Europe is on a path to technological stagnation and demographic collapse. There's a reason its economy is depressed, its electricity fantastically expensive, its people angry, its programmer wages depressed, and its startup scene anemic.
Europeans refuse to embrace modern technology like genetic modification and nuclear power, much less allow the flourishing of information technology. They'd rather comfort themselves with their pseudoscience and their precautionary principle and their Luddite privacy regulations than join the rest of world in imagining something better.
A more careful reader might notice that I was specifically referring to privacy. If you wanted to have a conversation about something else, preferably involving citations not from U.S. political blogs, this is not the place for it.
Irrational and emotional European paranoia on privacy chills technological development. Look at all the silly cookie warning on the European web. Now imagine having to "warn" users before applying basic algorithms to data they willingly provide.
I don't mean to derail a rant with inconvenient facts, but 75% of France's power comes from nuclear power and they have the ITER fusion research facility.
It's not just the German Greens. There is a consensus on shutting down nuclear pants among basically all political parties in Germany. A conservative coalition was at power when Fukushima happened and the early shutdown of the plants was decided.
A substantial number of people object the GM foods on the grounds that it will inevitably limit their freedom of choice. Americans are supposedly in favour of freedom of choice but it seems that such freedoms can only be exercised by large corporations.
Europe is on a path to technological stagnation and demographic collapse. There's a reason its economy is depressed, its electricity fantastically expensive, its people angry, its programmer wages depressed, and its startup scene anemic.
Europeans refuse to embrace modern technology like genetic modification and nuclear power, much less allow the flourishing of information technology. They'd rather comfort themselves with their pseudoscience and their precautionary principle and their Luddite privacy regulations than join the rest of world in imagining something better.
Europe is absolutely no model to emulate.