Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> They talk shit about EU innovation and talk up their own dominance, but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated.

I'm waiting for the day when a country stands up and says their strategy is to be unmotivated and commit to outdated approaches. Most of them seem to have huge crowds of motivated and capable people who are then swatted down by the local court system because success makes the powers that be uncomfortable.

I'd feel more optimistic if you had a specific mistake that Europe was going to stop making. Maybe adjustments to tax laws. Motivation doesn't cut it against people like the Americans or the Chinese, there needs to be actual actions taken beyond makerspaces. Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis, that balances out a lot of makerspaces.

View on HN

This whole Europe bashing is becoming a tiring trope. Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML, ASM, ARM, NXP, STM, etc.). What we don't have are hyper-growth companies that mostly profit from vacuuming up your data and selling you ads. Good riddance.

Yes, Europe would be nothing without the US. But the same is true the other way around as well, a few decades of globalism has distributed the production chains across countries.

At any rate, back to the GP's comment. I do see a lot of optimism and the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI. There will be plenty of money floating around.

Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis

Well, not purposefully. But certainly ill-considered. At any rate, the EU is on the renewable energy track, we'll get there, and it will give us energy independence. Which is better than going a few decades back in time and 'drill drill drill baby'.

I just want to point out that this is very much what I expect from Europeans. Motivated, optimistic but explicitly rejecting large profitable companies and cheap energy. The immediate plan is to invest in the military which, notably, generally has negative returns on investment.

> Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML...

visualcapitalist has a wonderful chart I thought of when I saw that: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/semiconductor-production-by...

The chart is interesting, but misses on an important thing: semiconductor production on it's own is complicated, but producing equipment for semiconductor production is the whole new level, that's why ASML.

>Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML, ASM, ARM, NXP, STM, etc.)

Having "a lot of companies" is a meaningless metric on its own when all those European companies combined make less money than Apple on a bad quarter. That's like me saying I do "a lot of deadlifts", without mentioning all those deadlifts are done with an empty barbell. Context makes the difference.

What matters is not how many companies, but how much money are you bringing into the economy and how many well paid jobs you're creating.

EU has a lot of traditional and mediocrely profitable companies that are still going through layoffs: Bosch, Siemens, VW, Audi, etc due to being mostly stuck in stagnating industries that are facing increasing competition from Asia.

>the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI

I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.

Apple won't produce a lot of cutting-edge iPhone chips without ASML lithography. iPhones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips. ASML incidentally had a revenue of 28.26 billion in 2024 (slightly more than e.g. AMD).

I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.

Which kinda shows that you (maybe?) don't understand Europe. Sure, more salary is always great. But many Europeans (also those working in the highly technical industry) prefer vacation days, good health insurance, unemployment benefits, being able to cycle/walk to work over concrete jungles, etc.

I know a lot of tech people who had job offers in the US, but would never want to move there. Some do work remotely for US companies though.

>Apple won't produce a lot of cutting-edge iPhone chips without ASML lithography.

Who cares who makes what widget in the supply chain of whatever product? That doesn't change the fact that Apple makes higher margins on the ASML-TSMC made chips than ASML themselves.

If you insist on being pedantic on the supply chain, then ASML couldn't build those machines without the EUV light sources from Cymer in California. iPhone are also made by Foxconn in China, so what?

Every country has some companies highly specialized in something specific, but what matters at the end of the day is who takes home the biggest slices of the pie from the end product, not who makes how many widgets inside the product.

>Phones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips.

NXP is highly toxic company to work for that just had another wave of layoffs, and also has lower profit margins that Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc. basically all the US semi companies.

So I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here but your chosen examples aren't selling the image of EU tech supremacy. Just look at market cap of EU vs US tech sectors.

EU has much better banking than the US. With VAT ID is paradoxically less fragmented as well. SEPA transactions is something the US can only dream about and will never materialize because Jim Texan's Right Bank ltd. will be against a common payment framework ;D because freedom or some other generic-murikan brainfart. America ban when cannot compete. Culture of guns and oppression.

