Where Is Europe's Silicon Valley? 266
An anonymous reader writes: A New York Times story delves into the conundrum faced by Europeans: Why are there few, if any, technology companies from Europe with the size and reach of American tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple? The article hypothesizes that, though employment regulations and other business and legal factors play a role, it's actually deeply embedded cultural differences that are the primary cause, citing less aversion to risk-taking, less stigma from business failures such as bankruptcies, little or no stigma from leaving and rejoining a company (seen as disloyal in European cultures), more acceptance of disruptive innovation, and a less rigid educational system that allows individuals to find their own form of success.
Venture capitals are more conservative in EU. (Score:5, Insightful)
In contrast, everywhere else, investors are much more concerned about minimizing risk and focusing on commodities such as building houses, selling mattresses, etc. Silicon Valley is so different that you can find VC offices next to an ice cream store in the middle of the street.
Re:Venture capitals are more conservative in EU. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is probably difficult to understand for Americans, but the key factor that makes SV so amazing is that venture capitalists over there are a century ahead in terms of taking risks than anywhere else in the world
Most of Silicon Valley isn't amazing. Most businesses supported by that venture capital culture you're talking about fail.
The peculiar thing about SV is the glorification of failure. It's rather like the traditional American Dream, where everyone is going to be rich one day so huge numbers of ordinary people irrationally support policies that actively go against their interests and probably always will. The venture capital model is based on the idea that if you support 100 businesses, it doesn't matter if 99 of them blow your whole investment and then die, as long as the last one becomes the next Facebook or Google or Amazon.
You can get away with this in the US partly because there is a seemingly endless supply of kids who are willing to basically give up any sort of work-life balance for a while in the hope that they too will be the next Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. In Europe, you'll be hard pressed to find even a newbie in the industry who actually thinks stock options are worth anything these days, and several popular employment practices in the tech industry are literally illegal and would be viewed as worker exploitation.
In other news, look at the electronic devices around you, and tell me who designed the processors driving the majority of them. It's probably ARM, which is based here in Cambridge, UK and has an 11-figure market cap. Also here in Cambridge we have what is now HP Autonomy, and whatever you think about Autonomy and/or the HP acquisition, it is a matter of fact that someone paid 11 figures USD for that business, too. We do grow some substantial, widely influential tech businesses in Europe, they just aren't always the very biggest or highest profile ones.
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There's a big con game. You convince someone to work for you for a very low salary that they can barely live on by handing out useless stock and the promise that they'll be the next big thing. Startups aren't just for Silicon Valley but we've certainly perfected that long con game here.
Re:Venture capitals are more conservative in EU. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you missed my point on both counts.
ARM don't mass-produce processors, they design them. And they're so good at it that numerous other businesses do mass-produce processors based on those designs. (Also, you're being rather optimistic about Intel being able to buy them with loose change. Intel is a much bigger firm, but not that much bigger.)
And I'm not suggesting that HP are British. I'm saying that despite their size they were willing to pony up ten billion dollars for a British company rather than try to enter the space themselves.
As I said, the tech companies we produce in Europe aren't always the biggest or highest profile, but we already have our successes both technologically and commercially without the boom/bust culture of SV.
Finally, you do realise that Siemens is German, and therefore another example of a very successful European firm involved in a lot of tech industries, right?
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I think if it takes several years to save up enough to buy something, calling it "loose change" is something of an overstatement.
I'm not disputing that Intel is a much bigger business financially, on scale where it could make an offer for a business like ARM. It was the implication that it could do so casually and if things didn't work that would be a minor distraction that I was challenging.
Where Is Europe's Silicon Valley? (Score:4, Funny)
In California! Of course! So is Russia's and China's.
It's not innovation, it's the market (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither Google, Facebook nor Uber is about innovation. It's about implementing an idea that's obvious in its time and bringing it to customers. The 5% inspiration, 95% transpiration stuff. And they did it very well.
The US's distinct advantage: Immediate access to a 320M people market with the same language
and very similar culture. Thus able to reach critical masses much faster, hence ability to collect
more venture capital, grow bigger etc. Less need for internationalization in the early phases (no, it's not just
about translation!).
Other factors may also play a role, but I think the above one is the main factor.
