EU chip goal 'unrealistic' says ASML CEO | Hacker News Reader

EU chip goal 'unrealistic' says ASML CEO

electronicsweekly.com

117 pointsjernejzen307 comments

All the big blocks: EU, US, South Korea, Taiwan, and China assume that their subsidy policies will expand their market share.

Obviously they cannot all be right.

The only that I think is given that will expand its global market share is China. Paradoxically because of the US sanctions and the fact that it relies so much on imports presently.

Having the largest internal market which is still on the rise probably also helps, but China has enough problems that it may all come to nothing in the end.

But after the trade war with Huawei and zte they don't really have a choice, do they?

A multi billion dollar company will not just lay down and die when its shut out from the open market, it will use its muscles to create its own.

Hisense is not the market leader, but they have done a significant leap in the last 5 years (Not all of it through legal means thought)

Agreed they don't have a choice, I'm just not so sure about the positive outcome. Xi has built a house of cards and has too much of a cult of personality to create a stable environment.

Wrt. this I don't Xi matters a lot. There is consensus in the broader Chinese leadership that China needs to move up the value chain to the point where it has leadership, and potential self-sufficiency, in all key industries and at the same time stimulate internal demand.

He's cemented his position as dictator-for-life, and also shown that he will actively interfere in publicly traded companies. That matters a hell of a lot.

Xi isn't going anywhere as long as he's got a pulse.

This is opposite of reality. House of cards (RE overinvestiment) of past leadership was inherited by Xi, who has been actively dismantling it for years, which he started early - RE square footage stagnated a few years after he started office. Meanwhile, almost every PRC strategic improvement that US is panicking over from PRC military modernization to MIC2025 to PRC moving up science/innovation, capturing higher value supply chains, PRC expanding trade influence was driven by Xi. He also inherited inertia from past efforts still it's been down to his guidance. Which is not to say he did "best" job, but good enough job that PRC strength on trend to grow under his trajectory, which we have 10+ years of data on.

>Obviously they cannot all be right.

Sure they can, just ban imports. Each country/trade bloc ends up with their own chip.

They don't have to. The US is doing the banning.

But then you will shrink your global market share. Semi conducting fabrication on a sub 7nm can only work if you have big market share to keep the factories running 24/7..

> Obviously they cannot all be right.

They could all be right that their market share will be higher if they adopt this policy than if they don’t.

The market share is the percentage of the market, up to 100%. The market might grow due to the different measures adopted but percentage wise it will always be limited to the whole being 100%, split between however many players. Everyone's share increasing means the market going above 100%.

What OP means is that it's a mathematical impossibility for everyone's market share to increase. It's a zero sum game, for any player's market share to increase, someone else's must decrease.

I think that what the GP is saying is that they could each be correct, individually, but not all collectively.

> they could each be correct, individually

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

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

The collective case is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_competition btw.

Obviously they cannot all be right.

As a percentage of the market, that's true, but if the subsidies grow the whole market then every block's dollar value of market share can all go up.

Every startup learns this lesson quite early on. It's a heck of a lot easier to grow a market by 5% than it is to take 5% of the market from a competitor, mostly because competitors do things to try to stop you.

Sure, but the semiconductor market is mature bordering on stagnant. There's a high-risk/high-reward competition for the leading edge that is currently dominated by TSMC, but there's just not much money to be made from the older nodes that the automotive, aviation and military segments care about. Building out capacity to secure your supply chains is potentially a very sensible strategic decision, but I'll eat my hat if it ever turns a real profit.

After, if we assume from Apple sales, everybody got a mobile phone, AI could be what makes it non-stagnant again. Just companies ordering GPUs and servers, plus more and more similar features being shipped to consumer hardware could make a difference.

I do not have any data though, just thinking out loud.

Yes. Think this is it. Even if some sectors appear stagnant now, everyone is expecting some huge growth spurt with AI. Lots of new data centers, GPUs, etc...

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

I would assume all those companies want cutting edge (higher performance at lower energy cost), not chips that are 5-10 years behind. Those can barely run current android.

> the semiconductor market is mature bordering on stagnant

Is this true? And by what measure? I see nothing but incredible growth driven by cloud, mobile, and AI/ML.

But that's only a small part of semiconductors localized in a couple of hubs. The vast majority of semi work isn't working on that.

barriers to entry are getting higher by the minute, there are no new entrants, most of them are state-sponsored, and it's true for the whole supply chain.

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

Do you mean the market is stagnant or the tech is stagnant, because those are different things imo.

If we have finally reached the final boss of silicon lithography, then the market will figure out whatever nodes make sense (best efficiency, best performance, best value) and presumably we will need ever increasing amounts of them… especially if future solutions just stack tons of dies together etc. it’s fundamentally a pivot from growing through the tech to growing through packaging and putting more silicon into a product… at higher power and cost. But as that market model matures you will very much continue to need more and more capacity to replace the growth that used to come from Moores law.

But without subsidies they could lose market share

Saying something is a "given", without providing any evidence, is a pretty silly argument

> The only that I think is given that will expand its global market share is China.

That doesn't make sense given that all the other big blocks are cooperating across borders while China is subject to stiff export controls in an area with real technological chokepoints.

PRC is entrant, west is incumbant with majority of global shares to lose. PRC building up mature nodes, which is still plurarity of chips, which they can soon with indigenous supply chains. As since they are huge export source, and intermediate good source, they get to inject their own chips into everything on global markets. Of which they now trade more with global south than they do western bloc. West can consolidate within bloc, but they'll start to lose large segements of global share, which is where future growth will be. Loss of global revenue, will in turn impact west ability to R&D without large subsidies, which drives down commercial viability. There was study analysing result of PRC domestic overcapacity turn into exports in various sectors like solar, display etc, and their effects on incumbant leaders (predominantly western firms) operating profits, and the effect was like 50-100% loss. The TLDR is west already has dominant global share, any share PRC gains on global market is share lost by west, and west is going to lose big if they retreat/consolidate around only monopolizing western shares .

Why did you exclude Japan?

It would be fair to include Japan on the list of major semiconductor producers.

Yes, but most of them could be right. Given that Taiwan has cornered the market for so long, now that other countries are at least trying you could see a shift like this hypothetical market share change:

Taiwan 80% -> 50%

EU 1% -> 10%

US 1% -> 10%

South Korea 9% -> 15%

China 9% -> 15%

And if 4/5 of them ended up "being right" would indicate that subsidy policies are effective, right?

The EU is simply too scared to actually put it's foot down.

If they really want to, they can just limit the export of ASML machines only to companies that have at least one of their fabs here in the EU.

But they won't. In stead they will just handover €30 billion of public money to multinational corporations with market caps larger than the yearly GDP of some EU countries.

Edit: For clarity, I'm not suggesting banning the export of ALL machines to outside the EU. I'm just saying they could force companies to also have at least one big fab inside the EU, for geopolitical purposes.

I’m all for a sound industrial policy, but comparing market cap to GDP isn’t helpful. Better to compare corporate revenue which is typically 5% or less of market cap for FAANG.

> Better to compare corporate revenue which is typically 5% or less of market cap for FAANG.

I wouldn’t even bother with that much. You’re comparing international corporations’ reported revenue with one measure of one country’s general economy. I know a lot of us here are from countries that are either really really big or really really rich or both, but most countries are not really really big or really really rich. The only thing reported revenue, GDP, and market cap have in common is a unit you can denominate them in, but GDP as measured in dollars or euros or whatever still isn’t money in the bank (and neither is market cap).

Reported revenue is pretty reliable. Profits not so much. Revenue for a company and GDP for a country are at least broadly comparable.

I know it's harder to know for sure, but wouldn't a country's "revenues" (tax, other revenues) vs corporate revenues be better? A country doesn't have instant access to its GDP.

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

> Revenue for a company and GDP for a country are at least broadly comparable.

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

> In stead they will just handover €30 billion of public money to multinational corporations with market caps larger than the yearly GDP of some EU countries.

Those GDPs varies from about €18 billion (Malta) to about €4 trillion (Germany).

Yes, but we typically think of the EU as advanced economies, and the notion of a company having a market cap larger than some advanced economies definitely hurts when subsidies from that bloc are increasing profits.

Which is what the parent is directly addressing.

anyway: GDP is more closely related to revenue than it is market cap.