If only they had some money to put in those banks

We have plenty and have higher quality of life, better healthcare, better social services, vastly better public education, better infrastructure, much lower criminality, much better personal happiness and personal fulfilment, much less stress and live much longer...

Yeah enjoy your money, you will need it when getting older to finance basic services and needs.

We are having less and less money (growth has stalled), which means we will struggle to maintain everything you've mentioned, we already are.

Why are people so catty to each other? I feel like I'm on another site.

Yes thats true, I also feel a bit regret for getting provoked (but never starting out of blue, just responding in similar manners).

Ifs fucking disappointing, Europe and US are by far the best allies and friends (Australia and New Zealand too) on the most important matters - our core values, our respect for democracy etc. France helped you with independence, you helped us defeat fucking nazis ffs.

I hate to see this breakup, because it feels permanent for foreseeable future. And there aren't even good enough reasons. I hate that 1 unstable person can literally drag a billion down down the mud.

I think we agree actually. I’m just tired of seeing European workers getting paid dirt.

We're all fucked and we don't want to admit it. So we squabble. Europe is obviously fucked already and America is getting fucked by the orange ringmaster. The future is bleak.

I live in Europe and moved here from California but so long as you can triple your pay by moving to America Europe will be a laggard. Retire at 40 or work until 70?

Not to mention that millionaires in their thirties and forties are the raw material startups are made of (who else can justify the opportunity cost?) and Europe lacks that, badly. Meanwhile one in fifteen Americans are millionaires. Which group is more likely to have the freedom to take risks?

Agreed, SEPA is objectively better than what the US has.

But it doesn’t matter how easy it is the transfer money if you increasingly don’t have any.

On average, governments in the EU centrally direct roughly 40% more economic activity than the U.S. (and Chinese) government does.

In the short term, this appears more efficient. Allowing markets and decentralized private players to sort things out is messy and aesthetically unpleasing at times (like democracy), but leads to greater growth and innovation overall. The Chinese Communist Party understands this, maybe the Eurocrats will figure this one out after a few more 6-course dinners in Brussels.

Please explain to me how efficient the US health care system is.

That’s right, it’s part of the money handled by public entities in my country, and "decentralized" in the US. Personally I don’t want any of the kind of "growth" the US has experienced in their health sector.

Nothing about US healthcare resembles a free market in any sense of the word.

The US in fact has government healthcare for anyone over 65, anyone under 22, anyone disabled, anyone who has been in the military, and anyone who is poor (essentially half the population).

The other half outside the government system is nothing like a free market either, due to the existence of the first half combined with well-meaning policies that ultimately create the worst kind of adverse incentives.

That said, the US funds basically half of global medical research while Europe funds only a third while having double the population. So again, the EU centralized government system is absolutely more efficient overall, but the messy (only slightly more decentralized) US system drives far more innovation.

What makes you think there is a domestic energy crisis? Spot prices are comparable with neighboring countries: https://www.energyprices.eu/

"Apart from a complacent reliance on Russian gas throughout its period of fast growth, Germany’s energy policy faces a detrimental resistance to nuclear energy, a sluggish transition to green energy, and an incredibly slow bureaucracy, all contributing to the nation’s energy crisis." [1]

[1] https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...

Ah ok, an opinion piece from last year makes you think that.

I will call bullshit over and over again.

Especially companies rested on a relaxed foundation of artifically low energy prices due to lobbyism and dependence on cheap Russian gas.

Both is gone and companies face "true" prices and have to deal with them.

Nevertheless, energy generation from renewables is rising and rising, more and more renewable capacity is added to the grid each week and laws have been loosened to enable a faster transition.

I won't get into what might be considered "artificially low prices" and "true prices", but isn't what you describe an energy crisis, then?

I picked an illustrative article that explains things. Germany has been hit by an energy crisis as a matter of concensus and fact, not opinion. You can easily research the topic if you are actually curious and interested.

The dependence on Russian gas is still prevalent in Germany but it now comes through transit. Consider that there are many machines that use it, which can’t be replaced immediately.

