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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I'm not understanding, as an European who's been part of multiple startups how's that supposed to boost growth.

There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).

In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans.

Sure, there is an attached cost in having your terms reviewed by a proper lawyer and documenting the entire list of cookie providers, but that's basically where it ends. It's really minimal effort and cost, we talking in the low single digits for the review, and few hours of engineering time.

The biggest issues in European growth are others:

- focus on being an export economy while neglecting the internal market.

- bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in physical goods (our economy's backbone) nor services which doesn't allow national startups to scale at European level

- very conservative and risk-adverse mentality. Young people in college can't wait to graduate and find the best paying lowest effort stable job. That's not a problem if it involves a majority of graduates, I imagine all world is like that, but you do have an immense problem if you have 1% or 3% or 10% of wannabe entrepreneurs.

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I would go farther. Privacy laws seem like an excellent way to tighten the internal European market and develop homegrown competitors, which (one might argue) Europe really needs. If Europe is loosening up those laws, does that help Europe? Or does it help Meta and Google and Microsoft?

This argument in favor of protectionist industrial policy is almost universally opposed by most modern economists, for a good reason.

We wouldn't be banning any law abiding company from operating.

Nations don’t outsource critical national security industries even though economists might say that’s more efficient. The question is whether they should outsource critical tech infrastructure to huge quasi-monopolistic US firms that can turn it off or abuse European data at will. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I have to imagine it’s a worthwhile debate. The data we have cuts both ways: China applied protectionist policies to its own Internet companies, and it’s hard to argue that this has been economically devastating for them.

>China applied protectionist policies to its own Internet companies, and it’s hard to argue that this has been economically devastating for them.

China has 1.4 billion people in one country while the combined population of Europe is around half of that, so that's one difference.

But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism. To the Chinese state, protecting Chinese citizens from harmful things (like knowing full details about atrocities perpetrated by their government, or organizing to criticize the government) outweighs other concerns.

Disagree. China has had incredible benefits from its own social media and commerce platform growth.

Yeah, the US is missing out.

But the US could have benefitted from China's social media and commerce platforms and China could have benefitted from the US's. That's my point.

I am no economist or even that economics-knowledgeable and maybe I'm wrong and maybe China's protectionism is better somehow, but from everything I know or at least from every trope and meme I've ingested, free global commerce eventually leads to better outcomes for all parties.

What would have happened is the US platforms would have moved into China and stifled the competition.

As we can see everywhere else.

This wouldn’t even be good for the US, just good for the shareholders of these companies.

Maybe, maybe not.

China is a decade ahead of the rest of the world in different kind of use cases (think their super apps or payments).

TikTok is the most popular social media app out there, and it's chinese.

They are also tremendously competitive in AI despite all the limitations they encounter.

Honestly I think that the last century should be a clear statement that protectionism, sanctions and closeness is a failure whose bills are paid by tax payers.

We've been bailing out and protecting non competitive industries (which have further incentives *not* to invest due to protectionism they benefit from) for decades.

When Trump 1 put high taxes on dishwashers and house appliances it hasn't really pushed US companies to do better, it just allowed them to raise the prices and do very little.

But the fact that some countries play dirty (see China and their industrial espionage and lack of respect of patents and intellectual property), while others are obsessed with being #1 even if it means pursuing that via bullying methods have pushed us in this very negative scenario I don't see how can we leave us behind unless we get a new generation of brighter leaders.

Sadly, that's not how you win consensus and elections today.

> But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism.

I really don't see how Chinese tech companies would have benefited from receiving the diapers.com treatment.

> But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism.

How would china be better off? All their tech companies would have been bought out by larger foreign tech companies. Kinda like what happened to many european tech companies.

> To the Chinese state, protecting Chinese citizens from harmful things (like knowing full details about atrocities perpetrated by their government, or organizing to criticize the government) outweighs other concerns.

Yeah that's what the chinese state is worried about /s. Not the neverending misinformation, disinformation and propaganda directed against it.. When china does it, it's "authoritarianism". When "the west" does it, it's fighting against misinformation.

>All their tech companies would have been bought out by larger foreign tech companies.

That's not necessarily true.

>When china does it, it's "authoritarianism". When "the west" does it, it's fighting against misinformation.

What's the "it", here?

>Not the neverending misinformation, disinformation and propaganda directed against it.

Talk to any pro-democracy Chinese citizen and I think they will probably agree with me.

> That's not necessarily true.