> Yes, but we typically think of the EU as advanced economies

The size of an economy is in no small factor of population size. All things considered, Luxembourg is an advanced economy, but it is also a tiny nation.

The economic bloc as a whole subsidizing any initiative should not be impacted by the relative small size of some of its members, as the bloc has a budget of its own, relative to the size of all those economies together.

>If they really want to, they can just limit the export of ASML machines only to companies that have a fab here in the EU.

LOL

This would devastate the world economy. Gl getting chips for phones, computers, satellites...

They wouldn't have to put all their fabs here. But if they want the latest ASML machines they need to have at least one big fab inside the EU, or else they only get one generation back.

There's only a handful of companies in the world producing chips at scale, so it wouldn't be too out of the question.

You could even invite the Chinese to put their fabs in the EU so that they get a chip sector they control but also make them a bit more dependent on the EU, in stead of the EU on China.

But hey, we can also just handover €30 billion of taxpayer money to TSMC and Intel, I guess.

>There's only a handful of companies in the world producing chips at scale, so it wouldn't be too out of the question.

Don't think you have any idea how complex it is to both set up the fabs and run them. Are you gonna fly half of Taiwan to run these fabs here? How long do you think this process is going to take?

>Don't think you have any idea how complex it is to both set up the fabs and run them. Are you gonna fly half of Taiwan to run these fabs here? How long do you think this process is going to take?

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

Luring them away is not limiting their ability to sell machines outside of EU, which is what you proposed in your op

30B € is laughably small for bootstrapping a competitive process business. at least one zero missing. more likely two.

Nearly all chip making machines are computer controlled. The operators could easily operate them remotely from Taiwan.

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

>The operators could easily operate them remotely from Taiwan.

It's time to stop talking about things you don't know anything about.

Comparing a server to an ASML litography machine...

TSMC have delayed opening their US fab because apparently local talent was lacking, I think that suggests it cannot be done remotely.

> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was supposed to have its first Arizona chip factory operational by late 2024 but now has confirmed significant delays. Primarily due to a shortage of technical workers with critical expertise in the US, TSMC projects to finish construction instead by 2025.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-c...

Sounds like we're likely to see TSMC have a large hand in determining course work in academia. Thanks for bringing this up.

Isn't it better (though harder) to have a good environment for building things than to just write protectionist rules?

It should probably go hand in hand. The US federal government is spending a lot of money on getting fabs to the US. But they also banned ASML from exporting their machines to China.

So they're simply doing both.

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

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

At what cost? An environment with slave labor would be great if you wanted to have things produced for cheap. Should we allow slave labor to stay competitive?

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

> At what cost?

At the cost of seeing people take advantage of the opportunity to add value for their customers.

> This is a pretty extreme example, but that's what it comes down to

It's not what it comes down to. Someone in the market for the cheapest smartphone possible won't buy a $10 phone even though it's cheaper than the next alternative, because quality also matters. Or at least, value for money matters.

> Thanks to the free market, there's always going to be someone willing to do it for cheaper while sacrificing product quality

Someone might be willing to offer something cheaper, but thanks to the free market, that option will only be popular if people believe it's good value for money and buy it.

> employee welfare

This is mostly a competition issue. If it's too expensive to create employers, there's no competition for workers.

> or environmental impact

This happens in all types of agreements. The limiter on non-free market countries for environmental impact isn't ethics, it's inefficiency. Only regulations can solve this.

People thought the iPhone was good value for money even though there were widespread reports of workers killing themselves by jumping out of factory windows due to horrible working conditions. I'm not singling them out, just providing a point of reference. [1]

> If it's too expensive to create employers, there's no competition for workers.

Employees working in a manufacturing facilities in e.g. China and Europe aren't competing for the same jobs. There's one set of standards for employees there, and there's another set of standards for employees here.

We can't compete with that because we've decided that workers shouldn't be driven to suicide while they don't always share the same reservations and deem waivers, "safety netting", company-provided help hotlines, prayer sessions and "no-suicide pledges", to be an acceptable solution to the problem. [1]

What can we do other than add protectionist rules?

> Only regulations can solve this.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

> We can't compete with that because we've decided that workers shouldn't be driven to suicide while they don't always share the same reservations and deem waivers, "safety netting", company-provided help hotlines, prayer sessions and "no-suicide pledges", to be an acceptable solution to the problem.

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

> What can we do other than add protectionist rules?

Worker protection isn't the same as protectionism.

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

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

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

I never said that we're uncompetitive solely because of environmental and labor laws, but those factors make such a significant difference that any other factors become irrelevant. We could have all the cheap capital in the world but it would still be cheaper to manufacture in China, Taiwan or other parts of Asia where people work 50,60+ hour weeks for lower pay and no benefits or vacation.

> Making sure specific environment-related rules are followed for certain products coming in is much smaller than just a ban.

And how do you propose we enforce that against untrustworthy or even hostile governments that have a history of covering things up and a vested interest to do it again?

> We could have all the cheap capital in the world but it would still be cheaper to manufacture in China, Taiwan or other parts of Asia where people work 50,60+ hour weeks for lower pay and no benefits or vacation.

What about the US? If 75% of Intel's fabbing is done in the US, that should show us something. An EU-based company that sent 25% of its fabbing off to China would also be much better than protectionist laws. Why can't it be made?

What are you talking about? I don't know where they currently stand but Intel used to produce the vast majority of their chips in Asia.

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

> What are you talking about?

I'm talking about Intel doing manufacturing in the US.

> I don't know where they currently stand but Intel used to produce the vast majority of their chips in Asia.

Can you cite this? E.g. Intel seems to have said something quite different in this press report[0].

> US government had to introduce very similar incentives and decided to just hand out dozens of billions of dollars to get them to move production back home

Can you cite this?

> which is arguably worse than what you're criticizing the EU for

Anything is arguable. It's also arguable it's better. I think it's better, personally.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110302101731/http://newsroom.i...

Even if you have the best environment others still have the protectionist rules

You write as if that had ever been tried. Everybody has protectionist rules. Some have a little less of them than others and they make a big show of it, but acting as if that show was equivalent to absence of protectionism is like celebrating self-imposed ignorance.

> acting as if that show was equivalent to absence of protectionism is like celebrating self-imposed ignorance

How is it like celebrating that?

you dont build a big fab in a couple of days. and suitable sites are probably very few and you can expect the greens to complain all the way because of water use

Do you have any insight into the projects, and how they operate?

The US has already done that. They leaned on the Dutch government to get ASML to reduce exports to China

ASML isn't guarding profound insights revealed by the gods requiring some sort of eternal liver pecking sacrifice to obtain. If the EU plays hardball to too great an extent, other countries will replicate the research.

China will already have started their attempts. It isn't crazy to expect them to achieve success single handedly. If all of Asia starts mucking in the EU will get crushed. The EU does not have a track record of staying ahead when they tangle with Asians for tech manufacturing supremacy.

The EU can't parlay a temporary monopoly held by one manufacturing company into a useful strategic edge.

>ASML isn't guarding profound insights revealed by the gods requiring some sort of eternal liver pecking sacrifice to obtain.

As someone who's worked in semiconductors... [citation needed] on that claim.

>If the EU plays hardball to too great an extent, other countries will replicate the research.

If they could have, they would have. Many have been trying, and still are.

>China will already have started their attempts.

Not "will have". China has been trying to catch up for many years.

> The EU does not have a track record of staying ahead when they tangle with Asians for tech manufacturing supremacy.

You're just lumping "Asians" into one group, aren't you? China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea have very different strengths.

>The EU can't parlay a temporary monopoly held by one manufacturing company into a useful strategic edge.

Oh they absolutely can. So can Taiwan (and does so pretty successfully).

> The EU does not have a track record of staying ahead when they tangle with Asians for tech manufacturing supremacy.

ASML is literally the one that won vs Japan's Canon/Nikon.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/race-technological-dominance-...

In a consortium they started in the late 90s with Intel and a couple of other companies to license US Department of Energy EUV research from Lawrence Livermore. There’s a reason the US has control over where ASML hardware can be exported - a lot of the technology was originally developed and funded in the US.

I am using ASML as an hypothetical example here.

When there is a giant like ASML in the market, the competition is squashed out pretty quickly. Especially when the barriers of entry are so high like in fab space, the competition does not stand a chance to capture any good tenders.

