I'd recommend for Entrepreneurs, just like Scientists now do, to consider Europe as a safe-haven. In the EU the rule of law still matters.
And Europe is most certainly not an exception to this, especially in current times. For instance 65% of EU citizens do not believe that high level corruption is sufficiently pursued. [1] And basically every EU country (outside of Scandiland) has a majority to vast majority who believe that corruption is widespread in their country.
IMO, this is more important.
That was once different, with Berlusconi at the helm in Italy while owning the major TV outlets.
Like most things in life, I suppose it is all relative? Diabetes sucks, but it sure sucks less than cancer.
Of course it would be lovely if there is zero corruption, zero pollution, zero nepotism etc. Which is highly unlikely to happen?
Which brings the question - what is the best country to live, relatively speaking?
And she is just the tip of the iceberg of EU corruption. In general such politicians only get repercusions selectively, and usually only when the political direction changes and they're no longer useful to the establishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://www.politico.eu/article/5-things-to-know-about-ursul...
So in the US you have a corrupt, authoritarian takeover of a society – and in Europe you have well-meaning, but somewhat annoying, regulations that still need some work to function perfectly.
They could've just respected a browser's do-not-track header but chose not to. The EU legislators should've done that too, that is, dictate a standardized method for people to opt in.
Btw, I can dig up 3 dozen of other state institutions with cookie banners, if you so wish?
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/1Fn23uYVxK
The data depicts the exact opposite of what you are saying. As an entrepreneur, you can be “safe” knowing you will have far less chance to succeed in the EU.
If this were true, 15 years would definitely be enough time to show up in some form of data you can cite about the death of American startup culture.
America has jut installed a corrupt autocratic government that has immediately become mired in corruption, graft and defiance of the rule of law.
That will have a negative effect going forward.
American media is just as innovative as the rest of their economy, meaning they are constantly finding ways to prey on your emotions and your eyeballs with stories and content.
In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The US government has been trying to get Europe to invest in its own defense for 50+ years. It's been trying to solve immigration for 50+ years. It's been trying to come to a solution on healthcare for 50+ years. Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Blatantly untrue. America has spent 50 years ensuring europe is reliant on America for security, because America likes the economic benefits that brings.
Uh, Joe, it was a pretty bad scene the last time that happened.
https://www.ft.com/content/ad16ce08-763b-11e9-bbad-7c18c0ea0...
> The US has warned that greater military co-operation between EU countries would be a “dramatic reversal” of three decades of transatlantic defence integration, in the latest sign of the fraying relationship between Washington and Brussels.
That's 2019. When Trump was in power.
> It said that Washington was “deeply concerned” that approval of the rules for the European Defence Fund and the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or Pesco, launched in 2017 to plug gaps in Europe’s military power, would “produce duplication, non-interoperable military systems, diversion of scarce defence resources and unnecessary competition between Nato and the EU”.
At the same time, they complained about Europe not doing enough and shouldering enough of the burden, and I find it plausible that they legitimately did wish Europe would do that, the above paragraph notwithstanding.
Except whenever Europe did try to, America used its soft power to dissuade Europe from this course of action, and instead continue funneling money into American arms manufacturers.
How naive are you? I mean seriously.
Your post is one of the worst faux savvy takes I have seen. A true classic of the genre. The US Government is not an independent thing: it is made up of people. And if you haven't notice the current set of people are doing lots of gigantic, unprecedented things.
You either have a truly massive case of normalcy bias, or you approve of their lawlessnes and are running cover.
But I totally get it, this time is different! The US is in crisis! How could I not see the obvious signs?? It's all over the headlines!
https://reason.com/2025/03/17/allies-cancel-orders-of-f-35s-...
How do you not see that this time is different?
> In reality, the US government is one of the most static, unchanging organizations on the planet.
The changes in that past couple of months are, objectively, enormous disruptions to the previous status quo (of the last 50+ years).
NATO may still exist on paper, but not in the world. The US has estranged almost all of its closest allies that it's had for my entire lifetime — I'm 50 — and in ways that are offensive, threatening, and simultaneously weirdly petty, and which would take a decade or more to repair even in the unlikely event that somehow the current administration was somehow replaced today, and efforts began immediately.
