Just to echo your point… USA >> EU
US GDP = $23.3 trillion
EU GDP = $15.8 trillion even if you counted UK (to make Europe rather than EU)
UK GDP = $3.1 trillion
282 karma · joined February 24, 2008
Don't forget the third part, which is what the author described, i.e. "not very smart people say they can easily do it themselves". They do not have to be able to do it, they just have to be able to convince the CEO to spend $1 million in salary on the internal delivery time to try to do it.
They have separated citizenship from work visas. Anyone can come, they do not need to prove that they can do work that anyone else cannot do, and as long as their employer sponsor is happy with their work, they can stay and work. The governments compete on how quickly they approve the visas and how business-friendly they are in doing so.
The system works well enough that 60-80% of the people living in these countries are not from these countries. They work, study, bring up families and they go back home wealthier than when they left.
(I am missing out a lot of politics here, and there are plenty of things I would want to change, but the GCC does have the most open economy in the world, both for goods and for people.)
Disclaimer - I live in the UK, where my start-up is, because I grew up here as my father came to complete his studies and then became an academic here. I have lived and worked in the USA on H1-B visa and so know first-hand how bad that system is. UK has a similarly bad visa system, I am told, but I love the start-up ecosystem here.
Governments, for all their posturing, love dealing with oligopolies, or even better, monopolies. They feel safer in making purchases from them. So around 2002, the UK government decided IT was so important, it was going to be done centrally for the whole NHS. They gave the job to Richard Granger, who then proceeded to divide England into five regions, each of which would have one vendor responsible for all software in the NHS for that region.
As part of that deal, they licensed MS Windows and Office. At that point, it became more expensive to use open source software than Microsoft's software. Then they standardised on IE6, and many vendors began using ActiveX.
When I ask departments to upgrade, they say they are going to do so, but first they need every single vendor to have signed off that their software works in the new browser. This will take a really long time.
Some will install a new browser for us, but this will actually result in a worse outcome for the clinicians because they have to use IE6 for most of their existing browsing, and then the other browser for us. They do not understand the point or the difference, and new browsers mean a different user interface, and they want to get on with treating patients rather than choosing between browsers.
The epilogue is that the UK government's national program wasted 12 billion pounds (about 20 billion US, ie the same amount the US government is also identically wasting to subsidise electronic health record purchases). And Richard Granger left the UK in disgrace.
He is now a consultant in... Australia :)
What your statement shows is not a understanding of how to solve the problem for such a client, but a rather a complete lack of understanding. Check the audience metrics, check the real problem being solved, and leave the grandstanding aside.
And for the record, I hate IE (6 or otherwise) and never want to support it. But I am not going let me personal dislike for a technology get in the way of helping a client solve a really important problem.
I have no doubt that the USA / SV is a great place to start a company, but why waste your life trying to satisfy government bureaucrats that you should be allowed in when there are plenty of other places that want you?
If you are European, you can move to any of the hubs like London or Berlin. They might not be as brilliant as SV, but they have their own advantages, and the key for an entrepreneur is to get down and make use of these advantages. Folks in the Persian Gulf (I am from Bahrain) can move to any of the hubs there like Dubai or Bahrain, and there are plenty of gaps in the market that an entrepreneur can fill by starting a company. And of course the BRIC countries have huge growth for their own nationals to ride.
So why go through the headaches of government immigration?
(PS I am really sorry for entrepreneur that this story describes. I just hope fewer people have to go through that fate.)
Reading in bed with a smartphone is great because the light does not bother my partner, and after two minutes of my falling asleep, the phone switches off its screen as well. Any bed lamp I use keeps me awake rather than allowing me to fall asleep.
(I know I am the exception as I have been reading on Palm Pilot screens since the late 90s - it was the only way to make sure I could get enough reading time in medical school.)
However, you will have difficulty understanding the dialect of the person you are speaking to. And if you have a dialect that you should understand, I would say it should be Gulf Arabic (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, UAE and of course my own Bahrain).
Economic (thriving free markets, not just oil-funded governments) and military activity in the Arab world is concentrated in the gulf, so unless you are trying to be a tourist (Egypt), the real value is in Gulf Arabic. Note that most Arabic teachers are Egyptian or from the Levant, and will try and persuade you otherwise ;)
Egyptian Arabic is dominant in a similar way to American English, i.e. Egypt had the largest movie industry and population, and everyone else could understand Egyptians while Egyptians had no need to understand other dialects.