No reason to worry, though, Frau Moser. Diversity has other advantages, and the world would be a boring place if
everywhere would be like Silicon Valley, even though I like it.
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This.
And further to what the parent poster said, there is the issue of whether Silicon Valley is really any "better" when you consider the number of FAILED companies it has produced. I think the Europeans are a lot smarter about their investments than North Americans; both Canadians and Americans are far more prone to gamble on someone with a good story than they are in Europe.
Even Canada suffers on the "Silicon Valley" front because we're required by law to deploy systems in both French and English o
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Note that although there are 7-bit character sets that will support each of the European languages, you have to use a multi-byte set in order to support all of those languages in one database. Splitting your data on language barriers isn't very effective, and would complicate systems even more than MBCS do.
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Honestly, this shouldn't be a big debate should it? If you have any user generated content at all, you're going to want emoji and and other language support. Might as well pick UTF-8. Heck, it's really easy to use in many common programming languages these days. We now know more about the right abstractions to use when building APIs, and every year they get better.
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Re:It's not innovation, it's the market (Score:5, Informative)
Just wait until someone from Quebec wants to use whatever you're producing and you'll be hearing from the lawyers.
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Rational investors are concerned with risk and return. If you let considerations of the number of failed companies override risk and return considerations, you aren't smarter, you are dumb.
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A lot of people in Europe speak English as a second language. The language thing is less of a barrier than people make it out to be.
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"A lot of people in Europe speak English as a second language. The language thing is less of a barrier than people make it out to be"
Well, standard wisdom will say it *is* a tremendous barrier, specifically for the kind of global reach business that this story is about. You certainly will *not* get any significant market penetration in Spain if you don't go Spanish, or in Italy if you don't go Italian, or French in France, etc. But, hey, don't let the fact that nobody has managed to develop a hugh roots m
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The USA has 319 million people. The EU has 503 million people. Sure not all of them speak English but the fraction is still significant enough. English is spoken by 47% of EU citizens (i.e. 236 million people) and the fraction of those who speak English has been increasing.
As for the regulations it doesn't explain it. If regulations were the problem why is Silicon Valley in California to begin with and not somewhere else with less regulation?
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"The USA has 319 million people. The EU has 503 million people. Sure not all of them speak English but the fraction is still significant enough"
No, it isn't and what's more important, while you might find you can do business with a little fraction of the already little fraction of global population of nerds, you won't go business into a mass market in a foreign language. You won't find, for instance, and add on TV or on press in nothing but the local language. But, hey, don't take my word for it and just
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There's a European Patent Office and there are World Trademarks. I think the whole patenting deal is bunk in the software business though. It hinders more than it actually helps.
The different VAT percentages also exist to a degree in the US in the form of Sales Tax. It's just that US companies can get away with actually breaking the law because its "on the Internet" and the state doesn't enforce actual existing laws.
Labour laws differ among US states as well.
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The USA has 319 million people. The EU has 503 million people. Sure not all of them speak English but the fraction is still significant enough. English is spoken by 47% of EU citizens (i.e. 236 million people) and the fraction of those who speak English has been increasing.
I take it you've never been to Europe? Unlike the US which is a young country that (mostly) identifies under one flag, Europe has hundreds of cultural variations, some of which are thousands of years old. Some villages only a few km apart refuse to do business with each other based on some shit that happened 4 centuries ago. So there's a lot more to it than just speaking a similar language. The US is unique in this regard that is has one extremely large, almost homogenous population (relatively speaking - I
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Or ANY need to internationalize. Hell, my company outright blocks all inbound packets from IP addresses outside of the ARIN blocks. We got tired of Russian and Chinese hack attacks.
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The US's distinct advantage: Immediate access to a 320M people market with the same language and very similar culture.
Seems odd that it works well in the case of technology or entertainment industry, but why is the American auto industry so shit?
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because kids want their $27,000 Hyundai. Beats the snot out of $12,000 American "Muscle" that puts out half the horsepower for twice the weight and a fifth the fuel economy. ::shaking my head::
Where is Dice's soul? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why make a change (that no one wants, no one asked for) to a UI element that's served perfectly fine for 15+ years? Certainly it's not for us, the audience. Please Dice, explain.
