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Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by heipei on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:35AM (#23427353)
You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption.

I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.

Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by ChuckNorris89 on Friday June 05, 2020 @08:28AM (#23427710)
>family-owned business where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives

Maybe that was the case in the '50s to '80s but I recently worked at two small family owned German companies that were leaders in their niche and their primary objective was to make their owners rich, not their employees happy(Kununu employee reviews reflected that). After that, I learned my lesson and moved to $BIG_CORP where at least I know it's all about the profits and they don't pretend to be your family as an excuse to pay you peanuts.

Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by davedx on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:57AM (#23427466)
Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by dukeyukey on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:02AM (#23428626)
Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by j4yav on Friday June 05, 2020 @12:26PM (#23430314)
In my experience the Netherlands is quite a bit like the US. Not as much VC available, but businesses tend to be pretty agile and willing to pivot to get results. All normal day to day government interaction is digital and works well. ING is a good example of a very big Dutch company that seems to do pretty well with innovation.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by davedx on Friday June 05, 2020 @12:38PM (#23430452)
Germans have a lot of legal requirements, red tape, old ways of doing things. Netherlands and UK are more streamlined, more parts of govt and daily life are digital, bank systems are more modern.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by goatinaboat on Friday June 05, 2020 @02:45PM (#23432239)
When Europe does do fintech it’s just really sleazy and exploitative, like Revolut, so better off without.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169

Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by joelbluminator on Friday June 05, 2020 @08:26AM (#23427692)
There's a lot of criticism of the US/VC model, sure it brought tremendous success stories but it's not clear if the model actually works.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by rorykoehler on Friday June 05, 2020 @11:04AM (#23429365)
Ye I’m not a fan. All it does is entrench existing inequality. A few new millionaires are minted but I’m interested in solutions that provide an economic floor for everyone so we can all bootstrap if we want to instead.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by Nasrudith on Friday June 05, 2020 @12:28PM (#23430336)
The distribution is a result of VC being a lotto that pays out well enough that not only is it not a bad idea to play it in terms of return on investment. Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to "buy every ticket". Which means to "win" for a VC they need to win big enough to outweigh their massive pile of failures.

Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company.

The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.

Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by rorykoehler on Friday June 05, 2020 @03:08PM (#23432557)
Sorry you lost me regarding why the economic floor is a bad idea. I like advancement too but not at such a high human cost. It is bad value for money and tbh I'm not sure how much advancement is actually taking place as we move beyond the breakneck innovation phase of this technological paradigm shift.
Re:Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech s... by bergstromm466 on Friday June 05, 2020 @08:55AM (#23427927)
According to some: "It works great!" Thanks to Intellectual-Property-Monopoly Valley the US government has access to all computers all over the world (Intel ME etc.), as well as backdoor access into Google, Facebook etc. [1] [2] [3]. And Palantir works to 'support Homeland security'.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...