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Comment by vjk800 | Hacker News Reader

As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.

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This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.

just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.

Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.

that's why you give credit to investors not just compnaies.

Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.

> just give tax credits

On what? The EU doesn't levy any taxes and has no authority to.

The reason they're paying with grants is because that's what they've got.

Yeah, I feel that a lot of EU projects work that way.

I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.

They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...

I've also known people who have participated in some EU funded research programs. The consensus among the researchers who apply for those funds is that you write whatever bs gets you the funding and then you do whatever research you were going to do anyway.

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