Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 905 posts

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

#301

Post by ZeroGravitas »

davidgatti wrote: post #166
reader_mode wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of t…

This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you h…

If the benefits of companies touted elsewhere in the thread is providing employment, why don't you hire two people to work 8 hour days and get more done?

If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.

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

#302

Post by berkes »

gryn wrote: post #92
lashloch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I'm having a hard time sympathising with you rather than the people spending time with their friends and family and enjoying life. Life is not a purgatory unless you believe there is an afterlife, which many people do not. You are free to derive joy from hard work or whatever, but do not think yourself better than those who do not share your priorities.

the point he's probably trying to convey is that lifestyle is subsidized by the rest who aren't and wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Which is countered by the fact he did not subsidize, but moved away, rather than sharing.

I think it's either sarcasm or bullsh#t

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

#303

Post by microtonal »

sildur wrote: post #203
Dma54rhs wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be employed in order to get Healthcare in most of the EU countries anyway, so it's not all that rosy as Americans tend to think.

No, that's false. At the very least, all residents are covered, regardless of their working status in Austria, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Serbia, and Sweden.

Add the Netherlands. Healthcare insurance is mandatory.

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

#304

Post by nxc18 »

ativzzz wrote: post #204
nxc18 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wondered this. I work at an American company with many European employees and it is just really hard to see a complete lack of ambition/competitiveness. At some point being on vacation so much must hurt, I know projects are delayed when folks just can’t be expected to be there and will randomly disappear for 4+ weeks at a time. But that really doesn’t explain the extreme cultural conservatism towards effort/am…

A very US mindset. I live in the US and I completely disagree with your outlook on life. Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money. I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just…

If you stopped working, society wouldn’t care. If everyone did, there would be a problem; no more good food or vacation accommodations.

I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an Android flagship CPU that wasn’t years behind last year’s the iPhone on day one. On the flip side, imagine if Google hadn’t gone out of their way to create street view, or the rest of the Maps system? The folks at Apple and Google aren’t Einstein or Newton, but they make a vigorous contribution to society nonetheless.

Everyone has to do their part, and when they don’t, we are all poorer for it. The European attitude towards work isn’t fully entrenched in the US but it seems to be growing to our detriment.

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

#305

Post by raverbashing »

238475235243 wrote: post #43

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once). Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or…

> the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly)

No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays

> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice

I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)

> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)

Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.

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

#306

Post by tasubotadas »

MperorM wrote: post #284

If you remove the bay from the equation, the US starts looking much more like the rest of the world. I now live in Copenhagen Denmark but still maintain a decent network in the bay. The difference of culture is astounding. More than anything else the bay created a culture of innovation and excellence that cannot be found anywhere in Europe. That it happened to be the bay area that became this hub and not eg. Copenhag…

>If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe

Why they don't move?

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

#307

Post by sudosysgen »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #267
sildur wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's false. At the very least, all residents are covered, regardless of their working status in Austria, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Serbia, and Sweden.

The subject is about mobility of workforce.

The standard is almost always résidence, not work status. So if you move to that country from inside the EU and thus get recognized as a resident you get these benefits, sometimes after a period of time.

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

#308

Post by ganzuul »

periheli0n wrote: post #218
ganzuul wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a forum for like-minded people? I went and acquired all the technical skills I need but then discovered that I have zero interest in the profit motive.

Sounds like you're ready for academia!

They just shift the same profit mechanism to a different token; citations.

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

#309

Post by _Microft »

chrisseaton wrote: post #68
everyone wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your crud app is 'advancing society'? Really?

US companies are far more ambitious than that. I see large corporates in the US genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc.

> I see large corporates run by Elon Musk genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc.

Fixed that for you. ;)

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

#310

Post by tsimionescu »

kortilla wrote: post #238
tsimionescu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy to argue that a well functioning economy should never produce an Apple.

Do it then. Explain why we shouldn’t have Apple.

Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules.

Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).

Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]

Post reply on HN