EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology • Hacker News Board

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#451

Post by Radim » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

rualca wrote: post #347

Radim wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who came from academia, now runs a commercial company, and having participated in several large consortia projects (including Horizon 2020), I find your perspective… charming. I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. And where you taxes really go.

> I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. I appreciate your arrogance, but as you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage. Thus your complete lack of arguments, which you tried to hide with snide remarks and an unimpressive attempt to appeal to authority, were dully noted.

> you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage.

I noticed nothing of the sort. No need to lash out – you probably meant to describe your experience but then forgot. I'd be curious to hear. I'm not psychic, and your account is anonymous.

OK, so you've had good experience with the EU bureaucracy and its "innovation funding" schemes. What was you role in them?

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#452

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

nickpp wrote: post #338

tsimionescu wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guaranteed wealthy clients are equivalent to investors. They're actually better, because you don't have to pay them back. One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free m…

Guaranteed wealthy clients and investors exist in free markets too. That doesn’t make them Tech creators, that merit is still reserved to the startup itself. Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.

If you have guaranteed clients, you're not selling on a free market. This is one of the reasons why you can't have have (healthy) free markets in medicine in general.

And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#453

Post by kazen44 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

mafribe wrote: post #299

dmix wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the bri…

As far as I understand, ASML is not the creation of government funding, but instead a spinout of Philip and ASMI, two successful Dutch electronics companies. ASML was successful in a competitive market, dominated by Japanese companies pretty quickly. In other words, very different model from what the EU is currently trying.

ASML is not directly funded by a govermental grant yes, but phillips had massive govermental support (mainly from the dutch goverment and the EEC aswell).

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#454

Post by emn13 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #279

dmix wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the bri…

I think I share your concern -- it's a question of "is a top down order to develop some technology (with required investment to 'force' it to happen) the best way to achieve that?" What often ends up happening is that because it's so "strategically important" and so much money has been directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation -- which may not be ap…

Conversely, for the really novel stuff government investment in research has a pretty good track record, really - I mean, they don't always turn it into a product, but who cares? Hoping for a corporation to fund medium or long-horizon research seems unwise. Even if they do, they're not going to do it in a way that's very efficient (i.e. they'll inefficiently invest in stuff with a high moat, rather than broad applicability).

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#455

Post by f6v » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

ladyanita22 wrote: post #447

f6v wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what was the alternative? The German’s objective was to literally clear the land out for German settlers. By killing everyone inhabiting those lands. For soviets it was a matter of giving at least some chance of survival to women and children they were trying to protect. Imagine all those soldiers who knew they had to sacrifice their lives. And you try to reduce their bravery to being “Stalin’s targets”.

We're not talking about what should have been done, but at how efficient the USSR was. It. was. not at all.

I mean, how do you quantify that? I’d love to see the study measuring USSR efficiency.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#456

Post by rusk » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #445

rusk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point was that despite repeated successes with this style of investment the libhurdurians still insist it’s a bad idea, totally blind to the fact that lassaiz affaire is just as prone to degeneration. It’s ideology as much as any other approach and when you find people insisting on it without any concrete examples it’s just plain ideology you’re dealing with and there’s just no point wasting your time.

I'm a libhurdurian and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. A public goods argument can be made for strategic investments. I also don't think it's been conclusively shown that there have been "repeated successes with this style of investment". Demonstrating that would require knowing what the opportunity cost of the spending for these projects was, which is impossible. Claiming it's an open-and-shut case that…

I’m not claiming it’s open and shut. Every time something like this comes around you have all these guys giving out. I don’t say free market doesn’t work in all cases but just that it doesn’t work in all cases. Libertarianism is a dead end. Also BSD Unix.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#457

Post by ATsch » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

TMWNN wrote: post #380

ATsch wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage increase, the increase in living standard is very minor (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you lose daily to the car c…

>That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD ( http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ ), where…

"Disposable income per capita" is certainly a number, but it's not actually meaningful in this context for a few reasons:

1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".

2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.

3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#458

Post by golfer » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

audunw wrote: post #405

golfer wrote: post #174

Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.

Why do you think EU is behind in tech? As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the lithography machines used by all state of the art IC nodes is designed in Europe. It’s one of the most complex machines on the planet. Then there’s mega projects like LHC and ITER (international projects, but it’s not pure chance that they’re located in Europe) and Wendelstein 7-X. My pet example is Nordic Semiconductor, which has an…

The market defines behind "ahead/behind" by market value. None of the top 5 market caps in Europe are in tech. They are Nestle, Roche, Total SA, Novartis, and LVMH. They are tiny in comparison to the US tech giants.

All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.

An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.

Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#459

Post by TMWNN » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #407

kortilla wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s not even specific to tech salaries. A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also include great healthcare so there is basically no competition in any European location. You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.

You have actually addressed the actual issue here but from wrong perspective. Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA.…

>Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

Now let me give you actual statistics.

In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.

By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#460

Post by wott » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

usr1106 wrote: post #317

dmix wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the bri…

> Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. I can understand your concerns. But if you look at mid-range airplanes the European monster Airbus did respectably catch up with incumbent Boeing. In with the Jumbos they clearly surpassed it engineering-wise but failed in their commercial predi…

Airbus was not related to EU (or EEC). It was basically a France-Germany bipartite cooperation, with tiny bits of Spain and Netherlands, and UK being in/out. UK didn't belong to EEC when they were supposed to take part in the beginning of the project. Spain didn't join EEC until 20 years later. Netherlands were in by accident, in a way.