EU countries team up for semiconductor push
reuters.com
reuters.com
If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn't a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).
I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world's advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.
It's not like they are cooperative like US automakers, and they have done China's will.
Edit: I've missed one "while" before they.
And as far as I know, China is a huge supplier of chemicals for biological engineering. If they know that much about chemistry, is the gap still so big that they cannot transfer their knowledge?
Today China is on a one sided war of technology dominance while the rest of us are sleeping or bickering over patents & tech protectionism, anti competitiveness and blocking acquisition.
China has the scale, money, leadership and capability to pool resources on a literal war footing to develop what it can not buy. Let us not fool ourselves.
TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.
this semiwiki article point that out.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/29364...
"TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few."
TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.
bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.
Not saying they should move completely, but to strategize to limit their operational risks. I am sure they'd receive some nice grants from EU.
Europe is in this strange place where collectively account for enormous wealth and power but individually no country is a match to the big boys like USA/China when simultaneously are super unoptimised due to cultural/lingual differences.
The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English, so who knows, maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it's a small country).
At the end of the day, those large Eurpoean projects bring a lot of good. Be it political or simply keeping some talent in Europe. I am also hopeful for some competition from the UK :) Since the collapse of the USSR, finally there's a competition.
If we have to go back to mentioning Airbus (1970) and CERN (1954) to find successful European projects, I think this show how big of a serious problem there is in Europe no!?
P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
> P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
What factors make you want to get out? As an American who's spent a lot of time in both the US and Continental Europe (and elsewhere) I don't see any terrific suck.
At the risk of speaking out of turn, I've traveled extensively outside the US and befriended a lot of folks and had discussions on this topic with them. I would summarize my findings as such:
1. Economic Mobility: In Europe economic mobility, on average, is actually better than the US. But, for those who are educated and driven, economic mobility in the US is much much much higher. Average person may up their income by $10k/yr in PPP or more in Europe from young adulthood to adult-hood, average person in the US tends to stay flat. But driven, intelligent people with degrees in the US can double or triple their income from young adulthood to adulthood, and this simply doesn't happen in Europe. The tech industry is a major factor in this, where senior-level positions in non-FAANG companies can make upwards of $150k/yr in the US, and the PPP equivalent European salary is around half of that.
2. Lifestyle goals: In Europe, it is very hard to be successful as a young person outside of major metro areas. This is somewhat true for the US as well, and while business cultures are different in different areas, it's easier (pre-COVID) to work remotely for a US-based company vs a EU-based company, but usually requires working US timezone hours or relocating to the US. Additionally, Americans tend to lead faster paced public lives, but slower paced private lives, and the reverse tends to be the case for Europeans. Everybody has their own lifestyle preferences, and lifestyle also is a major factor in intra-EU movements as well (I have friends who moved from Belgium to Portugal for instance, due to lifestyle. Friends that moved from Germany to Spain, etc.)
3. Freedom: The US is more diverse and free in some aspects. There's a lot of nuance here, but while you obviously have a lot of history, linguistic, and food diversity in the EU, there's significant similarities in cultural expectations, especially in professional work environments once you enter the middle class. The US is a LOT more free in regards to one's behavior, lifestyle choices, and personal life when you are in the middle class, compared to Europe. This is probably more obvious in the UK than anywhere else, where class hallmarks are as direct as how you speak to someone verbally, where in the US it's possible to have a pronounced Southern accent and still be solidly middle class in a professional environment, even though that's not considered as high-brow as a West-coast accent would be. Europe is in many ways more diverse overall, but not really in the middle class and above environments. Also some people just want to be free to do whatever they want on their own property without anyone nosing in, and this is antithetical to the European communal mindset which is very often enforced legally through direct government regulation.
2 Could you clarify a little what you mean with lifestyle?
3 Not so important in a big city IME.
Furthermore: 1. yeah, triple the money, quadruple the life costs, and no social security safety net, or at least poor one. 2. what? 3. FREEDOM - very US centric view on the "freedom"
I think there's inherent selection bias in the way we perceive this: we see someone "leaving" only if we're involved with them at the moment they depart; we see someone "arriving" if we encounter them any time after they came our way.
EU to US immigration is about 60,000 per year. It's about 20,000 in the other direction. Of course, EU has about 1.5x the population of the US, so it's more like double the rate of immigration, not triple.
> triple the money, quadruple the life costs
My short experiences living in Germany and the UK each seemed more expensive, denominated in dollars, than here, one of the highest cost of living regions in the US.
1. Life costs are nowhere near quadruple, in fact they are roughly equal to lower in the US. I have no idea where you think this costs more, but I feel like this is a politicized statement taking averages and applying them to a subset of people who have the necessary affluence where the transition makes sense. Increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US, as a simple example where this line of reasoning is flawed.
Social safety nets are something that only really matters to people who think they may end up using those social safety nets. People are often wrong about this, but that's just how people think. A lot of the affluent people who see themselves becoming more affluent in the US clearly understand it's partly due to not having to cover the social safety net for others. Actions speak louder than words.
2. and 3. I don't understand your "what?". In regards to #2 and #3, there's a massive difference in lifestyle and freedom of choice in your daily life when you own a sizeable single-family home on a city outskirts or in a suburb vs live in an apartment in the middle of a city. Each of these has pros and cons and attracts different people at different stages of their life. Meaningfully, the sizeable single-family home on the outskirts is mostly out of reach for people in Europe, even highly skilled individuals who would be solidly middle class in the US. This is only one of the myriad differences in lifestyle and freedom and how it affects daily life for someone living in both places.
A simple example from my own life, is that a good friend of mine moved near me from Germany because we both have a shared interest in racing cars. While Germany has fantastic things like the Nurburgring where you can simply drive on during open days to the public, TUV regulations and the significant increased costs of components, as well as difficulty in owning enough property to have space to work on your own cars makes it a lot more difficult to be a serious hobbyist gearhead in Germany vs the US. Here, he has a decent sized single-family home with a 3-car garage with high ceilings and a lift, as well as easy low-cost access to 6 race tracks within a one day drive, all at a fraction of his salary.
Obviously, YMMV and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I loved Europe, but I came back to the US after many visits and living in Europe on a temporary residency for a year, largely for many of these same reasons myself. My sample set may be biased, but the Grandparent asked why some Europeans want to move to the US, I'm just sharing the reasons which were expressed to me. You may disagree with them in your own personal opinion, but it doesn't change that these are reasons which matter to some people.
That's the thing that interested me about TacticalCoder's comment: it didn't seem to be some small preference or economic factor but seemed to have a lot of vehemence behind it.
That is unlikely. Metropolitan areas in the US are expensive as f. But assuming they are the same. Health care and education of your children will kill you financially.
A small number of metropolitan areas in the US are expensive, basically all other metro areas offer near similar lifestyle options while being massively cheaper. I live in the 7th largest metro in the US by population, it's exceptionally diverse and cosmopolitan, my cost of living is 1/6th what it is in the Bay Area and 1/5th what it is New York City. Not every metro area in the US is NYC and SFO. I've lived in numerous places abroad, and my cost of living in this city is on par with places a lot cheaper than Europe and the only places I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon. Everywhere else in the EU was significantly more expensive to live in.
Again, you're repeating the healthcare issue, while ignoring the comment you're replying to. It is standard, basic, benefits in the tech industry (and in many other professional industries) in the US to have quite competent employer-paid healthcare. Tech and Finance are certainly blessed industries compared to others, but even in other industries any middle-class professional will have employer-paid healthcare. The plight of the average person (the majority of Americans are lower-class, not middle-class, which heavily skews the average) is not the plight of tech workers, who are among the most well compensated and most privileged individual contributors in the US economy. If you're single, it's even better. In my entire career, spanning almost two decades, I've never once had to pay even a single dollar towards my healthcare premiums and I've had high quality non-stop uninterrupted healthcare coverage the entire time. I've also never worked at a FAANG and grew up in the Midwest. This is just how the tech industry is, nation-wide. For people with families, they usually have to cover some of the premium cost either directly or being taxed on it as imputed income (if your partner is not your spouse, legally). Even then, most employers cover spouses and children at no premium cost to the employee in the tech industry, although that's not as universal.
Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars (primarily property tax) across the entire US. Different areas have different qualities of public schooling, but a tech worker salary makes it more than affordable to buy a single-family home in an area with good schools in most cities in the US (but not all). If you feel the need for private education, that's on you, but that's a cost you'd have to bear in Europe as well. European public schools aren't really any better than public schools in the US unless you compare to the worst quartile. Suburban school districts in the US are pretty well-funded. College on the other hand, is another story. But if your kids perform well academically, scholarships are very plentiful in the US, and there are tax-incentivized ways to save to cover the cost of college, and college isn't really necessary to enter the middle-class in the US unlike in Europe (however it does certainly help). Since you'd be residing in the US while maintaining EU citizenship in this hypothetical scenario, it's also likely your kids could go to Europe for college at a significantly reduced cost as well.
There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, but for the subset of affluent people we're referring to in the context of this thread, healthcare costs is simply not one of those things. The economics /clearly/ favor the US, many other things do not.
"s I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon."
Lisbon is a bad example. Real Estate is out of control there. A decent apartment will set you back at least 500k, thanks to supply and demand due to the Golden Visa.
" employer-paid healthcare." If you have an employer and everything goes smooth
"Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars"
There are a few excellent k12 schools if you live in the right place (did we mention real estate costs?). But if you want your children to go to a good school you likely have to pay for private school. Then the universities fees later. I think my school in the US bills you 60k or something per year. 4 years, two kids, this sets you back already about 1/2 million. If you pay for k12 we are talking easily 1 million for education alone.
"There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, "
No sure. If you do the right thing at the right time the US is great. I immigrated, got a STEM PhD, got naturalized and then left to China. Never looked back. And if I see not how my friends that stayed are struggling, it was a really good decision.
Not everybody works in IT my friend.
At FAANG salaries I sure as hell bet they love life here since they're basically part of the 1% top earners in Europe but not every skilled worker in Europe can achieve FAANG levels of compensation. In other words, your sample size has too much room for selection bias and is purely anecdotal.
Why does this matter so much when there is affordable healthcare, lots of social programs to save you in case things don't go so well?
I am honestly asking. I am in Europe and my salary is half of what I could make in the US, but it never bothered me. I have a very chill life and more money wouldn't make me significantly happier.
Because when things are going well it means you lose out on a lot of economic opportunity and not everyone feels the same way about the probability of things not going well, or who has the responsibility to cover them in the case that things don't go well. As I said in another comment, increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US. So those factors don't detract people from moving here if they see other benefits to go along with the economic benefits.
Certainly, it is the case that this has it's trade-offs. I'm not making any value judgement on what the correct decision is for anyone but myself, but just trying to share some of the reasoning I've heard (from a probably biased subset of people).
World class healthcare is included on top of the compensation at FAANG. Also, what are these social programs you refer to?
Also by making more money, you can retire early and then work on whatever hobby project you'd like. I know in europe with generous social programs you kind of can do that already to a certain extent, but with money you can actually do that for a long time.
Freedom at times kinda looks a lot more like selfishness.
The EU has a lot of other problems, but at least people here does not have to think twice before doing "normal things" like going to the doctor. I mean it is primarily important to think about one self, I get that, but what happens to others is really important and will affect us eventually!
PS: I left Buenos Aires in 2009, now I live in Spain, even though here it is not perfect at least I can sleep without regrets.
It very much does. I think that one of the great philosophical debates that's never really been resolved is the moral quandary between individualism and collectivism. Individual freedom, at it's most fundamental level, is the freedom to do what is good for yourself, rather than being forced to do what is good for your community. It is the freedom to make the moral choice of what "good" is for yourself. In many many ways, freedom /is/ selfishness. It's not clear to me that this is a bad thing, except at the extremes. It's clear that the "best" society would be one that finds a balance, but that is very hard to do.
