There's nothing special about EU regulations vis-a-vis other laws. China, Russia and the US also have laws, many of which are also perceived as overly bureaucratic.
Pharma as a whole is still dwarfed by the trillion-dollar US tech giants that the EU has no equivalent of. One standout doesn't change the broader lag.
Russia is currently struggling to make inroads on invading its relatively small neighbor, so I really doubt it would be able to make a bunch of nuclear powers who have a nuclear alliance its "vassal"
I understand that Russia's not fighting just Ukraine but rather Ukraine with massive US and EU assistance but my point still stands.
Ukraine doesn't have that "benefit".
Also the EU pays for countries like Turkey and Libya to prevent refugee ships from coming to their continent. If that means sinking those ships with people on them, well...
That the west is also doing some bad stuff (though really in the EU we're not that bad IMO, most EU countries recognise Palestina now, it's just for a few blocking hard measures against Israel) isn't really a relevant topic in this. We're not going to have boots on the ground in this conflict until an agreement is reached because of the risk of escalation.
OK but Ukraine isn't trying to invade a small country next door and claim a global superpower status.
It's expected they would struggle against a much larger neighbor invading them.
Russia is struggling where nobody expected it to struggle.
People really don't understand war and death, they treat them as some silly sports game. As a result they completely miss the boat not only about military conflicts but also about peace politics.
That's why democracies are so good. Because it's hard to do too stupid things in them persistently.
But say that you were right, and you have to choose between privacy and relevance, if you choose privacy, then once you are entirely economically dependent on Russia (Europe is still paying more in energy money to Russia than in aid to Ukraine) and China — when Europe is a vassal — it won't be able to make its own laws anymore.
I'd rather be free and my data safe than be an economic world leader.
In general, it is hard to compare the US and the EU; we got a head start while the rest of the world was rebuilding itself from WW2. That started up some feedback loops. We can mess up and siphon too much off a loop, destroying it, and still be ahead. They can be setting up loops without benefitting from them yet.
Today, we have fully automated the methods from this manual in the form of LLM Chatbots, which we have for some reason deployed against ourselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual
Overconfidence bias is real.
Knowing your circle of competence is a gift.
Will take them a while to get out from under the US umbrella. But acknowledging the problem is the first step.
Spending on defense is not the same as. Norway is spending more on everything all the time and getting worse outcomes all the time. We spend more on police than ever, even per capita, and crime is up, we spend more on military than ever, and our actual metrics are down. I think with most of Europe the defense spending is the same, I hope I'm wrong, but if you up regulation then you have to spend more to get the same results, and Europe has runaway regulation in addition to people who try to hijack institutions for other purposes.
I got the same impression seeing Trump meet Putin. The US is a vassal state of Russia.
Personally I'm not too worried anyone is going to become a global superpower from generative AI slop.