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Their choices, since they ran out of good ideas long ago
(when beta was overwhelmingly rejected), was to sit there and masturbate or screw with you. It appears they did both at the same time and this is what we have for proof of it.
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Little Miss Muffet..
Yes, It's Culture (Score:3, Insightful)
Watching things like Cringeley's two series about the start of the computer revolution I cannot imagine something like that happening in Europe because the culture here is so different. Apart from a constant desire for stability there are still people walking around saying things like 'my grandfather was a miner, I'm a miner and, by God, my son will be a miner as well'. In America that would be replaced by 'my grandfather was a miner, I'm a mine superintendent and my son will own the mine'.
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In America that would be replaced by 'my grandfather was a miner, I'm a mine superintendent and my son will own the mine'.
And in 99 cases of 100, his son will end up unemployed. That's why Europe prefers stability, being an older culture, they've learnt that it's better for 100 sons to all be employed, than 1 son is rich while the other 99 starve.
US Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to start an IT business here in the EU, it is hart to get venture capital. It is easier to go to Silicon Valley and get money from European lenders than to do so on European soil. While the US has such a good reputation for being innovative they have an advantage in getting money. The labor regulations are not a problem, because they are mostly ruined in the last decade and they only come into effect when your company is larger and your people work for longer time.
Taxation too. (Score:5, Insightful)
As anti-business and anti-success as the American tax code is, the tax codes of most European countries, in general, are worse. When Hollande put France under a 75% top marginal income tax rate, even Sarkozy started making plans to leave the country. Think about that for a second. The ex-president was going to leave to avoid the taxes.
You're not going to lure top talent to your country to try and make a billion dollar business when you promise to tax most of their income at 75%. With proper planning, in the US you'll be paying about 50% tops in California, and 40% in some other states.
Re:Taxation too. (Score:5, Funny)
If Sarkozy left it would have had at least one positive effect.
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Thought about it, and came to the conclusion that the ex-president, who is now trying to get back into politics after being through many court-cases, is quite probably trying to get an upper-hand on his rival. Has he left? No. Will he leave? No chance.
Not saying that 75% tax rate is a good thing, but taking Sarkozy as an example is not very convincing.
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Re: Taxation too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't *your* Eisenhower the one that topped taxes at a whopping 93%?
USA didn't go so bad after WW2 despite of it.
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Yes, but with so many exemptions that nobody actually paid that rate. That was the rate for someone who totally didn't play by any rules. In reality, it topped out somewhere around 20% or so.
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You're not going to lure top talent to your country to try and make a billion dollar business when you promise to tax most of their income at 75%..
If memory serves, that was the tax rate for income beyond the first million euros. Do you personally know *anyone* who makes even close to that? The explicit target were the clique of fatcat CEOs who sit in each others' boardrooms and vote their respective salaries up.
I can think of some places (Score:2, Interesting)
1. One logical type of location would be adventurous, investor-friendly corners of Europe: Ireland, Iceland, Scotland (which is already promoting a "Silicon Glen").
2. But a better bet might be industrial rust belts like Upper Silesia in Poland, or Birmingham, which like its American namesake is redneck heaven (the term there is "chavs"). These are places which already have dense industrial infrastructure like power and rail service, but it's now underutilized as the heavy industry has moved elsewhere. Tech
who are yow calling a chav (Score:2)
No more chavs in Birmingham than anywhere else (Score:2)
Piss off you southern shite.
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It's even worse than that, I'm afraid. I'm American.
Brain drain (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many reasons but I think the best one is that there is a brain drain.
Why set up in Europe that doesn't have good laws and tax breaks for start ups anyway... when you can just move to the US and be surrounded by the best and the brightest from the whole world?
Its worse than the europeans realize because we've pretty much filled SV to capacity and now we're seeding Seattle with more of it and Austin, Dallas, a little in Los Angeles, and even something in Boston.
The US draws them in like a loadstone. The Euros are going to have to offer very attractive subsidies to keep those people in Europe. Think of the sort of pull Europe would have to have to start pulling American tech startups to Europe. That is how hard the US is pulling... If the Euros haven't noticed this then they're not paying attention. The US wants ALL your bright minds. All of them.
