I never understand this idea that Europe is somehow in a bad place compared to America. Go ask people, it’s really not.
Achieving Euro-Big-Tech for social media and AI would not improve European's lives either, except for the few oligarchs that would run the equivalent corporate giants there.
I can't help hearing Bender's voice after getting kicked out of the Casino...
Average American is materially wealthier than the average European, with more influence over the latter than the latter has over the former. Go above the bottom 20% or so, and you have vastly higher living standards in most of America compared with most of Europe.
This is obscured by our terrible treatment of the bottom 10%, as well as by the burdens we put on our middle class. But the American middle class is wealthier and, I’d argue, more powerful than most European countries’, the exceptions being in the West and the North of the continent.
You repeated this misinformation in another thread.
Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259 | https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
The study is fascinating on its own without needing to be lied about.
If you ignore the wealth metrics, Europeans live objectively better lives than a majority of Americans.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
Define that “basic quality of life” and map it to the EU. We define our baselines much higher in America than they do in Europe because of course we do, we’re richer per capita.
Quality of life for the bottom I think 50% of Americans is worse than in Europe, almost entirely due to food quality and healthcare. But for most Americans, it’s materially better for most values worth measuring. (For the richest Americans it’s way better, but that isn’t how I believe one measures a society.)
Keep in mind that I’m counting the whole EU. If we restrict ourselves to its richest members, sure, QOL is higher in Switzerland and Norway than in Mississippi.
It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US, more so as upcoming Medicaid cuts occur.
https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-...
Few European social welfare systems unburden their populations of all of these. Those that do are comparable to America’s wealthiest states.
> It is possible to live comfortably in most of Europe for €1000-€1500/month. This is almost impossible for most of the US
It’s also a lot easier to earn more than that wage in America [1][2]. (And you can absolutely live an okay life in NYC if you got your subsidies right on a job that pays ~$20k/y.)
[1] https://kagi.com/images?q=average+monthly+wage+eu+member+map...
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-median-income-by-sta...
Nice. Where can I get that salary in Spain?
The United States provides universal coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA); none of these programs expose citizens to unlimited liability. Under the ACA, annual out-of-pocket costs are capped at about USD 9,200 even when bills exceed USD 1 million. Even in Germany, there is a co-insurance payment; liability is at 1300/year, I think. Given that US coverage is cheaper, this can go either way. It is widely accepted that it is much easier to see a specialist in the US and get appointments than in Germany, so there is a good argument to be made that US health care is better.
Living on EUR 1,500 per month in Germany is feasible only in remote rural areas, and even a net income of EUR 3,000 in provincial cities leaves little discretionary spending. Higher average earnings in the United States, together with easier property acquisition, generally offer superior opportunities for wealth building. Claims to the contrary overlook relevant data on median incomes, benefits, and costs and are pure cope about the declining standard of living in Western and Central Europe for the middle class.
Even upper-middle-class women are more likely to die giving birth in the US than in (almost any part of) Europe.
Middle-class families can be financially ruined by chronic or terminal illnesses within the family.
Below-average income families in the US have heavy financial hurdles trying to get their kids into college.
Religious homeschooling is currently preparing a generation of undereducated American children.
GDP isn't quality of life.
Silicon Valley is financed by China, Japan, and the Middle East
The C-Suite are nearly all European.
The manufacturing is worldwide, but mostly Western. Only one facility in the US, employing about 100-200 people.
As for US-financed... it's a publicly-traded company that makes most of its revenue from selling to big chipmakers, so largely Taiwanese and Japanese "funded".
The rich people in the US have lower life expectancy than the poor people in Europe. People in Europe are also happier than the ones in the US. What those startups will bring?
Source?
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=rich%20people%20in%20the%...
“Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.”
The wealthiest 25% of Americans have mortality similar to the poorest 25% in Northern and Western Europe. And the wealthiest 25% of Europeans as a whole outlive the wealthiest 25% of Americans.
The richest Americans, where I mean top 1 to 5%, on the other hand, match with the richest Europeans because of course we do, we’re accessing the same global pool of health services. But there is zero evidence rich Americans are outlived by poor Europeans, even if we restrict ourselves to its wealth West and North.
Compared with EU Europeans, yes. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that similarly-wealthy Europeans are healthier than their American counterparts.
> we should not be including them for comparison of majority outcomes
OP made a statement about the rich in America doing worse than the poor in Europe.
It doesn't matter if your salaries are higher when your healthcare it's subpar (and more expensive) and tons of food additives are hazardous.
For one thing I'm interested in quality of life for my kids, not only mine. The world is a big race: those who refuse to run become irrelevant and disappear.
Linux came from Europe. A lot of open source does, see blender.
I know VC money is sexy but does it add real value
In no small part because I utterly despise the VC fueled hustle culture winner takes all disruptive bullshit from the US. I don't want to be anywhere near that particular toxic wasteland.
I don't work for it, I just post shit here.