One of the most remarkable differences between most of Europe to most of North America is average physical space per person. That difference manifests itself in myriads of ways, from less regulation to being less in your neighbor’s face all the time. It’s just easier to live and let live when you’re a little farther apart.
And I think that is attractive to a percentage of our species, regardless of our birthplace. And being closer together is more attractive to another percentage of our species, as witnessed by people who move from North America to Europe.
(a.1) it bootstraps / gets venture capital
(a.2) Leaves after 2 years for the US / gets acquired and the fiscal headquarter moves to Delaware (Stripe)
(b) Gets absorbed by an old blue chip, like Siemens, Telefonica, and dies a slow death.
(c) Becomes highly stymied by bureaucracy, and the initial momentum wanes without winning much market share (Zalando, Deliveroo, Idealista).
It's called the market of lemons problem. Only the least productive projects want to have their hands tied and financed by the government.
EU has tons of projects with smaller or even larger scale, usually in areas that are not supposed to yield profit but has large impact to trade and life quality of the citizens, preserve peace and food security. Mostly boring stuff, EU is not a for profit company that will design the next iPhone, it's this organisation that does the stiff that individual countries or companies are not willing to do or simply cannot do but it needs to be done.
By which upper middle class kids get a free year of holidays abroad at the taxpayer's expense. No results expected.
Finishing studies, getting a job and family formation can be postponed to early thirties.
Our young generations are having so much success in the job market, housing, and family wise.
I don't know why you would say that. Me, my brother and a lot of people I know benefited from these programs and we are not even a middle class. Now we do better but back then the times were tough.
Frankly, a semester abroad with Erasmus is more of partying and networking than studying but people keep these connections and the poorer people who could have never been able to afford it can actually afford it.
Many times, poor people stay poor because they lack networking and perspective. Erasmus is a fantastic program, especially for the disadvantaged students, at least they know what's out there and know some people.
I'm rarely totally in favour or against something but in this case I can see only positive things.
According to you, who wants to leave and why?
P.S. Raising your kids in a British college? As in a school in Britain?
The Netherlands and Scandinavia accounts for the most of the European global tech output and this is not because Spaniards don't know how to code.
The Dutch and people in the Scandinavian countries are so proficient in English that they do products like the Americans. Knowing English that well makes it possible to understand the global popular culture and think in global scale when doing startups.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
> About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
> "Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
The EU exists to matter on the global stage in the age of superpowers, to keep alight the flame of European economic imperialism that was being smothered bu US/USSR (and now US/China). It just so happens that most people here think the best way to go about that, without massive societal upheaval, is to guarantee prosperity for all. There is little “cute” about the project, any “cuteness” you might see is the result of strategic positioning.
This is absolutely not true. English is tought in most schools simply because it's used worldwide. Also, most of the people I know are very happy to live here, and most who may have wanted to emmigrate to the US lost any desire to do so after the four years of Trump.
Biden is all about things I personally don't care about, like anti-COVID measures, or fighting global warming, which will very likely destroy US economically. Emigrating to a country that's on a brink of the worst crisis in its history is indeed pointless.
The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
In both cases we would be better off doing nothing.
The reason we went into lockdown and went under all these draconian restriction measures wasn't because the virus was considered deadly. It's not that deadly for the majority of the population actually, especially for younger people. No, the reason we went into lockdown was to avoid the hospitals overflowing with patients. If you let the virus spread around like wildfire through the population with its spread rate of 2 to 3, then you would very quickly make a lot of people very sick and need hospitalisation. This isn't to say that the majority of people would get very sick. You only need a small minority of the vulnerable population to get very sick suddenly all at once in order to shock the hospital system.
So, if indeed we care about treating people with other diseases as you say, our priority should be on making sure we have as many beds and doctors available in hospitals. And the only way to achieve that is with coronavirus restrictive measures. It's much easier to get doctors and hospitals to treat other. "doing nothing" as you suggest would be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve. patients if they don't have to constantly worry about their COVID-19 patients. If the hospitals were full and you e.g. broke your leg while on your motorbike, would you like to be told at A&E that "sorry we're full, we have all these COVID-19 patients that are dying"? I wouldn't.
>The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
You only need to take a simple cursory glance that the IPCC report to realise that it's not that simple. Hell, ask the CIA! They consider global warming a serious threat to national security. If the CIA considers it a threat, shouldn't we worry?
Relevant videos that show how climate change is already having detrimental effects on our daily lives:
And anyway, if your kid goes to college, he or she is very likely to be of legal age and have, like, opinions of their own. Yet you make it sound like you're raising cattle for yourself or something.
To me, it sounds more like they identified common trends and desires within young people in Europe, determined those desires to be beneficial/making sense, and are trying to give their kid the prep needed to execute on those desires in the future, in case the kid decides that this is what they want to do.
Sounds pretty normal to me, I would only raise an alarm if the parent commenter was just pushing this against the child's wishes. But just giving the prep needed is not in itself wrong. Especially when it comes to something as useful as english language, which will serve the kid very well even if they decide to spend the rest of their life in EU.
P.S. Yes, I wish I got more english prep when I was a kid, because doing it all in my late teens was not the most pleasant experience on earth, because at that point in life you got tons of other worries that every other teenager has, on top of worrying about english (college entrance exams/standardized testing, schoolwork, etc.).
Not in the EU I was born and raised.
Malta also has English as an official language, though again, it's an even smaller country. On the other hand, in neither Ireland or Malta is English the "first" official language.
https://www.politico.eu/article/english-will-not-be-an-offic...
Surprisingly with the UK out of the EU; English is perhaps best placed to fill this role, as it is now a "neutral" language, with only the Irish and Maltese contingents who, broadly speaking, don't wield the same influence as France and Germany.
It's not clear yet if it will be used in official documents after Brexit agreements will be signed, but UK was the only country who chose English as an official language.
There's an hard requirement in EU to translate every official document in every language spoken in the EU, if English is not an official language, that requirement will cease to exist and slowly there will be no official document in English anymore because it's also a very costly operation.
Unless Ireland or Malta apply for English as primary language.
It's also a political stand, Macron is pushing to use French more and more in the EU institutions.
It doesn't mean that it won't be taught in schools or that it will fade as the most spoken language in EU, it still is by a large margin, but that it will move away from UK English and will become more similar to the English 75% of the > 1 billion English speakers in the World speak as a second language.
Native English speakers not understanding or not being understood by non-native speakers it's already a thing, the gap could widen in the future.
Though the places I visited: Sweden, Rome, Greece, Netherlands, France, Spain, Vienna, Ukraine, Berlin all have above average levels.
Do you see the Brexit changing this?
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_Europe
It has already changed, before Brexit was even a thing.
From 2013
China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013 the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6Ikp...
Then Finland went ahead and ruined it by registering both Finish and Swedish as their official languages (they have a Swedish minority there) :)
Of course the Swedes would like to blame things on Finland if they can ;)
(and the US cultural influence is the main reason for this, the UK doesn't really matter much in that regard since around the 19th century).
First of all, I'm European.
Use of English as a second language, it might surprise you, dropped in the past 10 years, it was spoken by 52% of the population in 2012, now it dropped to 44%.
Not native speakers, English is the fourth language in Europe for number of native speakers, after German, French and Italian (if we don't count Russian, largely first with 120 million native speakers)
Secondly, things can change rapidly.
20 years ago the most studied second language in Italian schools was French.
Thirdly, in Europe countries have spoken to each other for centuries, when I go to Spain I speak Spanish, when I go to France or Belgium I speak French, I can also speak some German.
Of course not perfectly, but we still understand each other better than through English, because of similarities in the languages.
So yes, second language counts, but only when other options are worse (I speak English with Sweds or Dutch - I've been studying Swedish on my own but my progress with the language have been very slow)
In many schools we study more than 1 foreign language.
I studied French in primary and middle school then English and German in high school.
They were regular public schools, far from the best.
It's quite common elsewhere.
My cousins live in Belgium, their kids study French, Flemish and of course Italian in school.
Many Italian researchers, for example, move to Germany and they learn German because it's better to know it when you live there, English is used to bootstrap the social life and at work.
CERN is in Switzerland and even though I believe everyone there speaks English, in Geneva the official language is French, it helps a lot outside of work to learn it, more than English. Move a few Kms and they speak German, go South and they speak Italian and you will still be in small Switzerland.
Where many people are naturally bi or trilingual.
Adding English as a third/fourth it's very easy for them.
Eventually everybody will learn some English, undoubtedly, but it's gonna be foreigners' English, that it's different from proper English and sometimes it's pure nonsense for native speakers and viceversa.
The official languages of the EU are set by Council Regulation No 1, which declares English to be an official language. Brexit did not change that regulation in any way; it would take a unanimous vote of the Council of the European Union to amend it, and it is very unlikely that Ireland would vote to remove as an official language the first language of the vast majority of its citizens.
In other words, English is in practice the first language of virtually every Irish person, the vast majority of media, and all business in the country.
Imagine telling a bunch of Jews that Hebrew was a load of nonsense and they're better off learning German, French or Spanish. I would agree though that the level of spoken Irish amongst the general population of Ireland is poor.
For them it's not about more opportunities it's about preserving something meaningful. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.
You mean Israelis right? Many jews outside Israel don't know Hebrew.
Sure, Israel is the country where Hebrew was restored as an everyday spoken language, but Israelis are not the only Jews for whom Hebrew is important.
A similar situation is with Quran and classical Arabic, even though it's not an everyday spoken language in (most of) Arabic world.
AFAICT Irish does not enjoy a similar status. If you want to hear a more or less alive Gaelic language in everyday use, visit rural Wales.
>Thanks, TIL!
And yet, you had the confidence to assert the above...interesting..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Spanish
The expulsion of the Jews is a specially sad part of our history, some families still keep the keys of their old houses after 5 centuries. A few years ago a law was passed so their descendants could claim Spanish nationality without the usual requirements applied to people from other nationalities.
It can be very much about telling you who you're supposed to be rather than the other way around.
Israel and Hebrew is actually a good example. Modern Hebrew was created pretty much solely for nation-building purposes (and with great success).
Jewish people are also pretty unique in having maintained a strong identity throughout the millennia without speaking a common language.
I wonder how many national identities would survive without one. I'd posit not that many.
It's very frustrating because we do foreign languages so badly but instead of making an effort to improve our foreign language skills they're trying to push a largely dead language for purely symbolic reasons.
And I guess you mean to say germany has gone farthest in christianisation, with the least of old german or old norse cultural remains? I guess that might be true.
I'd put the entire east into the protestant bucket too. Berlin might be a special case because it was traditionally "draft dodgers" in the western part and "exemplary GDR citizens" in the eastern part, but especially in the more remote parts religions has survived the GDR (and was even somewhat tolerated later on by the regime - even thought the supression and surveillance of the church never stopped until the end).
IMEC's research mainly benefits companies like Intel, Samsung, TSMC. The only relatively local link is ASML.
Staying up to date on leading edge logic is crazy expensive.
I hope I die before that ever happens.
But I've also seen a German speak bad English to someone just because they looked foreign. They were foreign, but having lived in German for a while they could speak German better than they could English, and after a while they politely pointed this out. It was a bit embarrassing. It is definitely better to try the local language first.
How about fund university research in related technology, reduce regulation that inhibits free enterprise, open financial markets to support capital formation, lower taxes on capital gains, enforce anti-trust regulation, and cross your fingers and hope some comes from it in 20 years.
You could also spend trillions of dollars on a high tech military industrial complex. That helps also.
This is not going to do it.
How does that help semiconductor development?