America is drinking your mental milkshake. *sluuuuuuuurp*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Few European technology companies? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you mean like Siemens, Philips, Ericsson, BAE Systems, STMicroelectronics, and Logitech? Or possibly much smaller ones like Raspberry Pi, Nginx, AVG Technologies and F-Secure?
Mostly, the big European technology companies actually make stuff.
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It's funny, though. Other than razors and keyboards/mice, none of those companies are consumer companies, at least in North America. Or, as you and the article mention, they're smaller companies.
Where are the European consumer tech giants, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others? Per capita, for each massive North American consumer success, Europe should produce two.
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And don't forget ASML. The biggest in semiconductor lithography.
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Take it from a Detroiter, actually making stuff is not the way to get rich in this world. In fact being good at making shit is a bad thing in a global economy, because they'll pay you really good until the Mexicans get to be 3/4 as good as you, and at that point you're a) fired and b) unemployable. because nobody believes you'll take the 50% pay cut that would make you competitive with Mexico.
Moreover those companies have roots that go back a long way. Most of the big ones you mention were major players on
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Oh, you mean like Siemens, Philips, Ericsson, BAE Systems, STMicroelectronics, and Logitech? Or possibly much smaller ones like Raspberry Pi, Nginx, AVG Technologies and F-Secure?
That's cool but I don't think you understand how dense Silicon Valley is with tech companies. There are probably at least 30 within walking distance of my house.....and that's not an unusual density.
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But yes, there is more in the US, or maybe that's just how we perceive it... Personally, I think it also has to do with people from all over the world relocating to the valley... Rather than trying to create the same atmosphere elsewhere.
So if the US stops things like the H1B program, there is a real risk that Toronto, London or Berlin becomes a tech hub like the valley.
Must be Ireland. (Score:2)
Other Technology, other history (Score:2)
In Europe there are several areas where technology thrives. However, they are not in the area of Internet technology. For example the Southwest of Germany is a hub of machinery technology. And there is another cause: In Europe computer science is often called informatics and originates from mathematics. There is no mathematics industry (beside present day banking). In the USA computer science originated from electric engineering. And finally, we do not have one big market, we have 28 countries every country
Europe is a shadow of itself (Score:2, Interesting)
Europe 110 years ago ruled the world, period. Compared to that time, our influcence in the world is nothing. Since then we had a horrible 30 year war and countless genocides. America on the other hand never had any war on its main land. After that war, europe was split in two: one russian hemisphere and one american. And both americans and russians are clinging on their part, with now most of europe being an US colony. If we can't fight the russians ourselves, but have to hide behind the american army, how
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"America on the other hand never had any war on its main land."
The American Civil War was fought on US soil, is considered one of the earliest "Industrial Wars", and resulted in over one million casualties. Not the largest war ever, but its impact is still felt today.
"Also, europe is very strong in the free software world."
There was also that guy Torvalds from Finland who created something called Linux.
Stockholm is for sure on the list. (Score:5, Informative)
Unfair (Score:2)
Why does California have Silicon Valley and Hollywood ?
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Where is Texas' Silicon Valley or Oregon's ?
California.
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I'm sorry. This joke was already used. Please find a new one and try again.
This is an Apples and Oranges comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of comparison doesn't make all that much sense. First of all Europe isn't one country like the US. People in the comments here and in the New York Times article makes sweeping generalisations about tax rates, laws and regulations in Europe, when those differ substantially between countries. There is a lot of cherry picking here to make a point. Doing a startup or going a bankrupt isn't necessarily difficult all over Europe. I can only speak for Norway where I am from and starting a company here is not hard. I've done it at I have several friends who have done it. Some more successful than others and I've worked for multiple tech startups. Nobody here in their right mind would commit suicide over a failed startup.
I just wanted to mention these things because I think it is a tired accusation that Europe is failing in this area because it is not business friendly. That is frankly not the issue. The problem in Europe is that nobody has a 320 million market. Sure Europe is 500+ million people, but these are people in different countries with different regulations, cultures and languages. We have had a number of successful tech companies here in Norway but they don't show up on the radar because we are just 5 million people. E.g. we got a very successful company that does house listings, buying and selling, job adds etc. But such a company can't quickly expand. If they want to expand they need to learn about the laws and regulations of the next market. The jargon and language used etc. It is not easy. E.g. the way you describe house size in Norway is not the same as in the Netherlands.
