What a strangle "Europe is failing!" comment thread, when ASML is a European company selling to all of the factories.
Uranium is energy-dense enough that it could come by private jet and still be cheap.
Then you add in "services" and "assets growth" to cook the numbers (don't forget to incldue illegal drug trafficking and illegal prostitutions numbers to jack things up even more even though you have no real data about it), and magically everything in the the green, although pensions are decreasing, retirement age is increasing, social benefits are being cut left and right, but don't worry brother, we're in the green!
1k of produced steel is 1kg of produced steel, no matter how you look at it.
How much value does illegal prostitution brings to you country though? Someone had to come up with a number apparently
The main issues Europa has are dependency on Energy imports, an unhealthy but fixable dependency on US IT tech, an ongoing war with Russia, and an aging population. Renewables are are really good idea, immigration would also help a lot, but is politically difficult.
What value was added here? None, gdp is meaningless in post industrial countries, it wasn't designed to measure anything other than industrial outputs.
But if your core take is “GDP is meaningless in post industrial countries”, then you’re at a level of crank not worth engaging with
I think you could make that argument (at least structurally) as late as the 2000s when batteries and solar were still un-economical. Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels in almost every sector except long haul trucking, a few industrial processes, and aviation, and those together are a small percentage of overall fossil fuel use. Aviation and trucking are less than 10% of oil use.
Europe doesn't have an energy shortage that's not self-inflicted. Becoming dependent on Russian gas combined with anti-nuclear in Germany probably contribute. German greens are basically an advertising arm of Gazprom. (Just like how America's huge inflation is self-inflicted via dumb tariffs and unnecessary wars. We should pay politicians an extra bonus to do nothing.)
The most likely explanation for Europe's stagnation is a mix of stifling bureaucracy, low birth rates, brain drain (mostly to the US), and policies that are explicitly growth-limiting.
And obviously energy too, until Europe completely electrifies .
So it's quite a big deal when gas goes from being cheap and reliable to expensive and unreliable.
It's cheaper than nuclear. If one is discussing vs. renewables, then Europe is comparatively poorly situated to exploit those, especially solar.
I think Europe's larger problem is a smothering blanket of taxation and regulation. Good for standard of living in the short term (or at least was), but not good for growth and long term competitiveness.
Is this a real question?
- just bend down to harvest, nature has done all the work over millions of years
- energy dense as fuck
- reliable, it doesn't matter if you have sun, wind, if it's winter or summer
- easy to store and transport
- can be transformed into fertiliser, which allowed us to feed more people, for cheaper and more easily
- literal building block of everything that made what the world is today: plastics, medicine, synthetic fibers, etc.
- allowed us to transform materials which required high temperatures: metal, glas, etc.
We're quite literally a fossil fuel society...
I have seen this raised as yet another interesting Fermi paradox idea: maybe our planet is unusual in that it stored up a giant store of easily exploitable energy to bootstrap a technological civilization.
Cool, "added" is doing a lot of work here. We're still mostly relying on fossils, about ~70% of our mix.
> Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper
Bonus question: how much does it cost to build a solar panel or wind mill when fossils get 2x, 5x, 10x more expensive? When we run our of fossils?
Ah yes, oil extraction, refinement, and transport is a famously simple and low-capital process.
Citation needed, or I don't know what "very possible" actually means. Possible perhaps, but not realistic, and certainly not economical.
The best Europeans are 10x worse, only China is catching up with only 2x worse.
Europe is allied with Taiwan and South Korea, and until recently also with the United States. Those countries can't build new chip factories without European lithography. Do you want everyone to innovate and grow by having each country focus on what they are good at, or do you want everyone to burn trillions reinventing the wheel over and over again solely for their own domestic market?
The grandparent literally said "it would pack more punch if ASML wasn't the only go-to example European company accomplishing something in tech."
Do you consider ASML to be a web-commerce or adware business? If yes, then I am not sure you could be helped.
If not, then how is this relevant to the discussion?
It seems to me it would make sense if it were:
it would pack more punch if ASML WAS the only go-to example...
Is that what it's supposed to be? And then, since it isn't the only go-to example it must follow that the example packs little punch.
If it is supposed to be that perhaps the person you are responding to misunderstood and thought it actually meant exactly what it said, which after all was that ASML IS the only go-to example. And thinking what it seemed to be saying was actually what was meant they responded to that.
However I think you and I agree that what was actually meant was a sarcastic observation that hey, ASML is not the only go-to example European company thus this carries a reasonable amount of punch, it was just poorly phrased.