more insular and protective policies and basically ban foreign technology in so many places, on the other hand I don't want a gov like Ethiopia to have the choice between having no technology or being spied to the bone by all of its tech providers. The EU would be the only place with a one in a million chance to pull it off, there sure must be another way ?
Unfortunately this is required by regulators in many countries. In Thailand you can't fly a drone without a license. You need to obtain the license before activating the drone and provide your information and the license number at time of activation (which is tied to drone serial number).
It sucks but it's the law here.
dji having access to cameras also strips anyone the drone can see of their human right to privacy
An accompanying requirement would be to document interfaces to hardware subsystems (chip spec sheets would suffice).
With drones, the potential for mischief is too great to let malware be smuggled in.
Is this a politically and technically realistic goal ? Or am I talkin' thru my hat ?
or
https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav
or
among others
North America has the benefit of two oceans for national defense, but the risk associated with that is one of insularity and stagnation. Ask an indigenous person (if you can find one) how well being a couple hundred years behind European technological development worked out once hostile colonists are on your shores.
> a couple hundred years behind
Even before muskets started becoming common, European professional infantry had largely abandoned shields. Mass produced plate armor provided sufficient protection from arrows, and two-handed pikes were better than a pike and a shield.
On the other hand, bows became more effective again as muskets improved. When a musket could penetrate any reasonable armor, personal protection became less important.
But the fact that goofus fails at doing X doesn't make doing X always the wrong choice.
Lumber prices rose because at the start of the pandemic, the industry predicted a housing crash and took drastic steps to downsize and then the exact opposite happened. And we were left with a garden-variety supply vs demand situation.
If it was just protectionism, prices in Canada would not have had sharply increased lumber prices at the exact same time: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lumber-prices-covid-19-cost...
- On the one hand, as SE Asia is intimately familiar with, it can create space to create globally competitive industries.
- On the other hand, it can also remove the incentive for local industries to invest and become technically competitive.
IMHO, what I'd like to see would be a stricter link between protection measures and R&D investment.
If an industry is protected, then it is required to prove it's improving itself + limit returns to shareholders.
E.g. steadily increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards, requirements to demonstrate decreasing costs of production (lumber and/or steel), etc.
Too often, protection measures are implemented, the excess benefits are skimmed and go directly to shareholders, and the company doesn't increase its global competitiveness (e.g. US Steel).
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.
"Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it".
Also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is another strawman, used by those who dislike capitalism. People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
That's fair, I should have said "because the poors might benefit". Rich people don't like socialized healthcare because they, by definition, will pay for people who can't afford it.
The problem is when people who will benefit from this identify with people who will lose from it.
> People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
They do, but here we're talking about the opposite: People being against policies they benefit from, because they identify with the group that will not.
P.S. I liked your comment, it was a reasoned reply that furthers the debate, thank you.
The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and;
Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.
I'm afraid your experiences are not universal.
There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."
There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.
If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.
You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"
It's an unsavory thought, but the US has a significant amount of people employed in the business of denying healthcare to other people, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Any politician attempting to fix this would be committing political suicide.
Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
These words are doing some very heavy lifting.
This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
Source? Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
> Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?
Yes, yes, and no (irrelevant because it barely shifts the result)
Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
> Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
You griping about luxury goods on principle isn't "Econ 101" or "basic logic".
You can look at basically any material metric you like (cars owned, house size, etc.) and Americans come out ahead. Nominal GDP numbers are kind of nonsense, but they're directionally the same nonsense everywhere, so they actually work OK as an international comparison.
Rate of personal bankruptcies? Homeownership rate? Median household net wealth?
The amount of cars Americans have on absurd loans is entirely irrelevant to their personal wealth or lack thereof.
The allocation of debt is essentially irrelevant - there are materially more, bigger, better cars per capita in the USA. Whether those cars get repo'd and transferred to richer Americans is irrelevant - you can't fake the material presence of more stuff.
Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)
The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.
Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.
> Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP
The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.
Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
No. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
By median, the US is on par with Italy. If you adjust for property prices (cheaper in Italy), then it's definitively lower.
How about the median Western European (including nordic)?
>Most of the top colleges are American.
Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.
>Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US
The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.
>Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead. And this doesn't adjust for property prices.
Yep! And the European countries behind include like ex-soviet bloc countries and such (basically starting from very low in 1989-1991). And as you not, the cost differences (not accounted in the table) push European countries even further than this ranking.
Besides mean vs median, I'd point also quality of life factors not measured in dollars or euros.
On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
It usually isn't the law's job to dictate an implementation.
> shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking.
How is the law that doesn't even talk about browsers or cookies responsible for this?
