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by mrtksn 132 days ago
What you are suggesting is vertical integration. If Europe goes crazy, can do that. From start to finish this chip thingy can become "magic crystals from Europe" as they already have control over the tooling. How many billions it will take to build the fabs with these tools and hire the talent from all over the planet and put all that in special economical zones? I don't know but I bet its less than those who don't have and end up buying the tools.

Europe is already a great place to build your life and despite the narrative about "EU killing businesses with over regulations", Europe is an exporter, that is EU makes physical things in large quantities(that's why USA is able to blackmail EU with tariffs). EU produces and exports so much, more than it consumes. Its closer to China than USA in this regard, you can check out the recent stats here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...

The infrastructure is in place and there are both many nuclear reactors that were decommissioned early or not yet commissioned but canceled/put on hold as well as regions with plenty of sunshine or hydro power opportunities and also has all the expertise to re-work those quickly.

It's really a political decision to push for something like that or not. Geopolitics may eventually make it happen, who knows? At this time it makes more economical sense to make the tools and send them close to the larger supply chain of electronic products production.

1 comments

> Europe is already a great place to build your life

Agreed. Its countries' long-standing equivalents of America First policies mean that they spend far more on their own citizens, import far fewer people, and leave most of the charitable, defence, and research spending to the US taxpayer. Good for them.

I kind of agree that "America First" policies tend to be Europeanization type policies and as a result quite un-American and that's also why USA will end up like Europe if it keeps course.

Europe is great in many ways but lacks the dynamism exactly because of its highly controlled immigration policies instead of free market ones. Bureaucrats actually are terrible at picking who should come. A major example are the Turkish immigrants to Germany, where they imported huge numbers of Turkish immigrants for their booming car industry in the 60s and instead of just treating them like normal people they did this "guest worker" thing and as a result those Turks failed to integrate and remained in the low socioeconomic status with exception for some high profile cases like the inventors of the mRNA vaccine or the Crysis founders. In other places like UK or USA, Turkish immigrants tend to have much higher socioeconomic status.

If EU end up doing its chip and energy industry push, better be following the pre-Trump era immigration policies because that's how USA got is all the workforce that make USA leap ahead in many industries. Some French or Swedish immigration officer would not be picking people better than industrialists or startup founders. Immigration and its integration are not Europe's strong traits.

I think that's a good point, but with the caveats that:

Immigration and benefits are in opposition - the more immigration you allow (unless it's careful, skills-based) then there's a strong risk of costs of living rises (e.g. housing becomes more expensive with immigration) and benefits systems requiring higher taxes to pay for them. European countries can sometimes be very strong on immigration (e.g. Denmark) likely because of this reason.

Entrepreneurialism and benefits are in opposition - the more benefits you offer, the higher the taxes need to be, and so the less worth it it is to take risks with money or with time. It's just a tradeoff between risk and safety, and Europe in general (or Western Europe, at least) is more tuned for safety. And why not, if the US is willing to take the risks?