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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Plenty folks in Europe work for American businesses, including tech, it’s just super duper hard to scale a business as quick as it is in the US for a variety of reasons - regulation, funding, labor laws, euro idea of work life balance, …

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Fragmented EU domestic market (27 very different countries with no shared language) vs. unified US domestic market (50 pretty similar states with shared language) is the most important factor when it comes to scaling the typical services with marginal to nonexistent unit costs that are common in the tech world, especially consumer tech.

Yeah but also the consumer (if you’re selling to consumers) is very different in the US va Europe: on average, the US consumer wants to be sold stuff to. Not as much in EU.

> 27 very different countries with no shared language

Yet I can ask a Chinese frontier model in Russian how to say the phrase in Hungarian. How do they manage to achieve that?

Whatever LLMs are capable to with regard to translations is not relevant for the 30-year history of primarily Silicon-Valley-originated consumer tech service expansion: todays' LLMs didn't exist pre-2022, but the gigantic moat of US tech giants was developed pre-2022. Today, they mostly profit from that flywheel having been sped up already in the past.

Thank you. People love to blame regulation but no amount of regulatory simplification is going to make a Lithuanian speak Italian.

Combine it with the fact that in the media of every country the US comes far ahead of any other UE countries in terms of coverage (on any topic), you have a recipe that no amount of deregulation can ever fix.

What’s the „euro idea“ of work life balance?

That there’s life outside work ;)

You work to live, you don't live to work.

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