Yes it is. Why wouldn't larger foreign tech companies gobble up smaller companies if they were allowed to.

> What's the "it", here?

"Protecting" the population against disinformation. "It" was fairly obvious.

> Talk to any pro-democracy Chinese citizen and I think they will probably agree with me.

You mean the "pro-democracy" plants funded by the US, europe, etc. Good one. The ones that always seem to flee to germany, britain, us, etc after each crackdown? You talking about those ones.

Imagine if china was funding "pro-communism 'citizens'" trying to undermine political systems all over europe and the US.

Define "better off". Companies like Meta and Google are enormous behemoths that make their money through advertising. One advantage of their size is that they have lower costs, but a greater advantage is that they have much larger market power: they can purchase competitors and demand higher rents for advertising space. Is society genuinely better off from this kind of concentrated market advantage? One might argue that there are different kinds of 'efficiency' at play here, and not all of them are in society's interest.

This would allow direct, constant competition between companies like Meta/Google and their Chinese counterparts. Americans could choose to use Chinese providers when they're outcompeting the American behemoths, and vice versa. We see that China's companies are very competitive and innovative. Both American and Chinese citizens might be better off if they all could freely choose from different global options.

But that's not at all how things have worked out, even here within the US. Waze does not compete with Google Maps. WhatsApp and Instagram do compete with Facebook, each of these companies were simply acquired. We've learned that new social media companies have a very hard time spinning up the network effects required to make them prominent, and in the rare cases they do, they quickly get bought out or their products cloned by incumbents. There's an excellent chance this would have happened in China without state intervention.

The most prominent recent exception to this rule is TikTok, which spun out of an already-successful Chinese tech company. Its owners resisted acquisition until legislation forced their hand.

"Economists" also love free trade, and we have learned in the last 10 years that it has become harmful to people at middle class and below. Even if GDP does grow, the benefits are not distributed evenly.

Which would make sense when everyone is part of open markets.

People are opting for the less efficient options, on purpose now. We live in an era where America is imposing tariffs.

Yes, and the reasons why they do so has little to do with why this law exists.

A law whose purpose is protectionism is bad. It invites stagnation, pointless inefficiency, and retaliation.

A law whose side effect is a bit of protectionism has none of these problems.

Something that is good for a country as a whole isn't necessarily good for the economy. On the flip side, being good for the economy isn't necessarily good for the population of a country.

While I agree with you 100%, I think most modern economists fail to account for bad actors.

If a situation was "China is producing X and having its taxpayers subsidize cars, steel, etc" then it would be their loss and our advantage. We get great products they get pieces of paper. I couldn't care less.

But considering that the real goal of those bad actors is to annihilate the competition and then pull the rug this is ultimately a bad idea.

Especially when those bad actors, at the same time, do their best at playing dirty and ignoring intellectual property.

I couldn't care less if Europe didn't have a shipping industry, in fact protectionism of it has failed miserably in Europe, and made our yards less, not more competitive. So yes, in that world I agree.

But in a world where an elected (or unelected) government, can suddenly blackmail you or create such an immense strain on your economy (as Russia did with Europe) this is not really like that. And suddenly you realize you should've paid way more, but invested way earlier in diversifying energy-wise.

In an ideal market I'd be 100% with you, in the real world, it's really neither black nor white.

Europe has a shitload of homegrown competitors. The problem is that users here in Europe either goes for a national service or for an US service. They don't look up what their EU neighbor has to offer. In fact, most don't bother translating their services to appeal to the entire EU market.

If you live in country X, you will only ever learn about services from country X or from the US. No one here knows what goes on in neighboring countries.

It's easy to think the EU is like the USA, but it's not, it is still separate sovereign countries with their own language and culture.

I never really looked at it that way, but I think you're right. Although, non-European-owned companies aren't necessarily incentivized to look towards European companies. Looking towards your European neighbors mostly comes down to logistical situations. In those sectors, multilingual services are more common.

I think there's something like 24 national languages in the EU. I can hardly blame hetzner for not translating their services to say polish and think it's entirely the wrong approach anyway.

It's really true language is a big barrier but honestly the solution cannot be for every single company to offer services in 20 languages. It can't be. English must be adopted.

    > English must be adopted.

I cringe when I read this. Why not German? There are more native German speakers than any other language in the EU. Also, in the age of LLMs, translating (on a best effort basis) to (at least) 24 different languages is trivial.

