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

economist.com

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

#761

Post by wreath »

sudosysgen wrote: post #755
wreath wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also those US companies brought this tech they bought to the masses. To say they were built by others anyway reduced the role big tech played here same way a naive developer thinks a company’s success is just because of code he wrote.

Do you think OSM was going to not bring the data to the masses? Or that no developper was going to make apps that used that data?

There is no way for us to know and I didn't say that w/o Google or other Big Tech we wouldn't be have these candies as someone described. Rather that we should acknowledge the role they played in distributing the tech they didn't create.

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

#762

Post by iso1210 »

sbacic wrote: post #725
iso1210 wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do "high taxes" crush a company? Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"

> Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%" No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."

Why would the higher corporate taxes in the US encourage that?

Cushy low strsss jobs and enjoying life are more likely in Europe thanks to social safety nets, which is great - means that 80% of the continent gets to have a nice life, rather than 1% hitting is big and 99% in wage slavery.

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

#763

Post by relativ575 »

dmitriid wrote: post #386
yoz-y wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money" startups. Uber is the latter and imo the role of the investor is to be able to distinguish which one is which. However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing…

> There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money" My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind. > However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds This has always been the case. Until unlimited…

> My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.

Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?

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

#764

Post by malshe »

minipci1321 wrote: post #594
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…

You are of course entitled to your personal opinion, and sharing it is OK, but this: > ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly). is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us. Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for th…

I am not a European but I have spent some time there. I agree with you totally. I always find it bizarre that Americans complain about European work ethic as if people there are just slacking off. I look back at my experience there and I can say I have only respect for my ex-colleagues’ work ethics. There are slackers everywhere and the US is no different. It’s just that for many people in the US answering your emails on the weekends and staying late in the office equate to stronger work ethics. Btw, this same culture exists at many companies in Singapore too. But I don’t recall Singaporeans calling Europeans lazy because of that.

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

#765

Post by danlugo92 »

withinboredom wrote: post #694
simonh wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I people freely move from one service or product to another, usually it's because the new service is cheaper or better than the old service or product. That's direct value to the end user right there. Moving to AWS from running your own data centres is vastly more cost effective for most companies, you can build systems faster, you can scale them instantly, you can move resources between regions easily, you can focus…

> You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price. Strange, I bought a PC with 2x the specs at the same price as a maxed out Mac…

And I bought a Mac with 2x the ergonomy and 2x the battery life at the same price as a maxed out Dell ;)

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

#766

Post by Joeri »

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…

It used to indeed be the case that in Belgium to fire someone the notice period could be quite literally years. However, Belgium changed its laws in 2014. For firing someone it's now 1 week the first 3 months, and then it goes up more slowly. For example, for someone who's been there 4 years it is a 3 month notice period.

As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.

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

#767

Post by jakelazaroff »

swiley wrote: post #748
jakelazaroff wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re sidestepping GP’s point. Does your PC have an equivalent to Apple’s Secure Enclave, for example?

Most PCs do at this point, also that secure enclave is very rarely both effective and something empowering the user so it's often ignored outside of very closed systems like Macs and phones.

Not sure what you’re saying here — most PCs have the hardware but they don’t use it?

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

#768

Post by coldtea »

refurb wrote: post #530
coldtea wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work mentality is more like "we're the slaves to the coproration, our lives belong to it". It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”. That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations. The h…

No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere. The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.

>No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere.

Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.

Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.

That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.

>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.

Innovation is not about the hours.

Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.

And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.

And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).

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

#769

Post by relativ575 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #367
berkes wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Just Eat Takaway. Booking.com are from the Netherlands too. Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British. Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J). Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down. There is lots of high tech in Europe. Just Because th…

The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was AFAIK developed entirely in Germany by BioNTech. Pfizer helped with regulatory affairs, logistics and mass production. It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultura…

mRNA vaccine was originated in the US in the 1980s [1]. BioNTech got in the mRNA game thanks to Katalin Kariko, who was a professor at UPenn [2].

Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.

Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

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

#770

Post by dcolkitt »

satellite2 wrote: post #319

This article is truly bizarre. The main point it makes is that the top 500 US companies grew faster than the top 500 European ones in the last decade or so. But then it quickly mention, without any further analysis, that both their GDP actually grew at a similar pace. So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US…

> So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US companies grew more slowly and that this article is simply mesuring increasing corporate inequalities

The flaw here is ignoring that corporate earnings are not contiguous with GDP at a country level. A country’s earnings cam grow faster than GDP, when overseas profits grow faster than domestic profits. Since most large corporates are multinationals this consideration is highly relevant.

Apple has grown very fast, but since iPhones are mostly assembled in Asia and the software is booked in tax havens like Ireland, very little of that accrues in the form of US GDP.

What’s much more likely than corporate inequality increasing is that US corporates have done a much better job at expanding overseas than large European corporates. This is also why American consumer expenditures are much higher than you’d predict from looking at GDP per capita. iPhones may count as Taiwanese and Irish GDP, but the huge profit margins wind up buying back AAPL stock that is largely held by American shareholders.

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