>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis:
In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.
Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
I suspect you're over-egging the amount of compliance that needs to be done and under-egging the filter of the existing big players mostly being American, who buy up competitors in order to maintain market dominance
I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.
any number of reasons: language barriers, existing American firms anti-competing, smaller domestic markets, less centralisation, and, yes, in some cases, regulation, but, when it comes down to it, it's better to have smaller firms that don't (or less frequently) damage society than larger firms than do, even just from the perspective of wealth distribution.
I think he's saying that, yes, this regulation means that your own companies are more ethical, but European consumers end up using these less-regulated American companies anyway. this is true, but this problem has started to be solved by the EU anyway, for example, with the Digital Markets and Services Acts
Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.
Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the other hand, it naturally means having to choose between American and Chinese tech giants.
> Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe.
Which Europe? All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?
> Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.
This is true, because the EU is composed of 20+ different countries, each with different languages, cultures, histories, priorities. It's impossible to remove that boundary.
> All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?
Each of them can be done online in most countries. All, very few. I think only Estonia comes to mind. (At least one form in that process requires visiting a notary in most of Western Europe.)
The cost of terminating an employee is also a unique risk that European firms have to capitalise for which American start-ups do not. Again, I understand why one would choose this stability. But it comes with a cost.
> It's impossible to remove that boundary
It's absolutely possible by mandating a lingua franca. But it would cause irreparable damage to those cultures, which is why the EU--sensibly, in my opinoin--has chosen to preserve them. But this is a choice and it comes with costs.
The US had an entire decade of war on cryptography that was literally required to safely transact on the internet, and yet the 90s had plenty of online store startups.
Granted the chat control issue, is unfortunate on the privacy front, however I wouldn't call it a hindrance on innovation.
IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
That someone can buy new DJI drones in europe is right, but only the latest releases. You cannot use any of the drones you might have purchased over the last years anymore in europe because of the new regulations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I've heard offhand here that the ease of starting a business in general is easier in the US and that funding for tech startups is more available in the US due to policy.
Regulation isn't going to stop innovation that much, or the tech industry wouldn't be in california. The primary difference is that the US is one homogenous, huge market.
If I build something in California, to California's laws, and it becomes a success, I can immediately sell it across the entire rest of the US, and I can expand across the US, using the same employment contracts as in california, same lawyers as in california, etc.
Sure, later on I can save money by making the Delaware version of my product with more cancerous chemicals, or have stricter NDAs in my Florida contracts.
But if I start with California regulations, I can expand to the entire US with a small team of employees.
There's nothing like that in Europe. If my product works in Germany, I'll need a french, spanish, italian translation to sell it in these countries. I can't just hire people from these countries either — they've got different holidays, different work hours, different unions I'll have to deal with. Different tax codes and agencies. And often these are conflicting with one another.
In the US, I need one or two support shifts in one or two languages. In the EU I need 27. In the US, I need one version of the product, with one plug. In the EU, unless I'm okay with 10A and a plastic chassis, I need a dozen different versions.
And even if the product can be used universally, European culture is significantly more diverse than US culture.
Is a phone call at 7am or 8pm more appropriate? Depends on whether you're in Germany or Spain. When a job applicant includes a photo of themselves and lists their parents' degrees and jobs on their own CV, is that appropriate or not? In Germany, that's often expected, in many other regions, a huge no-go.
To be successful in the US, I need to build one company. To be successful in the EU, I need to build a multinational corporation with 27 local branches.
California's tech industry works because there is a long-established tradition of lawbreaking in California. We pass all these regulations, and then ignore them. Sometimes the more enlightened legislators put in explicit carve-outs for businesses of less than 50 employees or a $B in revenue, so that startups don't have to actually break the law, they can just ignore it. But they're going to ignore it anyway, so the carve outs really serve the law's benefit rather than the startup.
In practice, the way California tech startups work is
1) Break *all* the laws.
2) Get customers
3) Raise capital
4) Profit!
5) Hire lawyers to bring the company into compliance with the laws.
6) Hire lobbyists to bring the laws into compliance with the company.
7) Try to prevent your employees from doing the same thing you did.
Steps #5-6 aren't limited to a particular state. At that point, you have buckets of money anyway, so you contort your company structure and product into a configuration that is legal in as many jurisdictions as possible, including internationally.
You’re discounting the fact that there’s plenty of internal movement in Europe - I worked with a French firm that had a bunch of Italians, some Swiss, an Englishman, two Spaniards and a bunch of Russians working there along with the French people, all living around and working in their Paris office.
It wouldn’t be that hard to find people to translate your app and provide support in the major languages in most large European cities.
In the US, you don't have to find people to translate your app and provide support in other languages at all. It would help if you did this for Spanish though, but that's it.
Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.
And once you've got control of one EU country, expanding to another EU country is just as complicated as expanding to the US is.
So if you're spending the same effort anyway, expanding to the US with 300 million people is much more profitable than expanding to Germany with 80 million people, or the Netherlands with 20 million people.
Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
There's literally a section on the Wikipedia article detailling how it launched in a handful of countries, expanded to the US, and only then expanded to most of the EU:
Spotify launched in Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, followed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
After the US expansion, Spotify finally expanded to Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland
That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
You'd never see a US company launching e.g. only for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada, expanding to China, and only afterwards become available in the remaining states.
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
> That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
> Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
Sure, but they still decided to expand to the US, despite a worse outlook, before expanding to the remaining EU countries. As said, you'd never see a US company do that.
The US is a large, rich homogeneous market with a population of over 300 million. There's no wonder foreign companies want to get a foothold in this market, and it's no wonder US companies don't tend to look outside of the US until there's nothing to do in the US.
Sure, but that's exactly my point: The primary factor limiting EU startups isn't regulation, it's that they don't have access to a large, homogeneous, monolinguistic market
Oh, those pesky consumers getting in the way of the innovation of the free market with their protections. If only they could be fully exploited for maximum value extraction without interference.
This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
> The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example.
This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
GDP and GDP PPP are almost irrelevant with regards to personal wealth or lack thereof. A factory making billions to its owner doesn't improve the revenues, wealth or standard of living of more than 1 person. A factory producing luxury Louis Vuitton handbags is good for GDP and the wealth of the factory owner, but is irrelevant to the living conditions of the workers. A private equity firm making wild bets is very "productive", GDP wise, but again , entirely irrelevant at a personal level. Even the worker's salary is tough to compare in isolation between countries because of the vastly different costs of living - an American having to pay tens of thousands of student loans back, with obscene housing prices, absurdly expensive healthcare... $200k/year in San Francisco might not get you as far as e.g. 100€k/year in Berlin (throwing numbers for illustration, haven't actually done the math).
> A factory making billions to its owner doesn't improve the revenues, wealth or standard of living of more than 1 person... A factory producing luxury Louis Vuitton handbags... is irrelevant to the living conditions of the workers
> Come on, this is Econ 101 and basic logic.
You griping about luxury goods on principle isn't "Econ 101" or "basic logic".
You can look at basically any material metric you like (cars owned, house size, etc.) and Americans come out ahead. Nominal GDP numbers are kind of nonsense, but they're directionally the same nonsense everywhere, so they actually work OK as an international comparison.
> The amount of cars Americans have on absurd loans is entirely irrelevant to their personal wealth or lack thereof.
The allocation of debt is essentially irrelevant - there are materially more, bigger, better cars per capita in the USA. Whether those cars get repo'd and transferred to richer Americans is irrelevant - you can't fake the material presence of more stuff.
And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home, 70+ yo still working their ass off in McJobs, crumbling public infrastructure, homeless and billionaires laughing all the way to the bank...
Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)
> And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home
The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.
Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.
> Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP
The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.
Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
>The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare.
How about the median Western European (including nordic)?
>Most of the top colleges are American.
Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.
>Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US
The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.
>Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
> Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).
US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead. And this doesn't adjust for property prices.
>US ranks 3 by mean but 15 by median. It's ahead of most European by mean but by median most West European are ahead.
Yep! And the European countries behind include like ex-soviet bloc countries and such (basically starting from very low in 1989-1991). And as you not, the cost differences (not accounted in the table) push European countries even further than this ranking.
Besides mean vs median, I'd point also quality of life factors not measured in dollars or euros.
That's exactly what I think when I read one of these "EU stifles innovation" comments. It sounds to me like the equivalent of not wanting socialized healthcare because "the poors" might get it, not caring about the fact that you're the one who will benefit.
This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.
The resistance to socialized healthcare in America can be easily understood without resorting to bizarre strawmen about hating poor people. Healthcare is of course a huge part of our economy and lives. Many (most?) people are satisfied with the status quo and are hesitant to see (what they consider to be) a huge increase in government power, spending, and general involvement in their lives. It's the same impulse that motivates people to oppose new housing -- people are loss averse and hate change.
Yes, the resistance is because the private sector will lose a lot of (parasitic) jobs. It's a non-starter to attempt to reduce health insurance companies power, because it would gut their employee numbers.
It's an unsavory thought, but the US has a significant amount of people employed in the business of denying healthcare to other people, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Any politician attempting to fix this would be committing political suicide.
We do not have an established history of accurately predicting or managing the costs of overwhelmingly expensive government programs, at least here in the US.
The US already runs two government healthcare programs. There are 65 million people in Medicare and 83 million in Medicaid. For less money per patient than private insurance.
"Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it".
Also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is another strawman, used by those who dislike capitalism. People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
> "Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it".
That's fair, I should have said "because the poors might benefit". Rich people don't like socialized healthcare because they, by definition, will pay for people who can't afford it.
The problem is when people who will benefit from this identify with people who will lose from it.
> People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
They do, but here we're talking about the opposite: People being against policies they benefit from, because they identify with the group that will not.
P.S. I liked your comment, it was a reasoned reply that furthers the debate, thank you.
You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way.