Don't believe me? Just ask Robert Noyce, who lobbied for this for US semiconductor revival against Japan.
I have not looked at it this way, but maybe you are right and this is the big chance for the EU. It would make the EU so much more efficient.
I mean, this is never going to happen. Name one country in history that completely switched language without external pressure (invasion or colonisation).
So instead of dealing 24 languages, EU can make English the default for everything international. Local stuff will continue with the local language but all the international dealings can be conducted in English.
That's pretty much the standart on the internet and the younger generations are already used to it. If a website, an app or a game doesn't support your language you simply use English and it's all good. From the admin side it'a also good, many people who are not native English speakers who want to build projects for the global audience would simply start with English as a base language and localise from there.
It works fine for the most international thing we have: The Internet. Should work fine for the EU too.
That being said, English is already unofficial common language between most Europeans. E.g. it's very common for Finns and Swedes to communicate in English, despite Swedish being one the official(!) languages in Finland (also taught in elementary school), simply because many Finns have much stronger English than Swedish skills (and Swedes speak typically more neutral (clear) English than native speakers).
Actually, because English is native language only in UK, that makes it excellent lingua franca for the rest: when both parties speak it as 2nd langauge, the communication is more easily kept in the same level (i.e. not speaking too fast, using exotic words, etc).
That's just how the world works nowadays, e.g. in tech English vocabulary is extremely pervasive. Even in Finnish every-day talk in tech related areas we often use direct loan words from English ("Finglish").
Personally I think the only downside of English is its irregular prononcing, i.e. relatively weak correlation between written and spoken language.
IIRC Geneva switched from being bilingual French German to French completely dominating public life in the space of a generation because of the influx of French Protestants because of Calvin.
English IS the lingua franca in Europe, right now, at this moment, no question about it. Even the in remotest parts Generation Z and younger speak and understand a little bit, it is only the older folks who still remember the EU with borders are reluctant to speack anything else other than their own language.
And there are more and more people picking up a third language as they move around within the EU.
English is well suited for this lingua franca thing because at the beginner-to-mid level the syntax is simple, and you can get by with a few hundred words, much better than in other languages. Also there is a common pronounciation that is different for everyone (and reflects the mother tongue of the speaker heavily), but again, people speak slowly enough that it is possible to understand what they are trying to say.
Which cannot be said about the native speakers (coming from the UK, mostly), so the UK leaving us might actually improve the situation. No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)
I'm confused by this. Are you saying that the native English speaker in the room was the one having difficulty understanding what the other non-native speakers were saying?
Unfortunately the majority of native English speakers (not just from the UK) fail to realise that there is an 'international' business English which has significant differences from how they would speak 'back home'.
From the faux pas I've seen in international teams, my shortlist for the English native speakers:
1. Try to speak slowly and with diction
2. Avoid idiomatic expressions
3. Avoid phrasal verbs
4. Avoid Sarcasm (!)
Do that and 90% of miscommunication in an international setting is gone.
I work with a lot of near-native speakers, where we can understand each other, but we never get to that lively back-and-forth that comes in an L1 (or a fully fluent L2).
It's not a question of relationships -- you can do that well with VERY little verbal. It's a question of nuanced, technical, back-and-forth. I can understand on a mile-high level that they used Python to build an ML system which can recognize whether something is or is not a hotdog, but we never get to the point of discussing finer points of algorithms, nuances of business models, or similar in-depth discussions.
Some of these folks have lived in an English-native country for years, but it's just not quite there yet.
Next, China is sponsoring actively similar agreement for African countries. Africa is a potentially huge market and has a lot of natural resources. It seems that Europe totally drop the ball here, the only thing they have done was to destabilize some of the African countries in the name of supporting democracy - this failed miserably everywhere, new rulers were equally undemocratic and often even more hostile towards Europe.
The same with US, they totally gave up Africa, they could not to come up with something else than mumbling about democracy and trying to impose some post-colonial trade deals. China is playing this game much, much better and, whatever I think of them, they have actually something substantial (investments other than digging diamonds and cobalt) to offer.
Europe will loose Asian and African market, India is building up its economy fast as well, so soon Europe will not have anything to sell over there too. Europe lags behind US for a long time in all aspects (education, innovation). This only means marginalization and the role of destination for cheap crap that cannot be sold on other markets.
It seems that UK politicians sort of noticed that, that's why they decided to cut ties with EU without much fear (brexit without any agreement) as they count on their influence and position in Commonwealth countries, what will give them backdoor access to developing markets and be part of the global economy.
Europe leaders really need to wake up. Stop concentrating on immaterial issues, push for more competitive economy, lower taxes, less regulations, development of innovative companies in a natural way, not buy being financed from some EU founds - this just does not work, as this creates companies that are good in acquiring those funds, not creating market value.
Common market should be available for all EU countries, not only (still) the richest ones - "innovations" like 2014/67/UE directive are not helping - this one hit less developed EU countries - it forces companies to pay local wages for workers who are delegated to work in other country. As a result the truck driver from Poland has to earn the same money as the driver in France, Holland, Germany, depending where the truck is in the given moment of time. This makes new EU countries companies less competitive. And nobody cared that it violates EU treaties and the rules of "free movement of goods and services".
Stop internal fighting with anyone who dares to have different views or elect government that EU bureaucracy does not like (Italy a few years ago, today Poland and Hungary).
There are very noble ideas like reduction of CO2, this is important, but maybe Europe just can't afford being the leader in that effort if the rest of the World just does not really care? Europe need sources of clean and cheap energy. What the biggest EU economy does? Nord Stream 2, to buy gas from Russia. Is it helping? Not really. Why can't Europe start spending funds on innovations in nuclear and fusion energy reactors?
I don't see any leaders that Europe used to have who could push Europe in the right direction, unfortunately.
I am waiting for someone who would just say: hey, maybe moving whole "The European Parliament" every month from Brussels to Strasbourg and back does not make any sense and it costs a lot of money that can be spent better.
I agree that our dear leaders have to wake up - but that is not the direction they should go at all. Our taxes are already so low that many countries have problems financing taking care of basic needs like healthcare. Less regulation? This will directly, and negatively, impact the people of Europe because corporations always exploit every legal (and illegal) avenue to cut corners at the expense of the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
I do question myself sometimes how much longer this can be maintained. Our world is changing fast, and it's not like Europe is losing the game, it's that we are not even playing it.
We will eventually need to do something about it. What exactly needs to be done is definitely debatable.
The alternative to that is becoming like the US: homeless people everywhere, people spreading illnesses (not just corona) at work because they can't take any sick days, people getting chronically ill or vastly worse side effects from untreated issues because they can't afford health insurance, people fearing eviction because losing their job.
All while the billionaires made an additional 800 billion in wealth.
> I do question myself sometimes how much longer this can be maintained.
We can maintain the status quo, but we need to tax the rich and international mega-corporations for that. It is unsustainable that the massive profits generated in Europe are siphoned off untaxed to "tax heavens" and foreign countries.
I agree with you, that it has to focus more on innovation. Regarding quality of life for the average person I would take the stability of a Northern European country over the US or China at any time.
Examples for things Europe is also missing: Opressive governments, gang shootings, school shootings, people without healthcare, social scoring systems, polluted rivers, forced labour camps, denying of facts like evolution or climate change.
1. competitive capitalism: see US
2. competitive state-orchestrated capitalism: see China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore
Although the Chinese model doesn't seem to be too successful with regards to chip fabbing, their efforts are behind schedule.
1) The commoditization of foundry technology. 2) The hardware equivalent of the reproducible build.
The first is necessary for nation-states to feel comfortable building and maintaining national-security infrastructure.
The second is necessary for the rest of us. If we are able to purchase an open-hardware CPU and verify its integrity through hardware/metrology checksums in addition to a software checksum, society will have made a step forward. The hardware checksums might be expressed through moire-patterning visible in x-rays, for example. The CPUs on which such technology might be developed need not be fancy - if a proof-of-concept works on cheap chips, the extension to the high end is apt to be feasible.
Aside: how did the Netherlands become such a semiconductor powerhouse?
However, the prior initiative was VHSIC and that basically produced the modern semiconductor industry (including the software tools!) in the US.
I was always under the impression that the difference between VHSIC and Sematech was simply that VHSIC threw around a LOT more money.
It may be that nothing much will come out of this initiative, but what choice does Europe have? Europe simply has to have control over its computing/communications infrastructure, if it wants to be truly independent.
As Macron recently said ( https://geopolitique.eu/en/macron-grand-continent/ ):
> In concrete terms, this means that when it comes to technology, Europe needs to build its own solutions in order not to depend on American or Chinese technologies. If we are dependent on them, for example in telecommunications, we cannot guarantee European citizens the secrecy of information and the security of their private data, because we do not have this technology. [...]
> The same goes for the extraterritoriality of the dollar, which is a fact and not a new one. Less than ten years ago, several French companies were penalised to the tune of billions of euros because they had operated in countries that were banned under American law. In concrete terms, this means that our companies can be condemned by foreign powers when they operate in a third country : that is a deprivation of sovereignty, of the possibility of deciding for ourselves, it weakens our position immensely.
> Unfortunately, we grasped the full implications of this when it came to the discussion on Iran. We Europeans wanted to remain within the framework of what we call the JCPOA. With America’s withdrawal, no European company was able to continue doing business with Iran for fear of sanctions from the United States. Hence, when I talk about sovereignty or strategic autonomy, I am bringing together all these issues, which at first glance seem very different.
Micron has one in Italy that is basically shut down. I was once told that to avoid payouts, required by Italian Law, for letting employees go the factory had been put on a sort of "pause" everyone sent home but not let go. If things like this still go on I see no hope for a European electronics/Semi manufacturing industry to ever take hold.
The EU doesn't have a unified military in the same way as the states.
Intel is dying a slow death, ARM is leaving UK's control, and TSMC is slowly taken over by China. The tables are turning.
The point is if China decide to do this, there isn't anyone who can stop them.
Taiwan's history is complicated. it have its own military. its people pay taxes to Taiwan, not China. Taiwan's safety is its own responsibility. its more than possible that China can take Taiwan by force but at what price. its not like Taiwan's military have no teeth.
After it became part of China again, it is not possible to interviene militarily in Beijing - HK relationship - that would be an invasion of China and violation of international law. You could not phisically station an army in HK.
Even if China has violated an agreement with UK regarding HK autonomy, thay does not give you legal grounds to start a war.
In cotrast, you could deploy the entire US military in Taiwan tomorrow, it would be legal and peacefull (provided Taiwanese Gov. Invited it). Additionally, invading Taiwan is actually extremely difficult because of terrain, just because you have a massive land army does not mean they can just teleport to Taiwan. It would be basically a D-day style effort against a well entrenched opponent.
So it is unlikely we will see phisical takeover of Taiwan in the near future, as so far we have no indication that China is looming for a causualty heavy war with little gain.
This is true, but I view China's economic growth more as 'reversion to the mean' when their population is 3x that of the US.
See Cuba and the Soviet Union
Is their military power proven and able to assert power or enforce its will?
Will America maintain its might?
And ST Micro chips are heavenly used in IOT. Maybe it's more than the semiconductor sector and includes telecommunications, networks equipment, phone/pc CPUs.
Makes you see ST in a new light.
The thing is, micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes. They don't have a lot of logic (it's all relative, but compared to a PC CPU or smartphone SoC), so would be "pad limited" on advanced nodes: the area of a chip depends on the logic (and memory), but also on the I/O pins or pads, which take area. So if you used a too advanced node for a chip with (relatively) little logic and still enough I/O pads, some die area would be wasted as the minimum area would come from the pads. It's a situation you want to avoid, as there's no point paying for a more costly finer nodes (with more leakage) to waste it by not using the silicon area.