A second major obstacle is that we don't have VC capital even remotely as accessible as in the US. That is simply a cultural thing. American's are of course much more risk taking than most other people on this planet. We also don't think as big as American's. We get content much more quickly. People are as mentioned also more loyal to their employers. You can't change that with business laws and regulation as that is part of the culture and it is not all exclusively bad. There is a flip side to everything. The US is a country which is poor at manufacturing while Germany and Japan excels at this. This is helped by a culture of loyalty which allows companies to spend a lot of money on investing in skills of employees without risking that their investment is lost because people suddenly leave for the competitor. As an employer you would not spend say 5 000 dollars a year on training if you could use that to increase the salary and steal skilled employees from somewhere else.
And thirdly while Europe isn't one homogenous mass that could be compared to the US, neither is the US really either. I'd go so far as to claim that Silicon valley is a west coast thing. Why is there no Silicon Valley on the east coast? Doing startups simply isn't such an honourably thing on the east coast. There is more status in being a big shot banker. In many ways the west coast of America has a unique culture created by all the luck seekers all the way back to the gold rush which can't be recreated easily elsewhere regardless of business regulation.
Trying to do this is really just stupid. Each country should find their own way. Denmark has a sort of food silicon valley. In Norway we have strong business clusters around oil technology on the west coast. Lots of different countries have different specialised clusters based on what they are good at. Replicating silicon valley when one already exists is a waste IMHO.
London! (Score:3)
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
answer: low inequality (Score:2)
Europe achieves what progressives want: low inequality through redistribution, taxation, and other policies. That means that if you're below average, you get compensated better than you ought to be, and if you're above average, you get compensated worse than you ought to be based on your ability and productivity. It shouldn't be surprising that this is not an attractive proposition to people with skills and talents, so many leave if they can.
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the most unequal areas in the world are the least innovative...You'd be surprised how egalitarian Silicon Valley is compared to 99% of Asia or South America.
Stratified distribution of wealth is not the same as compensation based on ability.
Re: answer: low inequality (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what delusions you have about "correct" compensation. If Europe pays "superstars" less than they get paid in the US, then the superstars leave, because other countries are willing to pay them market rates. Or if they don't leave for the US, they simply don't work as hard, because what'
where? (Score:2)
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You must utterly despise companies like P&G, G.E. and Dupont. Crap I mean they are so yesterday they actually make things.
Re:Silcion Valley is old school and gone. (Score:4, Interesting)
look man, if parent post wasn't at least partially true, you wouldn't have things like SF residents up in arms over companies like Genentech or Google using private busing. There is a very very clear differentiation between the haves and have not's. Kind of a bad comparison *now*, but prior to becoming the 'rust belt', the northern Midwest produced 'things', as well as a huge middle class across multiple industries.
Tricking people into clicking on ads, or electronically stalking them not only fails to produce wealth outside of shareholders, but it has a negative social value as well. (though that's arguably just an opinion.)
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Amazon isn't at all related to Silicon Valley either. Google is a new company. Even Apple wasn't even around when the term "Silicon Valley" was first used. So these companies come and go. The old silicon companies no longer dominated, though they're still around, but low tech stuff is taking over; web applications, social media, etc. Really, when people talk about high technology they're not first thinking about Twitter...
Meanwhile in Europe, Nokia was gang busters for awhile. Oh but wait, some say, i
Re:Cultural differences (Score:5, Insightful)
All of with lead to a more equal society in Europe instead of a winner-takes-all-screw-the-rest situation like in the US.
I think this is because of a misguided desire to turn employment into some kind of welfare system.
I think a better approach is to combine a super-efficient hands-off capitalist economy with a highly socialized government. Regulation on business should just be to deal with externalities (pollution/etc) and to prevent the formation of monopolies (which even conservative economists will agree destroy free markets).
Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
In such a system there would be plenty of risk-taking, and the wealthy will be able to earn great deals of money. They would of course then pay a large portion of that back in taxes. However, we won't begrudge them the odd private jet if everybody gets decent healthcare and a roof over their head.
