Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

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> Outside of the nationalist far right, I never hear people saying anything of the sort. How are we "declining and sinking"?

You don’t have to be a far-right nationalist in order to have an objective look at the situation in EU, although I understand your temptation to resort to such low-effort arguments, it’s fashionable after all.

As a non far-right European, the EU is falling behind by failing to drive any tech innovation, by relying on non-EU countries for vaccine production, by not importing any external tech talent by having extremely unattractive wages in the tech sector. Every major tech innovation happened outside of EU, and this is something I’m not proud about. If your only metric for success is having decent public healthcare and social benefits, then I guess EU is doing fine, but I’m skeptical this will do us any good in the long run.

> You don’t have to be a nationalist far-right in order to have an objective look at the situation in EU

Sure, but I didn't say that. I said those are the only ones I hear making unsubstantiated alarmist claims about Europe, and/or their respective home countries, "declining and sinking". I have no problem with people pointing out specific problems, like you did with wages and tech innovations. This opens up for constructive debate. Screaming that we're doomed does not.

A lot of tech innovation happened in the EU, the issue is that companies are acquired by the major players as a way to curb competition or acquihire a good team. The issue with tech in the EU has more to do with how different markets are across the Union, not the lack of innovation. Language barriers, cultural barriers and economical barriers are all more varied in the EU than in a market such as the US or China, it's a uniquely European issue on having such large variance in a single market.

What is the metric you are using to gauge innovation in tech in the EU?

The first COVID vaccine, Pfizer-BioNTech ... was developed within Pfizer in the EU (Germany to be exact).

The part that made it work, a lipid envelope that keeps the thing running at non cryogenic temperatures, doesn't sound very impressive (though it is), is a Belgian company (Dutch, although I believe located in the French part of the country).

This vaccine, aside from (part of) it's financing is very much European ...

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