[mrtksn]

It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement.

They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.

It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.

Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.

[asenna]

I recently moved to Spain, after having lived in the US for a decade. It's only been a month for me and I definitely see the over-reaching over-regulation of EVERYTHING in the EU.

It's so much that it literally pushes young people to have a non-risk taking mindset. I have a friend who has some knife sharpening and tooling skills and she's been figuring how to do something with this (some kind of a business). I suggested why not get a garage and get the machinery you want and get started. She listed down all the regulations and how even thinking about it is not allowed.

Starting a business/startups is hard. The EU just adds 10-20 more hurdles to cross to get even with the US startup ecosystem. At least that's been my observation in the few weeks.

[mrtksn]

That's probably not an EU thing, you should consider an EU country more suitable to your line of business. Or you know, just do your thing don't bother with the regulations and pay a fine if it becomes a problem some time in the future?

Apparently Spaniards like it this way, they live long healthy lives in the system they set up for themselves.

[influx]

What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?

[mrtksn]

Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.

[simplyluke]

I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.

[mrtksn]

Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals.

Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.

If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.

[RestlessMind]

> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction

Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6)

[1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former.

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/

[mrtksn]

I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.

[satvikpendem]

> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price.

No? This is exactly the opposite of why companies exist, they are specifically there to increase the stock price via development of their products. That we get better happiness via rising wealth standards is just a coincidence, albeit a very useful and historically true coincidence. And even then, companies can last quite a while trudging along but it will stop at some point if new innovation is not kept up in the form of new companies (as older companies are usually at capacity for hiring). Look at the youth unemployment rate in many European countries compared to the US.

> Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.

Changing a measure does not change the underlying thing it's measuring, no more than I can time travel by changing a clock. Obviously people are talking about what those numbers represent, not the numbers themselves. GDP is a useful enough concept as I mentioned above, one that correlates well to overall citizen wealth. Europeans are generally quite a bit poorer than Americans, even with the addition of the value of free (or rather, "free") healthcare. Tech employees are even more so advantaged, as their health insurance is excellent while they make multiples of their European counterparts. It is not "libertarian" to acknowledge this fact, and it's one of the main reasons you see many European tech people moving to the US and Silicon Valley.

[mrtksn]

Right, that's why at the heart of the tech innovation peple are running from mentally ill homeless people the insulating themselves in gated communities to pretend like living in a german village. Huge success.

I wouldn't obsess too much with the GDP too, its not as good as a proxy to the important stuff as people are trying to make it. An appendicitis surgery generates much more economic activity in USA than in Europe and Americans don't end with better appendixes.

[kube-system]

Vacation time.

[satvikpendem]

If we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.

[kube-system]

They are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.

[influx]

I know a bunch of FAANG engineers that retired in their 30s and 40s, so the rest of their life is vacation time...

[RestlessMind]

Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s

[mrtksn]

The full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".

[NicoJuicy]

I bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word.

Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too.

ASML

[freedomben]

Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...

[NicoJuicy]

Except Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC.

Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML.

Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though.

Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.

[freedomben]

If you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones.

In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole.

But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction.

As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.

[NicoJuicy]

Well. It's not about the cheapest place where to get business done. I doubt it's the US fyi...

It's where the money is there in large numbers for the bang per buck.

Additionally: Natural resources ( middle east) or continents that are not land locked with bad actors ( almost everywhere outside of the US / Canada).

Additionally, 1 language/culture to rule them all has an incredible benefit compared to Europe.

Just my POV fyi. Coming from Belgium, 10 million people and 3 official languages. An European tax number is relatively new too.

[quentindemetz]

Adyen

Revolut

GoCardless

Shift

Vinted

…

[gruez]

>Adyen

>Revolut

Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.

[bmurphy1976]

I don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list.

Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.

[grumpyprole]

I had always assumed that the UK killed it's tech industry by selling it all off for short term gain. That needs regulation to prevent.

[mrtksn]

IMHO it has nothing to do with the governments, in Europe there's no that kind of money and the investor mentality is very different than the Americans and the European culture is much less accommodating to failure.

It's the European way to roll, the Brits are trying to be a bit more like the Americans but its worlds apart. The American spirit is something else, I wish we had it in Europe but maybe its not compatible at all with the European way of life. So, if you feel adventurous, motivated and ambitious you go to USA to make it big.

[gruez]

>They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks.

Say all you want about "speculative public trading stocks", but I trust public markets' pricing more than private markets[1] or the government[2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-h...