Pull ASML out of the equitation to "punish" Chinese- suddenly those "bug" fab companies are flourishing and winning tenders left and right and suddenly become viable businesses. Give it X years and they are competitors.

Of course if this is a viable route, you may ask : Why don't China ban ASML then? They could, but of course there is going to be short term pain in impacting all levels of supply chain and therefore macro economics. They may not want to take the hard pill.

China is already banned from buying many of ASML's machines, which is why China doesn't have any leading edge fabs. They probably will be able to replicate the research and solve the manufacturing issues eventually but it took a global effort and many failed tries to get it working the first time.

I dunno, the issue with government picking the winners is there’s plenty of people who like money out there and sound very convincing. Even selecting the best people you still might not build what ASML have. I’m not even sure they can produce the mirrors needed for EUV let alone the laser light source and all the tens of thousands of other technologies that are in these machines. It’s extremely hard and China is in a recession and property crisis right now.

The Chinese government attempting to pick winners is the best hope the chip embargo has; Xi Jinping is ironically the person best placed to cause it to succeed. The issue is that a Manhattan projet styled effort followed up by turning technology over to private industry is something that China could very well do and would probably be effective.

Let alone the silly idea of challenging multiple countries simultaneously as was proposed at the thread root. China tried that with rare earths and failed about as quickly as could be expected; as I recall they lost a quarter of the market in short order and backed off.

I would just emphasize something obvious about different cultures. Culturally, China is really long term while the West culture is anxious (not bad, just different) and looking for short term results. China does not have problems embracing challenging and strategic endeavours knowing that the result will come out eventually.

People say stuff like that all the time, then the most free market economy does well in the long term. Culture is important, but mainly as far as it permits people to freely help themselves prosper.

The West is made up of countries that often have 40%+ of their economy made up by government spending, ie, spending that wouldn't happen under a free market. That is far more a problem as far as raw economic outcomes than long- or short- term cultures. China will collapse if someone high up in the government attempts a 2nd Leap Forward, culture matters a lot in whether they tolerate a bureaucracy with that sort of power (history hint - don't tolerate that sort of power in the bureaucracy).

> China will collapse if someone high up in the government attempts a 2nd Leap Forward...

China has collapsed before and here it is. My observation was about time perception in different cultures not a pro-China anti-West rant. The perception of time can play in favor or against you but it is an important factor to take into account.

For example, the canonical startup culture is about scaling scaling scaling and exit in a short term while business cultures in China or Japan are different.

> The West is made up of countries that often have 40%+ of their economy made up by government spending, ie, spending that wouldn't happen under a free market.

How about Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Chile?

What what is the "correct" percent to spend? And, what non-microstate countries do you consider "free market"?

By the time you include: military, education, health, and infrastructure, it is very hard to be less than 25% for any highly developed nation.

> What what is the "correct" percent to spend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Singapore operates at 15% but doesn't really try to field a military

Singapore is one of the most militarized countries on the planet. For example, they currently operate more jet fighters than Australia (100 vs 94).

Yes! I think their national budget rule is that 1 in 4 Sing dollars must be spent on the military. That is an enormous fraction. The annual military budget exceeds 11B USD. With a population of ~5.5M, that is 2,000 USD per capita.

16% from Taiwan (18% from here) looks far too low. I find it hard to believe. Could it be they are measuring differently than the other three?

Other source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/727604/ratio-of-governme...

and don't forget defeating western world is a common dream of all Chinese people. they are fighting for this prospect until it comes true. this is helpful for encouraging people.

Pretty sure the average guy in China has more pressing issues than thinking about "defeating" some abstract concept thousands of miles away.

Normal nationalist propaganda can work well.

> China is in a recession

The Mainland Chinese economy grew more than 5% last year. It is no where near a recession.

Press release: "The Mainland Chinese economy investigated itself and found that The Mainland Chinese economy grew more than 5% last year."

yeah Chinese numbers are absolutely bollocks. there's some signal in how much they change. the absolute values are absolute... bullcrap.

Only government picking winners can succeed when incumbant leader is generations ahead in sector with generations of knowledge mote and 100s of billions of historic investment, a big % of which was also industrial policy. The alternative to gov effort is nothing. Which is better than nothing and no waste (not trying), but worse than something an waste.

But real question is, when has PRC government industrial policy failed? Essentially never. Especially under pressure. They're inefficient sure, miss deadlines, but overall they have either delivered and caught up on almost every strategic sector of interest, except leading edge semiconductors. They even caught up on turbo jet engines within last few years, it's within single generation of performance, behind on reliability (hence operating costs). Which makes commercialization an issue, but that's hardly factor when alternative is nothing.

EUV being "hard" is to be quanitified. Despite narratives to liken EUV to black magic, it wasn't an Manhattan project effort. Before first commercial EUV system was released ASML had ~10k employees, Zeiss SMT had ~3k, Cymer had ~1k. EUV developed without any pressing strategic urgency for 20 years. It wasn't a massive commercial/strategic undertaking. For reference, Boeing/Lockheed/Airbus had like 100-150k in 2010s.

Also PRC growing at modest 5% vs previous 8-10% with RE speculation. 5% because without excess RE, PRC still has many easy growth drivers for recession. and RE is hardly an exitential crisis that affects development in other sectors. Only idiots thinks PRC economy is just a giant RE ponzi scheme and nothing else. US S&T growing throughout GFC too. There's plenty of money and more importantly, finally talent, to go around. And economically it's dumb to not dumb stupid money in semi, when it's PRC's largest import by value. Indigenous semi will save trillions from going to western pockets/western strategic industries. Simply not paying western IP fees / rent pushes inefficient PRC semi processes to be into commercial viablity. It pays for itself.

> The EU does not have a track record of staying ahead when they tangle with Asians for tech manufacturing supremacy.

Depends on your definition of "tech", see e.g. Airbus.

I would say: "watch this space". There is a major aircraft manufacturing effort underway in China.

Parent is saying "don't be complacent".

I don't accept that example. The Aerospace industry is dominated by the Americans [0]. Challenging North America is a much harder proposition than challenge the EU. The EU doesn't have a competitive edge in that market and I doubt they'd stand up all that well if challenged, given that they were already challenged and didn't stand up well.

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

>see e.g. Airbus

One single successful company can't sustain the tech economy of a continent.

Even if they lost the commercial aviation crown after Boeing's flops, the US still has far more local champions with insane margins successful in other critical areas (military, web services, mobile, cloud, GPUs, AI, CPUs, etc) than the EU could ever dream of.

I'm sure working at Airbus or ASML is nice but those two companies can't employ all of EU's tech workers and fund EU's monetary deficits, especially since both are registered in the NL tax heaven.

Europe of today is nothing like the Europe of the 1970s.

In the mid to late 20th century, Europe has a deep & diverse industrial base. Public infrastructure projects like high speed rail were world leading. Western Europe had a military industrial base genuinely competitive with the US.

China is finished, behind the propaganda poster, have some pity and compassion.

According to some China has been finished for ten years now. When are they going to go bankrupt?

I don't think China is doing as well as many Chinese might believe but this doom of China is predicted every other year. Chinese companies are making strides in battery tech ( CATL ) and robotics ( DJI, Siasun )

demography is their doom

They can lose entire countries worth of people and still have a plenty of engineers to run circles around others.

maybe but a time bomb is still a time bomb

Why is China finished? They have manufacturing, talent, and a large internal market - and whatever financial problems they might be facing are rather virtual.

and no babies so demography is going to hit them really, really hard

How would that hit exactly look like?

GDP destruction. You cant have high GDP without people to sustain it. with all the consequences you can expect on its economy.

Wouldn't GDP per capita stay the same?

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

And Japan is finished decades ago?

> other countries will replicate the research

Why hasn't Japan done it yet? As I understand, ASML is the only maker of EUV etching machines at this point.

> other countries will replicate the research

How did that go for China and Russia during the last... 20 years of them throwing all their money and brain power at it?

No, ASML is guarding profound insights. I run a community for silicon valley veterans from areas like silicon design, manufacturing, hardware design, top-tier testing equipment, military and research lab prototyping, etc. The stuff ASML is doing is night on impossible, and even the brightest minds I know in that community find it hard to begin to imagine the minute details that really make ASML's tech stack a possibility as opposed to a flight of fancy.

