alt Hacker NewsWell at least from where I'm sitting, it's working fine for us. We aren't in the midst of an oligarchy made up of the Epstein class, for one.
Could thing be better with the tech industry here? Sure, but at the same time, profits and industry leaders aren't the only things that matters. And at the very least companies here can't just exploit the public with total impunity.
Replies
> We aren't in the midst of an oligarchy made up of the Epstein class, for one.
Aren't you? Or, haven't you noticed yet?
> We aren't in the midst of an oligarchy made up of the Epstein class, for one.
Europe even has literally hereditary monarchies; let alone an insular upper class who are famous for their debauchery. They just have much less free speech protection so it doesn't get bought up as much because of the legal risks.
Related note, but while looking up some background info on Wikipedia it appears [0] it was technically illegal to publicly insult Donald Trump in Germany at the start of his presidency which would have added a hilarious angle to a classic joke [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9#Germany & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#G...
[1] In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished.
You are posting this on a forum made by American venture capitalists, and not a forum made by European tech unions, for a reason.
I am also a European. Our oligarchy looks different for sure (and look into the history of pedophile scandals in Belgium, BTW).
I am not as optimistic as you. We seem to be stagnating our way into a stark choice between becoming an American tech vassal, a Chinese tech vassal, or losing out the remnants of our ability to compete on the world markets. Half of the continent borrows money at an unsustainable rate in order to pay millions of people to do nothing for decades.
We have made decisions that looked reasonable at the time they were made, but too much has changed in the meantime and now we are stuck in bad equilibria.
The Bismarckian pay-as-you-go pension system was stable as long as people had plenty of kids and died, on average, a few years after retiring. Now they have one kid and spend 20 years in retirement before they die. The maths of that system just does not work out anymore.
The European highly regulated industry was king as long as the rest of the world had no other choice, but now that Asia has industrialized, they are blowing us out of the water. First with lower prices, but now also with quality. German exports are half of what they used to be, with another halving expected. And of course without exports, our current social spending cannot be sustained either - you cannot keep such a massive redistribution mechanism running on an economy based on selling each other cups of coffee in a beach bar.
Our most talented engineers tend to move abroad and stay there. Brain drain is one of the most serious things that can happen to a country or a continent, and we are suffering from it.
We just cannot continue to live like that, something will have to yield, but many voters just don't want to hear that.