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Comment by vjvjvjvjghv | Hacker News Reader

There is definitely much more happening than what american media tells us. When I visit family in Germany they are all doing pretty well. There are problems with expensive housing but that seems to be a worldwide problem.

But there definitely seems to be a lack of ambition in business and technology. For example, the car companies seem to be more coasting on past successes vs pushing things forward. Europe is also not trying much to compete in AI.

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When I visit Germany everything strikes me as meager. Like everything is rationed.

Out of curiosity, how so?

I was there a couple months ago and all the cities I visited felt very poor. The buildings were depressing and drab, the trains were frequently delayed, the food was probably the worst I had anywhere in Europe.

    > [T]he food was probably the worst I had anywhere in Europe.

Weird: Any medium-to-large city will have great Turkish food. Do you not like Turkish food?

I had 2 hour transfer in Frankfurt am Mein, so I wanted to do something that is Germany is know for, so I decided to get a nice doenner kebab (it was good :))

(Btw. Last week I was in Istanbul; maybe unlucky, but I did not like kebab in Turkey, ingredients were somehow strange)

I had the same experience. I was very excited to try a Doner in Istanbul, because one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was a Doner place (The Berliner). They didn't seem to know what I meant. I got something they insisted was a Doner, but not really the same sort of thing.

Not sure if the Seattle place is really Americanized or I need to save up and try one in Germany.

Plenty of great Turkish food btw, but obviously Doner's are not really a local thing.

When I visit the US everything strikes me as overbuilt to the point of being dull or in the case of vehicles, downright dangerous. The dullness part, especially, is a real pain. Cheap concrete sidewalks. Cheap looking infrastructure everywhere, etc.

There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.

I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.

Ok. And what does the US have to do with anything?

The odds of you not being American are less than 0.

Europe should have had their own SV starting back in the 90's...

Instead the wall fell and Europe decided to go on vacation for 35 years

They had two world wars and devastated cities to rebuild. They also had the very real threat of further escalation with the raging Cold War. Meanwhile, the US had no real threat of further violence. Most of those with the adventurous spirit found their way to the US to continue the westward expansion and seems to be Europe's biggest export.

The rebuilding phase was over by 1990. And so was the cold war, more or less, and that strongly involved the US too.

Did you misread the time period they suggested?

Look at the huge cost of German reunification from 1990 onwards, for example - "rebuilding" Eastern Europe was a big effort.

I count German reunification as something quite different from rebuilding from WWII.

By the mid-90s we were 50 years after the end of the war. It didn't take three generations to put the cities and infrastructure back together.

It took about 2 trillion and maybe a couple of decades from 1990 onwards.

Okay, but it wasn't the thing we were talking about...

Sorry, I just tried to add that post cold war there was substantial rebuilding (again).

That's fair but I don't think it would have stopped a "Silicon Valley" effort, especially not across all of Europe.

Maybe not. As always, I think it's more complex: It certainly used a lot of funding, not just from and for Germany that wasn't available then for other things; at the same time there was not much defense spending (to go back to the origins of SV) either, there was also a lot of socio-politcal change binding change capacity, and in parts there has been a certain distrust/dislike of information technology in countries like Germany.

The rebuilding phase only really got started in the 90s! Integrating the post-communist states was a huge effort that is still arguably going on.

A continent of people didn't sit in bombed out cities and countryside for fifty years before getting major repairs going, what are you talking about.

The damage from WW2 to Europe was not limited to bombing and killing, it includes the economic harm inflicted on Eastern Europe in the decades afterwards by the Soviets.

Ironically the US was the one holding the line against that threat.

Europe did itself in with intense bureaucracy and a culture of "individual wealth is bad"

SV in 1990s was effect of 60-70 years of hardcore government funding that was not only not stopped, but amplified by WW2 whereas Europe was heavily wrecked by it (UK finally stopped wartime rationing of food in 1954!). In comparison, in 1945 USA was trying to redirect wartime production surplus into other sinks to give "soft landing" to industry and invented new approaches to discriminate women from workforce to create openings for returning soldiers.

Could something be done starting with 1990? Probably, though the much fragmented by natural borders (if not regulatory) markets with resulting less cash-flush companies had issues fighting against US competition being able to underprice them with politicians ensuring there were no barriers for american companies "or else".

Some of it was at worst mostly local (if with American "advisors"), like in Poland - we started technically from same position as Taiwan when it came to semiconductor manufacturing, but instead of investing "shock therapy" destroyed it. At the same time... can you mention a taiwan major business that is not TSMC, or part of semiconductor manufacturing chain? Without thinking too long or googling?

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