There's a very good reason why the powers that be decided to move heaven and earth to get TSMC out of Taiwan and onto safer ground. This knowledge is at the very edge of what we know about physics and manufacturing. There's no replicating it, there's only losing it and starting again from scratch with no genius insight at all.

I hope ASML has something like an internal journal, like oldschool HP or Bell Systems, and one day they'll release it, because it will revolutionize what we know about a lot of practical engineering, even if by then it's 30 years behind the curve of what they're doing at that point.

The US dropped the atomic bomb in 1945. The USSR replicated their efforts by 1949, and both had ICBMs by the 1960s. The Chinese were late starters figuring the tech out by the 64s.

It is likely that nano-fabrication is harder than the atomic bomb - but betting on the Chinese not figuring this out just seems overoptomistic. They can bribe people. They can hire people. They can spy. They have some of the brightest scientists and engineers. They have enormous market, military and political incentives. They know what they are targeting and the tolerances they need. There is a good chance they crack this nut.

> How did that go for China and Russia during the last... 20 years of them throwing all their money and brain power at it?

ASML wasn't causing trouble until the Trump sanctions of 2018, up until then SMIC could just buy machines off them. The situation is different now and the research efforts will have kicked up a notch.

If it really was so easy then don’t you think every country would have their own ASML?

The economic incentives are there. They’ve BEEN there for decades. To think China doesn’t have an equivalent just because they haven’t cared enough yet is laughable.

> they can just limit the export of ASML machines only to companies that have a fab here in the EU

This kills the crab.

Specifically, that would force the development of a (probably taxpayer-funded) US competitor. Even at the cost of delaying the shrink cycle by a few years.

And delaying the shrink cycle would let China catch up.

Why? Setting up one of the n sites a company operates on EU turf would certainly be easier than avoiding ASML altogether. How would it force setting up a competitor? There's a huge difference between "can't use outside" and "can't use exclusively outside".

supply restrains create opportunities. you think China is waiting for the exports restrictions to ease up while doing nothing?

Is this restraining supply in any real sense? ASML will want to setup new factories, so saying "one of those needs to be in the EU" is more about directing the funding rather than forcing it to not happen.

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

> If they really want to, they can just limit the export of ASML machines only to companies that have a fab here in the EU.

US gets really unhappy and makes Taiwan ban exports of TSMC chips and products containing TSMC chips to EU. Oops.

EU would've to onshore the whole supply chain first. Probably a 100B-1T€, 10-30y endavour. Good luck with that.

Does not work like that, EU has big stake in the EUV-tech. I see no problem in forcing ASML to build a fab in Europe.

Why would ASML build a fab?

ups I meant TSMC

ASML makes lithography machines, they don't actually fab chips themselves.

ups I meant TSMC

They cannot, ASML tech is licensed from a US government (DOE) owned company - EUV LLC under full congressional oversight. The EUV light source is made in the US because they had to buy a US company for that too.

How does controlling one component give them control over the whole machine?

It happens to be a very important component, that's how.

With that argument, Germany also has "full control" over those machines, as the optics are a "very important component" manufactured by Zeiss.

The German government could probably dictate export terms too then. What's your point, that this is unfair or something?

Um yes?

Their entire EUV process is based on US research and patents. Their largest R&D center is now in the US.

I think it might not be completely unrealistic, after all, the goal of the Chips act is to support, to promote investments in the semiconductor industry. There are currently 7 factories in construction and 8 more in planning stages. This info is from December 2022, so by now I will assume something is already finished or in the final stages and possibly more plans have been made.

Also, setting high goals might not be a bad thing, even if you don't reach them you might still get far and do enough change to make a significant impact on something.

  This info is from December 2022, so by now I will assume something is already finished or in the final stages and possibly more plans have been made.

Ehr ... no. A fab takes about 3-5 years to build before you get "first silicon". The tail of that estimate depends on how easy you find skilled people.[1]

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18966/tsmc-delays-arizona-fab...

The unrealistic part is the 2030 and I agree with them

A semiconductor factory takes time to build and to ramp up

As a knowledge worker who immigrated to the Netherlands in 2022 and also lives in Eindhoven, these insights and discussions are super interesting to me. Unlike most of my nearby expat peers, I didn't move here to work at ASML or Philips, but now that I'm here, it's undeniable; the appeal of working for such companies is huge.

Obviously, companies want to make money, but the goals of the government have somewhat been at odds with funding growth and innovation in this sector because of some resentment on the ground from citizens. Tax legislation is all over the place and it's becoming more and more expensive to hire experts from around the world. I understand the sentiment to start hiring at home, but at a certain point, you have to take stock of what is available and get to work with what tools you have. Invest in education for your local population (lots of cuts in the past two decades) but don't punish individuals and companies trying to get work done and benefit your economy.

The infrastructure is basically all in place for Europe to foster its own Silicon Valley, with homegrown production to boot!, but it will come down to politics to make it a reality. These goals are good baby steps, but they need to ramp up quick if the EU is serious about becoming a global competitor.

Go for it. They're cutting edge and a good employer too.

Isn't the pay smaller compared to other big companies in NL?

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly, but if you mean the pay compared to US tech companies active in NL then I would say it depends very much on your specialization.

Engineer: 40k and up, team lead: 70k and up, project manager: 90k and up. I don't have much data on other roles but the 'and up' is the big factor, depends on seniority and specific skills. What really strikes me is that an extremely high fraction of the people that work there speak highly of their employer.

I'm sure Google or FB would pay more, especially if you're prepared to move the USA.

Other 'big companies in NL' can pay crap or good depending very much on the company, the field they are active in and the kind of job you are looking for so that's a bit too generic to do something with. HTH.

> Engineer: 40k and up [...] I'm sure Google or FB would pay more

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

The 'and up' bit is relevant. I know some people there that do large multiples of that figure.

Minimum wage in the Netherlands is about 26k a year so i sure hope it skews to "and up", you can make 40k at a helpdesk resetting people's passwords.

Primary school teachers make 40k to 72k in the Netherlands.

It doesn't make sense to be a software engineer in that country, unless you prefer looking at a screen all day over working with people.

Whoa I'm a senior enterprise it architect in Spain and I only make 60k lol. The Netherlands standard of living has really accelerated since I left there

That's truly sad if true and up to date. Your top of 70k for a staff engineer is a common senior salary at any software company in DACH area (working on totally boring tech like Salesforce or SAP). If that's for an industry as as unique as chip production, something is very off.

Where did you read top of 70k? He stated 70k and up for a team lead, not a staff engineer. 70k is the bottom for that role. Given the starting point is that for 'just' a team lead, presumably a staff engineer would start much higher, if they have that role.

I agree it's low given even a team lead role, but it depends on how many are on the low end of their pay scale.

Those salaries seem quite low compared to the Randstad. If these are true, then the answer is "Yes"...

Can you name me 3 tech companies in the Randstad that aren't consultancy that pay more than that?

I don't think these numbers are exceptionally high but they're not low either.

Source: Former SWE, current PM in the Randstad.

https://techpays.eu/europe/netherlands

Amsterdam's crypto fintech startups buy the souls of juniors for 73K. Juniors!

I work for the largest ISP (KPN) and started at €43k for my traineeship about 6 years ago. I'm now at €80k.

€40k is way too low, way way too low. People starting out in regular jobs in healthcare or education without too much education already make €45k.

€45k is 'modaal' in 2024, the modal salary for the entire country.

I think your numbers are about 10 years behind reality.

Booking Microsoft Google Amazon Flow Optiver Messagebird

Etc etc etc

I meant not just US comps but Spotify/Booking/etc... Was asking because was reading some comments in the past that the pay is not that competitive

Booking vs ASML? ASML any day. Even though Booking.com is nearby. I don't think what Booking.com does is remotely interesting whereas ASML is driving forward the whole of the semiconductor industry. That's a very easy choice. If it is just about pay then they are roughly comparable depending on your specialty, though Booking has less technical debt.

I understand the 'interestigness' but was asking particularly about the pay, because I've heard asml isn't exactly among the top payers, should research levels.fyi I guess to see for myself

ASML is well known for it's exceptionally high pay compared to other Dutch tech companies.

well, looking at the other comment in this thread, looks like the pay is kinda smaller compared to say Spoti/Booking/similars and not comparable with big tech

Throwaway because this is a touchy subject, but if you've worked/contracted/supplied for ASML the consensus is pretty much: cutting edge on the hardware end of things, hopelessly behind in the software department.