The problem with the US is that our social programs are even weaker than in Europe, and so are worker protections. We have that strong economy as a result, but the money just goes into the hands of a few instead of benefitting the many.
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Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
Then why would anyone put in the not-atypical 60-hour work week or do tasks they didn't want to do?
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Then have a decent tax rate on that economy and use that to fund strong social protections, including programs like basic income. That alone would eliminate the need for a lot of business regulation. There is no need to have a minimum wage or safety protections in the workplace when people can still live reasonably comfortably without a job. Employers who offer only a pittance won't be able to hire anybody, and if an employee walks into the workplace and sees frightening conditions, they'll just quit.
Then why would anyone put in the not-atypical 60-hour work week or do tasks they didn't want to do?
They would need to be very well-compensated. Lots of people would still choose to work. They'd probably work a lot less, and they wouldn't put up with nonsense. You're not going to live in luxury on basic income, so there will always be incentive to do more.
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Because they have to eat and pay the rent. Here in London, because both major parties believe a housing shortage will help them*, and lies about it, rents are often more than 50% of salary.
It is not easy to get a job. If it was, things would change fast - mostly imigration would increase to bring in even more people who don't understand the cost of living until too late.
Conservatives thing rising prices
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Because, if you want to live better than the government-designated minimum, you're going to have to produce. I like earning considerably more than the median US household income, because I prefer more money to less money.
If you want a whole lot money than I do, and many people do, you'll have to do something more special. This is likely to involve sixty-hour work weeks (on up), risk-taking, and intelligence, and almost certainly creativity.
One problem a government safety net solves is family risk. I
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Actually a number of European countries follow an approach not that different from this. E.g. Nordic countries have more extensive welfare systems and higher taxes than e.g. southern Europe but it has far less business regulations and red tape. Laws are usually quite straightforward and governments are efficient. E.g. tax laws are much simpler in Nordic countries than the US. The whole welfare system is also much simpler. The US has a myriad of different programs overlapping in all sort of ways, while Nord
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Apparently you haven't been reading the same news feeds I have over the past few years. The whole world's economy has been in the shitter for a long time now.
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The idea that US social programs are weak is a fiction. Government social expenditure in the US is 20% of GDP, which is roughly in the middle of the OECD and Europe. But given that US per capita GDP is significantly higher than that of most European nations, that actually puts us near the top in terms of per capita government social spending. And that isn't even counting the massive US non-profit sector.
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I'd be interested in a comparison of what percent of that spending directly benefits the intended recipient.
In the US somebody who simply doesn't want to work has no real benefits available to them. That means that you spend a lot of effort trying to regulate the bottom end of the employment food chain, because people are desperate for jobs.
Also, healthcare is a big area of public benefit spending in Europe, but costs are much lower there. That means that you get a lot more care per dollar spent than you
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Basic income is not a workable idea
Considering if it hadn't been for Watergate we'd have had that, since Richard Nixon thought it was a good idea, it must have been thought workable. We still have the pilot program, we call it "Earned Income Credit"
He was also in favor of single payer government run health insurance for everyone, the stickler was the details. Teddy Kennedy blamed himself for it not getting enacted, since he was holding out for more concessions towards the lower income folk...then Watergate happened and that ended any coope
Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:5, Interesting)
Now not to sound like a bat crazy right winger. Europe does tend to go a bit to far in being pro-worker, and anti-corporation. To a point where there is so much stuff that running a business is harder to do in that area. When companies expend they like to try to go to Europe, however they find the rules to be prohibitive, and prevents actually getting to the goals.
Now I am not say we should let the Corporations do what they want as that will only create more business, because that is false. There is a balance that is needed, where employee are treated and compensated fairly for their work and are able to thrive in their area of living, however the company needs the freedoms to take risks and run their business and trying different ways to run it.
This is shown by the weaker EU members during the last recession, they had too much entitlements that cost more then what would cover when things are not working well. The larger EU members were big enough to handle such entitlements but the smaller members cannot. The US during the same crisis got hit but recovered faster because of a more conservative approach towards entitlements. Granted the US is the biggest economy, however if implements EU style entitlements you will find many States will have massive economic problems. Much like how the EU nations had problems. Richer states, NY, California, Texas, Illinois may be able to weather the down times, but Vermont, or Kansas?
Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the only way to keep those pests at bay. If you give them a finger, they take an arm.
If you refer to Greece, you might notice that one of the core reasons they're in the slump is that they failed to grab corporations and shake their owed tax out of their pockets. If you look further for nations with an economy problem you'll see Italy, Ireland and some others, all of them either being very permissive and lenient when it comes to corporate behaviour or already pretty much owned by corporations because their governments were or are run by crooks that sold out.
The countries that are still doing ok are the ones where corporations lament how damaging consumer and worker protection laws are.
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You do know that for company formation the UK is scored better than the USA by some Rightwing think tanks - we don't have those dodgy judges in texas helping patent trolls for one.
Apparently you don't understand how well the right wing can disseminate propaganda. Part of convincing citizens that lowering tax burden and removing regulation is a good idea is convincing them these things are hurting businesses enough to damage the US economy. Telling people that even the anti-business EU has countries which beat us in company formation is a great way to do that. It works even better when people believe a right wing think tank would have some natural bias against giving credit to Europe,
Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:5, Interesting)
Europe does tend to go a bit to far in being pro-worker, and anti-corporation.
I do not think it is anti-business per se.
In one German book about business, in the basics, I have read that business is like a privilege bestowed for the benefit of the society. And imagine that: there were no mention of money nowhere near the definition.
In other words, it is not seen as a device for personal enrichment. And it is handled as such, at the very least, to cause no harm to people and society.
In the end, I do not see the lack of an overcrowded tech town as a shortcoming. If a packed tech community is your thing, then there are several cities with strong tech sector - Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Dresden, Nuremberg, etc, their satellites - which provide enough opportunities for businesses and workers.
Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:5, Interesting)
Worker protection in the EU isn't the problem. There are all sorts of ways to go around the protections. If you had been in business here you would have noticed that. Outsourcing is one of the ways that "problem" gets worked around here. Worker protection for outsourced staff can be quite flimsy.
I would also say that bankruptcies actually happen quite a lot in the EU. What is much less common in the EU are successful restructurings or people who get back on business later and have success at it. Quite often it is legally easier to declare bankruptcy here than to restructure a company, especially if you have a large contingent of long term employees that would otherwise be hard to dismiss, while starting a new business after a failure can be quite problematic. Quite often in Europe people in the business know each other really well, it is a lot smaller, if people know you failed once they will be adverse to doing business with you again unless you provide extraordinary assurances that you probably wouldn't need in the USA. This is a cultural matter. I have noticed people in the USA usually keep to their own business and don't care much what happens around them but I can assure you the opposite is usually true in the EU. For good and bad.
The main issue in the EU is the lack of easy access to funding and the risk-adverseness of those with capital in Europe. They basically expect guaranteed returns on everything they fund. A lot of them got rich off the teat of the government or of government backed monopolies and are not interested in anything remotely competitive. So most innovation ends up happening with small enterprises people start on their own houses, much like in the USA I guess, the problem is then these small businesses cannot scale because there are no viable sources of funding to grow the business. So quite often either the business grows slowly and organically until it becomes massive (e.g. Ikea) or the founders just cash out on the business very early. But quite often the cash out isn't as gargantuan as what you see happening in the USA. It quite often ends up paying out like an order or two of magnitude less. If Facebook had been funded in the EU I bet if they did an IPO there people wouldn't have thrown them all that money just that. Then this money given to founders can be re-invested in new businesses. That's the main problem here. In Europe the founders never get quite enough to bankroll major new investments like what happens over there.
There are also infrastructure problems. The article talks about Silicon Valley. Well there aren't a lot of places where you can do silicon prototyping or manufacturing in the EU. There's Silicon Fen i.e. Cambridge the UK and Grenoble in France but little else. There are quite a lot of software hubs though. Like Silicon Glen in Scotland for games software, or Estonia (a place where Finnish investors usually go to because costs are cheaper and Internet access is fast) where Skype was located. etc.
Most of the "weaker" EU members during the last recession failed due to private banks failing and the state assuming their losses. Most of the talk about entitlements is pure bullshit.
