221–230 of 496 posts
It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
Just like those EU CERN bureaucrats funding Tim Berners-Lee, what were they thinking
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Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats Important defined how? The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But…
Companies rarely do basic research. Yes, there are exceptions.
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If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with…
Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
aerospace, energy, semiconductors,
telecom, drugs/biotech
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Government funding is extremely wasteful and will generally go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is this game has been played for a long time and it has diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get the exploitation down. Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang fo…
Remind me how is that WeWork and Theranos investment going?
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Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)
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> I am not familiar with successful EU initiative. The EU Cohesion Fund is one. Since 2007, ~133 billion € got invested in the poorer countries of the EU to improve trans-european traffic infrastructure (TEN, aka road, rail, waterways) and environmental projects (e.g. villages hooked up to proper sewage pipes with treatment plants at the end, instead of dumping sewage to the groundwater / into rivers and seas).
Yet after spending 133 billion € the vast majority of Romanian, Bulgarian and many more countries villages do not have sewage pipes for example
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Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.
Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)
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You mean that resource wasting shop, that is sending huge airplane parts all across Europe for political reasons? I don’t even want to start about the subsidies considered illegal by the wto...
Well, it seems to be competitive with Boeing & no one else really stepped up doing it the "proper" way so far.
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aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)
What did I just wrote about leadership and it's importance?
There are a variety of ways to cultivate a domestic industry, govt committees directly investing doesn’t seem like the leading candidate can. Trade barriers and state sponsored industrial partnerships.
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aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)
What did I just wrote about leadership and it's importance?
Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.
Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...