So great if you're a physics PhD, but if you're going in there as a software engineer thinking you'll be working with the latest and greatest, you'll be in for a shock. Not to mention that it's a huge ship that's very difficult to turn around in terms of introducing new technologies or paradigms. It's classic BigCorp politics all the way through.

> hopelessly behind in the software department

Yes, good point, but: because they're behind there is a ton of work to be done. This is where a good chunk of that employment comes from to begin with. Meanwhile their process is cutting edge, they pretty much define the market and that gives working for them opportunities hard to match with other employers in NL.

> don't punish individuals and companies trying to get work done and benefit your economy

Getting work done is one thing, why should locals support tax breaks for expats?

"Technology companies including ASML Holding NV and Adyen NV called on the Dutch government to maintain a tax break that seeks to attract expatriates to the Netherlands.

Ingrid Thijssen, head of the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers, said the government for budget reasons is considering shrinking or scrapping a rule that exempts 30% of an expat’s salary from income tax for five years."[0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-06/dutch-tec...

As a local I support this. Simply because having more smart people eventually benefits Dutch society and the long term is far more important than the short term. Usually this argument is based in some for of jealousy, but consider: an expat gives up their current life to chance it all on another, has stupendously high private costs if they want to keep up with their family and has to start all over again from scratch which also carries a lot of costs. Giving them a five year tax break seems like a smart thing to do to me.

Another supportive argument (especially for Europe, maybe not US) is that those knowledge workers have spent a considerable time, money, and effort to acquire that talent/skill-set, and unlike your own citizen your country spent *zero* euro paying for that.

Most European countries have heavy tax but very protective social services, including free education and universal healthcare, which only works because there's an expectation that when you come of age, you'll support the same system . So every citizen before turning adult (or paying taxes) are a net-debtor for society as a whole. Knowledge worker expats start at zero debt for you.

Worst thing for countries like this is if its citizen get educated there and the best talent just moves to greener pasture (SV etc).

If one can let go of their jealousy and see things practically, some tax incentive makes sense, but should be done smartly (not to cover rich people buying their way in while contributing zero long-term)

>some tax incentive makes sense, but should be done smartly (not to cover rich people buying their way in while contributing zero long-term)

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

> there's an expectation that when you come of age, you'll support the same system

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

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

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

I'm not looking from an individual perspective, but a balance-sheet perspective.

It's all lovey-dovey to see Free education as an investment and all, but at the end of the day, it's the accountant that will scratch his head looking at the red number on the balance sheet.

I share your idealism that education is more than just economics/investment and you shouldn't think how much you paid vs how much you receive, but when push comes to shove, and the accountant is knocking on your door in panic because the number have been red for decades, you have to face the reality and make (hopefully rational) hard decisions. And that's the part I'm talking about.

You can put your head in the sand and decades down the line to create a crisis like that of Greece, or you can see that to keep this system, you need to be smart and see things for what it is, and adapt the rules around it (such as incentivizing individuals, including from abroad, that is a net-contributor to want to come) while not losing the ideal.

But everyone having your ideal is fine by me. I'm the guy that got a free education(even paid) up to a Masters degree and moved country right after.

How exactly does that benefit the country outside driving up the cost of living for locals (which can't afford rents, houses or other services), since they actually have to pay taxes and are outbid by foreigners which don't really contribute that much to the tax base or have any intention of staying beyond the time in which they extract maximum wealth?

> driving up the cost of living for locals.

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

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

What kind of money are they spending?

Besides money directly transferred to wealth land owners via rents, some service owners, the rest goes back to savings to be spend after leaving the country. How are most netherlanders actually benefiting here?

Land owners do end up paying tax on all the money they earn no? And if people are living in a country, they still tend to spend at least 50-60% of it in the local economy itself. (Anecdotal numbers based on expat friends' spending there).

So the expats spend their home country resources for 20-25 years to get educated and be qualified enough to leave it and contribute to a different country's economy, taxes. Now the host country didn't spend any of it's resources in it's education, nor will it contribute to their healthcare - which typically becomes a burden only once they are older, by when they'd have left the country. Still seems like a net positive to me. Just can't put a number on it though. (wrt the 30% tax benefit).

So basically you're making living for locals unaffordable to trade of for tiny amount of taxes from expats and tiny amount of landowner taxes (which are avoided if possible via tax avoidance schemes)?

Sounds like a terrible tradeoff, isn't it?

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

> So basically you're making living for locals unaffordable to trade of for tiny amount of taxes from expats and tiny amount of landowner taxes (which are avoided if possible via tax avoidance schemes)?

Living for locals getting expensive is because of higher paying jobs - whether or not it is the immigrants who are helping build those industries - no? What is stopping local realtors building more affordable housing for more people? Imo. these immigrants are just accelerating the process of those industries being built.

And I meant more than just taxes. Expat friends of mine are spending 50-60% of their income in the local economy itself. So even if they are getting taxed at 20-30% lower rate for the first 5 years, they probably spent a lot more than the missing 20-30% taxes to gain the skills needed to move there. Do keep in mind that the employers won't be hiring them and moving them from elsewhere if they are not generating more revenue than they are taking in.

The people that hire expats are usually Dutch. Ask them why they hire expats, why they even make booths on other countries and do cold-calls (emails, linkedin) to convince them to go to NL. They're the ones with the answer of where the benefits are going to.

Why them and only them? And why should I "go somewhere" to ask questions instead of asking you in the hive mind why are you defending this? :)

> having more smart people eventually benefits Dutch society

Given that most of them don't stay for even five years[0], how does their temporary presence benefit society?

[0] "80% of expat employees use the facility for 5 years or less" https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-pe...

It's they stay that short, how much do they tend to rely on taxable benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having a foreigner stay in the long term could be worse, economically. Five years of taxation on highly-paid individuals - who are presumably producing far more than their salary to the companies paying them - is essentially free money for the country. You did not spend tax money on their education so far and are reaping all the benefits.

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

> You did not spend tax money on their education so far and are reaping all the benefits

That is one possibility.

Another is that the foreigner may have got the job instead of it going to a local. It's also possible that as a result of that the local may be unemployed and hence costing the country money.

In my experience Europe has a dramatic shortage of highly skilled workers, in technology and healthcare in particular. There are simply not enough qualified workers.

I also believe that the economy is not a zero sum game where there is a finite number of jobs. If the Netherlands suddenly absorbed 20k Silicon Valley workers, they would not simply replace 20k local workers. One of them might even create a company that ends up employing that amount of people.

>Another is that the foreigner may have got the job instead of it going to a local.

The birth rate is falling and well below replacement level already, and talent shortages are well-known to be a problem. It's too late to worry about protecting the jobs of locals.

> It's too late to worry about protecting the jobs of locals

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

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

The Netherlands already voted for a Eurosceptic, invoking similar rhetoric as you here - "replacement" of locals by foreigners, taking their jobs, etc. Interestingly, as is almost always the case in Europe, the places with fewer immigrants voted more harshly against them.

The question we should ask is whether this is rational or not. I think not. If the Dutch want to vote themselves into a Brexit, then so be it - the foreigners will go elsewhere, trade barriers will be erected to "protect" the local economy, and time will tell who will be ahead economically and culturally.

> as is almost always the case [..] the places with fewer immigrants voted more harshly against them

Well, the very opposite of that happened in the UK regarding the Brexit referendum:

"More than 50 per cent of the population growth in Lincolnshire in the last decade has been caused by immigration. Across the county, population growth has been 57,999, with 30,568 due to immigration - a total of 52.7 per cent."

https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/local-news/new-figur...

"More than three quarters of the people of Boston, in the county of Lincolnshire in the East Midlands of England, voted to leave the EU. According to the most recent U.K. census in 2011, Boston also has the highest proportion of eastern European immigrants of anywhere in the U.K., after an influx of EU workers to the area’s agricultural sector, earning it the label of Britain’s “most divided town.” Between 2004 and 2014, the town’s migrant population grew by 460%, and the proportion of residents of the Borough of Boston born in EU accession countries such as Lithuania, Poland and Latvia, stands at around 12%."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/28/in-boston-britains-most-pro-...

> The question we should ask is whether this is rational or not.

