281–290 of 496 posts
Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.
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> aerospace Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace. > energy CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy. > telecom Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech. > drugs / biotech BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine. The EU has many…
> CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that isn't in the EU, which is revealing. ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much. The biggest breakthroughs in fusion will derive from smaller projects, not giant slow-moving projects like ITER. The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some h…
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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”.
This can't happen in EU today.
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There are a fair amount of people who think the LHC was not a wise use of resources since it did not give any clues to a new theory beyond the existing "Standard Model" https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-f... It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that had to hand…
You are literally using a tangible benefit right now.
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Saying this while waiting for the new savior vaccine with a brand new mRNA technology pushed by two startups: Moderna & BioNTech is just... funny.
No, that's a great example of what I'm saying. The vaccine is payed for by states - they had a 100% guaranteed worldwide market. Whether they invested their own money (like BioNTech) or were explicitly financed by a state (like Moderna and Pfizer), the money for that research will ultimately be payed almost entirely by the state.
Just a giveaway to the best politically connected companies. Like all such EU initiatives.
Such a tiresome and self-defeating mindset. If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just corruption. Of course politics and lobbying will play a role when we're talking about hundreds of billions of euros, but that doesn't mean that it can't end up being a net positive for the union. Ask for transparency and keep tabs, don't assume that it's already lost.
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Most of that is packaging, seriously. The purity requirements and vibrational limits for those parts are very high. ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline. The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum. The limit for ma…
> The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding [..] gravitational-wave astronomy A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in gravitational-wave astronomy. ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately one billion times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton's width displacements measured by LIGO. From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts : > At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to…
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"Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.
Sovereignty matters when you can’t trust there won’t be supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade intervention. Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”. As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions o…
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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”.
Most of the time with countries not directly aligned to the west, the preaching is for us to sell our strategic industries in name of liberalism and "economic openness", usually spreading lies and misinformation about the company's efficiency. When it's the other way around, it's protectionism and good old Keynesian economics: China can't buy that company, their 5g is evil etc. I know this first-hand because it has h…
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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…
Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the bri…