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?

#781

Post by dv_dt » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

TMWNN wrote: post #330

dv_dt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366487/ Here is a different take from a newer paper. > The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually. Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy proble…

>Here is a different take from a newer paper. This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says: >So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started…

I think people have a better idea of their own finances than a trying to infer it

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

#782

Post by FredPret » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

splithalf wrote: post #724

FredPret wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one correction; targeted ads have enabled the existence of many small businesses. Want to launch a board game aimed at left-handed nerds in a specific city? Before, you’d need a big media campaign that would also reach many right-handed non-nerds, wasting a lot of money. Now, you just need a few thousand $’s worth of targeted ads.

Targeted ads are unethical and should be eliminated, the abuses are too obvious to enumerate. Prostitution and drugs have also enabled the existence of many small companies.

Everything has an upside and a downside. Eliminating all targeted ads will lead to entrepreneurship being restricted to the rich or the well-connected, which is not only unethical but anathema to me and many others.

I think the way forward is somewhere in the middle, targeted ads with restrictions and opt-outs. Polarization isn't a path to progress.

As an aside, prostitution doesn't have to be the crime magnet it is today (in medieval Europe the Church ran brothels!) And while most drugs are unambiguously bad, some are considered safe enough to be traded openly and very profitably - caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and now marijuana.

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

#783

Post by dv_dt » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #705

dv_dt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not writing a thesis here. Merely providing a counter example to imho a myth that wealth creation needs a weak social safety net.

In goverment policy there is very rarely a closed form proof of any policy - we are almost always stuck with collecting large and small data points and needing to form a policy based on incomplete information and theory. But mostly it seems it’s matched up with motivations and biases - which are worth examining.

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

#784

Post by simonh » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

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…

Raw speed isn't everything. They are offering performance per watt, per weight, and per battery life metrics that are unavailable anywhere else. Add in display, camera, security and hardware accelerated machine learning capabilities, and there are many, many axes on which they offer unique capabilities.

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

#785

Post by simonh » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #767

swiley wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most PCs do at this point, also that secure enclave is very rarely both effective and something empowering the user so it's often ignored outside of very closed systems like Macs and phones.

Not sure what you’re saying here — most PCs have the hardware but they don’t use it?

Or in some cases implement it so poorly you'd be better off not having it. But hey, let's just check that box anyway.

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

#786

Post by sudosysgen » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

wreath wrote: post #761

sudosysgen wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think OSM was going to not bring the data to the masses? Or that no developper was going to make apps that used that data?

There is no way for us to know and I didn't say that w/o Google or other Big Tech we wouldn't be have these candies as someone described. Rather that we should acknowledge the role they played in distributing the tech they didn't create.

Sure, they did bring them to the market. And they did play a role, which was not vital and that other companies were trying to do at the same time.

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

#787

Post by nxc18 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #690

specialkfan wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - it's this mindset that allows the US to be far more productive with arguably maybe a "lower" quality of life if you're benchmarking it against things like vacation time. It's all about trade-offs at the end of the day and what you choose to value. What folks in the US value are clearly different and therefore result in different priorities.

> it's this mindset that allows the US to be far more productive https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm GDP per hour worked for the US is $72/hour, same as Belgium. France is $68, Denmark $75, Germany $66. Is 9% "far more productive"? Japan FWIW is $47/hour.

Yes but you’re missing the part of the conversation where it was established that US workers work more.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2003/european-vacatio...

Anecdotally, it throws a wrench in the works when you can’t do any major projects over the winter or summer months because some portion of your team is going to be on a month-long vacation.

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

#788

Post by gumby » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:19 PM 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…

> 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…

I see your point but mostly disagree with it. The cost to advertise has dropped so while they have displaced some TV ads (still the largest) and most print ads, more people are able to advertise* so they are in a technical sense providing a different and better service to the market.

By analogy you say the same about cars, which “merely” displaced peoples’ “transportation spend” away from horses.

* I don’t think the growth of advertising has necessarily been particularly good; apart from the spying, people still only have 16 or so hours of consciousness per day so there is a zero sum and intrusive quality to ads. I’m just addressing your economic point.

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

#789

Post by Symbiote » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

jopsen wrote: post #527

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…

> Uber is displacing taxis, redirecting money to themselves. I lived in San Francisco 2013-2018, before Uber I very rarely used taxis -- to/from the airport maybe. Having moved back to Denmark, I again very rarely use taxis. But when I lived in the US, I used Uber many times each week. Sometimes to/from work. But taxis in Denmark is easily 5x as expensive, and generally unavailable on-demand. So now I was forced to b…

Taxis in Denmark are very easily available on demand. There are several apps, or you can phone.

(I have a friend who uses them regularly after we meet up.)

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

#790

Post by foobiekr » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

sildur wrote: post #178

laurent92 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end, one may talk about all the startups (when the BPI pumps billions into it, I sure hope there are some startups and medium companies), but EU has proven unable to build an Apple . It would be dismantled here, and CEO beaten up before reaching any interesting level. DailyMotion (French) was as big as Youtube. Many others like this. We always end up #2, and the Silicon Valley still decides what is ok to say o…

EU built a Nokia. Until MS infiltrated and dismantled it, that is.

I can’t let this go. You are viewing Nokia as a consumer company. That’s wrong. Like Ericsson and Nortel they were huge in service provider. By the time MS rolled around Nokia had already flubbed the consumer market but had more importantly completely lost in the high tech arena around service providers. I competed directly with Nokia in the early 2000s and we produced a solution in the mobile backhaul space that was not only 10x more performant but also denser and more reliable. We did this with ease and crushed them. Nokia still does work on the space (notably building the dissident tracking system for Iran) but it was killed outright as soon as the Valley tech companies (the actual tech companies, not the consumer web crap) went after them. Now theyre replaying that by clinging to a product (deepfield) that is already past its expiration date.

Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.