That sounds like a very German approach to the whole thing.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... and look at the total speakers vs. native speakers.

Now it should be clear why one is better than the other. The shared language of most is English, so you have the least amount of "extra learning" required.

Also, the number for German is generous in that it includes people that speak wildly "incompatible" dialects and accents. While people in Bavaria technically speak "German" and having them talk to other people that speak "German" (with various dialects) is easier than asking either to speak English as their primary language, that doesn't really solve the problem of even intra-German language rivalry.

Of course one thing will unite Bavarian and Saxon and Swiss and Austrian German and other highly accented/dialectic German speakers: They'd rather speak "German" (and deal with weird pronunciation/words) than English as an official language ;)

I have asked multiple native German speakers about the "linguistic distance" between various styles within the Federal Republic of Germany. It is completely overstated that people don't understand each other or are "annoyed". All German children grow up learning standard German in schools. Yes, they may speak a different at home and in the community, but they are all fluent in standard German. I am pretty sure most standard German speakers can communicate clearly with all of Germany, most of Austria... and Switzerland is a roll of the dice. Still, anyone in the German-speaking half of Switzerland that is university educated will surely speak standard German. Again, they may speak Schweizer Deutsch with their family and friends, but can also speak standard German, especially in a business setting.

That is basically what I was saying. The "air quotes" were meant to actually be read.

What unites them is the German language when there is an outside "threat": English.

Otherwise there's squabble and language is part of it.

It didn't work out well the first couple of times they tried it.

Why work work with native language rather than spoken? According to wikipedia less than 20% of the EU is a native German speaker while 47% speak English. When talking about technical people who may be looking into something like Hetzner it is probably higher than 47%.

> Why not German?

Are there more distinct markets in the EU/EEC where adopting german would give you a quantifiable economic and/or competitive advantage over adopting english?

Secondly it forces European companies to all have a 'USP' for high privacy which is useful when selling abroad as well. Becoming a byword for privacy and therefore trust/security is absolutely not a bad thing and comes at very low cost.

Europe has a lot of problems that result in low ambition and growth, privacy law isn't one of them.

IMO the biggest barrier is internal mobility. The European silicon valley never happened, because people don't want to move around. The biggest single barrier is language. I'm Irish, and young Irish people often emigrate (way more than in other countries). When I look at where my college classmates ended up, it's mostly America or the UK. We also emigrate a lot to Australia and New Zealand. In other words, we only really emigrate to English speaking countries.

Almost nobody goes to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. The mainstays of the European economy. Let alone central or eastern Europe. But if you're a young talented engineer in the middle of nowhere usa, you can just easily move to the bay area without any issue. That cultural unity IMO is America's biggest strength, and the lack of it is Europe's biggest weakness.

Note: I've lived in Ireland, the Czech Republic, and France, so I know first hand how hard it is to move inside Europe, and I understand why people don't do it.

> bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in physical goods (our economy's backbone) nor services which doesn't allow national startups to scale at European level

I guess you have been part of software startups and you severely underestimate the bureaucracy that is involved in physical companies nowadays. Farmers, fishermen, factory-owners, and other small to medium size companies all have severe difficulties with ever increasing regulations. By itself the regulations are not always bad, but usually it takes way too long to get through the system which makes it hard to compete with, for example, China.

How am I underestimating it when it's literally in the quote you provided?

> it hard to compete with, for example, China.

What exactly is europe competing against china on? Isn't europe's competition the US?

Cars

Aren't most of the foreign cars in europe american? Or maybe japanese?

I believe "most" is true today. However, my point is about change. Ten years ago, there were probably less than (finger in the air!) 10,000 Chinese cars in all of Europe. Now there are millions. This is the change -- fewer American, Korean, and Japanese cars.

Germany used to sell their cars worldwide but is having a hard time competing against Chinese electric cars

> an European

European starts with a vowel in spelling, but actually phonerically begins with a consonant, /j/, so it doesn't trigger the "an" thing.

Similarly some spellings start with a consonant but have vowels (like acronyms, "an SSRI", the name of the letter S, "ess", begins with a vowel)

More to the point I agree with what you're saying. This seems like lazy attribution of cause that is so common in American business and politics. "Of course deregulation will boost growth!" Why? Because of religious beliefs about deregulation boosting growth.

Maybe they say it as an "ew" diphthong instead? As an ESL, that makes sense to me.

> European starts with a vowel in spelling, but actually phonerically begins with a consonant

Ah makes sense.