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Quite often it is legally easier to declare bankruptcy here than to restructure a company, especially if you have a large contingent of long term employees that would otherwise be hard to dismiss
The Mandriva Syndrome
Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:4, Interesting)
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Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working out very well for Europe. See, you can't make people well off by government decree.
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Re:UK needs to be run by corporations like America (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever there's those OECD comparisons about things that I value: happiness, standard of living, access to health and education, low violent crime etc then North Western Europe along with Australia and New Zealand blitz those things every time.
So if there's one thing Europe shouldn't be doing, it's being more like America.
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You're just repeating uninformed anti-American beliefs common in Europe. In actual fact, Americans rank fairly low in terms of materialism:
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-p... [ipsos-na.com]
You mean the OECD
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Illinois has a $65bn (yes billion) deficit.
It also happens to have some of the most powerful unions and pro-worker laws in the country. Chicago is basically the US equivalent of Greece.
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Re: UK needs to be run by corporations like Americ (Score:4, Insightful)
Detroit is interesting because unions played a major part in destroying its car industry. At a time where US car companies badly needed to adapt to the new Asian competition, most of their money was spent paying for pension and benefits of people who had left the workforce years or even decades earlier. So they entered the death spiral of downsizing, outsourcing and such.
Same thing happens with civil servants and public workers in many cities in North America. Not only are the services severely downsized (such as in Chicago where they had to reduce the school calendar to be able to afford the gold-plated teachers conditions), but in many cases the cities have to spend tax money on pension and healthcare of retired employees who did not work harder than current ones, but simply happened to be in the workforce when the economy was booming and the unions had the cities by the balls. The result is that people who can't themselves afford a pension plan or decent healthcare and who will live in poverty when they retire have to pay for those lottery winners.
Another issue with unions is the lack of flexibility. They hold onto job descriptions to a point where it becomes totally absurd. Such as in the case of those people working in one of Warren Buffet's newspapers (I think the one in Buffalo); when the newspaper brought in a new machine to fold papers, they couldn't change the job of those poor union workers who used to fold newspapers manually. So until they retire, those people stand in line besides the conveyor belt where the newspapers exit the folding machine and in the air they make a move with their hand that is similar to what they used to do to fold the newspapers manually. They are known as "the blessers", and they are the perfect example of a situation where employees become wards of the company, not part of a team that is there to help the business.
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And they own the current president.
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The point of employment should be that it is social and you feed and give job to the workers.
Nice pipe dream, but no, it's just not a realistic expectation, nor should it be. When you start a business, which is the most likely thing on your mind:
- "I'd like to pay a lot of people to do stuff"
- "I've got an idea that could revolutionize the way we do X, and make me a lot of money in the process"
If it's the first one (i.e, owning a business just for the sake of owning a business) then you're basically guaranteed to fail. The purpose of running a business is to create a product or service that people
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tell that to Greece, Spain and Italy.
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Yes, the reason we don't have a lot of successful entrepreneurs is because of the social stigma of being rich. Why doesn't anybody step up for this repressed minority !
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Yeah, Europe definitely has a problem with antisemitism. Not sure that explains what the article postulates.
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Look to countries that are deregulating their economy for economic collapse followed by massive civil unrest up to and including civil war. You silly dipshit. Unless you were born prior to 2008, you literally just fucking saw what happened when countries let big business run amok.
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"A. Europe isn't (as) unified a market as the USA.
[...]
B. Venture capital. More specifically series B and C of funding. It is so much easier to get $30 million from VCs in the US than it is in Europe."
These two things are one and the same: you won't get such kind of money because you don't have reach to a market big enough to justify the investment at a low enough risk level. Creating a company with a viable product/service out of thin air is difficult and, therefore, financing it quite risky, but having t
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Wish I had mod points.
I would point out though that Apple were one of the original investors in ARM. They even helped with the early (though not the initial) silicon design.
The article is also wrong on other points. I've had two companies in the UK, the first failed (and I didn't really feel any "stigma". It just didn't work out); the second (which contained mainly the same people as the first) was bought up, which is why I'm over in Sunny CA now rather than back in London...
The social net is actually a lot
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last time I did any serious coding IT WAS ALL IN UPPERCASE. ZX81 BASIC for the win!