Comment by mentalgear
8 months ago
I'd recommend for Entrepreneurs, just like Scientists now do, to consider Europe as a safe-haven. In the EU the rule of law still matters.
8 months ago
I'd recommend for Entrepreneurs, just like Scientists now do, to consider Europe as a safe-haven. In the EU the rule of law still matters.
The grass isn't always greener. I think the core underlying issue at all of this is social divides within countries. When groups of people become sufficiently antagonistic towards one another, it really enables widespread corruption because people will actively blind themselves (or handwave away) to the wrongs of "their side" and magnify the wrongs of "the other side" with no limits to the hyperbole.
And Europe is most certainly not an exception to this, especially in current times. For instance 65% of EU citizens do not believe that high level corruption is sufficiently pursued. [1] And basically every EU country (outside of Scandiland) has a majority to vast majority who believe that corruption is widespread in their country.
[1] - https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3217
But public perception doesn’t necessarily reflect actual levels of corruption. Having dodgy planning approved is not the same as buying a seat at the head of the government for a quarter billion dollars.
Corruption is always measured by perceptions. There are many reasons for this but when it comes to high level corruption it's especially clear - high level corruption, in most countries, is rarely pursued, let alone prosecuted. And efforts to do such may themselves be driven by corruption. And people's actions, as on all things, will be guided by their perceptions. And so things like corruption's influence on things like starting a business will be driven largely by perceptions.
Public perception do not reflect actual corruption, but it affects how likely people try to start a new business.
IMO, this is more important.
I'd say US corruption is now more transparent than EU corruption :D
That was once different, with Berlusconi at the helm in Italy while owning the major TV outlets.
The grass isn’t always greener
Like most things in life, I suppose it is all relative? Diabetes sucks, but it sure sucks less than cancer.
Of course it would be lovely if there is zero corruption, zero pollution, zero nepotism etc. Which is highly unlikely to happen?
Which brings the question - what is the best country to live, relatively speaking?
Sure, that's why von der Leyen run the huge Pfizer deals then conveniently "lost" the SMS about them, hired her pals as defense consultants hiding €100+ million of the costs and the decisions which favored the companies supporting her (e.g. lucrative contracts were awarded to the global consulting giant McKinsey & Company, where von der Leyen's son works as an associate, and several other cases.
And she is just the tip of the iceberg of EU corruption. In general such politicians only get repercusions selectively, and usually only when the political direction changes and they're no longer useful to the establishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://www.politico.eu/article/5-things-to-know-about-ursul...
I love how this subthread devolved into arguing about Europe's attached bottlecap regulations and that the GDPR has resulted in lots of very annoying cookie banners.
So in the US you have a corrupt, authoritarian takeover of a society – and in Europe you have well-meaning, but somewhat annoying, regulations that still need some work to function perfectly.
The cookie banners were never mandated by GDPR, that's entirely the industry's fault and intent - dark UX patterns to try and annoy the user into agreeing, or a silent protest to the perceived overbearing nature of the GDPR.
They could've just respected a browser's do-not-track header but chose not to. The EU legislators should've done that too, that is, dictate a standardized method for people to opt in.
Or.. god forbid.. not track users?! I know this isn't viable for many businesses, but back then I just removed Google Analytics and all cookies from my sites, so no cookie banners needed.
Oh I agree. I'm just saying, either way that discussion goes, it just's not even the same order of severity magnitude as a corrupt authoritarian takeover.
Could you explain why the state railway of the Federal Republic of Germany uses dark UX patterns to annoy the user into agreeing or silently protests the perceived overbearing nature of the GDPR?
Btw, I can dig up 3 dozen of other state institutions with cookie banners, if you so wish?
Not sure how you could possibly come up with this idea — but I’d recommend not consuming hysterical media narratives and instead looking at actual data. This is a chart of globally relevant companies founded in Europe in the last 50 years:
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/1Fn23uYVxK
The data depicts the exact opposite of what you are saying. As an entrepreneur, you can be “safe” knowing you will have far less chance to succeed in the EU.
These just compare market cap. As the US economy is disproportionally financialized, that outcome is hardly surprising: This was just measuring market financialization by proxy. I mean two of the largest on the left, Google and Meta, are essentially just ad companies.
Now compare companies by actual revenue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
I omitted the 50 years distinction because, unsurprisingly, the companies in the US are younger.
None of these are actually relevant for founders, however, as even in the US you only have a couple dozen large cap companies, but millions of founders.
What is relevant is the share of employers per capita, as that shows us how many founders actually exist.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...