In my head it's never "you"ropean, but "ew" uropean as I'm not a native english speaker and phonetically it's a consonant in english only. In greek, slavic languages, german or latin-derived it's always "ew".

That's pretty cool. I'm from the Southeast US (redneck), and it sounds like "Yur-uh-pee-in"

Really depends on where you're from.

OP already mentioned in his area it's phonetically mostly "ew".

I'd say a lot of germanic areas also do something I'd describe as "oi". That'd also make one inclined to use an "an" when speaking.

I speak other languages where it starts with an E sound. But I'm not aware of any native English speaking place where it doesn't have /j/ in English.

> In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans.

This decision is in response to lobbying from these actors (and their new friend in the white house). It is not supposed to benefit you.

Here's my take, as a Romanian developer (since 2004ish).

One day I got a letter from the national authority regarding personal data where I was asked to reply to 15 questions regarding a personal project of mine, invoking the GDPR. The sanctions for not complying within 5 days was an incremental fine of 600 euros PER DAY, until I complied. This letter was directed to me as a natural person (not even my company).

Another story: I had a publishing website with some ads on it. The moment full GDPR went into effect, some years ago, revenue instantly dropped by 30% because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB). Most of the "approved" cookie banners are insanely overengineered nonsense and almost all of them cost a lot of money. And they kill your performance metrics. And when I finally gave in and implemented one of those, revenues dropped even more because I was losing readers who just quit without consenting at all.

Third and final anecdote: at one point I was contracted by a Romanian DTH television company who mostly operated with prepaid customers. According to GDPR, they were supposed to anonymize data they no longer needed, but because their clients were seasonal or less predictable, that turned out to be ridiculously hard. Their legal department, together with external contractors such as us ended up spending months to adjust their systems to conform to GDPR, and the result was their losing business and time, while being unable to properly serve older customers because they could no longer identify them.

So in my opinion, despite originally being well intended, GDPR opened a huge can of worms, created a lot of issues and made everyone's life harder on the internet, for no real benefit. On the contrary, the large companies could afford the legal counseling that they needed, but the smaller ones were hit hardest.

Did you consider running non-tracking ads? Of course not because even after the 30% drop, the spyware still pays more, right? But destroying websites with spyware is literally what the law is for - the people have voted to nuke your website from orbit.

> because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB)

There's your mistake. It's not approved. The EU literally sued them for coming up the bullshit banner: https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-eu-court-finds-widely-empl...

It's in the name: IAB stands for Interactive Advertising Bureau. They couldn't give two shits about your site. All they care is about testing the limits of the law to get their hands on any and all user data.

Their banners originally were explicitly illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come (this describes mostly OneTrust banners, but IAB's banners were the same) and https://noyb.eu/en/say-no-cookies-yet-see-your-privacy-crumb... (IAB's banner turned your "no to tracking" into "yes to tracking")

> So in my opinion, despite originally being well intended, GDPR opened a huge can of worms, created a lot of issues and made everyone's life harder on the internet, for no real benefit.

Translation: shitty businesses made life of everyone harder on the internet and blamed regulations for their own behaviour. From IAB (and OneTrust and Admiral and other scummy greedy leeches') banners to idiots at companies who assume that data on their customers is no longer needed to ... provide services to those same customers.

Yes, it exposed a can of worms. Worms decided its their god-given right to stay.

Sure but the laws are probably relevant for the startups you _haven’t_ been a part of. The ones that never got started.

It’s funny you mention a lack of entrepreneurial spirit but then dismiss something that’s clearly a factor (not saying it’s the main factor but obviously it has some effect).

I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.

Can you share the projects? In most cases it is very, very easy to comply with the *"random laws" (not that GDPR is much different from California's CPRA. Are you blocking Californian users too?)

Sorry, that's nonsense. cpra has a carveout for small businesses. gdpr has your one person company obey the same rules as meta.

This brings up the point that for some reason we're all terrified of the government. Maybe because we see the daily abuse from the USA? But if you accidentally violated the GDPR while in good faith trying to follow it, the most likely outcome is being ordered to fix it.

> I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.

GDPR fines scale based on annual turnover so blocking EU users on a non-commercial product is utterly pointless and just being mean.

Of course it's easier to do a bad job of something or to give up and not do it. That has no bearing on whether or not doing it the right way is actually onerous.

