Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management

And the next level of enlightenment is that you can further learn everything about corporate bureaucracy by combining the learnings from "Yes, Minister" with the American "The Office".

It's not any better in the private world, but the sociopaths are a bit more money-oriented.

This fits:

> Facing reality, whether Apple or EU, is core requirement of good management

I understand where the author is coming from and It is important to have a realist perspective on what is driving European strategy or else we will be in denial.

I think it's also important to recognize that the west are interconnected in many real ways beyond economic. The first and most clearly top of mind recently is the US defense umbrella which allows the EU to invest on other things instead of defense. Another less talked about is how the US subsidizes most of global R&D for healthcare by virtue of the obscene amount Americans pay and hence make profitable that industry to the benefit of all of humanity.

For American companies to contemplate selling into or building offices and having employees in Europe is to contemplate a set of trade-offs.. there's a reason why European employees are typically paid far less, it has to do with the fact that there's far less flexibility if they are a bad hire coupled with the fact that they have much better benefits provided by their governments and hence their money goes a lot further. That is of course related to the fact that they are not generally paying much for defense.

Everyone is self interested and when we see the Europeans talk about human rights on the one hand but then do big wine and dine trips in China to sell their luxury goods on the other hand you see clear evidence of that fact.

As much as many Europeans may loathe the united states, in the grand scheme of things we are far more interwoven with each other and ultimately entering a new cold war with China and decisions will need to be made over time around where to place bets around self-reliance. I'm sure Europeans love to sell to China but they will not love the glut of Chinese Imports that will decimate their protectionist economies at a level far more aggressive than they've ever experienced across the Atlantic

> And, as an institution, they are largely all too convinced that an all-seeing universal surveillance state would be a good thing, actually.

Not that I disagree, but where is the light in this tunnel? Increased police surveillance seems to be a common theme in USA, UK and Australia. And countries with less advanced democracies--to say nothing of Russia or China--are not climbing faster into the surveillance wagon mostly because of financial reasons.

Yeah, I had to make the change because HN has a length-limit on headlines