But it's also driven some pretty interesting projects, so I'd probably call it a wash or perhaps a slight positive, even if I were to ignore the major benefits as a consumer
To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.
Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.
None of which are required by GDPR. In fact, those obtrusive "consent" forms are usually violations of GDPR.
The laws are great because every cookie consent form is essentially saying, "we as a company want you to accept a cookie that is unnecessary."
If you don't install unnecessary cookies, you don't need to have a consent form.
2. It clearly explains which cookies it uses in the linked policy page
3. It has an opt-out that is as easy as the opt-in (as required by law)
As is explicitly required by law
There’s a different issue here: lawyers and companies are often concerned that what they deem necessary will be deemed unnecessary when challenged. So, they require cookie consent preemptively to avoid liability in case they get it wrong.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information).
So we can choose what we use because we are informed.
The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.
Some websites have become region-locked, but I found that it's mostly those who cater to American audiences anyways. Perhaps if you travelled to Europe, this was more of a problem for you because you wanted to read the local news back home. For us, back home is here, so local American websites region-locking us out isn't a big inconvenience. They probably only do this if European audiences don't make up much of their readership anyways — they wouldn't want to lose significant ad revenue.
Imagine if companies didn't collect copious amounts of user data and didn't try to use every trick in the book and all known dark patterns to make you give up that data.
"We care about privacy by selling your data to 2765 'partners' and are blaming GDPR for this"
So to me this seems more like the tech-companies and websites being annoying at implementing an easy solution, in order to rebel against the laws and make people angry at it for the inconvenience, then the law itself being bad.
(https://measuredcollective.com/why-your-cookie-banner-is-pro...)
IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
I'm not sure about that - I really like my lifestyle which would be nearly impossible to attain in Europe, but is very attainable for Americans.
I don't see how you're materially better off because you're forced to use foreign companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) instead of having your own.
And the inclusion of so many cryptocurrency "unicorns" in that list is also quite telling.
Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.
Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the other hand, it naturally means having to choose between American and Chinese tech giants.
Which Europe? All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?
> Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.
This is true, because the EU is composed of 20+ different countries, each with different languages, cultures, histories, priorities. It's impossible to remove that boundary.
Each of them can be done online in most countries. All, very few. I think only Estonia comes to mind. (At least one form in that process requires visiting a notary in most of Western Europe.)
The cost of terminating an employee is also a unique risk that European firms have to capitalise for which American start-ups do not. Again, I understand why one would choose this stability. But it comes with a cost.
> It's impossible to remove that boundary
It's absolutely possible by mandating a lingua franca. But it would cause irreparable damage to those cultures, which is why the EU--sensibly, in my opinoin--has chosen to preserve them. But this is a choice and it comes with costs.
[1] A dialect is a language without a flag or a float.
Totally hearsay from me.
If I build something in California, to California's laws, and it becomes a success, I can immediately sell it across the entire rest of the US, and I can expand across the US, using the same employment contracts as in california, same lawyers as in california, etc.
Sure, later on I can save money by making the Delaware version of my product with more cancerous chemicals, or have stricter NDAs in my Florida contracts.
But if I start with California regulations, I can expand to the entire US with a small team of employees.
There's nothing like that in Europe. If my product works in Germany, I'll need a french, spanish, italian translation to sell it in these countries. I can't just hire people from these countries either — they've got different holidays, different work hours, different unions I'll have to deal with. Different tax codes and agencies. And often these are conflicting with one another.
In the US, I need one or two support shifts in one or two languages. In the EU I need 27. In the US, I need one version of the product, with one plug. In the EU, unless I'm okay with 10A and a plastic chassis, I need a dozen different versions.
And even if the product can be used universally, European culture is significantly more diverse than US culture.
Is a phone call at 7am or 8pm more appropriate? Depends on whether you're in Germany or Spain. When a job applicant includes a photo of themselves and lists their parents' degrees and jobs on their own CV, is that appropriate or not? In Germany, that's often expected, in many other regions, a huge no-go.
To be successful in the US, I need to build one company. To be successful in the EU, I need to build a multinational corporation with 27 local branches.
So if you're spending the same effort anyway, expanding to the US with 300 million people is much more profitable than expanding to Germany with 80 million people, or the Netherlands with 20 million people.
Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Geographic_availabilit...
Spotify launched in Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, followed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
After the US expansion, Spotify finally expanded to Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland
That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
You'd never see a US company launching e.g. only for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, expanding to China, and only afterwards become available in the remaining states.
In 2012, after their "expansion" in the US they had five times as many paying users outside the US as in the US.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
> That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
Sure, but they still decided to expand to the US, despite a worse outlook, before expanding to the remaining EU countries. As said, you'd never see a US company do that.
I don't think anyone disagrees about that.