The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are:
First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and;
Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.
> You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way.
I'm afraid your experiences are not universal.
There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."
You're right about the first part, but I'm not confused about anything.
There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.
If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.
Clearly people of every ilk exist, but my claim is that people like this are irrelevant to the debate around socialized healthcare. Show me an American politician who's run on the platform of openly wanting to hurt the poor because they deserve to be hurt, their electoral victory, and that person's vote against a socialized healthcare initiative. It's not a thing.
Regan's "welfare queen" comes to mind. More recent examples were those against stimulus checks (but very much for PPP "loans"). Any politician who believes in means-testing, when the bureaucracy adds an overhead greater than the amount saved is arguably out to hurt the undeserving.
You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"
What an utterly ridiculous response. In your eyes, businesses should be able to run roughshod over the consumer? Yes, maybe the laws could have been more polished or have been implemented in a better way, but the underlying idea of protecting the consumer is the important takeaway from these laws.
On HN, you can be sure there are several people who literally believe the world would be better without any regulations or laws forcing businesses to do anything. This place is the pinnacle of anarcho-capitalism.
at least here there's a spectrum of views that largely get by peacefully, and the entire place isn't focused on that conflict, a la twitter. yes there are lot of right-wing headcases entirely taken up by their own bottom-line, and yes the place itself is broadly funded and owned by people who think like, or at the very least, act like anarcho-capitalists, but they only really float to the surface when a post about regulation comes up, and even then, the discussion stays mostly civil. it could be a lot worse
It could be worse of course, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind when using this site. I really think it should be a publicly-posted disclaimer.
to also be fair, I just recently returned from Europe and I was shocked at how maddeningly frustrating it was to simply use the Web. Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers, it was a wild look at what Europeans have to go through under the guise of consumer protections.
Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.
Not under the guise. They are consumer protections. As a European, I like them very much.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information).
So we can choose what we use because we are informed.
It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs.
The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.
It becomes apparent after a while. Generally, the websites that have very intrusive pop-ups or no real way to opt-out of associating cookies with personally identifiable information (that is what the notice is for) present themselves as information abusers, and that is a very important signal. I have very low trust that they respect privacy or have it as a value in their business. So it's good to know I shouldn't use their services nor hand over any personal data.
Some websites have become region-locked, but I found that it's mostly those who cater to American audiences anyways. Perhaps if you travelled to Europe, this was more of a problem for you because you wanted to read the local news back home. For us, back home is here, so local American websites region-locking us out isn't a big inconvenience. They probably only do this if European audiences don't make up much of their readership anyways — they wouldn't want to lose significant ad revenue.
AFAIK many cookie consent banners are actually against the law. IIUC denying any non-essential cookies should always be as easy as accepting all cookies. This is something many cookie banners have not managed.
So to me this seems more like the tech-companies and websites being annoying at implementing an easy solution, in order to rebel against the laws and make people angry at it for the inconvenience, then the law itself being bad.
As much as the idea of GDPR (and specifically cookie consent) is well intentioned, the actual laws themselves aren't great. Cookie consent is especially frustrating because it encourages the creators of the consent popups to use dark patterns to try and trick people into just accepting them.
Correct, but unfortunately that applies to the vast majority of websites. It wouldn't be so bad if the consent dialogs had an option to reject all optional cookies but unfortunately too many of them still try and trick or force you into accepting all cookies.
Hell, a lot of the 3rd party companies who are contracted to build the cookie consent forms are even following the spirit of the law (barely) by including a one click "reject all" button or link in the pop ups. They are often somewhat downplayed, like being in a smaller font or slightly hidden, because fuck you, but are you really so damn lazy that clicking "reject all" once every hour is such an objectionable activity that you'd rather just dump any and all consumer protections of data?
> Cookie consent only apply to non-necessary cookies.
There’s a different issue here: lawyers and companies are often concerned that what they deem necessary will be deemed unnecessary when challenged. So, they require cookie consent preemptively to avoid liability in case they get it wrong.
Imagine if companies didn't collect copious amounts of user data and didn't try to use every trick in the book and all known dark patterns to make you give up that data.
"We care about privacy by selling your data to 2765 'partners' and are blaming GDPR for this"
GDPR is really sensible legislation that largely only applies to companies who should be treating your personal data as sensitive data. I built a GDPR complaint system and was really happy about the security we put in place that we definitely wouldn’t have thought to do without these laws. Things like having someone you can ask and request personal data from at big companies is also an extremely well thought through idea. I don’t understand the issues people have with it to be honest…
Most people have no problem with the GDPR. It only seems otherwise on this forum and similar echo chambers / bubbles where lots of people made their fortunes with adtech.
I love the intention of the law, but it's so... flexible... in implementation that shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking.
On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
My only complaint with GDPR is when I have to do boring work in the name of GDPR compliance :)
But it's also driven some pretty interesting projects, so I'd probably call it a wash or perhaps a slight positive, even if I were to ignore the major benefits as a consumer
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?