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Comment by miohtama

9 hours ago

There cannot be echo chamber as long as entrepreneurship is not seen as generally acceptable in European culture

I hate that I agree, and yet, I agree. The EU has a giant single market, has a pipeline of elite tech talent from everywhere from Finland in the North on down, has long since settled on English as the lingua franca of business but has plenty of tools to solve i18n, and yet...culturally is just hostile to entrepreneurship in a way that goes beyond reasonable suspicion of fakery. what's that all about?

I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.

  • Brain drain I expect. All the people who believed in freedom and entrepreneurship have had maybe a century of incentives to leave Europe and head for the US.

    Society seems to rely on a tiny pool of overly-motivated people to do most of the work. There has historically been a healthy pipeline and many good reasons to convince them to leave Europe. And apparently sufficient safeguards to stop them building too much if they stay, based on the lack of success the EU has had in tech.

Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.

Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally.

Hardly anything to do with "entrepreneurship" and more about the insidious nature of US imperialism and how damaging neoliberalism is to the world.

Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.

  • > Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease.

    It's easy if you're in some nihilistic and cynical echochamber like reddit. For everybody else, entrepreneurship is still quite celebrated and seen as a positive for society.

  • >Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight.

    Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now.

    Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense.

    Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economic situation right now is borderline catastrophic, mostly because they built a society on someone else's support in the uncannily calm times after the wall fell.

  • Entrepreneurship is the fountain of wealth. What else are you going to do, extract natural resources?