The US president has also opened up avenues for corruption and out-in-the-open bribe-taking (meme coin, banks of hotel rooms, his wife's vanity projects, etc etc etc) that are absolutely unprecedented in US history, of the ilk historically seen more in places like Malaysia, Peru, or the Philippines under Marcos. (Even Silvio Berlusconi was substantially more tactful and less obvious about it.)
At the same time, the administration is performatively flouting the rule-of-law, in ways completely unprecedented in the past 50 years. Openly defying judicial orders. Disappearing people without due process (yes, like all fledgling autocracies, they are starting with the already marginalized; purported gang members, brown-skinned or Asian permanent residents).
The childhood parables like "The Emperor's New Clothes" never actually, like, literally occurred in the America I knew, until this guy. Last time it was just "my crowd was bigger than Obama's" but this time it's "Ukraine started the war" (somehow arranging to be invaded by a murderous dictatorship waging a campaign of rape, torture, and mass child abduction).
> Nothing is going to happen in the next 4 decades let alone the next 4 years.
Way more than "nothing" has already happened. More substantial, self-directed change has already happened in 2-3 months than in Trump's entire first term, or any term of any president, in 50-100 years. I strongly suspect this trend will continue.
As you can no doubt infer, I am not a huge fan of this administration. But neither am I a partisan; I would characterize this administration as worse than any administration, Republican or Democrat, of my lifetime — and by a lot. (I include Trump's first term in that, but only because that static, glacial-pace US government you think still exists did still exist then, so even though the graft and weird dictator-fetish/emulation was present then, too, it didn't have the impact that it's already had in this term.)
Whether you think it is worse or better, I mean, we all have different priorities but it is unarguably very different — and has already made the US government very different — than anything seen in the past 50+ years.
Washington is and always has been corrupt, and political battles no matter how hilariously trivial in context to history have always been "the most important of our lifetimes."
Everything is fine and going to be fine.
Very unlikely, just based on the math. Even less likely now that Trump is overhauling the federal election system.
Sure, the TV and social media will tell you that every year's crisis is "the most important of our lifetimes", and that isn't true. But obviously, it sometimes has to be true, right? I mean, at least once, and probably several times, depending from when to when we are alive.
"Important" is a matter of perspective, and also desired outcome, so YMMV but in my 50+ years of life there have been 3 such events driven by or pertaining to the US government:
- the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War
- response to 9/11 and the aftermath
- 2025 US table-flip of the post-WW2 world order, pursuit of autocracy, and assault on the rule of law
Every government is corrupt; it's a matter of degree, and the reason you can't name a US government as corrupt as this one is because there hasn't been one. Watergate? Iran/Contra? B.J. Clinton? It's not close to the same degree.
Lesser disruptions have included the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007 financial crisis, the internet, AIDS, maybe crack cocaine in the 80s, ... but those are more emergent side effects of human behavior than things done with intent. Things we deal with, not things we do.
Everything is fine? Disagree. Everything is going to be fine? Well, whew, good to know.
But I understood your point to be that everything is the same, and will be the same, broadly speaking, as it's been for the past 5 decades.
But it's not. It's wildly different, already. And even if, as you suggest, the 2026 elections somehow happened without egregious interference from the ruling administration (unlikely), and flipped control of congress to the opposition (maybe) — there's still no way to go back to the "before" times.
I think it's also important to say every public company is corrupt. It's a consequence of size.
Now compare companies by actual revenue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
I omitted the 50 years distinction because, unsurprisingly, the companies in the US are younger.
None of these are actually relevant for founders, however, as even in the US you only have a couple dozen large cap companies, but millions of founders.
What is relevant is the share of employers per capita, as that shows us how many founders actually exist.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
You can’t call a region a “safe haven for entrepreneurs” if all the globally relevant entrepreneurs from that region are dead from old age.
Remember, Europe has double the population of the US. To lag behind so dramatically in the last 50 years is absolutely something to be concerned about.
Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.
If we try to steer the ship back to the topic at hand...here's why we should be concerned that Europe's private sector isn't growing much or innovating much.
It turns out, Europeans entire way of life is funded by taxing the activity of the private sector and redistributing that money to things like healthcare, education, pensions, etc. Innovation (increased productivity) is the only way to reliably grow this pie, and innovation is exclusively the domain of the private sector due to the competitive pressures of markets.
If our private sector is entirely composed of aging industrial-age conglomerates waiting to be disrupted by more dynamic and innovative Chinese competitors (China is rapidly becoming better at the things European industrial companies used to dominate), our entire society is at risk. Militarily, we're sitting ducks, and economically, we are as well.
