This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades. You can't point me to one other industry which enjoyed as much success.

Of course, Europe couldn't care less - they never had a real startup industry in the first place.

This culture has been riding a wave of innovation, a wave driven by big chip companies (e.g. Intel, NVidia, Arm), big SaaS companies (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Google), big content / ads companies (e.g. Facebook, Google), big hardware companies (e.g. Apple, Samsung, recently Google and Microsoft) and big software companies (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google). From that big farm of company-flowers which live for only a couple days, founded on the most fragile of practices, only a handful actually produce some service that has any interaction with the general public, and these businesses' most innovative thing was to app-ify a thing that we used to do day to day (which I do not look down upon, but it's no "innovation"). Examples are Uber (however controversial), AirBnB, Etsy, etc., if we exclude those who feed themselves exclusively on users' private data (Facebook, partially Google, Twitter, etc., but these are not businesses whose customers are the general public, their customers are the ad publishers).

This kind of US-centric "only we know how to do startups" is tiring. And wrong, as there are in fact hubs here full of startups - you just don't generally hear about them online because it really is incredibly focused on everything American. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but it is important to keep that in mind before you form opinions that are frankly a little distant from reality.

I actually think it is exactly the opposite: the culture like this was killing the innovation. That is reason biggest companies are ads companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

And that is the reason companies like Oracle and other will still make big $$ - why? Because you cannot "break things and sell ads" and do "delete=1" when you are developing RDMBS.

I find this pretty rich. Breaking things and selling broken stuff to clients, and then turning around and selling them expensive consulting services is pretty much the biz-model of Oracle.

And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]"

So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)

The other side of this is that the GDPR puts all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations to speak of in front of a choice to either stop doing business with a huge market or actually stop ignoring privacy concerns.

The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. Most EU countries already had fairly solid privacy regulations, some more, some less, but certainly more than the US (generalization, but that's the trend). If you were a company from a different jurisdiction, you could mostly skirt those regulations (up to a point) because they weren't enforced in most cases. Not so much if the regulation is from your home country.

With GDPR, actual EU startups now play by the same rules as non-EU companies who do business in the EU. If a US startup wants to be international, they'll have to compete with EU startups on a more level playing field now.

> The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past.

I can easily say that if I had to choose between a US service and an EU one, from now on the answer is almost always the EU one.

> all those companies from jurisdictions with no privacy regulations

What gives EU the right to legislate in those jurisdictions? What non-privacy laws will EU enact in non-EU countries?

> If a US startup wants to be international

Well I have no intention of being international now, but I still have to play by EU's rules on the possibility that I might ever want to do business there.

driving innovation while having the biggest number of homeless people in the streets and no health care.

Not even close[0]

There is healthcare in America[1]

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

[1] Doesn't actually need a source

Holy shit. As a Canadian who moved to the US, that was quite surprising.

Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem.

I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...

Yeah I'm not sure. The presence of homeless people seems to be far more a function of how aggressive the government is at removing them than anything else. Melbourne is absolutely packed with homeless, but Sydney far less so, and I have a feeling it's not because of Sydney's cheap rent[0] or a lack of broken homes in the city. I suspect such a business oriented, conservative city is just more tough on its homeless.

[0] Sydney rents are insanely steep

I don't think the commenter meant healthcare as in hospitals and medicine being available; AFAIK the US has nothing like what most other countries has where it is facilitated for most or all citizens to access health care at minimum or no costs.

The commenter is responsible for the disconnect in their hyperbole as far as I'm concerned. America has a mix of systems including Medicare and Medicaid which are actually very similar to the systems we have in Australia. I just got out of hospital recently and didn't have to pay a cent, and at that moment I was really glad for the system we have in some ways, even if it doesn't totally gel with my professed ideology.

However if I were earning any kind of money at all, I would have paid out the nose for it, with some small help from the Government. The system here is actually very similar to what the American system would be if it functioned better. Medicare subsidises but doesn't eliminate costs for many low-income people, you pay for private insurance if you have money or else you get a big fat tax which is worse than any insurance fees. The Australian system is definitely nicer if you are absolutely dirt poor (by Western Standards) like me, but otherwise it's pretty much a correctly functioning version of what the American system aims for, ideologically and conceptually it actually doesn't differ much. I'm not sure why ours seems to work so much better.

Firstly, that list is useless because you're comparing wildly different definitions of "homeless". The US was counting

> The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.

> Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.

While the UK was counting

> The study, by housing charity Shelter, found that 307,000, or one in every 200, people are now either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.

Temporary accommodation includes bed&breakfast, staying with friends, emergency shelters. There are about 5000 people sleeping rough in the UK at the moment in a population of about 60million.

And then look at the countries who have worse homelessness than the US.

Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Indonesia, China, Haiti, Venezuela, India, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Ukraine.

the land of the 98% free!

> This culture has driven innovation of the last 2 decades.

So what? Communism turned feudal Russia into a world superpower in less than 2 decades. Do the ends justify the means?

Not making a moral argument. @gkya's comment paints a picture where entrepreneurs unhappy with GDPR are perhaps just a small contingent of incompetent amateurs who shouldn't be doing business in the first place.

While I, in agreement with OC/OP, see it as a threat to the entire industry.

Nearly, what I think is that, those unhappy with GDPR are either malevolent actors or incompetent people. And I think the bar to entry to the industry should be elevated (while bar to entry to learning ones way to that bar and to hacking should always be as low as possible; but you can't hack together and end user product, period).

BTW I'm not in the US not in a country where GDPR is effective. But I CRAVE that my country implement the same measures or better. Unfortunately that's unlikely.

Finally, it's a threat to the bad part of the industry. And then there are those who exaggerate the situation while they are not really affected by the regulation. But the hysteria will diminish and hopefully most of the bad actors wil either change their business or just go out of the industry, searching for other places to exploit (which hopefully they will not find).