Another factor is that micro-controllers also embed Flash on their die, to have a very integrated solution with logic, RAM and Flash storage on a single die. This puts a limit on the node density. Flash is OK down to 40nm. Then from then one must move to more advanced, and still young and costly, alternatives (MRAM).
So if your business is driven by micro-controllers, there's no real point in pushing toward node density ("low" nodes). ST does process optimization as everyone, but at "medium" nodes best suited for µC. There's no business drive for them to chase TSMC.
It's similar for other Eurpeans silicon makers: they tend to be on specific segments where going for "low" nodes like 5nm simply doesn't make sense. The relatively advanced fabs in Europe are from Intel and Global Foundries (both US). And GloFo stopped the race to advanced node at 14nm, as it was too expensive.
Why MCU-bound application logic are simpler than PC apps? If that is the case, we shouldn't have seen improvement in embedded MCUs in 20 years, yet every year the clocks are increasing, the flash/RAM size is doubling, ... I have a theory/fear that in future, the line between embedded-dev and web-dev would be blurred...
As for low volume designs, if reliability is important, rust would be a good candidate.
The US companies do what they do best: innovate business models and find ways to vendor lock in and own the market.
But who's been doing all the research keeping moore's law alive? Lithography?
For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing all the world's chips (answer: no, it would force other place to invest highly in competition out of strategic interest).
Hence the strategy of being long term profitable and to just sell the machines to everyone at the same price.
It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.
As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management".
So don't expect anything from this. The future most sold chip will still be Apple Silicon or Samsung Exynos in TSC's foundry or Samsung foundry on a machine by ASML using IP from ARM and NVidia
AFAIK, ASMLs fancy EUV tech comes from a Bay Area company they acquired a while ago and not from the Netherlands.
I see reference for a company bought by ASML in California, HMI. They were bought in 2016 but the development of EUV technology predates it by many years so I find it unlikely that it had an important role in it.
Applied Materials - 17bn
ASML - 11bn
Tokyo Electron - 10.8 bn
Lam - 9.5 bn
KLA Corp - 4 bn
Cymer (2012, before acqusition) - 600m
ASML machines do not produce chips, they're just ones doing the etching. There is a ton around what you do with it, and how all the rest of the chip is produced.
They don't come with pre-programmed transistor gate templates. Each fab company has its own libraries of extremely specialized designs, doing different optimizations and tradeoffs. As mentioned plenty of times before, the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach. You have to appreciate that a defect that impacts high-volume yield today could have its roots in a design that was put on the roadmap years before.
> As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
If H2020 is anything to go by, the majority of that money will be salaries of people working on big research projects. At worst the project outcome is useless. I don't see how any of the way these projects are structured benefit the pocket lining of managers.
Can you point to some industry literature that explains this?
If this is true, it is a lot more surprising that Intel is talking about going fabless. You build a lot of expertise by rolling the dice on new techniques that don't pan out on the first iteration. People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.
Well... yes. That's called judgement, and execs at firms like Boeing get paid positively stupid sums of money to provide the good kind. Which they didn't.
"What's the big deal? If I had left the vat of acid unattended in a locked room, everything would have been fine."
They’re not on the first iteration at this point. They’ve been on 14 nm since 2014. 10 nm and to a lesser extent 7 nm is failing after many iterations and many years.
Intel buying some TSMC capacity does not mean it is going fabless. Nor does it mean Intel is abandoning being vertically integrated.
I like your Boeing remark. It's better to fail at doing something aggressive than to fail to innovate.
I don't think that's a particularly useful way to divide up failures. I think it's better to fail in a way that doesn't kill people than a way that does. Whether you kill people by being too conservative or too aggressive with your design is pretty irrelevant compared to that.
The original article is here:
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/08/02/intel-guts-10nm-to-g...
It's paywalled but Charlie later published something else referring to that article as talking about COAG problems so I don't feel bad sharing the info at this point.
https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks-about-10nm-s...
Unfortunately Boeing doesn't have a huge list of customers that are willing to spend what it costs to switch to a new airframe. They sell to airlines what airlines want to buy. Airlines wanted a 737 with higher bypass engines and that's exactly what they got.
Boeing deserves what they get for pushing a faulty design out the door but they didn't do it as some nefarious cost cutting measure. They did it because American and Southwest said they wanted nothing to do with a "797" and threatened to switch to Airbus.
Maybe they are responsible for pressuring Boeing too much, but Boeing put defective airplanes on the market
so a nefarious moneygrabbing measure?
At the same time you can trust that TSMC secrets are no longer secret[2]. A lot of the Taiwanese companies are actually quite bad at security despite Taiwan have some top notch security engineers. I guess it's just old industries general problems.
[1]: https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/asml-is-too-convenient-a-targe...
[2]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313599-chinese-hackers...
100% agree. Considering the incredible education system and engineers we have, the 2 only things restraining Europe from reaching Silicon Valley level are corrupt politicians and risk-adverse VCs.
- labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries)
- lots of disjointed small-to-medium markets (with different laws and languages) make expansion on continental scale much harder than in the US
That's just not true now and hasn't been the case anymore since like the 2009 financial crisis. In most of Europe it's trivial to fire an underperforming non-unionized employee as the countries have adapted more business friendly laws to remain competitive after the financial crisis. Sure, there may still be some grey beards somewhere with old bulletproof contracts but for anyone entering the tech workforce now, getting fired is a rubber stamp basically especially since tech workers are not unionized and sometimes benefit from less protection than even some blue-collar professions which are unionized.
For example, in Austria you can fire anyone for no reason at all as long as you give them their notice period(usually 1 to 3 months) without them being entitled to any other financial compensation from their employer. Moreover, non-competes are legal here without any form of compensation and you can even fire employees while they're on sick leave. All this legally!
The whole you can't get fired in Europe maybe only applies to Scandinavia or France but it's mostly a meme nowadays.
Actually, contrary to popular belief, tech workers in California might enjoy better protection than tech workers in some European countries. Let that sink in for a bit.
On the other hand Silicon Valley is in California and has some of the strongest labor laws of the US, so if this is such a huge factor why is everyone in SV?
Even under the assumption that it's an important factor, would it be worth it for EU to adopt such policies considering the very real human cost?...
In the larger ones (DE, FR) labor laws are a nightmare.
France was famous for their approach of making an employees' life miserable in order to make them leave as they couldn't fire them easily. Honestly, I'd rather just be fired and get on unemployment than be subjected to psychological torture every day in a poisonous work environment.
Well they usually do it by compensating the employee quite heavily. Psychologically torturing an employee isn't that good for team morale, even if the employee was underperforming. I also don't think it's as culturally prevalent as you imply.
Where outside of the US/UK does that happen? Never heard in Europe that you get paid more so you leave when they can boot you out for free and I talked to lawyers about this. The reasoning behind the generous safety nets in Europe is also to make it easier for employee-employer terminations in case it doesn't work out. The laws here are that employers aren't allowed to abuse you, force you into unpaid overtime, etc. but fire you for free they can otherwise nobody would dare become an entrepreneur/investor in an environment where it's impossible to fire someone.
> when they can boot you out for free
You can't really. It's extremely difficult and no lawyer can magically change the fact that the culture and the courts are in favor of the worker, not the employer.
Now the laws might change a bit, making the terms of termination a bit easier for the employer in the future (we'll see what the next government brings), but in general I expect it to still be quite difficult. So it may be easier to pay the employee 30K extra compensation to let him go then trying a game of psychological torture. And if that sounds unreal to you, know that in the Netherlands employees can get paid up to 2 years if they have a nervous breakdown. And nervous breakdown is quite common culturally. So employees have dirty tricks of their own if the employer wants to play dirty.
Now of course, there are obvious disadvantages to this approach, not necessarily for the employer actually. The employer can protect himself by simply not hiring anyone for more than a couple of years, making "flex work" a real problem in NL. But yes, firing could be hard and I'd be surprised if it's much different in Germany/France etc.
As much as I like being on the side of the little guy, in any civilized society, the courts should be impartial and not favor the employer nor the employee and pass verdicts based on the law and not based on the culture and if the law says you can fire someone who continuously underperforms over a period of time then that law will be applied.
>After 3 years [...] a worker has to be moved to a permanent contract.
That sounds pretty poor IMHO. In most of the EU you're permanent after passing the first year of employment. I've never worked more than 3 years in a place so far, so in the NL I would have never reached permanent status, continuously being at the risk of on the spot termination. I dunno man, sounds pretty bad for me IMHO.
>And nervous breakdown is quite common culturally.
That actually sounds legit bad IMHO if mental issues are the becoming the norm in employment relationships.
>The employer can protect himself by simply not hiring anyone for more than a couple of years, making "flex work" a real problem in NL
I used to work for a top NL based company and this situation was often discussed around the office that NL companies are abusing expat workers from poorer countries by promising them riches in exchange for hard work and sacrifice and instead using them for 2-3 years then rotating them with new workers until they get fed up with this and move back to their home countries. Rinse and repeat. Sounds really good for Dutch business though.
Gonna ignore that one.
> I used to work for a top NL based company and this situation was often discussed around the office that NL companies are abusing expat workers promising them riches and instead using them for 2-3 years then rotating them with new workers until they get fed up with this and move back to their home countries
I really haven't experienced this at all. Tons of expats I know are on permanent contract (btw - many employers offer a permanent contract after 1-1.5 years if they're happy with the emplyoee, at least that's what I see in tech). Of course people in the hotel/entertainment business may have a different experience. I bet flex work is more common there.
> That actually sounds legit bad IMHO if mental issues are the becoming the norm in employment relationships.
I didn't say mental issues are the norm in the Netherlands, lol. Far from it, it's one of the happiest countries in the world according to research. I'm just saying - the law enables you to take a LONG paid leave if you have burnout. Now some employees actually get burned out, and some are probably abusing it a bit. When you're protecting employees there'll always be people who dishonestly try to take advantage.
Laws have huge margins left for judge's interpretation of what is fair and just in a given case.
The range of reasons include coming too late to work, insulting coworkers and even underperformance.
However you still have at least 1 month notice, and often more depending on the industry and seniority. Here in Zürich the standard in tech seems to be 3 month (anecdata though).
Where it gets kinda business friendly is that if you are fired for an illegal reason, it's up to you to prove that you were instead of your employer having to prove he fired you for something reasonable. The settlements are also nothing that would deter a company to behave badly I guess.
There is also a good tradition of union-like structure in the professions that need it (the ones where one is easily replaceable basically) that give workers a nice protection and benefits. It's not like in France of course but it's far from the US, based on the stories I gleaned about on HN.
>and risk-adverse VCs.
I don't know exactly how realistic this is. But from this side of the pond [Europe], it seems like, in the US there are VCs willing to throw millions [billions sometimes] at companies which are little more than a couple of guys with a silly idea, which would get you laughed out of your bank manager's office over here, if you went in asking to borrow a few hundred euros/pounds.
I've met a lot of European founders in the valley.
It doesn't happen with the one large corruption scheme taking all of the money. Its hundreds of small corruptions like a locust.
Here is a fair and neutral attempt to catalog all the schemes in play: https://www.oecd.org/gov/ethics/prevention-fraud-corruption-...
In return: Do you have an example of where the EU paid anywhere below 200% of industry standard price for anything?
I'm not arguing its more corrupt than say the US Congress. Its on par, with some weird extremes. For example: Berlusconi, a prime minister, spending public money on under age prostitutes, serving today freely as a member of the EP. That kind also owned most media companies in his country and implemented favourable regulation and tax exemptions for himself.
