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

economist.com

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

#701

Post by ponow »

concordDance wrote: post #458
thow-01187 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the ability to google things has provided immense, incalculable value, even if it's not value showing up in gdp figures.

There are "personal values" and there is "exchange value". The latter shows up in GDP. Isn't the problem with search also similar to education? Its effect is indirect on the both the consumer of education and within that consumer's society: when education is "useful", it enables all kinds of increased trade, not necessarily in education proper.

To do a proper experiment, I suppose we'd need to compare otherwise identical individuals with differing education. Similarly, we could compare people whose only significant difference is the amount of search using Google, and assess their effects on GDP. Daunting to carry out these experiments, but possible in principle, no?

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

#702

Post by iso1210 »

_Microft wrote: post #309
chrisseaton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US companies are far more ambitious than that. I see large corporates in the US genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc.

> I see large corporates run by Elon Musk genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc. Fixed that for you. ;)

Quite. Musk is so unusual and venerated by many because he's different to the normal US billionaires who seem to want to squeeze the world and get new yachts.

Bezos is doing blue original as a money sinking hobby. Ellison buys yachts and squeezes legacy companies (do new companies really choose to lock themselves into oracle?). Zuckerberg tries to control the worlds communication.

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

#703

Post by withinboredom »

sokoloff wrote: post #646
dukeyukey wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality I had a quick look at Wikipedia's wealth Gini figures and this isn't the case. Places like the Netherlands and Sweden score atrociously, but the three big European economies (France, Germany, and the UK) all have less wealth inequality than the US (significantly so for the first two), as do a whole host of other European countries.

It doesn’t look to me like Germany has significantly better score than the US. (0.818 Germany vs 0.852 US. 0.867 Sweden and 0.906 for Netherlands [with 0.736 the very year prior, making me suspicious of the stability of those data points as I can’t comprehend that wealth distribution across a country that large could change that much in a single year].) * - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_…

The Netherlands is quite small (about the size of LA + suburbs). I didn’t look at the data, but there was a major shift in 0-hour contracts in the last year due to COVID-19 which would probably impact those calculations[citation needed].

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

#704

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #572
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can't name any just proves my point. Thank you.

Your logic is flawed. That happens when following some ideology.

It may be flawed but at least I provide arguments for my logic while you just spam this thread with "Europe good because social system, USA bad because corporations"

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

#705

Post by jessedhillon »

dv_dt wrote: post #174
jessedhillon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of which is an entirely separate set of points from the point you were making about the number of billionaires.

If one is concerned about wealth creation as your reply to my original data brought up, it would seem that sentiment about friendliness of business creation would be relevant. Not necessarily accumulation of wealth from winning bets a decades ago.

Yes, well on the one hand you shared evidence of actual outcomes and presented that as meaningful, and that's what I challenged. Weaving theories about how social benefits are good for entrepreneurship is not much of a counterpoint here, unless you can connect it back to the same outcomes in question.

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

#706

Post by iso1210 »

nxc18 wrote: post #105
everyone wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your crud app is 'advancing society'? Really?

Not all of us have boring jobs. Geospatial intelligence is a severely underutilized technology (read: extreme growth potential). Remember the John Hopkins coronavirus dashboard making the rounds last year? You’ve probably had a use for the software that powered that.

> Remember the John Hopkins coronavirus dashboard making the rounds last year?

No.

I've seen good stuff from ft.com, ourworldindata, gov.uk -- all 3 are from the UK.

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

#707

Post by iso1210 »

sbacic wrote: post #151
chrisseaton wrote: post #8

Why are European companies so unambitious ? My whole civilian career I've had to work for North American companies because the European alternatives aren't even attempting to be competitive.

Because the rewards just aren't there. Amazon is a company started by some guy in a garage and less than 30 years later it is one of the richest companies in the world. Something like that just isn't going to happen in Europe - you'd be crushed by high taxes and regulation long before you reached that level. Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started in…

How do "high taxes" crush a company?

Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"

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

#708

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

withinboredom wrote: post #694
simonh wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price. Strange, I bought a PC with 2x the specs at the same price as a maxed out Mac…

I'm no Mac user but the value of a Mac to its users has more to do with its seamless integration with all other Apple products and services rather than a purely utilitarian perspective in raw specs/performance per dollar.

This has no value to me as their pricing is out of my budget and I don't like the idea of being locked into a proprietary ecosystem, which is of course down to everyone's personal preference, but judging by sales numbers, it looks like Apple's ecosystem has gotten some things really on point.

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

#709

Post by sokoloff »

withinboredom wrote: post #703
sokoloff wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t look to me like Germany has significantly better score than the US. (0.818 Germany vs 0.852 US. 0.867 Sweden and 0.906 for Netherlands [with 0.736 the very year prior, making me suspicious of the stability of those data points as I can’t comprehend that wealth distribution across a country that large could change that much in a single year].) * - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_…

The Netherlands is quite small (about the size of LA + suburbs). I didn’t look at the data, but there was a major shift in 0-hour contracts in the last year due to COVID-19 which would probably impact those calculations[citation needed].

The figures in the table are 2018 to 2019, so predate CV-19. Even with that, those would seem like that could shift income inequality measures but not wealth inequality measures by such a wide range.

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

#710

Post by [deleted] »

midasuni wrote: post #575
marvin wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving two written warnings two weeks apart for one of the five objective reasons that are grounds for firing, then firing with a three month notice period is by definition harder than saying "you're fired, please leave the building immediately".

So employ people on fixed 3 month contracts, or even by day. You’ll have to pay more of course.

[deleted]
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