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Comment by kredd | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. Unless I misunderstood your point it sounds like, what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives. Isn't that the entire point of life? I can see why general population might support it, while us techies would be pushing for deregulation and less of work-life balance. So my understanding of these articles is "it might be bad in a long term!", but Europe is still big enough market for all these companies eventually bend over backwards to get access to it.

Again, really no skin in the game, as I don't live there and I only have limited amount of perspective, which comes from my European resident non-techie friends.

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I think a lot of the complaining on HN comes from the engineers themselves. "Ugh," they say, "We have to write all of this boring code to comply with regulations, rather than writing exciting features!" I see it a little differently. As someone who's spent a good part of the last 6-8 years working on GDPR and DMA compliance projects, the way I look at it is: "We are finally making our product better for users, working on privacy improvements that our companies have opposed until it was forced on them." EU-led regulation has been a great engineering opportunity and a product forcing-function.

Europe is an amazing place, which is why I moved here in the first place. But for techies, it can be pretty challenging. The issue isn't with the techies themselves, though. The problem is that the environment here holds back big tech, making Europe heavily dependent on the US.

The mistake is making oneself dependent on big tech in the first place.

Comfortable stagnation is not a stable state for a society.

> what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives

Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.

how is europe's economy terrible? by what metric? considering that the EU still has a very large part of the global economy, especially compared to its population and size.

Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies.

People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making something very high end which solves a specific problem, no matter if it is sexy or not.

Maybe terrible is too strong but the trajectory is not great: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/07/25/germanys-busine...?

well, lets not forget what happened since the start of 2022...

the invasion of ukraine has a major impact on the european economy, but that has very little to do with the article in question...

40 years ago Europe (without former Warsaw Pact countries) accounted for 25% of global trade. These days it's ~12% and dropping. Since 2008 there is no meaningful GDP growth (1-2%) whereas US and China exploded in that time. India is on track to surpass EU by 2050. All that will be left is a large open-air museum.

India, a country with 1.4 billion people and growing, overtaking the EU with 0.44 billion people in 26 years (!) isn’t the flex you think it is.

It's not about flexing, it's about the diminishing importance of EU in the world. It doesn't matter if EU still has a better GDP PPP if India ends up with a bigger GDP overall as you are only as important as you have in the bank internationally. Competing for resources would then flip in favor of India; EU burning bridges with Russia sending it to China's orbit will likely accelerate the process as well.

Of course the influence of the EU will diminish over time, because they are currently very strong. It would be very weird if the Asian countries wouldn’t catch up, which automatically lets the EU have a smaller proportion of global trade. Guess what, at some point, India and china will also overtake the US. Is that shocking to you? That’s just what happens when absolutely massive countries catch up to everyone else.

US has fewer inhabitants than EU (342M vs 449M) yet keeps up with China economically in absolute terms.

And you think they will manage to keep up in the future? You don’t think china will be 1.5x the US in 26 years?

The point is that since 2008 US was able to keep up with rapidly expanding China whereas EU stood still. We are discussing future of EU here.

In what way was the US able to keep up with china? The GDP chart google shows has a factor of 3.2 for 2008 and 1.4 for 2022 when comparing the US to china. If you seriously think the EU falling back behind china is a EU problem, I don’t know what to tell you. It might happen at a different speed but it’s only a matter of time before china takes over the US.

Yeah, but the pie did not remain the same and Europe's slice shrunk. Some parts of the pie just grew faster. It doesn't mean Europe went backwards

Now imagine we are talking about companies: "We grew just our competitors grew 4x as much as we did." - that would be a prime candidate for an acquisition or being labeled a "zombie company" in a few years due to exponential growth effects.

That’s exactly what happens to every large company. At some point, growth is limited. You think google grows as fast as Kagi? Should google be concerned because kagi managed to 10x their users in the past year (made up figure, you get the point) and they didn’t?

You have a weird definition of “terrible”. How much EU taxes are being paid by Apple, Meta, Google, etc?

We pay more than enough taxes in Europe.

We do, but Apple, Meta, and Google don't.

I thought that tech companies working in Europe take advantage of Irish/Dutch laws and skip taxes almost entirely. Is that outdated?

Poorer is debatable. Ppl in eu usually can afford going to a hospital or going to school/uni- for us it isn't that straightforward

And saying eventually everyone will cater to tourism is peak us ignorance. The tourism sector in eu is fairly small, even in the (over) touristic italy. Just the fact you mentioned this leads me to think you are an ignorant american that likes how people suffer from being poor and being exploited by big corpos...

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