In that case "They could all be right that their market share might be higher". Because they never operate individually, in isolation. Two people can predict opposite outcomes that could be correct for a coin flip but only one is correct.

More on the point, I think they all invest in the same strategy not because they know they'll win but because they know without it they'll lose. Even so it's guaranteed that some of them will lose.

Or possibly just expenditure for both? I know borrowing can fill the gap between income/expenditure but it gives and idea of the actual cash that either entity can access.

It’s really not. One is a figure that a CPA (or whatever your country’s equivalent is) signs off on, reports, and is stored in or flowed through the reporting organization’s cash accounts and the other is a statistic represented by a figure that belongs to no organized entity whatsoever.

In principle I'm not against ensuring some protection of access to strategic resources for countries. (Note I say "access" and not "exclusive access").

What a take.

Is doctor telling bullshit about computers less doctor-ish?

and of course, for national defense, to have homegrown supply chains.

sure, there's technological progress and demand, but the market is in a near pathological state. (very short lifecycles, huge investments required even for fabs to keep up, etc. sure, it's unlikely that it will collapse, as demand is very strong, but market participants are very exposed to external factors. there is a huge discontinuity due to the dilemma of staying put and trying to beat the competition on price, or going all-in and building a new fab or at least upgrading one to be able to offer a newer/better process node. which leads to even more consolidation.)

Umm, my ex-RAF friends worked all over the world, including being stationed in Germany, and participated in NATO exercises.

"Der Spiegel reported that there are only enough missiles to make only four [of 128!] Eurofigher jets ready for combat" and VDL has seven kids.

https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jet...

https://www.dw.com/en/german-troops-wait-8-years-for-new-com...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/15/german-foreign...

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-baerbock-abu-dhabi-p...

https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-flight-woes-continue...

Airbus is the dominant commercial airplane maker, beating Boeing in orders and deliveries, not to mention quality, for years in a row. And yes, it started as a bunch of European countries merging their national (sometimes government owned, sometimes just closely guarded) aerospace manufacturers.

But I think that point of view underestimates EU a bit. I know it's a running joke that EU is becoming an open air museum etc, while the US companies are pushing forward all the innovation.

Well, if I look at biggest EU companies I see global healthcare leaders, ASML, chemical industry leaders, luxury brands etc. When I look at biggest US companies, I see quite a bit of, let's say, irrational exuberance that exist mostly in the virtual world.

That reason is that ASML wouldn't be in the position it is without USA's early investment into EUV technology, and ASML relies on its own imports from USA that USA could block (not allowed under current US legislation but they could obviously change that if there was enough political pressure).

No need for NATO conspiracy theories. USA is a good partner to ASML. Why the hell would they piss off their most valued partner to satisfy a country (China) that is dead set on copying as much of their technology as they can?

Once there now is one hub, you should expect trying to create a competitor to be vastly more expensive because you have to counter the draw of SV.

E.g. every effort to bolster the tech scene in London has sort-of worked, except a portion of the most promising companies then leave for Silicon Valley. This is repeated all over Europe.

Similarly, within the UK, I worked for a VC for whom part of the goal was to bolster investment in the regions, and we faced the constant struggle that because founders (rightly) assumed that most UK VC's preferred companies in London, a lot of the most promising companies moved to London before we got to them.

For that matter, I live in London because of this situation. I moved to London with my startup at the time because after getting funding in Oslo our VCs advised us there just wasn't enough capital for tech startups in Norway at the time, and so we moved to London for better funding opportunities.

Pouring funding in lifts all of these ecosystems, but it also hastens the departure of the ones who get the most benefit unless you do so well that you remove that incentive. Or attach strings to your funding. Fixing that will require you to provide so much capital that more startups start seeing staying in Europe as making their funding situation easier.

That means plugging the vast gap in later-stage VC funding between Silicon Valley and Europe, not just some R&D grants here and there.

That's not to say I think the European R&D funding efforts have been good enough, but it'll take many times as much funding, and a lot of extra effort, before you should even begin to hope to get the same outcome.

It's not so clear cut ;) "Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

It is however possible that Canon will at some point in the future be able to compete with ASML for all of its line-up, but Canon will have to make up for at least a decade of lag and for the industry that means that they're not relevant for the cutting edge. The amount of investment that they would need to make to be a serious threat to ASML is something they do not currently have in the works.

Industry watchers are skeptical about Canon's 'NIL' product, there are serious concerns about flaws in the process resulting in low yields. Maybe they'll be able to iron those out and then they may well become a contender. But it's an entirely different path than the one that ASML took and as those bets come a bit of a risky one (but with correspondingly high pay out if they get it to work). For now ASML is 90% of the market or so...

As for flight readiness: that has nothing to do with how many children von der Leyen has.

We gonna find ourselves looking very much like Russias army

You definitely can have very different amount of GDP with the same number of people. Why would less people mean lower GDP than simple proportion would suggest?