Here in the Netherlands, there is something referred to as the 'job carousel'. Where favourable regulation by politicians is rewarded in the future (after a political carreer) by very highly paid gigs in the industries and companies they favoured. Technically legal, and very hard to legislate against. Its a refined form of corruption, but it has all the same downsides. During Corona for example, the Netherlands had trouble getting its testing in order. Turned out we had excluded big commercial labs from consideration because we had represenatites of the 'small artisinal labs' in our taskforce lobbying. A small scale corruption, with heavy economic distortion as a result!
I'm also not perse blaming corruption on the politicians themselves. We are all together responsible for the corporate and governance culture we breed. Yet we shouldn't pretend we currently have the ability to spend/invest money effectively and fairly as a collective.
Do u have a link to that story?
https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/coronatesten-belangen-arts-micr...
However, this stuff is paywalled by now.
https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2346643-testlabs-kunnen-wel...
Or, an easy video summary by Arjen Lubach (has english subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUx-kdbKQys
The lobbyist, part of the Outbreak Management Team, is Ann Vossen. And she argued from her experise that there should be specific requirements that effectively kept larger laboratories from being able to be suppliers. Ironically, the trick used was the Tower of Babel (pretending language differences could be a risk)
I find it telling that it's mostly europeans who make these types of comments. The EU has tremendous barriers to labour mobility that most europeans don't even realise - differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant. And i cannot emphasise the bureaucratic hurdles enough when moving countries. Despite the EU crying itself hoarse about labour mobility, only around 5% of EU citizens relocate between EU countries. The majority of that 5% is people moving from poor to richer countries. The comparable number in the US is 20%.
Most rational people realise that despite all its flaws, some of the most key factors in US tech dominance are the existence of a large talent pool, all of whom speak the same language, the existence of a large market all of which operates in the same language and finally VCs willing to take on risk.
Corrupt politicians are not hobbling European tech success any more than corrupt US politicians are hobbling its success. The EU will not reach Silicon Valley's levels of success, at least not in my lifetime.
It's a chicken-egg problem, and Europe has no chicken nor eggs at the moment. But lots of grain and hay.
It has never been cheaper and easier to operate in several languages. Seriously, translation and internationalization is as cheap as it can get (and most folks in Europe are at least bilinguals!).
What they need to focus on is a unified marketplace and harmonized regulation. Now each tiny country has it's special snowflakes regulations (how to accept payment, who and how to pay taxes, huge amount of paperwork to get employees and ultra-restrictive labor laws). I mean it's good as a job program to keep EU civil servants employed, not so much to bootstrap a tech ecosystem!
The fact that the US operates entirely with the global lingua franca is a gigantic advantage that can crush competition before it even begins.
The unified marketplace is one problem but look at what has already been done - EU labour is free to move. Degrees are almost always mutually recognised. What stops further integration? It ultimately boils down to language. This is why a Greek doctor can't just move to Germany. Also why a Spanish lawyer can't easily move to Sweden. Language is a much bigger problem than people here seem to think.
These are all customer service positions (you get a prefix in front of your name but still).
That matters less with tech. You'll have a localized sales team/customer support sure, and that adds expenses, but it's not a huge burden.
Dealing with a huge amount of paperwork, taxes, special local laws of the N jurisdiction you're operating in, now that's a barrier to entry.
Law degrees might be harder to transfer generally though (easy to transfer in the Nordics at least iirc) but even in the US you need to take the bar in different states, so maybe that part isn't too different anyhow?
Actually, Might become easier in the EU in the future now that post-brexit there isn't any common law countries within the union and with mostly civil law systems it should be easier to unify principles in some sections of the law.
It's mostly northern Europe. Try France, Italy, Spain then you will change your mind.
I'm French, where I work I'm the only one on 200 people that can take a phone call in English.
Semiconductor manufacturing is really a global effort -- most device makers have fabs full of equipment mostly from US, European and Japanese suppliers. Korean equipment suppliers are also becoming more prevalent. Chinese suppliers are starting to try to gain some market share as well.
I used to work for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer a long while back so am familiar with that industry. ASML works on just lithography but there are dozens of other processes needed to manufacture semiconductors. The biggest of those in market share are the US companies Applied Materials and Lam Research. They make a quite a few of those machines. So ASML is an important part but not the only part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_...
FYI, a LOT of the critical components in ASML come from the US. There's no one country that can make the latest tech end-to-end relying on it's self. China seems to be trying, but it'll be inefficient.
My understanding is that Intel believed EUV would be very late. As such, it committed to Intel 10nm (TSMC 7nm) without EUV, which turned out to be too complex. At the same time, TSMC banked on EUV early. This gave them a headstart over Intel once Intel started down the EUV path.
The tables could have been reversed. EUV could have been very late, and 10nm non-EUV might have worked better. Hard to know these things when you are making plans 3-5 years ahead.
I do agree that every continent should have a modern fab along with the supply chain to feed and repair it.
If they can execute, which I very much doubt, given the history of similar EU initiatives. The only example I can think of is Airbus. Those funds are usually funneled toward bullshit vendors that are specialised in milking such EU programs, with nothing to show for it afterwards.
I’ve met a CEO of one such company. A filthy rich scumbag that has half the government in his pocket. Ensuring that he gets the big government contracts and muscles out other companies for EU funds.
When slapped with tariffs later judged to be illegal the Trudeau government didn't do anything, allowing Airbus to get ownership of their flagship plane.
It was fortunate for Europe that the consortium had a longer-term objective as opposed to other pan-European aircraft projects like Panavia and SEPECAT.
far from it
Lots of better stuff in the US, until recently when the stagnation in the US made it more feasible (and politics made things scarier).
It ain't much, but it's honest work.
GER and FR are just bigger names
NXP has a long history in the Netherlands. It started as a division within Philips (Dutch company) and it has done a lot of production work in the Netherlands.
Don't know about the others.
Without TSMC, everyone would make their own TSMC.
This is what we see happening in the world right now. Previously the only consideration was, "Is it cost effective." Now there are a myriad number of other considerations up to and including geopolitical considerations. The US, for instance, has always been able to manufacture lith machines. Economic considerations obliged them to innovate elsewhere. Yet it's obvious that were the EU to threaten US access to lith machines, the US would start manufacturing those machines on their own.
Lith is not even the hard part. TSMC and Intel have the same lith machines. Why is Intel having so much trouble? Because there is so much more to this entire enterprise than doing the lithography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
German companies like Zeiss build parts for e.g. ASML.
However, for these other countries, they have concerns that are not strictly economic, but also related to national security and economic flexibility.
I don't know their plans, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pragmatic solution wouldn't be to co-invest in domestic fab facilities with existing incumbents who agree to comply with domestic interests as relates to sourcing, labor practices, IP sharing, local hiring, training, and environment controls.
It doesn't necessarily mean "spend money to beat TSMC at the tip of the spear". I mean, at least, I hope it wouldn't. Not at first.
If market cap was relevant you'd be, in a parallel conversation, be able to say:
> Why isn't Telsa mentioned btw ? What cars have Ford, Toyota and Mercedes built so far ?
Granted, it's a smaller business than semi, but it suggests to me that a national program to strengthen an industry isn't guaranteed to be a failure.
"Isn't guaranteed to be a failure".
Sorry, I struggle to interpret sentences like this. English isn't my first language.
Please clarify?
Are you saying that "it is not definitely a failure"?
I can't figure out if it's the above, or if it is this:
"won't necessary fail"
More specifically, I'm not sure if the implication is optimistic or pessimistic.
I hope that makes sense - the nuances of English are a delightful journey of exceptions; something my programming brain struggles with at times.
To me, they can be optimistic or pessimistic based on what the baseline is. I read the GP’s post as optimistic, as they come from a perspective of these kinds of government programs always failing. However, from a baseline of these kinds of government programs often succeeding, any of the three versions would be pessimistic.
And I apologize for using unclear language. I should be thinking about a wider audience when writing in an international forum. Thanks for pointing it out!
The fact that you took the time to clarify my confusion is the ideal consequence I'd say.
An equivalent might be "has some chance of success" but that misses the sense that the presumption is failure. More verbosely, the phrase might be: "One might presume that a national program to strengthen an industry would be a guaranteed failure, but this suggests to me that it might have some chance."
The implied notion is that the governments and their agencies are usually too incompetent and anything but innovative, so programs like this are oftentimes just a way to extort the money for some and a chance to pose in front of the cameras for the politicians.
European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments.
I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and also private wealth to accumulate and grow easier than European counterparts. The American government simply allows its business and private individuals to accumulate money via off shore companies in the Caribbean. The US deliberately allows this.
Disagree. Research has consistently shown that American multinationals consistently apply better corporate management practices than their European counterparts.[1] This is especially true in IT-intensive industries.[2] This is true even when comparing American multinationals operating in Europe.
Any sufficiently large company in a globally integrated, competitive industry, is going to reap potentially large efficiency gains by replacing European management with American management.
[1]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/... [2]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...
Also, it's not like in economics/business science there's a European vs American distinction in publications. The European Economics Association is quite small and most European departments hire out of the American association's market, for instance
Their biggest tech companies are Spotify and Skype. That's pretty underwhelming given that Spotify's biggest innovations are in product development and Skype became a subsidiary of an American company within 2 years of its existence.
Additionally, the 2 companies that seem to have industry tech talent: UK and Sweden, are not part of this deal.
The tech scene in mainland Europe operates completely differently from what you might be used to from Silicon Valley, but there is lots of stuff going on. If you only look at the European car manufactures and the endless amount of small-to-medium sized businesses involved in the supply chain. Lots of stuff going on.
25% of the worlds research is done in the EU and a lot of that leads to something. Sounds to me like you look for software for the average Windows user only. ESA and CERN alone leads to huge innovations.
It was the first practical videocall software and pioniered the niche. It did more to improve my life than all social networks combined. I backed it with hard cash, paying for Skype premium or whatever it was called.
Then in 2011 MS bought it, and best as I can tell, has delivered no real improvement for the consumer.
The client was rewritten twice, now it's in JS, glitchy, slower and serves adds.
I think the world would have been better off with independant Skype, Zoom should have never become a thing.
If the criteria of tech innovation is a cloud-based xAAS then the list will be unfortunately short.
The semiconductor push was really expected for a longer time already and is (I think) obviously part of the aspirations in the strategic autonomy continuum. If the roles were reversed, that is, EU with some Asian countries owned and controlled the majority of all chip fabrication, it would make perfect sense for USA to start chip production of its own on its own soil.
Source: All other industries in Europe.
Giants in Europe, there are a lot more
Only Americans think the opposite, i wonder why..
And speaking of market, Europe is a big player, https://www.vgchartz.com/ console sales speak for itself
Stop being brainwashed
(Airbus has pretty heavy government involved, to be fair.)
And whenever the planned giant at least comes to reality, even if it is as dwarf; the politicians who previously made great announcements, distributed millions, created random office, launched parties and cut the ribbon of the project in front of cameras, then don't even feed it with public commands, but give them to the very American or Chinese giants those projects were supposed to counterbalance.
I don't think anyone here believes this kind of announcement any more: there has been so many similar ones already, that are already forgotten and replaced with yet another announcement 9 months later, and again, and again.
Was that so silly? AMD seems to be doing alright.
The Germans on the other hand, you can't keep them from forming giant trusts and cartels if you wanted to.
ARM is in the UK and not the EU. It's owned by a Japanese company and soon an American one.
Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications. [1] Some European countries are ahead when measured per capita, but only some and that's not an important figure here.
The rest I'm unsure about, but I would like to note that as a market China would easily dwarf Europe. As China becomes richer Europe will become less important in comparison.
[0] Page 10 at https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:f7982217-cfde-4fdc-8ba... (PDF)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4566288/#!po=13...