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

Hope of change isn't rational because it more than likely will be change for the worse, not change for the better. The idea that a demagogue is going to come along and as a strong man solve all of your problems is infantile at best and irresponsible at worst. Those that vote in wannabe dictators will get exactly what they deserve.

The main issue with populism and why people fall for it is a reliance on narratives over facts. If we discuss consolidated data instead of an anecdote, the conclusion is quite clear, and it shows that you are wrong: https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-areas-with-low...

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

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

> If the Dutch want to vote themselves into a Brexit, then so be it - the foreigners will go elsewhere, trade barriers will be erected to "protect" the local economy, and time will tell who will be ahead economically and culturally.

And plenty of locals will go elsewhere too. I for one. The morons that effected Brexit should be enough of an example that any other EU country that wants to go the same route has been amply warned about what that will do your country. It's amazing that so many people are utterly blind but then again, live long enough and nothing really surprises you any more.

Exactly where would you go? It's not like there's a lot of nice, developed nations on par with Netherlands that you can just pick up and move to. Perhaps some other EU nations, but many of those are electing similar people lately.

I live in a Scandinavian country. Our welfare system is structured such that people are expected to withdraw from the tax pool during the beginning and end of life, and contribute to the pool in between.

Adult immigrants will benefit less from the system than locals over their lifetime, but may end up contributing as much. Adult immigrants with advanced degrees who come to work here for a few years and then move out are penalized quite severely by the tax system, to the point where I think it makes very little sense to do that.

On my locally quite high $80k annual income (STEM PhD, 40yo), my employer pays an additional $36k in taxes and pension. Then I pay $22k in income taxes and 25% VAT on everything I buy.

Why would anyone with an advanced degree from China, India or the U.S. come to work here? Lowering the taxes for a couple of years following immigration, possibly proportionally to level of education, would encourage immigration and would be ethically defensible.

It works. After 6 years, I’m stuck in the Netherlands with a 50% tax rate and I love it.

For love, or if they have autistic children and a way to emigrate.

I did that (moved to a Scandinavian country), and it was an undeniably poor choice from a financial perspective - or rather a chain of poor choices that looked correct at the time. Paying almost 40% of my income that is rather low by global standards (although very high locally), while not planning to have children and never even once going to a doctor - none of this made any sense in the long run. I am the same age as yourself, and given the economic situation early retirement appears to be less and less feasible.

>> locally quite high $80k annual income (STEM PhD, 40yo)

I love Europe, both for the lifestyle and the safety net. But the salaries are kind of shocking for an American.

Healthcare, education and retirement/social security included.

And no tipping !

It's hard to really compare between the countries, but I feel like one should almost x2 an EU salary, to get an US equivalent, in terms of quality of life offered.

Plus, OP makes 6000 euros a month which really is not nothing.

6000 a month is huge by EU standards. Most of EU tech workers make way less than that. In Austria you can expect to take home about 3k a month. More is a rare outlier.

Outside of big-tech and FAANGS, pay in EU is super weak compared to US, like orders of magnitude.

It is huge, but still peanuts considering cost of living and prices for housing.

Many people just gave up to the dream of real estate ownership. Rent till the death.

With 6000 monthly how many years they need to save money for down payment for small apartment? Buying a house is not an option at all for working people.

I don't think that's true. America's home ownership hovers around 65% - in Norway it's 80%; Swedeon 65%; Denmark 59%; Iceland 73%. If anything, a higher percentage of Nordic citizens own houses than Americans.

Someone can live with parents and in statistics they will go into "home owners" bucket. Anyway I'm talking about possibility to buy with current salary and current price. If you like statistics - search for house affordability index.

> Someone can live with parents and in statistics they will go into "home owners" bucket

Funnily enough Nordic populations tend to leave home before Americans, so the American figure is even worse than they look.

Don't just tell people to look up figures - cite them here please, and why they should overrule the figures saying as many or more Nordic people own their homes than Americans.

Yeah but that pay is peanuts. None of that stuff costs even close to enough to justify taking less then half the pay.

Don't get me wrong the safety net component is really nice but as long as the goings good it's a hard sell compared to the USA.

A lot of things that (especially progressive) Americans love about Europe are at least in part financed by those lower salaries.

I work at said company with just a bachelors degree and make (way) more than that. I think its mostly PHD's that are paid shit comparatively to the US, lol. I've heard it's because there's little to no competition. If you have PHD's in certain fields, you can either work at ASML here or do something else unrelated to your PHD.

> I think its mostly PHD's that are paid shit comparatively to the US, lol.

No. The salaries at all levels in Europe are lower than in the US, regardless of a few outliers. That part is indisputable.

Both claims can be true (all salaries lower, PhDs paid poorly).

I don't have a PhD, but from what I've heard in the US, PhDs are paid pretty poorly there too, compared to their level of education and the level of work they do compared to, for instance, a software engineer with a Bachelor's.

Thats exactly my point

Does mcdonalds workers earn more than $20/h in the us? With 5 weeks of paid vacation.

>I work at said company

Which company is that? Parent didn't mention a company.

This may be out of date now, but friends in Singapore told me about their system and it sounded like a good idea.

They have a low base tax rate but permanent residents and citizens have to pay ~20% into a fund. They could withdraw from it to buy housing or for a pension. It could also be withdrawn if you leave Singapore.

It feels like that’s what we need in Europe.

At the very least Sweden has that in place: you can become income tax exempt for the first 5? years as an expert or similar specialist.

For me it's the question about what's inside my house and what's outside on the street. I'd like to pay more tax at the cost of having less inside my house if I know that the street outside is free of rubbish and crime with a suburban library within working distance, etc, etc, etc.

I want my society to be nice because that's where I live. And it's not about the exact amount I add or withdraw from the communal tax pool.

> The infrastructure is basically all in place for Europe to foster its own Silicon Valley, with homegrown production to boot!, but it will come down to politics to make it a reality.

This x1000. Germany, for example, created the worldwide market for solar in the first place with the EEG subsidies, and German companies were technology and market leaders for a long time.

Nah, I don't see Europe producing their own silicon valley - EU has over-regulated and a fragmented market. Too many regulations lead to less enterprises, while fragmentation (Germany, France, etc. with their own regulations + language barriers) prevents companies from growing big in their home soil.

Anecdotally, I feel like Sweden produces more startups that grow large worldwide. I presume, they have less regulations in place + English is more widespread I guess.

> I presume, they have less regulations in place

Why would you presume that? Working back from wrong assumptions and biases is never a good idea.

It's still true. Or, the regulations are at least efficiently enforced in Sweden, unlike in most countries in the EU. Inefficient, corrupt, or arbitrary bureaucracies are surprisingly common.

Do you have any sources or proof of that or are you working back from biases?

There are no "backwards bureaucracy" index, unfortunately, but that's what I hear. Sweden has a smooth system. To be fair, that seems to be common in Scandinavia. Germany is a mess for sure. Have heard nothing good about Spain/Italy. France seems to have a problem with powerful individual bureaucrats. Anyway, if you want something slightly more systematic, look at the Ease of Doing Business rankings, but keep in mind that it's constructed based on how the bureaucracies are supposed to work (legislation, etc.), not the actual experience of those using them.

Germany is a huge mess. Especially their constant desire to request paper copies left and right for everything.

There is an easy way to (statistically) double the amount of successful startups in Europe by almost any metric: include Israel in the count.

Why not include the US too while you're at it? Israel isn't in Europe.

I'd love to see the map they used in your geography class.

Depending on the metric, including Israel wouldn't even double the number compared to London, let alone the whole UK, _let alone_ all of Europe.

But I wrote "successful startups"...

Define "successful startups" and we can get some figures going.

> Anecdotally, I feel like Sweden produces more startups that grow large worldwide.

Yet, they are also part of the EU.

> some resentment on the ground from citizens

In many cases resentment is for low-skilled (or no skills at all) migration. Yet many european governments punish highly-skilled migrants yet don't listen to their citizens regarding actual issues on migration. Loose-loose situation for citizens, companies and governments.

Bert Hubert has a great series of posts about European Innovation & Technical Capabilities which cover this whole topic very well, here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/european-innovation-and-ca...

Random aside, but I love this news site. It's oldschool in the best of ways.

I agree. Speaking of old school, they scanned their first (1960) issue: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/read-first-ever-elect...

And almost unreadable on mobile.