Modern Europe is economically heading the way of the Soviet Union, with an increasing share of GDP driven via centrally controlled government spending (we're now at over 50% on average in the EU, the Soviets were around 70-85% at peak).
Meanwhile, The Chinese Communist Party has ironically created one of the most dynamic, capitalist systems on the planet. The Chinese supposedly "communist" economy is in fact more market-driven than even the US economy (33% government-driven vs 36% government-driven), and you can see this in the numbers: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
It doesn't take a Phd to understand that a much larger and more unified population in China, with a more unleashed private sector, is going to eat the lunch of the smaller, disjointed micro-economies in Europe. And this doesn't even factor in the rise of industrial investment in the US in recent years.
This is why the rule of law is so important. It's a Maslow's Hierarchy type situation, and if the choice is between creating value in a system which will tax a good proportion of it away (current EU) and creating value in a system which may capriciously confiscate it (current China) then I argue that people are more incentivised in the first case.
Hard to say for sure about Jack Ma, did anything actually happen to him, and if so, was what happened to him fair? He seems better off than me.
China still has many billionaire and millionaire entrepreneurs, so it does appear that they have the concept of markets and capitalism on a leash in such a way that wins for the people of the China, the central government, and the entrepreneurs. Even if some of that isn't perfect, they live in a country of rising prosperity, and I live in a country of 30 years of stagnation where billionaires just bought the government to turn us into an impoverished 3rd world feudal state.
Even if I'm completely wrong about about China and it's all a lie or bubble, my country isn't exactly offering a future.
I say "GDP doesn't matter that much" and you pivot back to how GDP isn't growing and that's a problem.
You say the future will be like the present except that China will replace the USA in the position the USA currently occupies. So what? The present is pretty good.
You say that the USSR is when the government does stuff and that's really bad. That's going to need more evidence.
Funding is a way of keeping track of the things that are done, not a way of doing things. Different economies put more or less importance on the accounting and more or less importance on the actual doing. Facts about funding cannot be conflated with facts about actual doing, especially in economies that are more likely to override the funding if they don't like the way the funding is causing doing. (That's something like what the "government fraction of GDP" is - it's the percentage of times the people didn't like the free market results and chose to override them)
You are able to read this very comment (and write your own) in large part specifically because of public-sector innovation.
But thank god for the US department of Y combinator for taking a risk on all those evil private startups so they'd be able to support this government website.
A big part of it is obviously the relative effects of twentieth century wars, both hot and cold. However, we also need to be aware that in recent decades, the US has just offered a better deal for entrepreneurs than Europe. By that I mean it has been a democratic, rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes.
It still has the last two things, of course. But the first two are also essential, long-term, and if they're eroded then the US might stop looking like a better deal.
On the one hand, studies have suggested that nearly half of highly successful entrepreneurs/founders in the US are immigrants or children of immigrants. As the US becomes more authoritarian and more corrupt, its easy to imagine people choosing to do their new startup from, say, Berlin.
On the other hand, lots of people choose Singapore, too; rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes — but without actual democracy.
I'm aware of my own inherent bias of wanting democracy to be important to people when making this kind of calculation, but I'm not sure that we have any real evidence of that.
I do agree on Singapore, though. It's an interesting case in that the benevolent dictatorship offers most of the advantages of Western democracies in terms of a law-based contract between rulers and the ruled, but with (arguably) a more solid promise of long-term social stability. There's definitely a chance that we all end up in that situation.
> Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.
Please actually have a look at the EU list and click through to the companies. They are all directly linked in Wikipedia. The majority is from the 1980s and younger.
* Volkswagen: Founded on May 28, 1937, as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, later renamed Volkswagenwerk.
* Shell: Formed in April 1907 through the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (established in 1890) and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (founded in 1897).
* TotalEnergies: Established in 1924 as Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP).
* Glencore: Originated as Marc Rich + Co AG in 1974.
* BP: Incorporated on April 14, 1909, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
* Stellantis: Formed on January 17, 2021, from the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles was established through the merger of Fiat S.p.A. (founded July 11, 1899) and Chrysler Group LLC (originally Chrysler Corporation, founded June 6, 1925). PSA Group was Established as Peugeot Société Anonyme in 1966, but its roots trace back to Peugeot's original founding in 1810 as a family industrial business.
* BMW: Traces its origins to Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG, established on March 7, 1916.