That is a strange way to dismiss the innovation from the country that brought to market:
- the light bulb
- the mass produced car
- the airplane
- the artificial heart
- the gold standard in Covid vaccines
- the personal computer
- the smartphone
- the internet
- GPS
- MRIs
- consumer grade LLMs
- the world’s largest public cloud providers
- TCP/IP and BGP
- the web browser
- the most popular search, social media, and e-commerce companies in the world
I know it feels good to say “but did they really make human kind better off?” and dismiss American innovation as another goofy VC-funded cash grab iPhone app; but the US is responsible for technology that has made the world better many times over.
This mentality is why Europe will never replicate the success of the US technology sector.
inb4 “but we don’t want that success!”
No country has a monopoly on innovation, you're being absolutely ridiculous
Eta: the tape recorder was invented in Europe. The compact cassette and compact disc were developed by Phillips to unimaginable commercial success. I'll keep coming back as i think of more :)
My American ex said she had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day at school. Apparently this is law in most states. I suspect it might be related.
I mean the comment i replied to basically comes across as a 11 year old who just aced their last history exam for the year.
It's just tragic that most Americans grow into adults without ever learning anything more about the rest of the world, or realizing how narrow and biased their baseline education was
What a shame
Huh? Wasn't that BioNTech, a german company?
Even 9front with namespaces has tons of European collaboration.
English.
Democracy.
The Enlightenment.
Modern Science.
Modern Religions.
Modern Medicine.
The School System we are all still using today.
The Industrial Revolution.
The Share Market.
Modern Corporations.
The modern legal system.
etc. etc. etc.
One of these things is not like the others...
The times of Bell Labs, C, Unix, Lisp/MIT machines... are long gone.
USA embraced capitalism and is geared towards proving concepts FAST and enabling networking. I love that about USA and I miss that in Europe, when it comes to IT/Tech sector in particular.
I'm not aware if Europe produced anything of significance in the past 30 years, we're lagging heavily behind USA/China and that's a fact. One could argue that Linus Torvalds is European hence Linux === European but I won't resort to such petty claims.
We produced very little value. We're having issues due to language discrepancy. Even though a lot of people speak English, it's often the case that we Europeans aren't able to communicate as well using English as we can in our native tongue. The lack of unified language is visible. The diversity in culture drives people to favor their own, we're bad at teamplay (this is from my personal experience and I am guilty of this).
There's many valuable lessons we could have learned from USA but we failed to apply them. We have various freely available systems that are great at, say, education - but education means nothing when it's difficult to apply it once people are done with it.
I worked with plenty of people from USA and I had huge prejudices towards them, in terms of "they talk a lot" or "they are not as competent, they are really slow when it comes to pumping out code" but I learned I was wrong to the point it's not funny. If anything, USA is really good at starting and pushing projects out that actually work.
Ultimately, do we even have a microchip factory (we might, but I'm unaware of it)?
Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to explain my POV and agree with you.
Personally, I'd love to see movement in EU's tech sector. We're 30 years behind USA in tech. I won't touch upon quality of life or similar topics because I'm interested in exploring technology.
As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
> As an American, It is really hard to understand how this can be for a country with such an incredible intellectual and engineering tradition.
As a German, I would claim that getting Germans on a hype train is incredibly hard.
I also cannot see anything that is "intellectual" about these LLMs. To me, the whole LLM scene is rather like "rich alpha tech bros are tech-broing; a lot of sycophants in the inner circle of these tech bros attempts to use the dictate of the moment to become rich fast; and a lot of real or feign AI fanbois attempts to rid the hype wave to make easy money".
With the absorption of entire markets the sober European view should be that the US approach was correct. Throw things at the wall until you have a wall full of things that stick. It looked pretty stupid until it didn't.
This approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste ...
I am aware of that, and this is actually my point:
Since you don't know what will work, you can easily have a long phase of "duds" in your investments until you get one big hit. If you don't have a huge mount of additional capital lying around, as an investor you will go bust during such a long "starvation period".
That is why I wrote that this kind of investment approach only works if you have an insane amount of capital to waste.
With an insane amount of capital you do get a more reliable % of success but with a single lottery ticket you still have odds to win.
If you are not in the game at all you certainly wont.
1. Europe has no large data centers. It has no such datacenters because the Green movement is much more powerful in Europe than in America, and they have systematically blocked the expansion of gas turbine power in favor of over-builds of renewables. The result is Germany having the most expensive electricity in the world. It just isn't affordable to train an LLM in the EU. Notice how Elon Musk has imported gas turbines from around the world to power the xAI datacenter; that just wouldn't be allowed in the EU.
But, still, a German company could do so using US datacenters. Mistral in France has probably done it this way. But then you hit:
2. Copyright laws in Europe are more restrictive. Even in the US it's very unclear whether training an LLM on copyrighted works is actually legal, but the US courts are fairly efficient and US law has the concept of fair use, which is flexible enough to give them the leeway to decide it's legal. In Europe the fair use equivalents are either more restrictive or don't exist at all, and courts follow the local culture of being much less business friendly, so it's much riskier to attempt this. The EU as a set of institutions is much more in hoc to the press than people realize, and MUCH more so than US administrations are. They regularly side with copyright holders over tech companies in disputes in a mostly successful attempt to curry positive PR for the EU project.