Firefox Reader Mode makes it readable on mobile.

This is an existential goal, so what if it doesn't appear realistic.

Satisfying natural gas demand without The Pipe was also unrealistic.

Vader: "Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them. The Emperor does not share your optimistic appraisal of the situation."

You mean how we also built methane liquefaction infrastructure for Putin, after the war started ?

> According to SEMI, China will have 8.6 million 8 inch equivalent wpm capacity this year, Taiwan will have 5.7 million wpm, Korea will have 5.1 million wpm, Japan will have 4.7 million wpm, the USA will have 3.1 million wpm, Europe will have 2.7 million wpm, and S.E.Asia will have 1.7 million wpm.

In the not quite unrealistic scenario of tensions between China and US increasing, with China possibly annexing Taiwan, it is clear that chips will have to come from Europe, US, Japan and maybe South Korea for the Western market. I think most of these investments are considering that scenario, and then they have to tweak the numbers and make unrealistic estimates to sell that idea as a regular business plan.

Not something new.

In 2000 the EU Lisbon strategy announce that it would be "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion", by 2010

This can become very realistic by 2025 even. Just poach the brains at ASML, shower them with money (you know those fucking 50 millions bonuses that shitty CEO's enjoy nowadays), give them free hand for all decisions (both tech creativity and management) and voila! - goal achieved. Doubt will happen since this "goal" smells more like another "it's electoral year, let's make some noise in the press" rather than an actual objective.

Money doesn't motivate people for highly technical work, in that way. I suppose if by "shower them with money" you mean provide them with best in class tools then yeah, sure, but then best in class tools have to be built by dedicated and caring engineers. If you gave the average staff engineer an $xmillion bonus that wouldn't appreciably increase their work quality.

This isnt some 50ppl startup

There are long ass supply chains

The software engineers don't realize that cutting-edge integrated hardware is actually harder than typing a bunch of letters into a terminal. lol.

That's because they've been allowed to call themselves engineers for so long that they're starting to believe they are.

Industry is so hard that they often don't even hire from outside. You've either finished school and interned in or you're too difficult to retrain.

>That's because they've been allowed to call themselves engineers for so long that they're starting to believe they are.

What a take.

Is doctor telling bullshit about computers less doctor-ish?

I don't understand your question.

Software engineeers dont work directly with hardware, it aint their expertise.

You definitely can be good SE without understanding semiconductors

The problem is that you can also be a programmer without understanding any engineering at all, and most "software engineers" are just that.

This method would take 10-20 years if it works at all.

ASML has brains ( and brains are rarely for sale like that, it takes forever to get a large qualified workforce ), suppliers ( their machines are made of very high grade components that are nearly impossible to source ), and a solid head start.

This isn't a software company.

It's just more practical to work with them.

Amyone know what wpm units are?

Wafers per month?

Correct.

But Europe has ASML and Zeiss.

Most other parts of the world have them too, since that's where most of their sales go.

Realistically, ASML is controlled by the US Army. I am not saying this lightly. NATO's top priority in Europe is ASML, and NATO is mostly a US extension.

It's news to me that NATO's top priority is a company created 35 years after its own.

That it is news to you doesn't mean it isn't true. ASML is strategic enough that NL actually adapted some rules that wouldn't fly for any other Dutch company. ASML has to go to Washington to ask for export permits for items that it would be free to export under Dutch/EU law. That doesn't happen without a very good reason.

> That doesn't happen without a very good reason.

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

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

Yes, that acquisition jumpstarted ASML's present day lead in that domain. But they were the only party in the whole world at the time that could take advantage of that tech. So it was good for everybody but that did mean that some strings got attached.

But within NATO ASML is strategic, there is zero doubt about that.

Canon couldn't have?

No, they couldn't have. Canon makes nice stuff but they're nowhere near where ASML is.

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

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

Didn't know that !

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

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

> I know it's a running joke that EU is becoming an open air museum etc, while the US companies are pushing forward all the innovation.

This is mostly the anti-regulation crowd led on by the FT who are a bit stuck in their own US centric viewpoints. I'm fine with that, the amount of innovation done in the EU isn't anything less for that. The big difference is the ready availability of massive amounts of capital and that's mostly a SV thing, which Seattle excepted (MSFT) the US also hasn't been able to replicate. If you take that one outlier out the rest of the world is not too dissimilar.

"EU is becoming an open air museum" lol

It's not because it's "strategic" it's because the USA owns the actual technology in use. They have to ask the USA Congress because they don't own it simple as that.

That's pretty insane an assumption. If the US wanted ASML so badly they'd piecemeal buy the most important bits, not waste trillions on NATO.

Also of all things the only real European adversary could target, some fragile equipment and ephemeral IP isn't not one.

The opposite is what really happened. ASMLs EUV wouldn't have happened without strategically acquiring US entities.

Is the tech ASML has to get US export approval for coming from, or containing, tech from those acquisitions? Because if so, having to ask for US government approval is actually pretty standard.

That's a good question, the answer is - from what I've gleaned from various sources - that they wouldn't have been allowed to make that acquisition without some guarantees up front.

How much does a chip fab cost? Internet says $10-20B [cost]

The last paragraph says they "would need about a dozen new fabs to be built and in full volume production by 2030"

max out 12*20 = $240B, but they say total cost $500B. Supply chain really on par with fab cost? Hm.

[cost] - ChatG estimates $10-20 for SOTA on par with TSMC

- https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-semic...

- transitively sourced to a "third-party analysis by IBS" https://www.granitefirm.com/blog/us/2023/04/29/cost-of-chip-...

it costs $10-20B if you have the process figured out.

good luck building a working fab from scratch without a blank check 20-year R&D investment.

Yeah, saw that too, but it's quoted at $4-5B and 7-10 years

This is most likely going to fail.

Just like how the EU finance a hundreds of millions of dollars for a Google competitor that we haven't heard of today. [1]

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-16...

Yeah I've worked in a couple of startups in the UK now that I was surprised to discover got most of their funding from the EU. E.g. Ultrahaptics (which was an obviously flawed idea) got most money from Horizon 2020, not customers.

Kind of weird that these wastes of money are never in the news, not even during Brexit.

Are they a waste of money? Did they stimulate the startup economy, upskill workers, etc? Were there no spin offs? Nobody learnt anything?

Or simply provided employment to people who then paid for other things in the economy.

At least Ultrahaptics was. It may have stimulated the startup economy, but you can do that by funding startups that have realistic ideas.

And yes, often you can easily tell if an idea is a non-starter. It isn't the case that "you never know".

Want to bet you've never heard of most of the companies that benefited from vast amounts of US government research grants that helped lay the foundations for much of the US tech industry?

Most people won't have heard about most the successful companies that resulted from the combination of military spending and research grants, much less the many failures on the way.

If we knew how to pick the successes ahead of time, there's be no point in gov funding, or in venture capital firms, because they'd be able to go into any mainstream bank and loan finance their entire business with regular business loans.

Government research funding almost inherently should have a high failure rate, because they offer the most value where they enable research that is so high risk they can't get funding elsewhere both because of the occasional big win, but also because of the side effects of creating eco systems.

That's not to say that doesn't also lead to lots of stupid projects getting funded, and lots of mismanaged funding programs that deserve scrutiny. But it's also always easier to recognize the stupidity after the fact...

Well said !!

I mean no one in the USA cares because the USA has accomplished amazing things with that money like say the internet.... Spending in Europe hasn't accomplished a fraction of what the same dollar has done in the USA. It's not clear why.

> Like say the Internet

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

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

There were a couple of global contribution during the development why pick literally the least valuable and most simple to replace one to highlight? We even had perfectly serviceable alternative at the time.

Spending of those dollar amounts in the US started decades earlier, and coincided with massive amount of military spending e.g. on radio and signals tech going back to WW2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You'd be surprised how many "commercial successes" in USA (essentially entire Silicon Valley and before that, Route 128) were driven by big bags of government money at a time when considerable portion of rest of the world would continue to repair and rebuild things wrecked by war.

It's a bit of a weirdly worded article. I think what actually happened was the German government funded it. The EU approved of them doing it, which had to be checked under the EU state aid rules. This is very different to what you stated.

https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/28084-eu-clears-state-ai...

At the end it is always the same type of scheme. The search engine story made the news because it sounded so ridiculous.