* Mercedes-Benz Group: Resulted from the merger of Benz & Cie. (founded in 1883) and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (founded in 1890) in 1926.
* Électricité de France (EDF): Established in 1946 following the nationalization of France's electricity sector.
* Banco Santander: Founded on May 15, 1857, as Banco de Santander.
We could do the full list and then weight by revenue or something but broadly, I think the point that 'pembrook is making is proven.
As an aside, one feature of LLMs that I genuinely do enjoy is the ability to ask for intern-level research like this.
I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).
The internet is borderline unusable without extensions like "I don't care about cookies". And in situations where you care about them, you can not, because something has to record that I've seen the GDPR consent form. Recently, in the name of... who knows what, it's become a pain in the ass to access Google maps from Google search.
The idea that Europe can become a safe haven for entrepreneurs is beyond laughable. The vaunted "rule of law" has degraded into nothing more than fetishizing arbitrary and irrational rules.
Look here: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ > Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies
If you don't use cookies or they're stricly necessary, no need for a banner.
Many websites work perfectly fine without a banner, for example, Hacker News.
Yes, the bottle caps annoy me, but if the beverage companies stuck to the much more recyclable glass bottles we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
Yes, the GDPR popups annoy me, but the law also punishes companies for being creepy exploitative bastards. If they had any morals, we wouldn't have the popups either.
So yes, Europe is sometimes frustrating, but at least it does some government. The US simply doesn't. It's a free-for-all hellscape and I'd much rather be lightly scraped on the face by a little plastic cap that one time a month I need to drink from a disposable plastic bottle than live in...that...
The popups are there for companies that ignore basic data sovereignty of "don't use my personal data until I say you can"
Yes, plastic bottles (and caps) are likely a major environmental disaster.
The alternative to regulation is innovation: force bottle makers to invest x% of their profit or revenue into actual research on plastic recycling or capture.
That's a very easy but hand-wavy thing to say.
How exactly would your suggestion work? Are the companies supposed to share their findings from this forced research with the world? What happens if they happen to discover something that doesn't help with the plastic problem but does improve their bottom line somehow? I can't see this functioning in any way whatsoever.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
It will click no no no no no to all cookie prompts for you, and hide the popup. It's sad that we need to do this, the companies could just not track you at all. But I haven't had a need to manually click these popups for quite a some time now.
Sure, Europe has some red tape that should be removed but don't paint it as some kind of Kafka's universe because it's not that bad. I'm from east side of Iron Curtain and I remember how bad that was.
Also, most of the businesses will do what's needed to be done because the market is big.
Personally, I prefer to live a life in a slightly over regulated place that at least keeps common people in mind than whatever is US turning into.
Cookies stuff is indeed badly made and should be fixed. The should just mandate websites to accept a http header with relevant option (no-cookies, no-advertisment, no-tracking etc.).
Still, it's not the problem of regulator in itself. Rather, companies are taking advantage of the current version of the law because it's favorable to them - they know most people with quickly accept whatever to close the popup.
I am honestly curious. If you are willing to go as far as they have, why not go that relatively tiny extra step?
I think it is a problem with the regulator. The cookie agreement mandate has legitimately fucked up the web for everybody. It's also done it in a way that mostly neutralizes the intended benefit of the law (because everybody just clicks the "fine! stuff your cookies up my arse or whatever, just get on with it!" button).
But a competent regulator must both measure the impacts of their regulations, and take action based on that data. It seems a weird place to stop.
The problem is that every other company thinks they are Google or Meta. So they start overcollecting user data, in hope that one day they will be able to generate revenue from them. So they end up with overcomplicated compliance solutions and GDPR consulting fees, but without any actual use for the data they collect.
I need to record names and address across the European Union. What character encodings are illegal for such fields in a database?
You know that it is easy to remove the plastic locking the caps on? (Just twist them) And to me it is also easy to drink with them locked on, just have it side ways.
So I also do have lots of complaints about the EU, but this ain't it.
Is life so bad in Europe that’s what you have to complain about? Sounds truly like a nightmare - caps attached to bottles? Barbaric.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/whatsapp-signal-eu-chat-contr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
So you replied about the UK specifically. I catered to that, and then reconnected it back to Europe as a whole, which I was originally discussing.
If someone here is derailing the conversation, it isn't me. Especially now that we're discussing the meta and not even the original subject.