> do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European

Making it harder for foreign companies to compete is actually great for European startups, though

I think (I'm an American so take with a grain of salt) even the "proper lawyer reviewing terms" part can be deferred quite a while by being conservative with PII (which you should be doing anyway) and using a service like iubenda to deal with terms and cookie warnings when you first start out.

The biggest hurdle Europe has to face is the cultural shift away from the post-soviet era of "Don't take work too seriously, enjoy life".

There is now a full generation of Europeans who grew up in with this mentality, looking down on Americans for their ridiculous work ethic and comparatively meager benefits.

But it's not sustainable, and the strain is already becoming obvious. Young Europeans will have to work longer and harder for less if they want to move Europe away from being totally dependent on American tech, American defense, and Chinese wares.

The data [0] begs to differ: in richer countries workers and fewer hours. The gap not shown here is working hours per capita (instead of worker), but I couldn’t find that data quickly.

Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/rich-poor-working-hours

Joining the rat race isn't worth it, in the near-term, which is why the threat is existential. Europe has been sleeping on it's laurels for 30 years now, and the signs are clear; borderline stagnating economies, low working hours, generous benefits, and most importantly still relying on the exact same industries as 30 years ago. Europe totally missed out on the tech boom, and is now also missing out on the AI boom. And Europeans response has largely been "Whats the issue, we can just buy it from the Americans/Chinese?".

Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash to stave off Putin should have been a gut-punch wake up call that Europe is in an extremely vulnerable position, and needs to get to work building their own modern tech, their own defense, and their own industry.

Failure to do those things will lead to Europe balkanizing as the economic situation gets worse under the weight of an aging population and shrinking economic output. Young Europeans think they cracked the code of comfortable living, but really they are just in a post-cold war golden period. Very similar to the post-WII era American baby boomers enjoyed (except they had lots of children).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Look at the bottom of the list and then go look at their growth.

> Look at the bottom

Also look at the top ;)

> Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash

That's beyond false, US provided little non-military help, the money mostly stayed in US and went to US contractors.

I don't need to tell you that those figures are also insanely inflated by crazy costs.

Zelenski himself has stated that he proposed multiple times to, e.g., send its navy to US ports to take the weapons so US taxpayers wouldn't have to bear the costs, but instead tens of billions went into that expense. Why? Because US support to Ukraine is a welfare machine for US contractors.

In total EU has provided around 3 times more between military and non-military.

https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/ukraine-support-tra...

There is a reason they wrote this article:

https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/ukraine-aid-how-eur...

But people at the ammo factory are going to have to work more than 4 days a week with 8 weeks vacation.

I think your data agrees with OP, you're just misunderstanding it. Yes, richer countries work few hours and richer countries also see modest GDP growth.

Cambodia's GDP growth is over +5% YoY, whereas Switzerland (and the rest of Europe) has more modest GDP growth.

There is some "Work smart, not hard." facet to this, which requires an educated population.

The other fascet is developing countries exist in climates heavily impacted by global warming (look at flooding in VN or TH this year). They make 2 steps forward, and then 3 steps back when a monsoon takes out an entire town.

> Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.

Personally, employment makes my life interesting and rewarding. I love the puzzles (and compensation) that my employer provides. The rewards compound, but in career development and via investing the profits.

Unfortunately, I think the one area that isn't accounted for is child care. Societies (rich and poor) continue to extract time away from parenting, via cost of housing near job centers and dual-income families. Offering an extra month of vacation or 4-day work week isn't the same as 1 income household or the parents living 15 minutes from their job.

> richer countries also see modest GDP growth.

This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.

A lot of GDP growth can come from establishing basic services like a functioning healthcare system, insurance apparatus and financial system. Of course, we can't building out infrastructure like roads, power, etc.

Especially construction can lead to substantial GDP growth, but once you have a basic set of infrastructure and housing in place, growth is much slower and consistent for very obvious reasons.

Once you have that stuff in place, getting consistent growth requires more advanced stuff.

The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.

>The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.

Right, Europe also has a suffocating business environment which is the primary driver.

> This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.

Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce. Entering the 2008 crisis, USA and Europe were neck in neck. Now, the USA has left Europe in the dust.

Declaring the US an outlier seems like an odd choice... What country should you compare Europe to?

Why do we use GDP though? On average quality of life, Europe left the USA in the dust. GDP just measures how expensive everything is. More expensive things is bad.

GDP is a measure of productivity, which is (normally) corrected for inflation.

The point you are making is exactly the reason why this problem is so existential for Europe. QoL is good, so nobody wants to change anything, or feels the need to.