The EU (and its members) does that for every key technology. For cloud they did it at least 2 or 3 times.

I vaguely remember a bunch of alternative "clouds" were created so they have a sovereign cloud, and then bought back by a big telco linked to the state.

Then the big telco have it managed by Huawei [1]

[1] https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-ser...

Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to.

This is how governments protect their countries, they have a back up plan. If access to MS Office, Oracle, AWS etc was restricted by the US government, or began to be priced unreasonably high, effective replacements are ready to go live. Until then it makes sense to stick with the ones everyone else is using

> Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to.

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

Politicians setting unrealistic goals? Well I never….

The US has what, 10%, according to that.

> The goal of the EU’s $43 billion Chips Act of achieving a 20% world market share for European producers by 2030

The only feasible solution I could think of is let Taiwan joined the EU.

So you don’t have to click through:

“ The goal of the EU’s $43 billion Chips Act of achieving a 20% world market share for European producers by 2030”

One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption. Anyone remember the glorious 5-year plan to build a European Google? I think they named it Quaero.

> One wonders how much of it is incompetence and how much just plain corruption

Well, one doesn't need to look very long at Von der Leyen to work out it's probably both.

Look at what she did before becoming EU Commission president ("Among friends and foes alike, von der Leyen’s stewardship of the [German] defense ministry, which she [..] headed since 2014, [was] regarded as a failure."[0]), and look at how she ended up with the job of EU Commission president. The best (worst?) bit is that she wasn't even a candidate for the job she got.

I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets.

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...

> I have several ex-RAF friends, and their joke back then was that von der Leyen had more children than her ministry had working fast jets.

What a dumb joke, besides the RAF being British, I wonder if your friends had made the same joke if she had been a man.

> besides the RAF being British

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn't make the joke less dumb.

It's not my joke. Perhaps the joke makes some people feel uncomfortable. Jokes can be like that.

If a NATO member had only 4 (four!) fighter jets ready for use out of a fleet of 128 (one hundred and twenty eight!)[0] we should also feel uncomfortable. That's not something to joke about.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-luftwa...

It's you posting it here, not your friends from the RAF.

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

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

Indeed not. Perhaps that's the reason the joke is funny?

We could sanitise the joke to become "Germany's defence minister had more fingers than working fighter aircraft" I suppose. Would that be better?

The real issue is VdL's history of failure, not the jokes about it.

No, the problem with the joke is that it doesn't just make fun of her, it also uses the fact that she is a woman and mother to make that joke. This plays into sexism and misogyny by implying that both of these things made her unfit for office by default. Note how the "sanitized" version using fingers instead of children doesn't really have any oomph to it - the sexism is not just window dressing, it's what makes the joke work.

Jokes are not "just jokes". Jokes play off culture and reinforce or challenge it. People having a low number of fingers doesn't do either of those things so at that point it stops being a joke and becomes a dry empirical claim ("they have at most ten working aircraft"). Stand up comedy is an art form and takes considerable effort, creativity and repetition. Dismissing jokes as "just jokes" as if they are shallow brain farts is like saying poetry is "just words". Jokes are worth analysing and being dissected just like any other artform and even if they're genuinely created by "amateurs" they're informed by the culture that surrounds them.

VdL is a terrible politician, I strongly oppose her value system and I think she does indeed have a history of failure. But that's not how the jokes are framed, that's merely the setup to the jokes. The jokes wouldn't work with a male politician because the punchline is that she's a woman and mother.

You can agree with the punchline but denying that it's sexist or misogynist (in the sense of "women and mothers are unfit as politicians") is silly even if you don't like those labels being applied to your sense of humor. Jokes are inherently political because culture is political. It's why reactionaries will say progressives aren't funny and why progressives will roll their eyes at jokes about trans people and say "that's just the one joke".

Clever comedians will actually use this and drop off-color jokes on audiences in the middle of a show to reveal their own hidden biases when they "accidentally" laugh about a joke they'd normally claim to be appalled by. But there's a fine line between doing that to lampshade dishonesty and just telling those jokes. And even then it requires a cooperative audience. As an example you can look at Chris Rock who felt he had to retire his routines that used the n-word because it emboldened racists rather than making fun of them.

> problem with the joke [..] denying that it's sexist or misogynist

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

> VdL is a terrible politician

At least we agree on that :)

> I strongly oppose her value system

Does she have a value system?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women can be misogynist. What is your point? We live in a culture still filled with everyday misogyny and sexism (and racism and other forms of bigotry). Misogyny or sexism isn't some innate character trait like a gene deficiency or something you get from exposure to gamma rays. It's something you do and behavior is specifically influenced by the culture around you.

There are still comedians "the ol' ball and chain" routines and how they hate their wife, basically, and there are still women and men who laugh at it (usually for different reasons).

There's a well-known phenomenon where women in positions of power will actively sabotage women under their authority and "kick the ladder down", often to avoid risking their position by being seen as "another woman" rather than "not like the other women". Even the "girl boss" trope liberals seem to enjoy so much is usually based on superficiality and suppressing womanhood. It's very much about "carving out a space" for some women who do the part and try to fit in with the men without challenging the need to fit in with the men in the first place.

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by citing more reasons to dislike VdL when I literally already told you I strongly dislike her. My disdain for her goes all the way back to when she was the figurehead for Internet censorship (i.e. DNS and IP blacklisting) and tried to justify the extension to government power with "fighting CSAM" and implying anyone opposing her project was a pedophile.

When your joke only works because she is a woman and mother, it's extremely likely that your joke is sexist or misogynist because it relies on sexist or misogynist subtext to work. "She has more children than working fighter jets" only works because she is a woman and a mother. You could make that joke about a man but it would have very different subtext, i.e. a man having a lot of children implies being an irresponsible womanizer: you could have made that joke about Berlusconi for example to build on his reputation for promiscuity and irresponsibility. It would be a very different joke.

> Does she have a value system?

Yes. She's a "liberal conservative". I realize this sounds nonsensical in the more widely used American sense of those words but it's a thing. I think the US equivalent would be something akin to neocons, expanding state authority while simultaneously reducing social services and deregulating markets. She luckily hasn't been very successful or coherent in practice, though.

The fact this needs to be explained in such detail and then the OP still doesn't get it is baffling, but thank you for taking the trouble.

Thanks. I'm okay with taking the downvotes for comments like this. There's a reactionary political bent on HN and you get more karma from participating in it than pointing it out. It's all fun and games until someone points out we're not rational actors in a vacuum.

> There's a reactionary political bent on HN [..]

There really isn't!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

HN on aggregate tends right libertarian, which is politically neutral with regards to the usual US "libs vs conservatives" political dialog. For every socialist I can show you a dozen Georgists, for every anarchist I can show you a dozen "anarcho-capitalists". There is some general resentment against concentrations of power (e.g. lobbyism favoring large corporations) but an unquestioning faith in the systems that bring it about (i.e. "small government" and "free markets"). There is lively debate around topics like Elon Musk, cryptocurrencies, online censorship and protectionism vs free global trade, but all of this happens through a lens of right libertarianism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And one of the biggest

We gonna find ourselves looking very much like Russias army

I find it funny.

It wasn't to compete with Google: "Quaero was not intended to be a text-based search engine but was mainly meant for multimedia search." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero. Its budget was also less than 1% of this chip initiative's.

I think you mean Qwant ?

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/alternative_search_pr...

We just aren't serious about this. If we were, Google and Microsoft would be banned in the EU. (Including other companies which are receiving a lot of money to prioritize Google or Microsoft software, like Mozilla and Apple.)

And it's not like there aren't other reasons to ban them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II

EU has no money for anything. We're "commies".

ASML already announced they're leaving the Netherlands. No 100% with those words, but they already know where they're going.

And where is ASML leaving the communist European block to? If it is so clear, you should be able at least to tell us the destination. Props if you link to some sources confirming the future move.

The only two places I can think of:

Germany (Berlin) (still EU, but at least there's a better climate). Enough space, people, life it good, lots of their partners are there.

Otherwise: Switzerland.

No sources.. But a highly technical CEO of such an important company does not 'threaten' our country to leave without actual plans and intention. I've said many times, if ASML was American, its marketcap would be 3-4x.

Shell, Unilever, KLM all left the Netherlands already.

You cannot simply propel industry with windmills. So leftist Europeans pipe dream

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