This is a pretty extreme example, but that's what it comes down to. Thanks to the free market, there's always going to be someone willing to do it for cheaper while sacrificing product quality, employee welfare, or environmental impact.

So they're simply doing both.

Furthermore, the EU is more expensive than other countries because we have stricter environmental standards and our people don't want to work 50+ hours a week as many in Asia do.

Letting Asian countries simply undercut your own homegrown companies because of these two (dis)advantages seems shortsighted.

I would think this would all happen the same way it would happen if we lured the companies here with €30 billion.

Data centers already work that way - the economic value of the physical building is quite small because all the actual moneymaking can be done by an office full of software engineers in san Fransisco.

Quite an interesting question - theories range from 0% to 100% and everywhere in between. Empirical evidence seems to be that >60% causes a collapse of some sort [3] since nobody serious is doing that. And probably a floor of 20% since Singapore operates at 15% but doesn't really try to field a military and is a micronation. Anywhere at 40%+ seems to have problems with industrial production and innovation. I'd suggest there is a sweet spot at 20-30% spending on uneconomic projects, although obviously if that number can be reduced then more spending on uneconomic things means more stuff for everyone.

If we look at the countries you suggest, we see 44% (Japan), 27% (South Korea), 16% (Taiwan), 26% (Chile). We see that GDP per capita improvement is worst in Japan [1, 2]. There is a bit of a link between high growth and low government spending. Of course, if a country is growing quickly and the government isn't spending much then government expenditure will appear low so we can't be certain it is causal - but we would suspect that fast growth isn't led by government spending.

My personal theory is we see economies grow, then people kill the growth and coast. The high-taxing economies are lovely places to live for a while, but are getting crushed industrially and have generally managed to get themselves into an energy crisis which is starting to have an impact on living standards. Coasting is a bad long term plan.

Until someone comes up with a number, we should at least experiment with zones of as close to 0% taxation and spending as can be managed without compromising the consensus essential services. That is the sort of thing China looked to be doing in Shenzhen and it worked wonders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

[2] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/taiwan/gdp-per-capita

[3] My guess is if we look at return on capital that is around the point where depreciation starts to overtake investment. And the symptoms of wastefulness go from sluggish--or-arrested-growth to now-obviously-shrinking-rapidly.

There's body shops in Eastern Europe that pay more for junior frontend developers...

Yeah, it should be tied to your job. If you work for a local tech company in a highly-skilled position requiring a lot of education and experience, then you get a big tax break. If you're just some rich person living off of investments, or you're a digital nomad working for a US company remotely, then forget it.

I think this is the wrong way to look at it. You are looking at it from an individual perspective. I think it's better to look at it from the perspective of the society as a whole.

Free education isn't a gift to an individual that they need to pay back. Free education is an investment into society. Society as a whole benefits from the fact that there are now well educated people around.

You don't pay taxes to pay back the education you received. You pay taxes to support the society you live in. If you want to live here, you need to pay your share, and how much you personally benefitted in the past or in the future should not affect how much you have to pay.

Someone who stays a few years at the peak of above average earnings might well be highly economically beneficial even at a steep tax discount.

I don't think governments ought to compete on tax in general, but this is one where it might both be a net benefit and there is the arguable case that most tax systems are geared towards people in working age overpaying to compensate for the cost of caring for children and the elderly.

Someone who comes temporarily during working age without a discount will get the downside without the benefit.

This will be a bigger problem for the competitive ability in places with comprehensive social support mechanisms.

Given dropping birth rates, trying to offset that to be an attractive place to immigrate to may well be worth it even if most leave again - especially as long as it's profitable too.

But if your concern is that it doesn't attract people who will stay, maybe there are ways to incentivise that too. E.g. let people earn a discount where a portion does not pay out unless they stay longer.

Now, if they stay permanently, you will have to pay their pensions and healthcare, which are very expensive.

That means they are spending a lot of money they earn on the local economy itself no? So even if their taxes are higher, if they are creating value in the economy, the locals do end up seeing those benefits imo.

From the perspective of a someone in country that loses a lot of talented/educated citizens to brain drain, If i were in charge of a country to which high skilled immigrants flock to - even if it is for a limited time, I'd try to see what I can do to convert them to permanent residents. It is a tricky thing to balance because the locals shouldn't feel like second class citizens in their own lands. But at the same time, if skilled people are migrating away - that's a lot of missed potential/opportunity.

I think you're excluding the middle[0] here. If you think the EU can't compete, you can't just say it's due to worker protections. There are lots of reasons. E.g. there's load more investment capital available in the US; that's not due to Chinese labour laws.

> What can we do other than add protectionist rules?

Worker protection isn't the same as protectionism.

> And if EU enforces such regulations while China doesn't, for example, we need protectionist rules in place to ensure that they can't undercut us by killing our planet

Much tighter, more specific rules though. Not "free markets bad so protectionism". Making sure specific environment-related rules are followed for certain products coming in is much smaller than just a ban.