I usually look at things like https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

And you can't use spot prices in the way you're trying to for a few reasons - firstly, those countries will all have interconnects with each other so the prices harmonise - if one country has a whole problem the whole area has a problem (which might be what we can see in the prices, coincidentally). Secondly the overall cost of electricity isn't set on the median day but by what happens on extreme days (dead of winter or height of summer, depending on where in the world you are). Thirdly, a lot of German policy seems to involve taxes applied after the electricity has been sold.

> I usually look at things like https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

This shows per capita energy consumption steadily decreased from ~1985 to 2023 almost back to the level of 1960. Should that indicate an energy crisis? The graphs from the whole EU or the USA don't look much different so I don't see how the chart helps.

What numbers could be looked at to identify that energy crisis?

You seem to have spotted all the salient features, I'm not sure what you want me to add. To the questions - yes and those numbers.

I remain mystified by the people who can look at a 25% drop in energy use, steady relative collapse of power relative to Asia and the gentle collapse of the political fabric and just shrug and say everything is fine. I dunno what the AfD needs to poll at before the German elite admit that maybe they screwed up the last few decades.

The statistics suggest there is a massive problem here.

But then we would have that same massive problem in the USA and the whole of Europe. Is that the case?

Yes. Do you not follow much politics? The US is currently undergoing one of the most spectacular political revolutions since the 1930s. The Overton window includes issues like the collapse of the US Not-An-Empire, invading Canada and deciding what form the civil war is going to take [0]. Driven by a gentleman standing up and shouting "drill baby drill" and talking about how the country needs cheap energy to drive a manufacturing renaissance as one of his central policies. Europe is currently re-arming because war has returned to the continent with around a million dead and escalating - discovering as they do so that service economies don't have an obvious path to stopping troop movements [1]. There is a mirroring political revolt brewing there as we see a large number of rather disgruntled alternative parties start to gain traction pointing out decades of failed policy that suggest living standards have been slipping. Most of the activity is the downstream impacts of energy policy. People are on edge because the real economic pie is not only stagnant, but shrinking and they're figuring it out.

[0] I recommend vicious debate, but physical violence seems to be a possiblity.

[1] And, realistically, if China ever openly supports Russia then Europe will probably lose any fight that eventuates. There is an interesting geopolitical balance forming.

Why would a 25% drop in energy use necessarily indicate an energy crisis?

Isn't it far more likely that a shift in economic composition changed the energy consumption? That shift might be a bad thing, but it's not an energy crisis.

I don't think you have a real point there. I'd draw a parallel with someone getting hit by a car and; someone shouts out "we need an ambulence this is a medical crisis!" and a helpful bystander pipes up to say the issue here is really more of a mechanical nature, nothing went wrong medically - this is all just a result of poor driving skills and is really a driver education crisis.

I mean, ok? Maybe call an ambulance anyway? Or in this case stop with the pressure against building out & using cheap energy.

Compare it with the USA though...

Europe is just a collection of crises - migration, energy, age demographics, productivity.

> I'm waiting for the day when a country stands up and says their strategy is to be unmotivated and commit to outdated approaches.

There's a few examples that come to mind, some better than others — "commit to outdated approaches" is what "conservative" used to mean, Chesterton's Fence etc.

Bureaucracy can be about powerful people capturing institutions to prevent competition. Totally a thing. But it's not the only cause of rules and regulations, some of which are very much written in the blood of those who died by the absence of those rules.

I think taxation changes are unlikely to unlock anything EU-wide (consider what it's like today in China or what it was like in the USA in the decades after WW2); instead, I'd consider the impact of having 24 official languages and needing substantially different legal teams between each nation. Imagine how much harder it would be to do business in the USA if everything in Silicon Valley and Hollywood was in Spanish, everything in Louisiana was French, everything in New York was in Dutch, etc. — innovation is still possible, and common regulations in the form of the EU still help, but these barriers still remain.

Likewise, despite the Euro, there's eight currencies in the EU. Imagine if Texas still used Redbacks; Vermont used Vermont coppers; Pennsylvania, pounds; etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com