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Comment by barbacoa | Hacker News Reader

America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.

Always the same ridiculous statement.

I, too, cannot wait when it finally stops being true, so people can stop saying it.

Americans are just as regulated and with even more egregious regulatory capture (see the American broadband/mobile provider cartel). At least Europeans get a little consumer protection.

You need a doctor's note to buy contact lens solution in Holland.

The level of regulation isn't close.

That's just... false? You just go to Etos or Kruidvat for that.

Otoh, you can buy contact lenses OTC in other European countries... not saying Europe isn't over-regulated (try legally building a bike-trail on your own forest-land in Germany!! ...insanity) but it's a bad example.

You cannot build mixed used buildings in most of due to ridiculous housing zoning, can you?

america regulates to ensure companies (as few as humanly possible) profit while europe regulates to protect the consumers. the core difference, yea! and americans seemed to be always shitting on europe completely oblivious of what is being done to them, for decades now

> while europe regulates to protect the consumers

I get what you're trying to say, but having just had some meetings on aligning with the latest AI act, as a small startup focusing on adapting open source models for local use, the way it looks now, it seems like we won't have any consumers worth protecting :) (and I'm only half joking. AI act is a joke, and Mistral have been saying this for a while now. We have chinese models launched with permissive licenses, usable everywhere except in the EU. It'd be good comedy if it wouldn't be tragic. ffs! We can't use open source shit!!! It's bananas)

I rather have European regulations to US wild west anything goes, and who cannot keep up isn't worth keeping around mentality.

Because it is ridiculously true.

It's ridiculously unoriginal and oversimplified.

truth hurts right?

I'm not American, so I wouldn't know much about making ridiculous statements.

I mean we are still waiting for the European Apple or Microsoft or Google or anything of that scale aren't we? China has it's own version of all this stuff, where is Europe's?

The issue is what kind of better service would move people over ?

They're monopolies or quasi monopolies.

China has their own because they block Apple Microsoft and Google, they are not competing with them.

It's probably better not to repeat the same mistakes that the US made and not have monopolies. Building a diverse ecosystem with strong competition would result in a world leading economy. Essentially there needs to be 10x more Mistrals.

How would European citizens benefit from having evil megacorporations?

If anything the main simplification here is that China is doing a significant amount of innovation too. Otherwise yeah. Europe's main purpose is to serve as a continent-wide historical Disneyland for rich American and Chinese tourists. And maybe we'd be better off admitting that rather than trying to pretend to have any kind of industrial or startup ecosystem.

A bit dramatic isn't it? I'd rather live in this Disneyland than in a suburban shit hole surrounded by parking lots and obese people.

Immigrants innovate, US declines and isolates, and Europe is waking up to the new world order where the west needs new leadership.

Two of these are true, but I fear Europe is perpetually incapable of waking up.

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