Hacker News Reader

Comment by maeil | Hacker News Reader

The irony is palpable.

For many years, FAANGs and the likes have made billions across the world without hiring any significant amount of people in nearly all of those economies. Zero profit for the non-US countries. Take a random one, Denmark. Google and Apple sure have been making great money off of the Danes. What has Denmark gotten in return for it? Nothing. It's all gone towards (generally US) investor returns, and US salaries.

Sure, make it illegal for US companies to hire boatloads of people abroad. At the same time, other countries should ban those US companies from operating there.

View on HN

Is there some law that prevents the people of Denmark from buying Apple or Google stock? If not, then anyone there can make as much from stock appreciation in those companies as any American.

Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition.

If Google is making money off of people in e.g. Denmark, it's probably also giving them something that is really valuable to them, like access to the Google search engine.

So I don't actually think Denmark would be better off by banning doing business with Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.

> Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition.

It absolutely does not [1]. This kind of blanket statement is on the level of "market intervention is *always bad, the free market solves everything". Wishful Raegan-era thinking.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42567145

Why would Party A trade with Party B if Party A is not benefiting from it?

Google has an office in Copenhagen. They also have a data center. Apple has an office in Copenhagen.

This is a bad example.

Google hired some VM specialists who worked out of their Aarhus office. I think they used their research for Android.

I don't know if Google still does this, but we have (or had) a large number of people working on CS problems which they could use working at our universities they could attract.

It's negligible. Pick a random different country if you're co nvinced Denmark is an outlier. Compare vs. their jobs in the US. Now compare that to per-country revenue. Quite simply, the % profit margin per country, looking at their expenditures made in each country (incl. salaries paid in that country) vs their revenues there.

And then compare it to "what if Google wouldn't operate at all in Denmark", how much jobs that would create.

The great news is this isn't a hypothetical that can be waved away with "we don't know", because we have a golden example in South Korea, where the 10+ year delay that Google had in gaining market share has resulted in tens of thousands of local jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Could every country have its own Google a la South Korea? Maybe not. But plenty could.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com