Except that ARM has many offices outside the UK developing important IP. Their Mali Bifrost and Valhall GPU architectures are mainly developed in Scandinavia by former Falanx Microsystems of Norway, aquired by ARM in 2006, hence the norse naming.
Sidenote: Norway is not a part of the EU.
Steel isn't a relevant metric these days. Almost all developed countries can make as much as they need. China needs and produces more because they have to catch up.
> Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications.
I would hope that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann-La_Roche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstraZeneca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanofi
etc. aren't just twiddling their thumbs :-)
People often throw around numbers like this without any context. In the other thread people were trying to judge economics of electric powerplants by total weight.
Why is this a relevant metric? Why would you not expect China, which is 2x the population and is building infrastructure to refine more steel? Like they also produce more food and plastic, so what?
It also is hardly correlated with wealth, wages or GDP. There has been a glut of steel on world markets for the past few years.
Are the kinds of steel produced even comparable, i.e. only recently China could produce ballpoint pens
www.bbc.com/news/amp/business-38566114
Because the parent poster brought it up. Also, Japan produces about the same amount of crude steel as the US despite being less than half the population.
Even if it is a standalone company, it'll be vying for that dank european subsidy.
Edit: clarification.
It was designed to launch a crewed vehicle that never materialized and is too big and too costly for most commercial applications.
ESA is a thing. ITER is a thing. But mainly all those small international projects that simply would be too niche or small for a single country or market. Im talking about stuff like wave power startup, on land fishfarms, salvage operations in the baltic, cofinancing of highways (or powerlines so that green energy may find its way across the union), et cetera..
In information technology, ARM is ostensibly British but key parts of their portfolio were Euro collabs that became acquisitions or whatever (Keil, Adelante, EuroMIPS etc.)
In space technology there's a fairly strong Euro theme. E.g. i live near Glasgow, Scotland. There's a few really cool Space firms here but the larger ones appear to have strong collaborative elements with other firms in Europe (and in some cases, ownership models now that span Europe).
In farming and food supply there's a lot of large impactful collaboration across Europe.
Transport and logistics is another one where specialist firms, a lot of them Dutch for some reason, have all sorts of unexpected collaborations.
In Scotland we have a few small parts of Europe's wind turbine manufacturing industry but that's grown thanks to some euro collaborations.
There's quite a lot if you scratch the surface.
Which is still European, sure there is Brexit on the horizon, but even then it would still be European just not European Union.
“ Press release7 December 2020
Member States join forces for a European initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies ”
Appreciate your cynicism but maybe Brexit along with competition from China, the Far East and the United States will focus European minds. Let's not forget the many EU-wide research and development initiatives that are successful. I can provide a list if you so wish.
See: Acquisition of Alstom by GE in France.
Did they pivot to other industries in Finland? If so, which industries? Were they valued as much in the other industries or did they take significant pay cuts? Or did they have to pack up and move elsewhere where they would be valued? If so, where?
I'm asking since I met a few ex-Nokia people looking for work in Switzerland/Germany/Austria years ago.
If anyone knows more I'd like to find out please.
Basically they went to work to other companies and spun up lot of new ones.
There are lots of small and medium sized companies in Finland that are operating in technology and hardware.
I presume a majority of them had similar salaries as earlier. Engineers have never been well payed in Finland and Nokia knew the market rate very well. It rewarded few individuals very well, but the general salary range was probably nothing special.
Finland has lots of engineering activity - always has had. The problem has been marketing this knowhow to external markets.
Explosion of Nokia was a blessing for Finland. It was too large for a country this small, and it started domineering investments in all levels of economy.
From geek consumer point of view it is a shame their engineering was run down by poor management.
But the company was fixed on this course from it's early years. It basically trusted on two things - that radiotechnology would be it's secret sauce for all eternity, and the main point of competition would be it's logistics network.
When the radiotechnology used in handsets became commoditized, China basically levelled the playing field regarding logistics and outsourcing, and the software development inside the company remained a second tier effort, it could have not ended any other way (in retrospect).
Isn't HMD R&D like "across the street" from the old Nokia building?
Also, the telecom equipment side of Nokia still exists as it was, only the phone division went into the whole Microsoft clusterfuck.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/10/surviving-nokia-how-oulu-...
https://www.eetimes.com/life-after-nokia-how-finlands-radio-...
I'm not sure we'll see a similar size global consumer hardware company from Europe anytime soon.
I would love to hear the most innovative, relevant mid-size/large class leading hardware companies HN readers can name in Europe.
imec, ASML, Graphcore, ST, Infineon, NXP, ARM (for now) - what else?
There is no reason that anyone shouldn't be able to take someone's databook for a processor and produce a legal work alike. But since we can't do that.
The whole industry is forced to create a new ISA for the sole purpose of saying it is ok to produce work-a-likes.
Cutting edge, but in legal maneuvers.
Counterpoint: processors have gotten so good at extracting ILP from a sequential ISA that I wonder how much benefit you would gain from a dataflow ISA. The downside is that it would require to completely rethink and redo the software stack. (efficient par to seq is just as hard as efficient seq to par)
The new architectures could also support new programming languages where single instruction multiple data and parallelism would be easier.
Get rid of all the sequential part.
edit: added link.
[1] https://millcomputing.com/in-the-press/
[2] https://millcomputing.com/forum/the-mill/implementation/
Anyway, these alternative/exotic computing models also remember flops like the old Transputers. But it is necessary to invest in those anyway.
The Transputer method of partitioning a multiprocessor system, into processor chips provided with memory interfaces (now DDR), I/O interfaces (now PCIe) and communication interfaces for interconnections with the other processors, instead of using shared buses as before, was revived in some later DEC Alpha CPUs, then it was used in AMD Opteron (many AMD designers came from DEC Alpha), and then it was adopted by Intel (in Nehalem) and by everybody else.
We already have x86-64 (guarded licenses), ARM (less guarded but still uncertain) and SPARC, Power, RISC-V (open source).
Should a new ISA be the focus of major economic plans? Maybe if one of the objectives is protectionist ISA licensing, but that seems like an insular mistake.
An ISA ecosystem is a lingua-franca, so choosing a well established one is the most sensible basis for growing different semi/IT industry flows around.
In terms of discovering new technical benefits, new ISA's should be explored in academic circles and startups where they won't waste everyones time and money on boondoggles.
This might apply less to microcontrollers.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/14/arm-co-founder-starts-save...
We've all seen it and already know the end of the movie.
Good luck to them, but I wouldn't build any kind of business plan based on the predicted outcome.
As an European working in a sector very close to the semiconductor industry my main reason is that I don't want to live in the US/Canada.
you want researchers, and EU has ton of them ;)
None of this is even close to true.
What are you smoking that leads you to believe non-Silicon Valley US IT salaries are comparable to Chinese ones?
Just ask anyone living in Munich for example, how much a house there costs (almost 4 Million Euros[0]) and what the typical dev wages there look like, but sit down first so you don't fall down.
Average property price in Munich is basically the same as in the Bay Area (aprox. $10k/square meter in both cities with Munich reaching up to $35K/square meter in the desirable areas[0]!!!), but salaries are half that at best.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/9ba4873a-60f3-11e9-9300-0becfc937...
I guess if someone can suffer the US' shitty conditions, I guess there's nothing stopping them from going there... except for the US's stringent immigration policies. Can't just hop over the pond to go work there, and I'm fairly sure it's easier for a US citizen to work here than the other way around.
Of course, that too is deincentivized thanks to US tax laws (still having to pay income taxes even though you don't live or work in the US).
So crap, that people around the world are fighting to get in, what for those jobs that pay 2-3x, and real exciting projects to work on, and for the most part people that actually don't care about your funny accent.
It's unwise to discount one of the US's fundamental, perennial and systematic advantages as somehow a drawback.
Like it or not - the US has been sucking in global talent since it's inception.
Net migration to the US from the richer EU countries is about 0, i.e. about the same number of US citizens are moving into the EU as are moving from those EU countries into the US.
This is a misunderstanding. 'Wealthy' people tend to not migrate anywhere, even America.
Amazingly talented and hard working Asians are coming to America in droves, which is a massive source of competitive wellbeing.
Google, Microsoft, Adobe etc. filling up the ranks with E. and SE. Asians at maybe 33% of their staff in SV for example.
Not true. 10-17% of Canadian, British, Australian, and Swiss scientists move to the US. (https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the_...) These are percentages of all researchers, whether they emigrate anywhere or not. (By contrast, only 5% of US scientists leave theiir country.)
Among the general population, there are 824,000 Britons living in the US, compared to 159,000 Americans living in Britain. Given that the US's population is about five times that of Britain's, that means that on a per-capita basis a Briton is 25 times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Britain.
Of course fewer Europeans migrate to the US than in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or compared to Latin American countries today, but they still come and the net flows are still considerably in the US's favor. There are 1.2 million German-born people living in the US, for example, versus only 150,000 American-born people living in Germany, although the US has four times Germany's population. Sweden and Norway? 15,000 Americans in each, compared to 54,000 Swedes and 36,000 Norwegians in the US. Sweden has 10 million people—the size of Los Angeles County—so there would have to be 1.62 million Americans living there to match those going the other way on a per-capita basis. There are 49,000 Swiss born in the US, compared to 24,000 American born in Switzerland. The US's population is about 37 times larger, so a Swiss is 75 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. There are 71,000 people born in Austria living in the US compared to 7,700 Americans in Austria, implying that an Austrian is more than 300 times (!) more likely to move to the US.
Same with non-European countries; for example, 945,000 Canadians in the US versus 279,000 Americans in Canada. Since the US's population is nine times that of Canada's, on a per-capita basis a Canadian is 27 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. Yes, the US has a nicer climate than Canada, but this is consistent with other Anglosphere countries; 75,000 Australians and 26,000 New Zealanders are in the US compared to 54,000 Americans in Australia and 13,000 in New Zealand, respectively, so on a per-capita basis Australians are about 20 times more likely to move to the US and New Zealanders an amazing 140 times. Etc., etc.
(All data comes from Migration DRC (http://www.migrationdrc.org/research/typesofmigration/global... see table 4. Military forces are excluded. A less-detailed graphical version (http://migrationsmap.net/#/USA/arrivals) is also available.)
See the line chart at about the middle of the page, with three lines in black, blue and red. The chart shows net migration Germany <> USA. The red line shows German citizens only, black shows people formerly living in Germany, but without German citizen status. In 1998 there was peak in emigration to the US, but from then on the trend moves towards net immigration from the US.
I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.
Thank you for pointing me to the document. The entire press release is a marvel of sophistry. From its first sentence ("Das Ergebnis der 59. Präsidentschaftswahl der Vereinigten Staaten am 3. November wird mit Spannung erwartet") to the later claim that "Seit 2017 ziehen mehr Personen von den USA nach Deutschland als umgekehrt", is the federal statistics office's communications office trying its best to claim that "Orange Man Bad so fewer Germans are moving to the US" without actually using Trump's name or, more importantly, with data actually supporting the claim. Most people are going to only read the headline and perhaps the first paragraph, and not see that the US hasn't been the most popular destination for German emigrants since 2004, so the recent trend is not a result of the Trump presidency. The US is still the third most popular destination as of 2019, only behind two German-speaking countries; it is ahead of every other country, including the UK and other countries that Germans can move to easily because of the EU and Schengen. Rather than Trump, it looks like the trend is a return to the pre-1990 norm. (More on this later.)
Regarding the chart you mentioned, the black line is presumably mostly Yugoslavian War refugees who used Germany as a stopover to get to the US (thus the late 1990s peak) and would not be applicable in showing native Germans' intent regarding moving to the US.