What is interesting is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.
> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.
They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.
> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.
Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.
On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.
But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)
The problem of health care integration is not just solvable, it is already being solved (we are playing our part) but many in the mainstream are still expecting a big system approach and thus missing the small pieces, loosely joined approach that allowed the internet to scale.
PS this is separate from the issue of whether the land belongs to native americans, native africans, or palestinians, I just mean that getting what you were demanding to be yours makes it easier to forgive previous wrongs.
I had the same treatment you are describing when getting my H1B visa in the USA from the UK. And things got even worst when my employer started to apply for greencard, and so I just left the USA.
From a private sector perspective, I had more things paperless available to me in 2003 - when I moved to the USA - in the UK than I did in the USA. And during my time in the USA, I was able to run all of my UK business and government transactions online.
But then I switched to the private sector and I have since seen that company fire lots of people quickly. To be fair, none of those fired quickly were H1B holders, and the US citizens who were fired were given very generous severance payments (this is a management consultancy that knows former employees are future customers).
My advice is to accept it, and then feel liberated by it. The same contract allowed me to leave my employer without feeling guilty, which is exactly what I did when I wanted to start my own company.
For me, the turning point was when I wanted to have a family. I just found the idea of being forced to leave the country when your employer does not want to sponsor you anymore too awful, especially as I had experienced it as a child when my father had a UK university do the same thing to him. We had 1 month to pack everything and leave the country.
I spent 5 years in the USA and what I loved the most was to read US history. Living in DC, I joined a bunch of think-tanks and saw how vibrant the political life is. And I was an admirer of the USA because of its amazing history, just as you say.
I just think the USA can do better than it currently is, and closer to what it is capable of being. I think it lost its ideals and drifted from the honour of a republic to the tragedy of an empire. The UK of course has the legacy of a more cruel empire, and no country in the world is free of blemishes. (And the Arab world is a basket case making its own recovery.)
But I just felt so sad when comparing what I saw Americans do - amazing people, such a pleasure to be around - and what their government did in their name - locally and internationally.
From my time, I would say that America is a land of free thinking and tolerant people, but not the land, and sadly not the land I had wanted it to be. (Am an Arab who had long admired the USA.)
Separately, I do not think the tax is unfair. Tax has to come from somewhere, and if SF can show a nicer environment for employees and founders to live in, then they can charge a higher price for the environment. Tax competition takes care of testing whether this is a wise decision, and there is plenty of tax competition in the region surrounding SF.
To me, tax becomes unfair if it is arbitrarily applied to some people, but not to others, e.g. letting Twitter and Zynga off, while taxing other start-ups.
Why is no one suggesting applying the 1.5% when cash exchanges hands? Everyone is either suggesting keeping the 1.5% as is, or scrapping it completely for stock options. But surely a middle ground allows cash for taxes as a small percentage of cash from profits?
So my error was not that I was full of it, just that I lacked the financial knowledge to maximize the benefit of the money that I had used to support my bet.
For "We didn't push to apply to YC", the original posting had said "I hadn't really considered an incubator like YC because we already had a product, customers, and whatnot and I thought I really just needed cash to hire a bunch of people. But one of the guys at breakfast really liked what we were doing and wrote an intro email to Harj, one of the partners at YC. It was mid-May so the application deadline for the Summer 2010 session had already passed. But Harj and I had coffee the next day, and he liked what he saw so he invited me to come interview for late acceptance."
And for "he definitely didn't split up the company for us", I was going on "So the day before YC started, I sent Paul and the gang an email letting them know that my team was changing. I didn't think it would be a huge problem. I (naively) thought that they'd just give me advice on how to navigate the new situation. But alas, Paul was not happy with the changes and told me it might put us in jeopardy of getting funded by them." In other words he did not say that you had told him the company should stay put, you had told him you would not fund him, now that the company had split up in trying to fulfil YC's requirement for SV location.
By the way, I am entirely aware of a third possibility, i.e. that you are both right, and that two different people can have correct but different memories of the same situation. But the story as it was written did not make YC look good, even though the author is promoting it with cheeriness as coming through adversity.