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The Future of European Competitiveness

commission.europa.eu

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Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#111

Post by Aerroon »

RandomLensman wrote: post #88
Aerroon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way the EU differs from national systems in that the EU is compartmentalized. The different languages and cultures mean that ideas, information, and politics doesn't flow freely. If you care about a specific policy then not only do you have to convince all the voters in your country, but you'll have to convince people in a dozen other countries that speak entirely different languages too. Compartmentalization lik…

The EU is also not a nation but only a supranational organization, so it shares that with other such organizations. But that aside, is that actually true for policymaking that it needs a lot of countries or for a lot things other countries don't care, i.e., small, focused minorities can enact things (not unlike most democracies)?

The Council can have a qualified majority vote - for the vote to pass 55% of the member states representing at least 65% of the EU population has to vote in favor.

The EU has a population of 450 million. 35% of it is a little over 157 million. Germany + France have a population of 149 million.

In practice every qualified majority vote has to have either Germany or France supporting the measure to pass the Council.

There are also Council votes that require unanimity. This is the so-called 'veto' that every country has. In that case obviously any country could hold up the process.

So, there are definitely places where things can be held up by a minority of countries, but I don't know if they can push things through. I think it would be more likely that they would leverage national level power for that.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#112

Post by unmole »

vaylian wrote: post #46

> Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia That's a very short and simplistic way to put it. We didn't lose Russia as a supplier. We chose to largely cut our economic ties with a nation that commits war crimes on a massive scale and that threatens the security of Ukraine and other European nations.

The end result is still the same: Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#113

Post by carlosjobim »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #85
carlosjobim wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who does that leave to defend against? Maybe the criminal gangs, who already have capacity rivaling and sometimes surpassing European governments? Or maybe killing, gang raping, shooting, bombing and looting is not an actual military conflict, because the soldiers don't wear uniforms, and thus nothing for the busy Europeans to mind.

Those are big problems, but the issue is a lack of will, not a lack of military strength. If the will situation changed those threats could be gone within a week.

That's laughable. Or really, it's tragicomic. If you don't have the will power, you have nothing. How can you not have the will to defend your civilians against the most horrible crimes and looting from organized criminals? Saying that you could fix it if you only wanted sounds like a guy in a bar saying he could beat you if only he wanted. Sure.

In South America they do put in the military against criminal gangs. Why don't the Europeans? Especially considering that the criminal gangs there are predominately consisting of foreigners, meaning they are de-facto a military matter.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#114

Post by wiz21c »

throwaway48540 wrote: post #99
Aerroon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't AI generated images save energy? AI generates a 10 images in 10 minutes. You pick one. A human would take hours to create one of them.

Ah yeah, I have a friend who's working on an online grocery store. He generated all his images - instead of driving hundreds of kilometers for weeks to take all the pictures. Definitely a huge win for the environmentally friendly.

OK, I take it as a good counter example to what I have posted. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#115

Post by wiz21c »

throwaway48540 wrote: post #62
wiz21c wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand growth as more economic activity and there I fail to see how they are disconnected. I mean, the more you move stuff around, the more you produce AI generated images, the more you consume energy ??? Of course we could as well produce energy without carbon emissions but we are not there yet. I'd be happy (honestly) to hear an example.

I live near 2 nuclear power plants producing practically zero CO2 compared to the energy output. We are there and have been for decades. You're basically saying "I don't want to consider other ways to produce energy so you should stop doing all the fun stuff you do". Nobody is ever going to agree with that, and you're going to antagonize people from even trying to be environmentally conscious.