Yes, Europe did have great entrepreneurial culture in the past, but the point of the “founded in the last 50 years” distinction is to measure how things have been going for entrepreneurs who are still alive today.
You can’t call a region a “safe haven for entrepreneurs” if all the globally relevant entrepreneurs from that region are dead from old age.
Remember, Europe has double the population of the US. To lag behind so dramatically in the last 50 years is absolutely something to be concerned about.
Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.
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Stop pretending that America of today is anything like America of 15 years ago
Please elaborate on the anti-entrepreneur shifts that have occurred in the US in the last 15 years that would disrupt this trend. I’m not aware of them.
If this were true, 15 years would definitely be enough time to show up in some form of data you can cite about the death of American startup culture.
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Historical data is not great for forming an argument when the basis is that things have radically changed and historical results don't matter anymore.
How much of this is because of the US strong-arming companies in their sphere of influence? Nobody here actually forgot the MegaUpload fiasco, it's just that people pretend to forget abusive relationships.
Europe suffers from another kind of "corruption", more akin to a corrupted file system: absurd, rigid and unpredictable regulation makes life very hard for businesses, which drives large private capital away.
I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).
Then send a message to the producer. The law requires for caps to be attached but doesn't describe how. I have a water bottle next to me that has a cap connected by one long piece after opening that doesn't touch my face at all when drinking.
Sure, Europe has some red tape that should be removed but don't paint it as some kind of Kafka's universe because it's not that bad. I'm from east side of Iron Curtain and I remember how bad that was.
Also, most of the businesses will do what's needed to be done because the market is big.
Personally, I prefer to live a life in a slightly over regulated place that at least keeps common people in mind than whatever is US turning into.
Same answer as GDPR: when the majority/all of the companies implement it in a way that hurts everyone (businesses and end users alike), then the problem is with the regulator, not the regulated.
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> I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).
Is life so bad in Europe that’s what you have to complain about? Sounds truly like a nightmare - caps attached to bottles? Barbaric.
They're pointing out a surface-level symptom of a much deeper bureaucratic sickness in parts of Europe. There's a reason British comedy is what it is.
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Stop buying disposable bottles then. They are part of a solution to a waste problem, but by continuing to buy disposablle bottles you're contributing to the issue.
"every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face)."
You know that it is easy to remove the plastic locking the caps on? (Just twist them) And to me it is also easy to drink with them locked on, just have it side ways.
So I also do have lots of complaints about the EU, but this ain't it.
This is what you complain about in Europe? Every day when I drop my children off at school I wonder if today’s the day. That’s not hyperbole, it’s my reality in the US.
European law is a patchwork of suboptimal solutions to hard (but often self-imposed) problems. The US meanwhile doesn't try to solve them at all.
Yes, the bottle caps annoy me, but if the beverage companies stuck to the much more recyclable glass bottles we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
Yes, the GDPR popups annoy me, but the law also punishes companies for being creepy exploitative bastards. If they had any morals, we wouldn't have the popups either.
So yes, Europe is sometimes frustrating, but at least it does some government. The US simply doesn't. It's a free-for-all hellscape and I'd much rather be lightly scraped on the face by a little plastic cap that one time a month I need to drink from a disposable plastic bottle than live in...that...
The bottle caps certainly don't annoy me, I find them very useful.
The popups are there for companies that ignore basic data sovereignty of "don't use my personal data until I say you can"
I don't dismiss the problem, I dismiss the solution.
Yes, plastic bottles (and caps) are likely a major environmental disaster.
The alternative to regulation is innovation: force bottle makers to invest x% of their profit or revenue into actual research on plastic recycling or capture.
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GDPR and Cookie acceptance popups are separate regulations.
For the cookie popups this is a great add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
It will click no no no no no to all cookie prompts for you, and hide the popup. It's sad that we need to do this, the companies could just not track you at all. But I haven't had a need to manually click these popups for quite a some time now.
One EU AI startup even named itself after these bottle caps:) https://www.bottlecapai.com/
With Tomas Mikolov in it? Holy cow! :)
Nevermind the bottle caps.
The internet is borderline unusable without extensions like "I don't care about cookies". And in situations where you care about them, you can not, because something has to record that I've seen the GDPR consent form. Recently, in the name of... who knows what, it's become a pain in the ass to access Google maps from Google search.
The idea that Europe can become a safe haven for entrepreneurs is beyond laughable. The vaunted "rule of law" has degraded into nothing more than fetishizing arbitrary and irrational rules.
why blame the rule and not the people adding tracking and cookies without reason? You don't need those dumb banners if you don't try to cram cookies in everything
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