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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

The main food deliverers (Uber Eats clones) here are Dutch and Swedish. The place you can find someone's apartment to stay in temporarily is German. The Fediverse was invented here, in Germany. Ride-sharing companies are Estonian, German, and some others I don't remember.

There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it).

Oh and the b2b companies... like ASML and SWIFT.

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You conveniently left our everything else I mention and those companies aren't really leading. Bolt for example has an edge because everywhere in Europe they're been killing Uber or limiting it hardly, and in some countries it's still the case.

In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly)

P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)

If you're arguing that Europe killed Uber by making it follow common-sense regulations, you could just ask well argue that the USA killed Bolt by not.

Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.

It's not common sense regulation. It's anticompetitive regulations. You're happy to ride a taxi that often times takes a longer route to steal you a few extra euro? Are you happy that a taxi driver earn 500-600-700 euro a day when the avg salary in some EU countries is 1.5k a month? Are you happy that they don't take credit card payments and accept (often time) only cash? Are you happy that they evade taxes? Are you happy to go inside a car and don't know how long and how much your ride is going to cost? Are you happy that often times in touristic cities they refuse to use the meter?

You seem to know well what Europeans want but I bet you never got scammed by a taxi driver. Europeans like everybody want to simply pay less by having an open market that allows the best players to offer services without artificially inflating the price because that specific category some privilege.

If you claiming that Europe is not decaying probably you're living in the wrong Europe.

Europe is decaying faster than you think.

You seem to be listing a bunch of things that are illegal in Europe. Yes, that was my point. Do you want to suffer from all these things that are legal in the USA and not in Europe?

They do regularly in Europe as well, just don't act like it's something that doesn't happen

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