> Nobody is ever going to agree with that

I certainly agree with that sentence. I know I'm on a pretty radical side of the question.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#116

Post by izacus »

silvestrov wrote: post #84

I'm reading the document a bit different. It is not so much about lack of competitiveness as it is about centralizing policy making and power in the EU organization, aka "all problems can be solved by giving EU institutions dictorial power over everything". E.g. making sure all military purchases are done centrally (aka EU army). All the text about GDP, R&D and AI is just window dressing for this goal. --- The summar…

Yep, that's what's my takeaway from here as well. But for that you actually need to read the document not just assume whats written in it. :)

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#117

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

hintymad wrote: post #97
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably not what the self patting EU clowns were expecting. I don't know who you have in mind with "self petting EU clowns" but in general people are very aware of what's going on. A lot of companies have been giving this feedback for a long time.

> in general people are very aware of what's going on. But what can people do? It seems to me that the EU government can do whatever they like. Or is it like what people say about the US politics: the politicians do what voters want, and it's just that a minority of people don't like EU's policies?

> But what can people do? It seems to me that the EU government can do whatever they like

You might think the problem is the EU but in all reality all this shit comes from the national governments. And how to improve these I don't know because people vote for this nonsense.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#118

Post by vv_ »

tl;dr The United States and the European Union isn't even remotely comparable.

Private investment in the European Union is just a fraction of what's seen in the United States. Investment across country borders, especially in Software, is practically non-existent.

Businesses in Europe often prefer to work with local companies within their own country, so the "common market" doesn’t operate as seamlessly as it does in the US. You can't scale to as many users as you could in the US.

Hiring across country borders is still pretty rare, except when companies set up subsidiaries to tap into cheaper labor markets. Oh, and each country has it's own complicated labor code. Complicating matters further, some countries have insane job-protection law (i.e. France) making it less attractive to hire there to begin with. Contrast this with the United States where a company operating out of California can easily (or more easily) hire in Minneapolis or any other US state.

Regulations in the United States can also be quite a headache. The main difference is that in the EU, you’re dealing with multiple legislative environments, which adds another layer of complexity. It's not that the regulations themselves are so terrible, but the variety across countries makes it more complicated.

Taxes are significantly higher in the EU. For example, in Lithuania, 39.5% is deducted from your salary—this includes 20% income tax, 6.98% for mandatory health insurance, and 12.52% for social insurance and pensions. On top of that, there's a 21% value-added tax (VAT) on all purchases. So, if you earn €5,000 per month, you end up with just €2,390 to spend.

Utilities are also more expensive than in the United States. In Lithuania, I pay €0.25 per kWh for electricity. Gasoline costs €1.4 per liter, which is roughly $5.67 per gallon. For businesses, it is even worse; Lithuania is considered to be one of the cheaper countries.

Software-based products mainly took off in the United States, creating a large talent pool and a high level of maturity in the field. In contrast, in many EU countries, people either concentrated on industrial applications or only began focusing on software engineering in the past 20 years.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#119

Post by Aerroon »

RandomLensman wrote: post #71
frankjr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know who you have in mind with "self petting EU clowns" The politicians. > A lot of companies have been giving this feedback for a long time. Yeah, still got ignored as the report suggests.

And who elects those politicians? Does the median voter in the EU want high growth or rather something more like museum?

I think there's a very large amount of Europeans that either want something like a museum or they simply don't understand what the opportunity costs are for what they want. They think the economy is gonna work itself out and be good no matter what.

For example: environmental talk when your largest source of natural resources gets cut off is just going to compound together. It will result in high energy prices, which will make your industry less competitive and prices higher. Quality of life will fall as a result of this. But people will just blame it on something else (whatever happens to be the popular scapegoat the time). And this same kind of pattern repeats itself in many areas of life, where Europeans just ignore what the opportunity costs are.

Re: The Future of European Competitiveness

#120

Post by tormeh »

_w1tm wrote: post #98
tormeh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, that's the easy bit, it just takes more development time. Easy, yes, but expensive for the business and its customers. It's a silly way to do things, but it's hard to see an alternative without member states giving up massive amounts of sovereignty.

> without member states giving up massive amounts of sovereignty. Why is this a bad thing?

Because it's very difficult to accomplish in practice.
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