In practice, the way California tech startups work is
1) Break *all* the laws.
2) Get customers
3) Raise capital
4) Profit!
5) Hire lawyers to bring the company into compliance with the laws.
6) Hire lobbyists to bring the laws into compliance with the company.
7) Try to prevent your employees from doing the same thing you did.
But the social differences of the two markets remain.
It wouldn’t be that hard to find people to translate your app and provide support in the major languages in most large European cities.
They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.
It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.
Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6)
[1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former.
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b...
The highest HDI in the world is possessed by dozens of counties in the US. The lowest in the US is on par with... Poland.
No? This is exactly the opposite of why companies exist, they are specifically there to increase the stock price via development of their products. That we get better happiness via rising wealth standards is just a coincidence, albeit a very useful and historically true coincidence. And even then, companies can last quite a while trudging along but it will stop at some point if new innovation is not kept up in the form of new companies (as older companies are usually at capacity for hiring). Look at the youth unemployment rate in many European countries compared to the US.
> Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
Changing a measure does not change the underlying thing it's measuring, no more than I can time travel by changing a clock. Obviously people are talking about what those numbers represent, not the numbers themselves. GDP is a useful enough concept as I mentioned above, one that correlates well to overall citizen wealth. Europeans are generally quite a bit poorer than Americans, even with the addition of the value of free (or rather, "free") healthcare. Tech employees are even more so advantaged, as their health insurance is excellent while they make multiples of their European counterparts. It is not "libertarian" to acknowledge this fact, and it's one of the main reasons you see many European tech people moving to the US and Silicon Valley.
I wouldn't obsess too much with the GDP too, its not as good as a proxy to the important stuff as people are trying to make it. An appendicitis surgery generates much more economic activity in USA than in Europe and Americans don't end with better appendixes.
GDP is a good measure in general, because again, economic activity is correlated with higher outcomes. See China now versus 100 years ago.
Besides, that’s why americans have cars to insulate them from the unwashed masses
Revolut
GoCardless
Shift
Vinted
…
>Revolut
Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.
Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too.
ASML
Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML.
Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though.
Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.
In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole.
But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction.
As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.
It's where the money is there in large numbers for the bang per buck.
Additionally: Natural resources ( middle east) or continents that are not land locked with bad actors ( almost everywhere outside of the US / Canada).
Additionally, 1 language/culture to rule them all has an incredible benefit compared to Europe.
Just my POV fyi. Coming from Belgium, 10 million people and 3 official languages. An European tax number is relatively new too.
Say all you want about "speculative public trading stocks", but I trust public markets' pricing more than private markets[1] or the government[2].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-h...
[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/c...
According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...
Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.
US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".
I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.
>According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...
>Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.
Arguably all of those is more due to government intervention than the companies themselves. Nuclear is impossible to build in the US due to overburdensome regulations, infrastructure/transportation is impossible to build due to NIMBY-friendly planning rules, electric cars are massively subsidized by the Chinese government.
It is the same with your comment, saying that it's only libertarians or those who want low regulation is a strawman, it depends on exactly which type of regulation. China can achieve some things with its big government ways, but it can't achieve everything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement
Chinese regulation is neither too high nor too low. It would be impossible to build a nuclear plant if the government didn't firmly back it, otherwise there are no barriers that it can't ignore.
It's not objective in the least. Stock markets are pure speculation.
It's the European way to roll, the Brits are trying to be a bit more like the Americans but its worlds apart. The American spirit is something else, I wish we had it in Europe but maybe its not compatible at all with the European way of life. So, if you feel adventurous, motivated and ambitious you go to USA to make it big.
Also, it's funny that you mention Goebels. It's ironic even when you repeat the same tropes about the US and how it's supposedly beholden to the capital markets and speculators.
Europe has its giants. Europe usually does not attack its giants. That's why you get megacorps like Maersk or Airbus or Volkswagen. The entire point is that it only attacks other giants (ie, not homegrown giants), hence the focus on legislation that mostly affects them but leaves European corporations mostly unscathed. Or why green legislation curiously doesn't affect German coal extraction (what a coincidence!) that much. Or all the other double standards Europe and some Europeans love so much.
The delusion here is this weird narrative of good, noble Europeans who are somehow only guilty of not being greedy.
Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check.
Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.
The only difference is that we hear a lot more about American success and failures as they are sadly utterly dominant in media presence way beyond their own borders. And Europe seems much more likely to just keep its skeletons hidden in its closet, and tries to talk about them as little as possible.
(For example,see how the German regulators dealt with Wireguard by going after the journalists that sounded the alarm for years. Or how Europeans love to discuss American issues like racism while ignoring how much worse the issue can be in their own backyard. Or the commenters here that recoil at any criticism of the EU and invent some conspiracy where said criticism obviously comes from. I never see any American accuse Europeans of being behind sentiment that is critical of the US.)