[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/c...

[mrtksn]

Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.

According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...

Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.

US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".

[gruez]

>Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.

I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.

>According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...

>Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.

Arguably all of those is more due to government intervention than the companies themselves. Nuclear is impossible to build in the US due to overburdensome regulations, infrastructure/transportation is impossible to build due to NIMBY-friendly planning rules, electric cars are massively subsidized by the Chinese government.

[seanmcdirmid]

The economic case for nuclear is mostly what keeps it from being built in the USA. The USA built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 70s/80s, and they didn't really pay off even with the government providing free insurance coverage. Likewise, today it is even harder to make the case for a new nuclear power plant since renewables are much cheaper on a kW basis.

Chinese regulation is neither too high nor too low. It would be impossible to build a nuclear plant if the government didn't firmly back it, otherwise there are no barriers that it can't ignore.

[troupo]

> it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.

It's not objective in the least. Stock markets are pure speculation.

[mrtksn]

Right, China achieve all this thanks to its libertarian low touch low regulation small government and only if the stock prices of the American companies go a bit higher and the government is a tad less regulated they will do even better than the Chinese.

[satvikpendem]

Not all regulation is bad, but also, not all regulation is good. Regulation is meaningless in a vacuum. I support more consumer protection regulation, but also, I support YIMBYism [0] which is a deregulatory model that wants to remove restrictions on housing, which were largely made by corporations and NIMBYs who don't want their property values to go down if new housing is built. YIMBYism is actually very similar to how Europe builds their housing, via mixed zone development.

It is the same with your comment, saying that it's only libertarians or those who want low regulation is a strawman, it depends on exactly which type of regulation. China can achieve some things with its big government ways, but it can't achieve everything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement

[mardifoufs]

There's no speculative stocks in Europe? Seriously? I guess if you ignore all the stock markets in Europe, sure?

Also, it's funny that you mention Goebels. It's ironic even when you repeat the same tropes about the US and how it's supposedly beholden to the capital markets and speculators.

Europe has its giants. Europe usually does not attack its giants. That's why you get megacorps like Maersk or Airbus or Volkswagen. The entire point is that it only attacks other giants (ie, not homegrown giants), hence the focus on legislation that mostly affects them but leaves European corporations mostly unscathed. Or why green legislation curiously doesn't affect German coal extraction (what a coincidence!) that much. Or all the other double standards Europe and some Europeans love so much.

The delusion here is this weird narrative of good, noble Europeans who are somehow only guilty of not being greedy.

[mrtksn]

Europe is far from noble, just different mentality and expectations from life. VW keep saying that next year VW Golf robotaxis are coming and not delivering wouldn't fly, therefore we don't have crazy stock prices.

Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check.

Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.

[mardifoufs]

Sure but that wasn't the main thrust of what I was replying to. Also, I guess it only has its own Wireguards or (if we want to talk about inflated promises instead of outright fraud) hundreds of start up like Qwant that promised to challenge the big American man in (2) more weeks or just a few more subsidies.

The only difference is that we hear a lot more about American success and failures as they are sadly utterly dominant in media presence way beyond their own borders. And Europe seems much more likely to just keep its skeletons hidden in its closet, and tries to talk about them as little as possible.

(For example,see how the German regulators dealt with Wireguard by going after the journalists that sounded the alarm for years. Or how Europeans love to discuss American issues like racism while ignoring how much worse the issue can be in their own backyard. Or the commenters here that recoil at any criticism of the EU and invent some conspiracy where said criticism obviously comes from. I never see any American accuse Europeans of being behind sentiment that is critical of the US.)

Americans love to be very loud about their issues, for better or for worse.

[mardifoufs]

Late correction: I meant wirecard, not wireguard!

[mrtksn]

Fun fact: Wirecard was a spy operation by the Russian intelligence.

[mardifoufs]

Yes, or at least its leadership had ties to Russian security services. Yet European authorities were more than complacent with them, in a way that the SEC would rarely be especially after 6 years of red flags. I don't think German financial authorities were also Russian controlled so my point, that Europe is very pro corporate as long as the corporations are European, still stands I think even with the Russian connection in this case!

[csomar]

The current conflict with China has the benefit that it dropped all of them masks off. You'd be labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggested otherwise to the narrative of the free trading liberal west.

Now that the emperor is fully naked; colonialism never ceased to exist, it just took a different form. The next decade is going to be very interesting, and not in a good way.