[0] https://www.siue.edu/~gdondan/bdkit.html

Opinions differ on this. There are women who find the joke funny and who don't think it's sexist, and FWIW my wife is one of them.

> VdL is a terrible politician

At least we agree on that :)

> I strongly oppose her value system

Does she have a value system?

"it’s hard to imagine a more telling example of the EU’s complete lack of transparency, disregard for democracy and unsavoury cosiness with big business — and of the cronyism and corruption that has characterised the entire Covid management, and the vaccine rollout in particular — than a Commission president personally making a deal worth tens of billions of euros with a Big Pharma CEO. Then add to that the refusal to disclose the texts in question, or even the contracts related to the purchase, despite multiple requests by some of the highest EU bodies [..] What are they so afraid of?"

https://unherd.com/thepost/pfizer-and-ursula-von-der-leyen-t...

EDIT: to add, it's not the first time VdL has done this kind of thing:

'The German Defense Ministry has been accused of sabotaging parliament's attempts to investigate a defense consultancy affair, after data from the official phone of former Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen was deleted "for security reasons," according to the ministry.

Bundestag MPs have described "annoying stalling tactics" and "a real scandal" after the Defense Ministry revealed, after months of uncertainty, that von der Leyen's old phone was wiped in August, well after the parliamentarians had applied to have it classified as evidence. German daily Die Welt reported that the admission, made by a government official during a hearing on Thursday, sparked a heated row between MPs of different parties in the Bundestag hallways.

Von der Leyen [..] spent millions of euros of the German defense budget on consultancy contracts, as part of efforts to re-equip the German military during her six-year tenure.

Germany's official Federal Audit Office reported that the ministry had given massive contracts to consultancy firms without first opening a competition or assessing the offers for economic value.'

https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense-ministry-illegally-wipe...

Sounds like a terrible tradeoff, isn't it?

I also don't get your focus on education, this is Europe, not US where college costs 200.000EUR per person, the aggregate education costs don't even come close to tax breaks.

What does one offer to locals to show them that they matter? Remember that all locals - even if they are poor or unemployed - have a vote.

If one washes one's hands of an entire group one should not be surprised the next time an election comes round if the outcome is a form of protest.

However this also means you will see literal nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, eugenicists, Christian fundamentalists and so on promote their beliefs (and attack others with different beliefs) here. And the people promoting these beliefs have become more open about their stances over time while simultaneously rarely being flagged/killed as long as they can stick to an acceptable register of seeming respectability (e.g. using the trappings of scientism by citing pseudoscience or flawed statistics to support their arguments).

The synthesis of progressive and reactionary is always reactionary because the latter actively relies on dishonesty and deception to propagate itself. An "open marketplace of ideas" will always favor those willing to game the system instead of playing by the rules.

I used to believe that "rational debate" would solve everything, too, but as the adage goes: you shouldn't try to play chess with a pigeon because no matter how good you may be at the game, it will just knock over all the pieces, shit on the board and strut like it won anyway. If you are debating the existence and value of humans, you have already ceded ground to the side that wants them extinguished or silenced.

Note that at no point am I alleging that Dang is reactionary or an "SJW". Much like HN on aggregate, he is a right libertarian: progressive on some civil rights issues, conservative on others but generally in support of free markets and "free speech" as long as it doesn't contain any slurs, explicit insults or direct threats. In his comment he points at the language from "both corners" and shows how similar it is and concludes that if "both sides" are equally upset, he must be doing things right. To play the same rational debate game, this is a well-known fallacy in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

If one side argues that people in economically precarious situations who are members of a demographic that has traditionally been discriminated against and actively disenfranchised should receive more support to compensate for the historic injustices and the other side argues that demographic is biologically predisposed to violence and low intelligence and should be treated as dangerous and unfit for skilled labor, "upsetting both sides equally" doesn't mean you've hit a golden mean, it means you've ceded ground to the latter group.

Finally, note that I've said there's a "reactionary political bent on HN". This is what I mean. I'm not saying "HN is reactionary", I'm saying, on aggregate, HN leans reactionary more than progressive, qualified by what I just described about "free debate" and false middles. This is different from Twitter, for example, which since the buyout has demonstrably shifted to reactionary because many progressive liberals and leftists abandoned the platform after it became clear that there was no more interest in moderating even literal nazis. It's also different from 4chan, which at some point was so overrun by "ironic" nazis that it's now impossible to tell what any of its users genuinely believe although in terms of what they say the general tendency is to the far right of almost any political point of reference.

US government had to introduce very similar incentives and decided to just hand out dozens of billions of dollars to get them to move production back home, which is arguably worse than what you're criticizing the EU for.

> To vote a particular way in the hope of change? Why wouldn't that be rational?

There are plenty of historical examples of people voting for "change" that ended up backfiring wildly. I think you could find quite a few of those in the same ideological spectrum of people like Wilders.