It won't win me any friends on HN but both of these factors boil down to a lack of a strong Republican Party equivalent in Europe. I don't think Americans appreciate the extent to which their economic success is dependent on the strength of the Republicans, and they really should. If American conservatism collapsed or was taken over by the left, as has happened in parts of Europe, you'd be seeing the EU-ification of America very quickly.
Companies do well there, but only some people do. This difference is clear and large even when ignoring the homeless population. Higher-ups do extremely well, tech jobs are cushy, but people doing the more hands-on work tend to get the shorter end of the straw staff with low pay and long commutes.
I'd assume that general health or happiness would be much more important than the number of startups.
There are and have been plenty of startups throughout Europe, and the typical story is that they get bought by American companies and eye-watering amounts of VC capital.
Not saying that's the only issue; it's also true that getting meaningful funding is excruciatingly difficult in much of Europe. However, at the same time US companies have this "one little trick" to get a global reach: enormous huge stacks of cash.
I have seen no evidence that European states would’ve developed the comfortable pace of work, welfare state, retirement and vacation systems independent of their amassed colonial wealth.
Not to mention countries like Poland and other soviet bloc nations that were the ones getting occupied, not the ones doing the occupying until VERY recently? And in saying "Europe", you're also including the non-EU Balkan states, Switzerland, the Nordics, Ukraine, Russia and depending on how you decide to split things, even Turkey?
Yet despite the MAJORITY of the nations here not being colonizers or having colonial histories, they all have all the comforts you mention in your comment, with things getting steadily better for the average Joe.
And what precisely did the glorious US manage to get with all their wealth, power and splendour, where people live in fear of ever having to go to a doctor's office lest they be indebted for the rest of their lives? Where you can get fired on the schizophrenic whims of the C-levels demanding the stones be squeezed for every last drop of blood?
You're not going to get some defense of the US here, there's well known connections between America's tryst with Slavery and Jim Crow and its dysfunctional government services.
But I'd love to see a Venn diagram of countries that "Actually Colonized" (tm) and countries with really generous welfare systems/labor protections. I am guessing it'll be close to a single circle w/ some countries that are actually just a bunch of banks in a trench coat, sitting on the outside (looking at you Switzerland).
Letting most of your population twiddle your thumbs all summer without any consequences means you're mortgaging some sort of early lead, that's really all it is. Europeans don't have some magic productivity pill for the rest of the year that keeps you ahead of the curve.
What do you think the unemployment rate actually is in European countries?
Having a social safety net doesn't make most people want to loaf around. I get that there's a massive amount of propaganda on this point in the US, but like, it doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
> I'd love to see a Venn diagram of countries that "Actually Colonized" (tm) and countries with really generous welfare systems/labor protections.
I encourage you to try diagramming that and see how it goes. Don't forget to include Ireland and the Nordics ;) And always remember that correlation isn't causation.
While you're at it, maybe have a look at the research on inequality, or the benefits of social safety nets.
The idea that a business could be considered successful by just providing a living wage for its owners and employees or contributing to the community is not a consideration.
People in this country see a single person startup making a few million dollars to be a greater success story than providing for the lives and well being of 20 employees for a decade.
I’m really, really starting to question how much of an Ultimate Flex “good for companies” is, when it comes at the expense of: standard of living, worker’s rights, privacy, a safety net, and everything else America lacks due to its single minded focus on being “good for business.”
Capitalists (the class, and the ideological faction devoted to promoting the interests of that class.)
Me, who enjoys higher salaries, more jobs, better benefits, better healthcare, better schools, more diversity, and higher purchasing power.
Also it's more fun to work for US tech companies than Nokia :).
The system is a joke. It takes forever to get MRI appointments. Everything has so much bureaucracy. You fill out forms and make calls and get letters and all this bullshit.
Meanwhile, I can just book stuff online instantly now that I live in europe.
And it's visible in outcomes, too. Life expectancy in the EU is around 5 years higher than in the US.
> You fill out forms and make calls and get letters and all this bullshit.
No I don't? I log into my hospital health system, click a button to schedule a specialist, pick a time, and then submit.
"In 2023, the average waiting time was lowest in the U.S. and Switzerland (28 days), while it was highest in Spain (77 days) and France (63 days)." - https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-f...
> Meanwhile, I can just book stuff online instantly now that I live in europe.
That's how it works here too, lol. Are you comparing 1980s US vs 2020s Europe??? You know we have computers here in the US now...
> the system is absolutely drastically worse than other developed countries
I can see my GP same day, and a specialist within a week, for $0. It really can't get any better for me...
That means having the money...
Wait until you hear about things like the Mayo Clinic Executive Health Program: https://www.mayoclinic.org/departments-centers/mayo-clinic-e...
You can spend three days in a luxury suite at the #1 ranked hospital in the world, while their top docs screen you for everything. You literally have full access to whatever the Mayo Clinic offers.
> I suppose in that narrow case, US health care may be good.
Yes, that narrow case of millions of tech workers like myself.
You're not gonna believe this, but you are paying for it. Every dime your employer spends on taxes is one dime they're not paying you in cash.
Wow, really?