But structurally, Europe is not sound and European leaders know it (Just look at the surge in rhetoric about Euro independence). Do you know the story of the ant and the grasshopper?[1] Europe is in a 50 year long post soviet era summer. Most young (and now even middle aged!) Europeans only know summer, so it's going to be incredible difficult to get them to collect food for this mythical thing called "winter".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper

Can you provide convincing evidence that this is the case? What is the winter that is coming? And that your proposal will prevent it? And what exactly is your proposal anyway?

North Koreans think the outside world is going to collapse because they aren't doing what North Koreans are doing, but it's all just propaganda. You need to distinguish what you say from this.

The surge in anti-EU rhetoric seems to be mostly coming from US propaganda bleeding over, and is still a minority.

People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe and the immediate collapse of the USA for decades.

Nobody on the ground, who actually buys groceries, trusts official inflation numbers. How much apparent GDP growth is actually just unreported inflation? I saw some food getting 50-100% more expensive over the last 5 years, which is 10% per year. What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...

Many topics condensed into a single comment to conserve rate limit.

> What is the winter that is coming?

This is not a fair question. The roaring 20s had no idea The Great Depression was coming. Most people didn't see the 2008 crash happening. Ukraine signed agreements with Russia to not be attacked. In 2019, no one was worried that their country couldn't produce face masks or mRNA vaccines.

IMHO, the only foreseeable disaster now is climate change and CN/TW conflicts. I'm not smart enough to model the downstream effects of those events and how Europe should be preparing for them.

The USA is forcing TSMC to at least shift some of their output to US soil.

> anti-EU rhetoric

I don't know what you mean by anti-EU rhetoric. Americans have no problems with the a centralized governance for Europe. Generally speaking, we are taught the EU is a good thing Europe (and the USA), because we want strong allies.

Just like how the EU got upset with Greece for poor fiscal responsibility, the US is concerned about the EU's military investments, tech development, and general economic output.

> trusts official inflation numbers

I think you're comparing apples and oranges. The inflation numbers are not supposed to represent any one individual's on-the-ground's inflation numbers. For example, Washington state adding a gas tax might not show up in the national inflation numbers, but if you're a long distance trucker, you're definitely experiencing inflation.

---

Anecdote with heavy sampling bias: When traveling in Southeast Asia, I met tons of Europeans complaining 5 day work weeks is too much and 30 days of PTO isn't enough. One woman in her 30s took an additional month off of unpaid leave so she could have a second holiday in Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.

IMHO, Europeans should be developing their own tech / biotech / military, instead of demanding 4 day work weeks, and 60d holidays.

> People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe

Have they? I thought most were predicting stagnation and slow decline? Which has been the cast for the past >15 years. Europe is just being left behind..

> trusts official inflation numbers

Because they are unwilling to read and learn what these numbers mean and how they are calculated?

> What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...

Well… reported GDP growth is always adjusted by inflation.

> Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce.

First of all, I hate that we're still using GDP as an indicator for any success, because by any stretch, it is a pretty shit indicator. Take medications as an example. Many medications in the US are substantially more expensive than they are in Europe. By selling/buying those medications, you to have a substantially higher GDP related to services like these, without having any benefit for the actual people living and working in that country. (/rant)

Putting differences like these aside, there are a few notable differences. First, the US being an outlier should be fairly obvious to anyone. First of all, the US being extremely resource rich is part of many US states' economic success. If you're lacking the natural resources to extract, there is barely anything you can do policy wise.

Then there is the fact that the US is (still) world reserve currency. With this constant demand for US dollars, the US can relatively easily follow an inflationary economic policy (as demonstrated by the debt to GDP ratio), which is obviously good for growth. Then there is the fact that the US has more consolidated large scale companies. In Europe, aside from a few national industrial giants, SMBs tend to play a much bigger role than they do in the US. This can of course partially be attributed to the fact that the US is a unified market, as opposed to Europe/EU (despite regulatory efforts). Partially this is also down to differences in market watchdog interventions (you can decide for yourself wether or not that is a good thing).

Aside from that, there is no denying that the US also knows how to use the advantage. Unlike other countries cough Germany cough, the US actually has a fairly solid domestic market, which is generally a healthy indicator.

All that "US has it easy" whining aside. I can't really comment on the industrial policy on other European countries, but as far as industrial policy goes, Germany really made some policy mistakes that are now backfiring in a spectacularly painful way.

