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Dear Europe, please wake up

klinger.io

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Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#201

Post by [deleted] »

alephnerd wrote: post #165
Muromec wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not providing critical infrastructure and people will not die, it's just you losing money, because your business is structured in a wrong way. You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions. If you do provide critical infrastructure and people will die, it's also not my problem, because there will be a law requiring you to hire an SRE and a regulator…

You're entitled to your opinion, just like I am entitled not hire you and hire an Israeli, Czech, Pole, or Indian for the same salary (and I have). Btw, I'm in the cybersecurity space, so a Tier 1 escalation generally means nation state attack or business stopping attack on a customer. > You did it to yourself and should not expect people on salary to bear the cost of your wrong decisions. Plenty of escalations are d…

[deleted]

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#202

Post by thefz »

> So, what do we need to change > First, we need to stop believing the US meme about Europe.

Never believed that for a second. First, twitter is not real life. Second, let the europeans speak about Europe, not those who live thousands of kilometers away.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#204

Post by alephnerd »

ghusto wrote: post #197
alephnerd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read TFA.

Read it, and that's my response. I get it, we could be more like the U.S.A. in the way we operate by removing / changing some of the obstacles we have for business. I don't want that.

English fluency and simplified incorporation are not major changes for Western Europe.

Hell, Switzerland does this, as do countries like China and India.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#205

Post by 62951413 »

subsubzero wrote: post #157

So many things here. Lets talk pay, US tech workers, lets just say Sr SWE and up, and lets look at SF as the author uses this as a focal point. Salary is roughly $300-400k a year(in SF FANGish company), in Europe or England its about half of that, and maybe even less. I know as I have family I married into that points out this fact, the best workers all go over to the US and make large salaries over there at US tech…

Let's talk about you growing older. The closer you're to 50 the more difficult it gets to find a new job. You get laid off in a major downsizing round. Your COBRA healthcare plan is $2K+/month which incidentally is comparable to your 1-bedroom apartment rent. It could take you a few months to find the next job. Or longer, people discuss it on this very site every other week.

The FAANGs and the capital gains are real but for a minority of us. If you're single and under 30 the Bay Area is a top destination for sure. You won't be that person forever though.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#206

Post by cherryteastain »

hollerith wrote: post #196
cherryteastain wrote: post #193

Europeans always like to approach this issue from the perspective of Europe being uncompetitive vs the US. I'd say it's not Europe that is underperforming, rather the US has been over-performing since the 2008 GFC. If we look at other major developed countries (say Japan, S Korea, Canada, Austalia, New Zealand) they also lack the same innovation ecosystem the US has. Their economies have also been largely stagnating…

Seigniorage is "profit made by a government by issuing currency" (according to Google). So the US government got all this money. And this led somehow to the US economy outperforming the rest of the developed world?

Money is a representation of wealth. Underpinning that are real resources and labor, economists have realized this since Adam Smith.

Debt is money creation. Deficit spending by the US govt is money creation; FED literally creates out of of thin air some money to buy T bills when it does QE.

USD is the global reserve currency. Practically all trade deals are in USD, even when say a S Korean firm sells stuff to Indonesia. Only the US can print USD, all other countries must export goods or services to acquire the USD needed for their imports.

Say an amount X USD represents all goods and services in the world. When the USG prints money, now X+dX dollars represent the same goods and services. USG spends the dX amount via salaries, purchase orders etc, and this amount reaches US companies and individuals. These individuals then purchase goods and services abroad. Essentially, without producing or selling anything in return, US gets to import dX dollars worth of goods and services. That's what seigniorage means in that context.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#207

Post by pvitz »

em-bee wrote: post #191
relaxing wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no continent called America.

they are talking about the americas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas which is sometimes called america. (mostly in non english native countries i suspect)

No, certainly the USA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States). The author is most likely Austrian or German and it is quite common to say "Amerika" for the USA there.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#208

Post by holtkam2 »

relaxing wrote: post #175
duxup wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck you can't even generalize about American tech industry and only talk about SF tech world. Granted that generalization is done in America too. It's always a bit of a frustration running into constant comparisons, managers who want to emulate processes, and such when "Hey, you know what, we're not them... and we're doing well being ourselves." Not that you immediately dismiss new ideas because they seem to be from…

It really isn’t! A lot of the SV stuff on here is frankly baffling to the rest of the country.

Agreed. I worked in tech in Chicago from 2017-2021 before moving to SF to take a new job in SF @ big tech. Feels like a different planet.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#209

Post by [deleted] »

cherryteastain wrote: post #206
hollerith wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seigniorage is "profit made by a government by issuing currency" (according to Google). So the US government got all this money. And this led somehow to the US economy outperforming the rest of the developed world?

Money is a representation of wealth. Underpinning that are real resources and labor, economists have realized this since Adam Smith. Debt is money creation. Deficit spending by the US govt is money creation; FED literally creates out of of thin air some money to buy T bills when it does QE. USD is the global reserve currency. Practically all trade deals are in USD, even when say a S Korean firm sells stuff to Indones…

[deleted]

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#210

Post by dl9999 »

lores wrote: post #58
ta1243 wrote: post #30

"If you go to the south of France – our hope and prayers in the global AI race – and order a coffee there is a chance that the waitress doesn’t understand the word “coffee”, can’t explain you what’s in the salad – happened to me twice." Oh they'll understand. They will just pretend not to. It's France.

Oh no! Someone in a foreign country did not make any more effort than the author did to learn a foreign language! Not once, but twice ! That's it, I'm never leaving San Francisco again. And as for your snark, no, many French people do not speak English, and a fair number resent Americans going around like they own the place without making even a cursory attempt at being polite.

My wife and I are from the U.S. She's from Belarus, but has been in the country for 30 years. We went to France about 10 years ago. I was semi-expecting the stereotype (rude, arrogant), but everybody we met was nice. One guy at the hotel seemed standoff-ish at first, but he was very friendly by the time we left a week later. Pretty much everybody we interacted with was pleasant and helpful. We tried to use the few French words we knew (thank you, please, hello, goodbye type of thing), but for the most part we had to speak English. I think almost everybody we interacted with spoke English, at least a little. This was in Paris mostly, so maybe that's not representative. I was generally impressed with the people.
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