> 4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc.

Agreed. My own anecdote: my company is global and for the past 6 months, we've been working on getting regulatory and legal approval for an LLM-based feature. The initial proposals of going live in all of our markets have been pared back to exclude Europe altogether due to the regulatory environment.

When I took part in company-wide gen AI councils that reviewed new product rollouts, it seemed like there was a definite hesitation from higher ups from pushing out any leading edge features to European markets. And it's not that the regulations would necessarily block these features from going live but that they'd increase implementation costs to the point where it wouldn't be worth it.

>The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).

Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.

1 and 2 are the same. Infinite money without barely any consequence because of 'reserve currency' privilege. To compete with that, the EU can't nuke the dollar because it would be suicide given the Eurodollar realities, and they can't anchor EU ip and talent because our politicians are too intertwined with globalist ideology and capital.

> 2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.

There is definitely a lot of truth to that. Maybe a bit of an arbitrary measure, but these are the nationalites of the people that wrote the "Attention is all you need" paper. Pretty revealing I find:

Ashish Vaswani: India

Niki Parmar: India

Jakob Uszkoreit: Germany

Llion Jones: Wales (UK)

Aidan Gomez: Canada

Łukasz Kaiser: Poland

Illia Polosukhin: Ukraine

Noam Shazeer: USA

> European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds.

Which countries do that? The ones in NL actually invest in US big tech.

Once Europe stops investing in USA, Europe will be better able to compete.

> Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.

That just denotes European students are high quality.

Brain drain is happening due to bullying and fascism. The extend of longterm danage of current administration is unclear.

> Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).

Bollocks. I have been in Berlin and Munich various times past decades, and people there speak English very well. Nowadays, translation is a profession which got hit by the AI club.

The people in the rural areas don't have to work together with other people from rural areas. They just need websites and tooling in their native language, or a major language.

Case in point: the French company Mistral has Dutch company ASML has one of their major investors. If you go to Eindhoven area (Netherlands mini SV called Brainport Eindhoven), you get away with English perfectly fine, and there too you will hear all kind if accents.

You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people.

Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.

re: #4 Maybe it’s easier if you grow up in the system and know how to navigate the written and unwritten rules, but as a dual Canadian-American who recently gained Austrian citizenship, the regulatory friction is absolutely real. I decided to launch a new venture through an Austrian GmbH.

There are supposedly streamlined paths for local residents, but I had to go through the standard corporate pipeline. I spent three months fighting a bizarre catch-22 between my notary (who cost €3k+) and the bank. To open the account, I had to prove I deposited €10k in capital. But I couldn't make the deposit without an active bank account. On top of that, the bank's compliance team kept arbitrarily canceling my application due to "incorrect answers"... refusing to tell me what the errors actually were and forcing me to restart the entire process ab initio.

I finally just gave up. I wrote off the €3,000 notary fee and €1,000 in registered office costs as a sunk cost, and incorporated a US LLC instead. It took under 10 minutes, no notary, fees of $25 since I did it myself, plus another 20 minutes to open the business bank account.

There was no commercial reason to choose Austria; it was purely sentimental. My ancestors were entrepreneurs in Linz and Vienna, and I loved the idea of renewing that legacy. But the sheer weight of the bureaucracy managed to kill about 99% of the early-stage startup enthusiasm you normally rely on to get a new project off the ground.