> This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.

E.g. emerging markets tend to outperform advanced ones, because they have more room to grow.

If you think the US stock market has done well in the last few decades, wait till you see India or Peru.

IMHO, the US and China’s hurry to expand into every possible corner is unsustainable. Unless we are actually trying to get ready to face an extraterrestrial threat, our endless effort to maximize our tech and become more and more efficient and profitable is unneeded and puts too much stress on earthlings, which is definitely not sustainable. Do you really believe that when we are able to pass production of almost anything to AI and robots and give generous UBI to each and every person, they will be happy and satisfied? It is a dead end, a loss of meaning that we are racing to reach ASAP.

Population collapse cannot be a good enough reason, either. Older people won't be happier if their servants are robots instead of climate migrants.

Maybe so. In the meantime, Europe will continue to fall behind economically.

The standard of living in China is bad for most people. IMHO, they need to expand in order to provide the same lifestyle as offered in the USA.

This has the energy of "Why are we building rockets to the moon, when there are homeless people in San Francisco"-vibes?"

> give generous UBI to each and every person

Have you seen the movie Wall-e? I don't think society should strive to outsource all labor to AI and robots, nor is that the final end-state of building robots and AI.

We could just, like, not give billionaires so much money, and there will be more left for everyone else.

Yeah, if we want to be the world superpower we have to work really hard. But we definitely won't get any of the benefits of being the world superpower - just like Americans don't already - all of it accrues to billionaires. And it'll make the rent really high. So why should we want that? Of course, we don't want anyone else to be a world superpower either, because kings/dictators/emperors are bad.

I know a friend who was building his first website, he asked in our startup group how to handle the GDPR cookie banner, it likely wasted 1 day on that, when he had invested maybe a whole othery day on the project. At that moment in time the GDPR cookie banner amounted of 50% of the effort. It killed momentum, it killed willpower with beuracracy. It should have asked himself how to get users, not how to comply with GDPR for a website that in that moment had 0 users.

The problem was not the cookie banner, but rather that they were doing things that required user consent (most commonly: filling up the website with 3rd-party marketing tools).

You can have a website as big as GitHub without a cookie banner yet still be compliant.

I know from the inside it feels like nothing is wrong, but if you're looking at the EU as a whole from the outside, the economies there have been coming apart for many years. You could even say the wheels have already fallen off. 100% of the economic woes in the EU are conferred by EU membership, and the web of inefficient, bureaucratic laws therein. Geographically speaking, Europe is positioned, perfectly, to be an economic powerhouse. It is close to the Middle East where much of the energy comes from, close to Africa where energy and other resources come from, close to Asia where certain base materials and manufactured components come from, surrounded by oceans everywhere, the Mediterranean has more than 1/5 of the world's coastline, giving ample opportunity to develop commercial ports, etc. The only reason the economies of Europe are in trouble is because of the EU. That is the only reason. The EU is the singular one only single reason. The EU. That is the single reason.

Cookie banners are just one tiny example that illustrates how death from 1000 cuts is a real thing. In the case of cookie banners, you could say it's death from 100 cuts, because, if you live in the EU, you spend probably one percent of your entire life clicking cookie banners. 7.2 minutes a day is all it takes to waste one percent of your productive life (assuming 12 hours of useful time per day). You might scoff at this, "I probably spend 10 seconds", but I spend probably a minute or more dealing with broken cookie banner garbage every day and I am an American. Just from American websites complying with GDPR nonsense, we have to waste some small portion of our lives here as well. Stupid laws written by stupider bureaucrats ruin everything for everyone. This is the description of an idiot by Dostoyevsky, somebody who does things that harm themselves and others.

It's pure ideology that "cutting red tape" will lead to growth. Unfortunately I don't think there's much to understand, perhaps beyond the US giving the EU some kind of kickback for complying.

The Elysium-Cloud needs your data

I agree with you partially.

My hot take is that this is a signal for Trump. We play nice with you, you play nice with us.

Big tech is well connected to the current US administration so if the EU were to make theses changes, then they will appease big tech (a little bit) and therefore by extension Trump.

I (like you) don't think that these regulations are the reason the EU doesn't have home grown hyper-scalers a la AWS or GCP or Azure.

I think the EU just fell asleep at the wheel for too long. It basically outsourced its defense to NATO, its tech needs to the US and its manufacturing to China and for a while it worked perfectly.