The red line does not show a recent trend toward "net migration from the US" (impling more Americans moving to Germany than German citizens moving to the US) but that, as the text says, recent population flows between Germany (German citizens) and the US have been almost even in gross terms. This is a reversion to the pre-1991 norm, as opposed to something unprecedented. Further, given that the US has about four times as many people as Germany, this implies that a random German citizen today is about four times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Germany.
Of course, these flows are not necessarily permanent; most are likely students, or workers on temporary assignments. Obtaining ciitzenship is a more meaningful indicator of interest. In 2019 4,745 German-born people obtained US citizenship while 1,205 Americans obtained German citizenship. This implies that a random German citizen today is 16 times more likely to obtain US citizenship than an American is to obtain German citizenship.
Further, 75% of those Americans obtaining German citizenship in 2019 do not live in Germany but are taking advantage of the right of return (encouraged, from 2006, by the German Citizenship Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Citizenship_Project)), while the US does not have a similar law. Only about 300 of Americans obtaining German citizenship actually lived in Germany. This implies that a random German citizen today is 48 times more likely to obtain US citizenship and to move to the US, than an American is to obtain German citizenship.
>I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.
Sorry; didn't realize that the domain had expired. The version 4 I mentioned of the dataset is now at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SCMR/drc/research/typesofmigra....
Here is the raw data: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...
And: I dont' have an axe to grind here, I just objected to the notion that there is mass emigration from the EU to the USA, because I remembered the numbers for Germany.
What makes meaningful comparison of the numbers nontrivial are differing definitions.
Basis of the graphs are permanent movements away from or to Germany, so students and temp work are not included - https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel... (sorry, everything German only).
Citizenship is probably a problematic category because it is quite hard to achieve citizenship in Germany. There a millions of persons being born in Germany that don't have citizenship. Compared to the USA, Germany has an essentially racist basis here, though it has been made easier in recent years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
First, you admit that "you and everyone you know" live in Europe. Perhaps consider not making sweeping generalizations about places that neither you nor anyone you know live.
Second, the many US States are far from perfect, as are the many EU member nations, but conditions in the US in general are hardly "shitty."
Other's have pointed out the extraordinary number of immigrants to the US -- there are more immigrants living in the US (40M) than citizens of Poland (38M)[1]. Those are normal people making intelligent, reasoned, self-interested decisions. They didn't leave their homes behind for a downgrade.
But more to the point, generalizing "conditions in the US" is utter foolishness. The US is very much like the EU v0. In the same way that my time living Italy didn't give me a great deal of insight into life in Belgium, a stay in New York City doesn't tell you very much about life in Idaho, or almost any other place in the US. The states are highly autonomous by design, and life experiences vary widely between them.
Yes, New York and San Francisco in particular are having a hard time due to acute housing crises, and some other cities are dealing with housing issues to a lesser extent. Yes, healthcare here is a problem if you don't have insurance.
But fortunately, the majority of the country is not SF or NY, and 92% of people have health insurance[2].
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding... 2: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
I read the GP as asking “how will the EU stop the people leaving when they prefer to work elsewhere,” which implies that most people are moving for personal preference reasons rather than jobs. I doubt that is the case - I suspect that most humans would prefer to have both an elite job and their family relatively nearby, thus keeping talent locally is pretty easy if you have elite jobs to offer.
But since the GP didn’t elaborate on why they think people are leaving it’s difficult to argue about the posters intentions.
Also, that the US accepts more immigrants is not an argument for its inherent superiority, especially given how vilified and abused they've been in the past four years. All it means is that there are countries worse than the US, or that better ones have more restrictive immigration policies.
I don't mean to take away from anything else you've said, but that statistic is incredibly misleading. It specifically states 92% were insured for at least part of 2019. It also ignores the quality and effectiveness of the insurance.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
> In the first half of 2020, 43.4 percent of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 were inadequately insured.
> The adult uninsured rate was 12.5 percent. In addition, 9.5 percent of adults were insured but had a gap in coverage in the past year and 21.3 percent were underinsured.
> A quarter of those who were continuously insured and did not meet the threshold for underinsurance also reported problems paying bills.
> People who reported problems paying medical bills experienced lingering financial problems including damage to their credit ratings and depleted savings.
The US is very much a tale of two countries - but people here making a lot of money have a great quality of life.
I find the holier than thou attitude based on European insecurity quite entertaining. Europe is great - you don't have to denigrate other places. But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.
I’m an American and my sentiments are based on watching what this country has done to my working class friends and family. I’m glad those things don’t happen to people in Europe.
> But not everyone agrees, and in our country, you have the right to disagree and vote for who you want.
Just about every parliamentary democracy in Europe is more representative than the American system and nowhere near as corrupt.
> But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.
Quite familiar with that history, as well as our own of chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous people.
US is a great place in many aspects for top 1%, but progressively crappy as you move down the scale. And even good-earning IT worker is one long-term debilitating illness/accident away from financial catastrophe. Let's not forget completely fucked up US university system.
Overall, when I was young and relatively naive, US seemed a great place to be. Now that I have kids and seen the world a bit, I see it as one of the alternatives (to say Australia and New Zealand, compared to Europe), but with way too many issues, high criminality, us-vs-them mentality. Also the very obvious class system based on income/wealth, we don't have it here so pronounced which I consider much healthier.
One last point - we europeans generally (maybe except for UK) strongly disagree with all wars US is waging in past 30 years or so. Deaths of millions, misery for hundreds of millions for generations to come, pure evil for very little good. There is no way around this if you work in US - your taxes are directly supporting this, everybody a little. We hear a lot about voting with our money - well not living there is also that kind of vote. Passive resistance if you want.
The US isn't perfect. But the idea that it is this lawless wasteland that is terrible is just flat out wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
combined with that "one illness/accident away from the catastrophe."
From the outside, America does not portray itself to be a particularly stable or desirable place to live.
In reality different people have different priorities, so no single country ever can be "the best", as that solely depends on the individual priorities.
It's also not like RT and Xinhua are making up the stuff they use to agitate against the US, like most propaganda it's usually based on at least a kernel of truth.
For example the US incarceration rate is a pretty blatant outlier, particularly among developed countries, a factual reality that clashes very harshly with the self-propagandized idea of "Country of the free". The regular "race riots" in the US, and their scale, are a clear indicator to still unresolved issues on that end.
Disregarding these as "It's only Russian/Chinese propaganda!" is exactly the kind of mindset that leaves these issues unresolved and tolerated as "normal".
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
> From the outside, America does not portray itself to be a particularly stable or desirable place to live.
In your opinion.
Basing anything on the horror stories will make you think everything is bad. Many americans think Europe is a communist hell hole where people steal your money through taxes overrun by islamists.
Again, it's better to be rich in the USA than in Europe, but it's way worse to be poor.
We consider roads to be "free", but with the understanding that we do pay for it in the end through taxes.
Do folks not understand how taxes work?
It is just, that when you are employed, your employer has to pay it. When you freelance or are a student, or unemployed you definitely have to pay for it. But in a nice way, based on your income.
But even if you have no income, you still have to pay for health insurance(lowest fee). I know that quite well from some time ago. You also cannot just quit health insurance, as long as you life in germany.
- US specifically starts to feel weird for non US citizens
- There are immigration laws
Besides that I think some people from US might be biased on the feeling of Europe towards US. If you just know Europeans living in US you will have a wrong perception, mostly because Europeans living in US are here because they want to do so not because they were forced to move.
Don't be so quick to assume that people want to move to and live in US/Canada.
Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
For the top end of talent there's always freelancing, with a different, higher band of earning levels.
Except that how many devs outside of Paris make 60-80k?
Most French engineers I met in Germany left France because of low wages outside of Paris which is so expensive that most of your wage gains evaporate anyway unless you have a baller job in finance or management consulting.
I think it’s also getting better as all employers need to compete on salaries with remote offers from companies in Paris.
I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.
That's kind of a catch-22 right there.
If it weren't for those "ludicrous immigration laws", tech salaries in the Bay Area would get watered down significantly while becoming even more expensive to live in, making the whole place less attractive to emigrate to over time, eventually reaching a state of equilibrium with wages probably close to EU level.
Think of it like a fancy nightclub. The more exclusive it is, the more people are willing to queue outside for hours for a chance to get in.
One guy I'm close with, and we've talked about our salaries.
I make 200k My friend in Europe makes 30k.
The difference is astounding.
And yes, there is this particular kind of people who feel offended by this. Largely the same people who get offended by gay marriage. Why should we care?
people might get offended because you are wrong.
Also, if you take median salary in software industry, which is probably closer to $65k, in my country it buys you much better lifestyle than 200k in the Bay Area does. Me, for example, I was able to buy 2 bedroom, 900 sq ft apartment in the capital city with cash, no mortgage required. Other expenses don't really register on my radar. I'm piling up cash for early retirement.
EDIT: fixed some of my numbers.
EDIT2: After my country joined EU I never emigrated to Western Europe, because it didn't make financial sense to me. If I ever find myself emigrating to California, that would be because of the weather, not money.
Some people enjoy that of course. I do find the working environment better in the US, and I enjoy my work, but on most other parameters it’s inferior.
>Your headline salary in the US is higher but disposable income is often lower
Even rough napkin math doesn't check out here. Let's say you are a senior engineer in Bay Area/SF (one of the most expensive places to live in the US, so I am not going for some outliers like Austin or Seattle where the math ends up being even more in favor of the employee), and you make $300k/yr total comp at one of the big tech companies (which isn't even that good for a senior engineer at Google/Netflix/Dropbox/Uber/etc., this is rather a low end of the comp at that level at those companies, https://levels.fyi has a pretty accurate data on compensation that matches with what I've seen in real life myself). I used one of the online calculators to see how much you take home after taxes in CA (https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...), it came out to around $7.5k semi-monthly or $15k/mo.
So you get $15k in cash every month after taxes. Let's say you want to live on your own in a new really nice 1bd apartment in the middle of the city. I will overestimate and say that you will pay $5k/mo on rent+utilities. After all of that, you got $10k left. Let's say you spend $2k/mo on food and other various random small expenses (again, overestimating here for the sake of the argument, realistically you will spend much less on both food and housing). After all of that you got $8k of disposable income left, and that's while living a very good quality of life (most engineers I know in Bay Area who make that much don't spend even nearly this much on housing and normal expenses btw, they are putting it in savings/401k/etc. in hopes of retiring early and such). Employer-provided insurance is usually amazing. My personal one is fully paid for by employer, and my out of pocket yearly maximum is $2.5k (so even in the worst case scenario, I won't ever spend more than that in a calendar year on health expenses). Also, most of the people in senior positions at those companies I listed make noticeably more than $300k/mo.
I guess the bottom line is, is there even a way in EU to have $8k+/mo of disposable income as an IC software dev? How difficult is it to make it happen? From my experience in the Bay Area and Seattle, it isn't the easiest thing on earth, and not everyone in those places makes that much, but it is far from "special" or rare.
At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
For the US, the thing that stops them is the incredibly hard immigration process. The US is a very protectionist labour market. I've looked into it myself as a Greek, and it's very fucking hard.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
- http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/life-satisfaction/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
- https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
While none of these rankings are perfect they show clear trend that some of the European countries are doing better than US.
Also you should keep in mind that money is not everything. (Which is why we have the above stats anyway). People have friends and family and a way of life that they might not be willing to abandon. As other have mentioned before migration to US is non-trivial and requires quite and effort. In contrast to that you can move much easier within EU. Which is what is happening anyway - if you want high salary you go to Switzerland / London / Paris or any other high income area and you can do so without being treated as an immigrant.
It'll be a stepping stone toward getting a job at the big players.
At best, they'll keep the B players around because they won't pass the stricter bar for immigration.
