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

economist.com

881–890 of 905 posts

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

#881

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Yeah but doesn't Apple rely on European companies like Bosch for sensors and stuff? So, no iPhone without those crappy uninnovative European companies. Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?

Yes, but how is Europe monetizing those things? Just because something was invented here is irrelevant if people can't use it to pay rent or create new well paying jobs.

So doing good is a bad thing now? Not the whole world follows the US approach where only making money seems to count. Luckily.

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

#882

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Pre covid U.K. was part of EU, very little has changed yet - same regulations and taxes as in 2019 Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.

But UK (and London especially) is different - that's why they left the EU and were always in tention with EU when they were a member, especially with regards to their financial sector. Bay Area, New York, Austin, US has a decent number of hubs, London is most comparable to New York from my experience (I've worked in a London based startup, NY agency and a SF startup) mostly focused on financial and not really into ha…

The U.K. left the EU because of left behind towns blaming the EU for their problems.

London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain.

Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?

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

#883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre covid U.K. was part of EU, very little has changed yet - same regulations and taxes as in 2019 Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.

The UK is different, because the EU is not like the US federal government. Economic systems and cultures vary massively across the EU, far more than across US states. Hell, half the EU were Marxist-Leninist autocracies just a few decades ago!

In which case you can say “Portugal is different” or “Denmark is different”

Saying “U.K. is different” implies that Finland, Greece and France are relatively similar

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

#884

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The NHS is probably the worst health care system in the developed world.

Hahahahahaha! It really really isn’t, it’s a national treasure and it’s amazing how well it runs given how numerous governments have underfunded it. Every study on international healthcare shows the NHS is near the top in every category and once you factor in the cost per person it’s the top in the world. If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEP…

> If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US

That's just wrong. Try actually talking with a UK doctor about their experience instead of blindly following Labour dogma. They don't have the equipment to provide the level of care an American or Swiss hospital can.

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

#885

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How is this "misleading"? We want the poorer countries to get richer faster in order to close the gap. Accomplishing precisely this is a large part of EU policy. And it is working.

If the US had its eastern part communist, it too would have a higher average GDP from decades ago. It is basic economics.

GDP per capita in the US ranges from $200k (DC) to $38K (MI).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

Lots of ways to catch up there as well.

And that doesn't change the fact that that is the actual data, nothing "misleading" about it.

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

#886

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Which countries is that exactly? I know for a fact Finland and Spain have free healthcare for the unemployed.

Is that for everyone or the Unemployed that you have to register to be a part of with terms & conditions? Because Estonia also gives healthcare to the Unemployed, but you have to be signed up at the job agency and I think you have to have had a job recently. If you don't fulfill some other criteria you can be taken off the list.

For everyone in Finland at least, don't know for Spain...

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

#887
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post #773

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Police have been told to avoid certain areas in uniform when traveling to and from work. In other areas the police think twice about entering, as people are likely to throw things at the car etc. I have this from a friend in the UK. If that doesn't qualify as a type of "no go", I don't know where to draw the line. In any case, it's shocking.

"a friend in the UK"... what an excellent source of factual unbiased information. It's also bullshit (and if it isn't prove me wrong with actual facts, not apocryphal stories from "friends" ).

Well I can't go and actually name my friends on a public forum, can I. So yes, it's unverifiable. But if you live there, it shouldn't be hard to find someone outside of your London bubble with this opinion.

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

#888
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post #740

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You could still do it with 6 weeks vacation though, with the sort of balance Europeans have come to expect.

You can’t if there aren’t any jobs like that in Europe.

But there are.

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

#889
post #527

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> 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…

They made upper middle class folks not buy a car, and cannibalized public transportation miles, which increased dramatically the total number of vehicle miles travelled. Not really a good trade off.

They gave people a choice, and they chose. Why does no-one see this as a problem indicating that public transportation needs to be dramatically improved?

The point of even socialism is not to push existing solutions for everything and look at everything as a threat. The point is to improve people's lives, and letting people choose might be a right-wing method of accomplishing that, but you can't deny it's effectiveness.

Why aren't we dramatically improving public transportation? The fact that people chose not to use it means people judge their quality of life better with Uber than with public transportation. Use that, don't fight it!

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

#890

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“No big companies” is a fine policy for things that don’t require a lot of money to innovate on. A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example. Pushing the envelope on tech is very expensive and this is where Europe’s current model doesn’t work. If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then small…

Europe had iPhone precursors before iPhones were a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design. Arduino and Pi still are. Also not doing so badly with fintech and entertainment. https://www.information-age.com/value-of-european-tech-compa...

The precursors to the iPhone were just garbage (I say this as a power user of these devices). There is a reason Android dropped their existing plans to mirror the iPhone form factor. It was a fundamental shift that fixed so many usability problems that it started the entire smartphone revolution.

> And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design.

For sure, but ARM doesn’t manufacture and has not meaningfully stepped into the datacenter where low power could be a home run with some more effort.

>Arduino and Pi still are.

Yep, but these serve very little of the public. The Pi as a desktop for regular users has failed.

These are great companies but they don’t have the engineering and financial muscle to completely reshape entire industries. You need to own the stack top to bottom to do that kind of change and those companies are innovators at just one level.

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