However the world is changing and the EU is simply in my opinion not up to the task. It's too slow, bureaucratic and messy to be able to adapt rapidly and it lacks the vision necessary to remedy to its weaknesses.

Few things.

1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.

2. Would like to remind you that article 5 has only been invoked by US and we lost many lives on something that wasn't even relevant to us, let alone the other wars in africa or central asia that we joined. So far, it's been Italian and Polish blood falling to comply with our North American ally, it hasn't been the opposite case for decades.

3. I think the European commission is simply corrupted, and when it comes to this data stuff, please notice how many dozens times Thorn and Palantir and many other US security companies have lobbied EU commission members, and those are just the registered meetings, you don't need to record phone calls or out-of-office encounters:

https://transparency-register.europa.eu/search-register-or-u...

I'm quite convinced Ursula von Der Leyen is corrupt and is selling out Europe and keeps engaging in anti European policies.

4. EU would be fine, if it was able to pursue a coherent foreign policy. Instead you have 20+ countries where the occasional Hungary can veto anything. It should be given more power on many fronts. We shouldn't have 20+ privacy agencies, 20+ ways to register a company, 20+ different legislations on this and that.

5. There are politicians with the right vision, such as Macron, but most politicians have to live election by election, so it's very hard to pursue long term strategies. To be fair though, US is showing the same symptoms with one executive undoing what the previous has done from a bit.

Are you sure you meant to respond to me? I agreed with you on most of what you said regarding the regulations but just in case let me respond to your points:

> We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.

Is that a counterpoint to my NATO comment? If so I agree, I think that the EU countries should exit NATO and form their own military alliance. However it is very clear that investing in military capabilities is not the priority of the EU countries as only a few of them managed to spend the required amount each year as per the NATO treaties. Most likely such alliance will be dead in the water.

> Would like to remind you that article 5 has only been invoked by US and we lost many lives on something that wasn't even relevant to us, let alone the other wars in africa or central asia that we joined. So far, it's been Italian and Polish blood falling to comply with our North American ally, it hasn't been the opposite case for decades.

Again I agree with you. I think that the US has caused much suffering by invading Irak and Afghanistan and then Libya (with the help of other countries), thereby causing the refuge crisis and then leaving the EU countries alone to deal with this problem.

> I think the European commission is simply corrupted, and when it comes to this data stuff, please notice how many dozens times Thorn and Palantir and many other US security companies have lobbied EU commission members, and those are just the registered meetings, you don't need to record phone calls or out-of-office encounters: https://transparency-register.europa.eu/search-register-or-u... I'm quite convinced Ursula von Der Leyen is corrupt and is selling out Europe and keeps engaging in anti European policies.

She was not elected to be a good politician.

She was a terrible politician in here home country. There was nothing to expect from her at any level and so far she has not disappointed. Her secret deal with Pfizer and her missing text messages are just the tip of the Iceberg.

> EU would be fine, if it was able to pursue a coherent foreign policy. Instead you have 20+ countries where the occasional Hungary can veto anything. It should be given more power on many fronts. We shouldn't have 20+ privacy agencies, 20+ ways to register a company, 20+ different legislations on this and that.

That is never going to be the case because all EU countries want different things and for very good reasons. They have different needs and different economies.

So the German government will keep selling out its EU "partners" as long as they can keep selling cars in the US. France or Italy would have done the same.

> There are politicians with the right vision, such as Macron, but most politicians have to live election by election, so it's very hard to pursue long term strategies. To be fair though, US is showing the same symptoms with one executive undoing what the previous has done from a bit.

I disagree with you on Macron. Macron has no vision besides a "more" federal Europe. The details are not very clear and his policies are constantly changing depending on his approval level in the polls. His promise when he was elected was that to put the far right out of business by the end of his presidency, the reality however is that the far right is now the biggest party in France and is in very strong position to win the 2027 election.

> That is never going to be the case because all EU countries want different things and for very good reasons. They have different needs and different economies.

That's quite of a weak argument, every state or county in the US has conflicting interests too. But there has to be defined boundaries in what is the business of EU and what is the business of single states.

I would say that matters like digital data privacy should have one common policy, not 20+ agencies.

>1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.

Reality of the situation is that in 2025 Ukraine IS the most combat ready army in Europe, and by far.

Russian army of 2025 is not the same as it was in 2022 too. It takes over a month to transfer military equipment across Europe /even without war going on/, we are SEVERELY unprepared.

>There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).

Thats kind of the point...

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