Americans love to be very loud about their issues, for better or for worse.
Now that the emperor is fully naked; colonialism never ceased to exist, it just took a different form. The next decade is going to be very interesting, and not in a good way.
It's so much that it literally pushes young people to have a non-risk taking mindset. I have a friend who has some knife sharpening and tooling skills and she's been figuring how to do something with this (some kind of a business). I suggested why not get a garage and get the machinery you want and get started. She listed down all the regulations and how even thinking about it is not allowed.
Starting a business/startups is hard. The EU just adds 10-20 more hurdles to cross to get even with the US startup ecosystem. At least that's been my observation in the few weeks.
Apparently Spaniards like it this way, they live long healthy lives in the system they set up for themselves.
In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.
Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
The US is embracing protectionism because we lost the manufacturing advantage. We lost the advantage because we outsourced our manufacturing to China with the pipe dream that we could keep the "higher end" of the value chain. It's as if we can magically have senior engineers without training junior ones in factories. It's as if the equally ambitious and talented Chinese fellows wouldn't want to climb up the value chain. As a result, we have lost talent. We have lost know-how. We have lost the supply chain. We have lost the intuition of how to optimize or scale manufacturing.
What a shame.
Only for targeted attacks. The Russian way of prosecuting war is still a shower of shells, rockets, and a mob with guns. Drones are retail, Russians do wholesale.
Non-FPV drone flyers can drop 40mm grenades from 100ft and hit a CEP of like a couple feet, and that's with literally four drops of practice and unsophisticated munitions. Untrained RC plane pilots can NOT do that.
That said, I don't think this law has anything to do with war, just simple economic protectionism driven by Skydio and other US drone lobbyists. Getting rid of DJI's excellent $7,000 enterprise drones lets Skydio sell their $15,000 + cloud-subscription enterprise drones instead.
As others point out, DJI can't control what buyers do (a good default).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say DJI won't manufacture drones for offensive war use. This sharply limits their usefulness to the US Military.
Either way, using US Mil as an excuse doesn't make sense for a ban. They won't be buying gear they have reason to mistrust.
As ever, reasons for the ban seem to be evidence-free speculation. Articles that omit this key part of the story aren't serving their readers.
See: chipmakers, telecom tech, aerospace tech, etc.
Is it any different than China wanting data access from U.S companies that attempted to open their business there? I'm not in favor of this ban. I think they should've at least forced DJI to keep the data local before going for an outright ban.
But yes it's obviously better for the US to at least keep the data from going overseas. But that's not really what we've been seeing with this potential ban and tik Tok. It's just outright banning stuff under the same "national security" boogeyman. Again, yes China does the exact same thing but I don't think we want to imitate China out of all nations. The cold war wasn't won by imitating the Soviet Union.
The U.S., Europe, and Japan need to create and enhance a drone industrial base before China invades Taiwan. By the time it has invaded, creating the industrial base will be too late.
Also, China has created DJI through government-sponsored industrial policy, not via open markets.
So like Boeing, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, GE, IBM, etc..
That's nothing new, just 50-100 years behind the west...
We used to spend ludicrous amounts of money to fly spy planes to map hostile countries - now a hostile country has a access to a huge number of drones providing live camera data. These drones are hard to track so the government doesn't always know if they've been flown near sensitive areas. It would be negligent of the government to not try to do something about it.
I've been looking at other commercial-esque options (mainly photogrammetry) and came across Sony's"bring your own DSLR" drone.
Is it? I suspect China has zero regrets in embracing protectionism for social media. The American drone consumer will get squeezed for a few years, until the US develops decent home-grown suppliers in a strategic industry. Hard to think of a better limited use of protectionism tbh.
Worth noting that this is a different kind of protectionism than that sometimes practiced by developing nations to build up their local infrastructure and industry. In both cases you end up with higher domestic prices and lower quality of goods (at least at first) but at least in the case of the developing nation you do actually build up some domestic infrastructure and industry in the meantime. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to do so.)
That's not what's happening here as there is no build-up for us to do. This is just the US government acting on behalf of US companies to shield them from competition so they can soak the domestic market for every cent without interference. There's no way any of this is going to reverse or even slow down the trend of enshittification - in fact, it's going to accelerate it.
This can happen much quicker and easier than you think. Some Chinese delusional leader is going to attack Taiwan and voila, all the import from China will immediately stop at that exact moment.
Actual armed conflict? Total annihilation. Neither side wants this. Its why China will not invade Taiwan, and why the US won't put its boot on the neck of the China.