What something like this needs is a leader driven by a huge personal product/technology belief and vision, backed up by personal technical capability, and his/her ass on the line. Versus what I could see is some generic credentialed CEO being put in to the top position to "manage", with little penalty for failure.
Sadly, at this point I wouldn't even expect a solid strategy, it's gonna be blatant actionism. But maybe that's just the cynic in me hoping to be proven wrong
> It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders.
With more than 50% market share it's the least crowded field there is, basically a monopoly formed by a very high barrier of entry, because not everyone has billions to risk on complex long term projects, private investors prefer shorter term returns. But it doesn't mean it's difficult to catch up or that the leader produces something good, on the contrary, monopoly means low quality, slow innovation, high price, easy to catch up by just throwing money at it, it just takes government involvement to do it.
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/joint-dec...
List of EU projects with associated legislations and projects: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/
Go Europe, we need an alternative to compete.
The right game is building end to end systems (ala what Apple does) where semiconductors are an important ingredient in that.
My .2$
One aspect that is less explored is the actual depth and breadth of the semiconductor supply chain. Moreover, that supply chain is bound with technical expertise at every level. You may have the fastest car at Le Mans, but you're not going to win without the best driver.
Chip design starts with design software. The most sophisticated software is made in the US. To use it, you need a variety of highly experienced designers of the right ilk (think neurosurgeon vs. cardiologist), supported by program management, organizational management, test and validation engineering and other disciplines. This synthesis of expertise and tools and equipment has to be at the highest level of capability all the way up and down the supply chain before you can get a 7nm chip to boot up.
Additionally, there are about 40 different types of process equipment used in chip fabrication. Every one of them requires dozens of product development engineers to design and build. Those teams rely on decades of both personal and organization experience to build on before they can produce tools that can, for example, apply a material like, say, tungsten, to a 12" slice of pure silicon in a layer that can be precisely measured in atoms, uniformly, across the 'wafer'.
Of all the 40 process tool types, the most complex work of science is the lithography tool made by ASML in the Netherlands. This thing produces the light needed to print the chip circuits at 7 nanometer geometries by emitting droplets of molten tin into a vacuum chamber and hitting the droplets with a 25,000 KW laser that vaporizes the tin and produces the light. It fires at 50KHz[0]. ASML has spent more than 20 years, employing 100s of engineers and scientists, in order to produce this wonder. There is no company (and certainly no government) on Earth that can catch up to ASML in any reasonable amount of time.
Next in the chip production chain is called 'Assembly' where the wafers are cut into individual chips and packaged into what you'd recognize. That node in the chain has it's own set of non-trivial equipment and expertise.
All of this is to say that there are vulnerabilities all up and down the supply chain, bouncing all over the planet. No one country has the technology to build state of the art chips from both the supply chain and expertise standpoints all within its own border. As soon as a nation has a deficit of one aspect of the overall technology required, that nation is no self sufficient.
$533 billion for the entire semiconductor industry seems small.. That's like .25 Apples.
So that would make proposed annual US federal funding in semiconductor R&D like .0016 Apples
You're right – when you put it like that it does appear very small.
† (Oct 15, 2020) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/semiconductor-indus...
Apple's recent annual revenue was ~275B.
I like to think of it like this: if magically the whole semi-conductor industry vanished overnight the world would be much poorer. We would be in a crisis. If magically the whole of Apple vanished overnight, we'd still have smartphones and laptops and tablets and basically all the tech that Apple makes.
Just goes to show that what the market values and what is actually valuable in aggregate are not metrics that are in tune.
At the start of this century, some famous American investment bank (Citigroup ?) came up with a report that said that in the near future (today) stocks which are luxury items will grow much faster than stocks that are essentials. And that is exactly what seems to have happened. The report said this was due to increasing economic inequality. Basically the middle classes of the first world have money to spare so they buy Apple Iphones and Tesla cars. The poorer people have less money and none to spare.
And outside of SH, it's even worse.
And at least for my normal rewe, it would make no sense to have those numbers, the average is below 1 person who’s in front of me at the counter.
These are major failures. Hopefully, as this was mostly due to constant sabotages by the UK, the situation will improve now that they are gone. Sadly, their constant push for enlargement can't really be undone and might still doom the union in the end.
Don't get me wrong, I like England. Great country, nice culture, shit partner. As far as I am concerned, Brexit is probably the best thing to ever happen to the EU.
Of course the UK will take a hit in the short term but failing to prepare for that is on them. It was their decision.
UK was in a lot of ways not a great fit for the EU sometimes but sometimes I do think it was good to have a larger player in the UK take a different position. I'm a big fan of the EU but they do seem to make mistakes, and completely ignore certain problems (like immigration).
Conservative politicians were the driving force behind the creation of the single market in the first place
> They lobbied heavily to be left out of the common agricultural policy
the UK is still part of the CAP
> were against Maastricht
which is why the UK signed it
> pushed heavily for enlargement ensuring they would be no political cohesion in the union
this is a common conspiracy theory, but it has no basis in fact
> Leon Brittan as a trade commissioner was a staunch opponent to any kind of state aid in the 90s and single handly significantly weakened the European industry.
yes, you make your industry stronger by protecting it from competition by providing it with taxpayer subsidy... right?
Although, Ericsson had their manufacturing in Sweden before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson
Sweden is ahead in some things related to tech, particularly their own version of startups. Spotify remember, is related to the fact that Sweden is a pop-music powerhouse - there is definitely industry synergy there.
They are generally well organized for a small country, they make Jet Fighters (quite a feat) which is also related to the fact they are a few degrees more 'sovereign' in that they are not part of NATO and have historical antagonisms with a much bigger power, Russia. They had one of the world's largest air forces back when individual fighters were only the price of a few cars.
Those synergies resonate with one another but I don't think it's in silicon.
The only well-known company that might have made semiconductors was ASEA, which might have made some thyristors before disappearing 33 years ago, after the fusion with Brown Boveri.
Now ABB has the headquarters in Switzerland. It has various sites in Sweden, but so have some US companies, without any of them being considered as Swedish.
Even the Eastern Block countries, during the Soviet hegemony, produced more diverse semiconductor devices than ever done in Sweden.
The most technically advanced countries in semiconductors in Europe, before the global fashion of mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs that obliterated most traditional semiconductor companies starting around 1999, were (in no particular order):
Netherlands (Philips) Germany (Siemens) France (Thomson CSF) Italy (SGS-ATES) UK (Plessey and a few others)
Relics of the former European semiconductor companies can be found now mostly in Infineon, NXP and ST, but all these present companies are the results of long chains of mergers and acquisitions of various companies spread all over the world, so it is difficult to define them as belonging to Europe, US or to any other specific country or group of countries.
I was exaggerating a bit, as a counterbalance to the weird statement to which I was replying.
Nevertheless, while ABB is a great company, its importance as a semiconductor manufacturer is minimal. ABB sells electronic equipment, which is made with components made elsewhere, except for some high-power thyristors that are made by themselves.
Thyristors are the easiest to make among semiconductor devices that are still used. The only really difficult part to make are the high-quality silicon wafers from which they are made, but ABB does not make the wafers. Most likely they purchase the wafers from Japan, or maybe from Germany.
I feel like there is a need for a fundamental shift in mindset in Europe..
These kind of startup focused news sites are quite biased towards B2C/C2C software/*tech places, as most of their businesses need the public attention to succeed. Most B2B startups don't care much about outreach to these outlets, as most of their clients don't read it.
The startup scene is less vibrant: valuations are typically lower and funding is not as easy to get as it is in Silicon Valley, but you shouldn't discount established players that innovate and mature startups.
How about SAP, Capgemini, Atos, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, ASML?
Not hip enough for you?
IT Consulting body shops & telecom. If that was the peak it would indeed be looking grim (luckily it isn't).
Only if you have a very narrow definition of tech. What about Infineon, ST, Siemens, Schneider, Dassault Systèmes, NXP, etc.
[Edit] I mean I don't know why I waste the time arguing with useless commies online.
They have a long history of failures and disappointments and still stick to this emotional garbage ideas, at this point it's not something I can fix since I am not a psychologist.
It's kind of amusing that HN has such slanted audience, given that startup funding is the biggest exponent of hypercapitalism.
Isn't that method exactly how the silicon valley, and with it companies like Intel, were created? By the US DoD directing money from the top?
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, IBM, list goes on, weren't envisaged by a 60 year old bureaucrat sitting in Brussels or Washington.
They were created by ambitious young men looking to shape the world in their own way.
IBM and Google both came almost directly from government money. Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix are arguably actual startups.
The snowball/butterfly effect is real.
I feel like some in tech want to take responsibility, somehow that American's are just better tech-bros than anyone else. It was mostly chance.
Call it what it is, a gift. And take care of it, they only get made by luck.
Consider that in the US, the decisions are also 'made from the Top' but often from large investment firms that decide where the money goes.
When an industry is small and new, it's more open.
But for commercial aircraft like for regular airlines, there is zero hope unless the government coordinates it. There's no 'hey, invest $20 Billion in my startup, maybe I will have customers some day'. No - you need a national strategy with the airlines buying in.
That said - concerns over central planning are real - not so much in impetus, but in execution.
If Europe could snap it's fingers and for $10 Billion just have competitors to Intel just magically appear - it would be a good investment. Very good.
But unlike roads, tunnels and bridges, you can't just buy innovation.
It's going to take the right leaders, the right investments, the right kinds of innovation.
Which is extremely hard.
I don't know the industry but it may may more sense to come at it from the periphery: possibly by creating design and fabs for more common chips.
Or maybe it makes sense to come at it from an academic/open angle, and get the top Universities to publish open source designs that if industry buyers want, they can get subsidies for fabs.
Finally ... the other parts of the ecosystem are not there as much: there is no more Nokia. There is nobody making computers. There is no 'OS' to guide deep integration.
I think it's reasonable to be wary of this kind of top down sentiment as it's risky and not preferable, and prone to fluffy words without action, at the same time, it's reasonable to address the issue.
'Boom' is a tiny little venture company that may or may not make actual commercial viability, in a niche sector.
Boom is not remotely trying to enter the market for real commercial traffic, which is essentially impossible for a regular private company.
There are no successful airline manufactures that exist without the expressed coordination of a national strategy.
Boeing is a 'strategic asset' - they are supported by massive military contracts and other industrial subsidies. They have Federal level support from the diplomatic corps and may involve themselves in foreign policy. Sales of aircraft may be tied to other mechanisms of statecraft.
Airbus - even more so, practically a creation of European governments.
To give an example of what happens when nations are not powerful, look at Bombardier in Canada - which was squeezed out of a more niche are of commercial aircraft by state actions.
Boeing complained to Donald Trump about 'unfair competition' - the US - against NAFTA treaty - imposed a 250% duty on Bombardier jets. To get around this, Bombardier had to drop their pants and do an ugly deal with Airbus. Eventually, this inability to flex material power in conjunction with other state assets ... and it's a flop for Canada, and a 'win' for a bigger entity backed by a more powerful state entity as the commercial aircraft business was sold off to Airbus.
If Canada had a huge domestic market, this probably would not be the case.
Edit: it's possible Boom eventually develops into a much bigger entity, maybe in 40 years, using their 'smaller, currently niche but growing industry' as an entry point. But taking on Boeing is tantamount to taking on Microsoft directly.
Also in the whole article there is no mention of funding. It is probably a tech sharing and licensing agreement more than anything.
They will probably have a similar realization about software in a decade or two.
They could start here. Why Facebook, Google, Amazon don't open massive headquarters in Paris, Madrid, Rome or Berlin, and they rather stick to UK and Switzerland?
Also software managers won't move to Europe for the same reasons. European politicians have the upper hand and the last word in negotiations.
If you compare Panama, or other tax havens where multinational companies like to stash their revenue, to the EU then you probably have a point.