[cromka]

It’s an interesting bias, that people use consumer facing European tech products and don’t even know it.

Just have a look: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQFqW-dnIUTj2w/articl...

Majority of educational software is European. That list above is missing Duolingo. A giant undoubtedly. Hey, did you know Gitlab was European, too? Or Skype? Or Waze? Or Booking.com? Or Skyscanner? Or even flightradar?

PS. I didn’t limit this to EU only.

[xvector]

When the EU's biggest competitor to Apple, Google, and OpenAI is Spotify and Booking.com, there's a serious problem with the EU. It shows that the region is barely capable of encouraging innovation that will meaningfully advance technological progress, which is the single biggest predictor of quality of life in human history. Yes, the EU might be nicer to work in, more vacation days, less layoffs. Such a view is shortsighted and does not consider how suffocating innovation impacts humanity long-term, because your 15 extra vacation days simply will never measure up to the literal humanity-changing advancements technology provides.

In essence, you have improved QoL today but sacrificed it for generations to come, because your region has decided that it's not important to craft regulations that balance entrepreneurial spirit with consumer good. Ask any startup how difficult it is to deal with GDPR, I have literally seen startups give up over this. (Is GDPR good for consumers? Of course. Was it designed with literally any feedback from people interested in starting a business? No.)

Perhaps the US has too far on one side, but the EU has clearly gone too far on the other. And the EU can continue to freeload off the US's advancement, but if the EU's current model were to become global, there's precedent that human innovation would grind to a standstill.