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

You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe. But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.

> sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.

Yeah this is the core of it. Most American devs realize this way too late, and as a result I think it powers the activism at US companies. Later in the game, they realize it’s all some form of adtech/sales/so on all the way down, so want to inject new meaning into their employment narrative.

I don’t have an answer for you other than agreeing with you. If you’re ok not looking for deep meaning through work, tech can present compensation and work life balance fo basically check out any direction of meaning fulfillment you like. Just… what to do? I empathize a lot.

Fwiw, my loose solution is two approaches:

- working in tech companies or open source projects that really present something different as an industry outlook if things work out. Crypto/btc open source comes to mind.

- or, seek out the really high comp tech jobs that are non-FAANG, and buy a new life basically after a few years there and saving.

Europe constrains its small businesses too. I’ve watched my wife’s company struggle through the endless maze of fragmented, bullshit European bureaucracy with great sympathy. It’s unending and costs small companies so much time and money.

> No, it absolutely certainly does not, unless that's the only way you could die. That's really, really basic statistics.

You're right, but all other stats regarding mortality are worse for US than my country, so...

Homicides rates in particular are many times worse not just some % worse, that's why I mostly complain about them.

But we also have longer life expectations, better food, better healthcare, etc. etc. if that's of some interest.

we have much worse salaries on average though...

but less inequality overall.

> so I'll have to make some assumptions here. 366 deaths in seven years means ~50 deaths per year

If that was the only way people died.

It's basic statistics.

But in reality it's 50 more deaths, completely avoidable, every other developed country avoided them.

It's like saying that in USA infant mortality rate is "only" 5.7 every 1,000 newborns, while Estonia, many times poorer than US, has only 1.9 x 1,000.

In absolute numbers and as deaths per year rate is negligible, but on a human level it's a complete nightmare! and an healthcare disaster, especially for the country with the highest spending per capita on the Planet for healthcare.

I think a positive example is deaths in space flights.

Only 15 austronauts died during spaceflight, the odds of something going wrong and killing everybody in space are gigantic, but the space programs managed to keep the fatalities low by applying rigorous security checks. The fatality rate is around 3%, it's very high in absolute, it's quite low if we consider the kinds of risks involved.

It's a matter of willingness, if in USA so many people die every year for reasons that other similar countries have mostly solved or reduced drastically, IMO means that there is no political will to keep'em down.

> which has ~330 million people, that means an approximately one in a million chance of getting killed in a mass shooting per year.

still a lot worse then everywhere else in the werstern World.

And you don't really count deaths like that, 10 young students killed by another armed student destroy the fabric of entire communities forever.

Because it's not 50 deaths a year, it's 366 people that shouldn't have died that way in a developed country.

It's 366 families than won't see their kids grow old, without any logical reason.

You are counting on luck, but I personally don't trust luck.

it's a risk I would never take. For no reason.

> But a one in a million chance of dying would not stop me from wanting to live in a country if I otherwise so desired.

except that that's 1 in a million MORE, that adds up to, for example, the 1 in 13 thousands chances of being shot dead that you have in Los Angeles, that your kids have, in Rome the chances are 1 in 200 hundred thousand (assuming all other stats are similar, even though they are not and Los Angeles lags behind in all of them)

If you understand basic statistics, as I imagine you do, it's pretty clear what a responsible parent would chose, given the choice.

It's not only about how many people die every year, having lost someone for a 1 in a hundred million event, it's the mentality that also scares me: considering the chances of death kinda like a gamble is what makes me think I would never go back living in the USA, even more so after having enjoyed the peace and tranquillity of European life for a long long time.

It's easy to discard the benefits if you don't factor them into the equation.

I'm in the US. Quality of life is unbelivable if you're rich, great for upper middle class, good for middle class, okay if you're working class, terrible if you're poor.

Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example, that's could be a good debate.