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Dear Europe, please wake up

klinger.io

221–230 of 323 posts

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#221

The EU does not have an equivalent of US commerce clause jurisprudence (which descends from Hamilton's original economic design to prevent exactly the kinds of problems that this author is complaining about). The EU does have an equivalent to the supremacy clause, but due to cultural and political forces it cannot have the same effect that it has in the US. Another major factor that makes the US more competitive is o…

I found myself nodding at the first 2 paragraphs, then got serious whiplash on paragraph 3. That was wild.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#222

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…

Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland, and (before 2022) Russia punch above their weight in entrepreneurship? Or Switzerland and the UK?

> Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland

And yet nobody would move there to find a job, not even from Italy, Greece or Portugal.

Their salaries are simply too low and the ROI in terms of quality of life it's not remotely comparable.

There's over one million Romanians in Italy, making them the largest foreign community in Italy.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#223
post #28

Teaching English will just reinforce Anglo-American hegemony.

I kind of agree with you, and (as a hobbyist linguist) I believe a diversity of languages is a beautiful thing, but it creates unnecessary friction for business and about everything. Europe really needs a unified language -- it could be English, French, German, or even Interlingua or Esperanto.

Lingua franca really matters. China, for example, didn't have a unified spoken language until about 100 years ago. However, Mandarin is today universally understood and spoken in the country. And the result? You only to know one language, and you can have access to one of the largest markets in the world. Alas, the same could not be said for Europe.

(In fact, Europe needs a unified language if people are serious about getting rid of English and the Anglo-American hegemony, because each smaller language really cannot fight English now.)

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#224

The EU does not have an equivalent of US commerce clause jurisprudence (which descends from Hamilton's original economic design to prevent exactly the kinds of problems that this author is complaining about). The EU does have an equivalent to the supremacy clause, but due to cultural and political forces it cannot have the same effect that it has in the US. Another major factor that makes the US more competitive is o…

And make EU more like USA? let them be influenced by corrupted wall street, loose EPA regulations for pesticides, favor the rich in the name of capitalism? In spite of the flaws and messy bureaucracy, I still like EU for their policies towards environment, food, socialism, etc. And above all, EU is the single beacon of hope to keep a check on mega corps like Apple, Google, Meta, MS, etc.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#225
post #64

European here. It normal that EU become the #4 economy in the world. There is nothing wrong with that. What wasn't normal was to see billions of people in poverty. I am happy to see India and China catch up. The best way to be #1 economy is to destroy others. We don't want to do that. Indian entrepreneurs are as ambitious as the growth of their economy. EU wants to focus on ecology and democracy and this impacts it's…

China has eaten European manufacturing, India will eat most of Europe Service jobs through remote positions. Europe will be saddled with debts, looking like a disfunctional Argentina squabbling about populist socialist /nationalist talking points.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#226
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t even get me started about on-call culture. No, I don't want to answer to your pager robot at 3 am for things I have no control over and don't want to touch. Get another robot to answer that or hire an SRE. I want to write my CSS and my 1 hour lunch break and live a life.

I dunno man the company pays you 10x your peers for a reason.

Scarcity of skillset. If there are 10x as many people than now willing to do the job, companies would offer much lower salaries while making the same or worse work demands.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#227
The author isn't wrong. Europe is falling behind, and people should not pretend it's a good thing: the current European life style ("more to life than work") depends on excessive interests gained from technological advancements that are not yet replicated elsewhere. The life would be much worse if Europe couldn't keep up.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#228

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…

The US has been outperforming since the Second World War but the most notable property is how consistent that performance has been decade over decade. Those consistent small differences in per capita GDP growth rates compound to a big absolute difference over the course of a century.

As an interesting correlation, modern institutional venture capital was invented in the US immediately following WW2, and was producing notable outcomes by the 1950s. That has never really been replicated anywhere else.

Re: Dear Europe, please wake up

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland, and (before 2022) Russia punch above their weight in entrepreneurship? Or Switzerland and the UK?

> Then why does Czechia, Romania, Poland And yet nobody would move there to find a job, not even from Italy, Greece or Portugal. Their salaries are simply too low and the ROI in terms of quality of life it's not remotely comparable. There's over one million Romanians in Italy, making them the largest foreign community in Italy.

And how many of them are working in Italy's tech industry versus working as blue collar workers.
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