[flanked-evergl]

If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations. If it was not for the largess of the US, then EU would become a vassal of Russia and/or China. And I think the US is running out of good will very rapidly. The EU could, of course, shape up, but it won't.

[cedilla]

It's hard not to react sarcastically to this. But I will try:

There's nothing special about EU regulations vis-a-vis other laws. China, Russia and the US also have laws, many of which are also perceived as overly bureaucratic.

[rafaelmn]

Identifying something as a critical competitive industry, then place a bunch of hurdles in front of it's development, and sit confused when we get left behind - that's the EU special.

[cloudrkt]

Left behind on what exactly? Privacy laws? Consumer rights?

[cooper_ganglia]

Technology, AI, semiconductors, cloud computing, consumer electronics, social media, app ecosystems, e-commerce, military technology, energy independence, venture capital, unicorns and scaling, banking innovation, space exploration, biotech and pharma...

[chpatrick]

Novo Nordisk has a market cap of 250 billion last I checked.

[rafaelmn]

Down 2/3 in a year because it failed to capitalize on an early score compared to US competition. Not saying EU has no companies just that they get left behind by competition. On the industry side its falling behind to Asia, finance and tech is losing to US. The only thing growing is luxury brands - kind of ironic that the only thing EU does well is selling pretentiousness.

[cooper_ganglia]

Novo is a success story, sure, but it's not uniquely dominant. Eli Lilly is more than 3x bigger in the same space, and J&J, Merck, Pfizer all rival or surpass it.

Pharma as a whole is still dwarfed by the trillion-dollar US tech giants that the EU has no equivalent of. One standout doesn't change the broader lag.

[airstrike]

...to name a few

[pipes]

Growth industries.

[viccis]

>then EU would become a vassal of Russia

Russia is currently struggling to make inroads on invading its relatively small neighbor, so I really doubt it would be able to make a bunch of nuclear powers who have a nuclear alliance its "vassal"

I understand that Russia's not fighting just Ukraine but rather Ukraine with massive US and EU assistance but my point still stands.

[flanked-evergl]

It's not struggling as much as Ukraine. Russia, if it was struggling, would accept a negotiated peace. It's quite clear that the last thing Russia wants is peace.

[wredcoll]

I love how the constant comeback to this is "well they're sorta-kinda winning the war" as if maybe barely defeating ukraine is some kind of mark of global dominance.

[bigbadfeline]

> winning... defeating...dominance

People really don't understand war and death, they treat them as some silly sports game. As a result they completely miss the boat not only about military conflicts but also about peace politics.

[lawlessone]

>It's not struggling as much as Ukraine.

OK but Ukraine isn't trying to invade a small country next door and claim a global superpower status.

It's expected they would struggle against a much larger neighbor invading them.

Russia is struggling where nobody expected it to struggle.

[wkat4242]

It's because lives are meaningless to the Russian government. They'll just throw more literal bodies at the problem. Nobody's going to stop them as they're a dictatorship. And now they're even getting North Koreans as extra cannon fodder.

Ukraine doesn't have that "benefit".

[holoduke]

Ukraine is used by the west as connonfodder by western institutions that control western politicians. The west literally doesn't care about life's of ordinary citizens. Specialy if its outside of its country. From supporting cruel regimes, to supporting genocide in Israël, to cheap labour without worker rights and so on. The west isnt a grain better than anybody else.

[testrun]

Russia invaded Ukraine. To stop the killing, all Russia needs to do is get out of Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign country, Russia has zero authority over Ukraine.

[holoduke]

The west doesn't make Ukraine sovereign. Western companies will extract resources and use the people for cheap labour. Not a single sane Ukrainian person is waiting for this.

[wkat4242]

"The West" wasn't really relevant in this discussion, all I wanted to point out is that Russia has a much larger pool of cannonfodder who can't refuse (the benefit of a dictatorship) so drawing things out is always to their benefit.

That the west is also doing some bad stuff (though really in the EU we're not that bad IMO, most EU countries recognise Palestina now, it's just for a few blocking hard measures against Israel) isn't really a relevant topic in this. We're not going to have boots on the ground in this conflict until an agreement is reached because of the risk of escalation.

[wredcoll]

'The west' can do bad things while not actually being worse. It's a complicated world.

[netsharc]

I was going to say "you're nuts!", but... I wouldn't say Ukraine is being used as cannonfodder, but the EU is very interested in Russia not winning in Ukraine, because if Putin wins, the EU will have a big refugee crisis (although "slightly better" refugees since they're white and share a similar culture, compared to the reception of brown and Muslim refugees).

