Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#531

Post by midasuni » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

break_the_bank wrote: post #351

tsimionescu wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules. Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit an…

If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple. What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.

Apple Pay didn’t come out until 2014, the rest of the world was paying with contactless on phones for years before that - Japan from 2004 onwards.

America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#532

Post by marvin » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

dieortin wrote: post #470

joelbluminator wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kneejerk reaction was to say you're wrong and of course EU citizens are happier, but thinking deeply about it that's nonsense. North Europe yes, happier by a lot. But if you consider the EU in its entirety, the South (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) and the East (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria) bring down the average by a lot. When the economy is down and corrupt no amount of safety nets will help you be happy, you sim…

Are you seriously saying people in the north of Europe are happier than in the south? I beg to disagree. Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.

You'd have to argue why suicide rates that are measured to be higher trumps scientific attempts at directly measuring happiness. The latter does indeed rank Southern Europe lower than both Northern Europe and the United States.

https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#533

Post by refurb » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #423

refurb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. It’s the mentality, not the vacation. My job in the US gives 5 weeks vacation per year. You are expected to disconnect and it’s embarrassing if email/text while on leave - people think you’re nuts. But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that id…

Work is just a paycheque. If they stopped paying me, I'd stop showing up. I really doubt I'll greet the reaper with the regret of not spending more time at the office. I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.

I guess it depends on what you consider cool. I work in drug discovery and no, I couldn't do that without some deep pocketed investors.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#534

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

gjhh244 wrote: post #525

pembrook wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Europe’s entire social safety net is at risk if their private sector can’t generate enough wealth to support it. Given their declining populations and anti-immigrant tendencies inflamed by the refugee crisis in many of its member states, it doesn’t look good for the EU’s future.

Few European people oppose migration of educated workers. Rather it's about asylum seekers who often arrive here illegally, and typically lack sufficient education to do well in our job markets, leading to very high unemployment rate and other social problems. Europe has a problem with aging workforce, but it can't be solved by importing people who can't find a job.

> Few European people oppose migration of educated workers.

That's a lie people tell you because they do not want to sound racist.

> Rather it's about asylum seekers who often arrive here illegally

... very few ...

> and typically lack sufficient education to do well in our job markets,

Uhm. And the ones that are educated, we don't recognize their diplomas. Nice.

And also, that's what the education system is for.

Finally, poor people in poor countries can't afford to flee to Europe. So those people are actually middle class people from poor countries with often quite some education.

> leading to very high unemployment rate and other social problems.

Nope, that's our own failed policies leading to that. Don't blame our mistakes on immigrants.

> Europe has a problem with aging workforce, but it can't be solved by importing people who can't find a job.

Than thank god we're not doing that.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#535

Post by simonh » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

thow-01187 wrote: post #430

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies This is literally the article’s point. Europe and the U.S. grew similarly. The U.S. and China produced more large companies. (The Continent’s larger companies also being older than the other two’s.) > supposedly more investment in R&D Not supposedly, factually. The article explicitly states this. It’s the Economist; if you…

Imho, what was happening in the Silicon Valley economy looks much more like displacement of value rather than creation of value (1). Google/Facebook have displaced other ad formats, redirecting money to themselves. AWS have displaced IT technicians in other corporations, redirecting money to themselves. Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware, redirecting money to themselves. Uber is displacing taxis, redirect…

I people freely move from one service or product to another, usually it's because the new service is cheaper or better than the old service or product. That's direct value to the end user right there.

Moving to AWS from running your own data centres is vastly more cost effective for most companies, you can build systems faster, you can scale them instantly, you can move resources between regions easily, you can focus on your company's core competencies. AWS creates massive value, that's why we use it.

I used to look up the phone numbers of restaurants in a phone book, but now I use Google. That doesn't mean they are equivalent to me and they provide the same value. Looking up a restaurant on Google Maps is quicker, I can do it from anywhere, I can look at reviews and I can see exactly where it is and get routing direction. The experience now is orders of magnitude more powerful and that creates huge value for customers and businesses.

Apple hardware is highly customised, and dramatically better than anything their customers have with better performance and advanced features like machine learning and secure authentication all implemented in custom hardware. That's been true on the phones for many years, and now with their in house designed desktop processors it's true for the Mac as well. Although the Mac has had unique custom hardware like the T1 and the 5K iMac video system for a while too. You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#536

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #509

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue if you say "the fact is", you should provide a source for that. So low-paying jobs in the service sector are not an immigrant thing in the US? Did you talk to enough Europeans to know we can only name the BionTech guy as an example of a successful immigrant?

>Did you talk to enough Europeans to know we can only name the BionTech guy as an example of a successful immigrant? Please name some for me. Especially in Germany.

I am one European. You would have to talk to a lot of Europeans to make the claim you made.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#537

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

varjag wrote: post #486

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. The fact is hard working immigrants in the US have a much higher chance of becoming successful than in Europe. Pretty much all the US tech companies are now run by immigrants of minority backgrounds while, for example, Eastern European and Turkish immigrants in Germany are still regarded as cleaners and kebab salesmen, with the only notable exception they can name being the Turkish CEO of BionTech.

Even the top tier of decision making political class in the USA has many immigrants. In Europe it's still largely token presence faces in auxiliary positions.

Yeah the Trump government was really really diverse, and so are the boards of the large companies.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#538

Post by oytis » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #503

oytis wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark legally discriminates agwinst "non-western" immigrants and officially aims at not taking any refugees at all. France is ruled by a rather right-wing government and has a chance to have a far-right one next. Germany hasn't seen a left-wing government for 16 years, will likely not see it for 4 more years (if ever). The rest can be easily compromised by economic stagnation, to have good social security you need…

I don't get your point. I mean, I agree with the danger of a far-right president in France in '22, and I'd like to see another party in power in Germany, but what does that have to do with the current quality of life? Right now, the social security system works, does it not? Just from the perspective of a citizen ... I have health and unemployment insurance, good public transportation, I won't get shot in public, the…

The first part was about quality of democracy. Europe has problems with the far-right too, and American democracy at least makes it possible that it's being interchangeably ruled by different parties with pretty distinct policies.

The second part is, well, like asking why should we sit in the lockdown and wear masks when not a lot of people are dying of covid right now. It's not something that may happen, it will happen if evething goes as it goes and no one makes anything about it

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#539

Post by midasuni » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #459

kentlyons wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much help did Nokia have from the EU?? Sure it was very Finnish, but not clear the EU helped. And it wasn't MS, it was Nokia itself in the face of Apple. I worked at Nokia and saw it first hand.

Europe gave us GSM[0]. At a time when everyone in Europe had a GSM phone penetration in the US was embarassingly low. It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

Back in 2000 everyone and his dog had a payg Nokia 3310 in the U.K.

The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#540

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #514

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the people commenting here are probably the ones that earn that tech money, not the person working in the service sector for a couple of $ an hour.

Well the topic of this thread was corporate and tech related so what do you expect? You can't always bring the lifestyle of minimum wage employees into every single discussion just as an joker card to argue that Europe is better than the US. Yes, minimum wage immigrants have it better in Europe and skilled immigrants have better opportunities in the US.

> Well the topic of this thread was corporate and tech related so what do you expect?

I expected exactly this - that people that benefit from those giant companies fail to see the downsides.

> You can't always bring the lifestyle of minimum wage employees into every single discussion just as an joker card to argue that Europe is better than the US.

Why not, if it works? Are you not just confirming that the US works for a few lucky ones whereas Europe works for most?