Also the EU pays for countries like Turkey and Libya to prevent refugee ships from coming to their continent. If that means sinking those ships with people on them, well...

[scotty79]

Dictators, not unlike markets, can stay irrational way longer than you (or a country) can stay solvent.

That's why democracies are so good. Because it's hard to do too stupid things in them persistently.

[OtherShrezzing]

I think you have an over-aggrandised opinion of Russia's geopolitical, military, and economic power.

[Cthulhu_]

I'd rather be free and my data safe than be an economic world leader. False dichotomy, I know, but I don't mind the people before money mindset.

[flanked-evergl]

This is a false dichotomy, you can have privacy and still be militarily and economically relevant.

But say that you were right, and you have to choose between privacy and relevance, if you choose privacy, then once you are entirely economically dependent on Russia (Europe is still paying more in energy money to Russia than in aid to Ukraine) and China — when Europe is a vassal — it won't be able to make its own laws anymore.

[staplers]

  I'd rather be free and my data safe than be an economic world leader.

You often need the latter to maintain the former.

[Y_Y]

How often?

[staplers]

Ask any non-five-eyes or backdoored chip producing country.

[Y_Y]

They don't post here often

[londons_explore]

Almost every country or group of countries today is either a world leader, nearly a world leader, or a vassal state of one of the first two.

[jimbokun]

It's not clear that the inscrutable process described is providing either.

[ekianjo]

With chat control you won't get either.

[bee_rider]

We’ll see if these LLMs end up having a real use, once the “giving away investor money” business model dries up. They really might! But it seems early to say that the EU has missed out on anything, before we see what the thing is.

In general, it is hard to compare the US and the EU; we got a head start while the rest of the world was rebuilding itself from WW2. That started up some feedback loops. We can mess up and siphon too much off a loop, destroying it, and still be ahead. They can be setting up loops without benefitting from them yet.

[myhf]

In the 1940s, the CIA wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] explaining methods to damage their rivals' operations through largely bureaucratic means.

Today, we have fully automated the methods from this manual in the form of LLM Chatbots, which we have for some reason deployed against ourselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual

[thenaturalist]

Comments like yours remind me that while HN is a competent technological forum, it's best to never, ever, engage in serious macro-economic/ int. politics discussions as the average user engaging in the latter topics is so far off base with common knowledge in these areas, any insider wouldn't find common ground.

Overconfidence bias is real.

Knowing your circle of competence is a gift.

[jimbokun]

They seem to be improving a lot on their defense spending, at least.

Will take them a while to get out from under the US umbrella. But acknowledging the problem is the first step.

[flanked-evergl]

I'm grateful that Europe is increasing defence spending, but I'm cynical regarding Europe because so far, it's been absolutely no hindrance to Russia's expansionism, and in some ways it has inadvertently provided Russia with material assistance while Russia engages with expansionism.

Spending on defense is not the same as. Norway is spending more on everything all the time and getting worse outcomes all the time. We spend more on police than ever, even per capita, and crime is up, we spend more on military than ever, and our actual metrics are down. I think with most of Europe the defense spending is the same, I hope I'm wrong, but if you up regulation then you have to spend more to get the same results, and Europe has runaway regulation in addition to people who try to hijack institutions for other purposes.

[suddenlybananas]

The EU is a vassal of the US, that is its entire raison d'être.

[t43562]

I think some in the US see it the opposite way - a system for preventing the US from dominating it piecemeal. This explains their support for "free speech" for the various neo-(no we're not nazi!) parties in the EU.

[falcor84]

What? How did you arrive at that?

[suddenlybananas]

To be honest, it's so blatantly obvious (especially with the recent meeting of European leaders and Trump) that I find it difficult to understand your surprise. I mean Christ, Europe is teeming with American bases.

[llbbdd]

Yeah I don't know how this isn't just the common understanding of the situation. The EU/UK is constantly working around whatever the US wants to do, and the US does whatever it wants.

[wredcoll]

At the risk of trying for nuance online, therebis a rather large difference between america being (the only) superpower and a country being a vassal.

[falcor84]

raison d'être means "reason for existence" and none of what you said supports that assertion

[lawlessone]

>(especially with the recent meeting of European leaders and Trump)

I got the same impression seeing Trump meet Putin. The US is a vassal state of Russia.

[lawlessone]

>If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations.

Personally I'm not too worried anyone is going to become a global superpower from generative AI slop.

[wredcoll]

Ah yes, famous industrial/scientific powerhouse... russia???