They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.

This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.

You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.

The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.

Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.

If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.

Older article, but seems like things are going pretty ok?

The Taiwanese are doing a lot to try get it up but all the reports on the ground level are rough.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...

USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.

I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.

Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.

You'll do that because of national adversity?

People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.

Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.

And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.

I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.

Very disingenuous counterpoint.

Also corner shops should be allowed everywhere.

People should be able to build where they want.

We can have reasonable restrictions around noise and pollution, but not on the land use itself.

Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).

The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.

The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.

I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.

This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?

Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.

That's a conspiracy theory and a half!

A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard). However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (e.g. lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules.

If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro

Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.

*could.

Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.

And Boeing's rampant carelessness proves European laws can be beneficial. "Hurr durr, how about them European laws" is a low-effort comment that adds nothing to the discussions.

The argument that a slack regulatory environment is sufficient was disproven when the US government subsidized new fabs via the CHIPS Act (a new law!), and then went further and partially nationalized a failing Intel to prop it up.

And there’s a supply chain, with packaging often separate from fab.

It seems like a reasonable objection but not a showstopper.

Nobody said that. That is a strawman

For those unaware, Mo Chang rarely gives interviews, let alone to English language media. This Acquired podcast episode is pretty incredible: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang

Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor in TSMC (both in money and IP):

Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History

It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.

The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers. https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab

European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.

GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.

The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.

[ Intel has yet to prove that it can sustain itself as a foundry for third parties, and until they do, I have a hard time believing the massive culture shift required across the whole company can be achieved without splitting the company up into separate parts. Samsung has fallen behind, but at least they have diversity across a variety of markets including HBM. Neither have leading edge fabs in Europe, so everything continues falls back on TSMC. ]

I think one of the big differences is that the "Gate Contact Area" simply isn't the smallest "feature" anymore - but the ITRS that defined those names called it "feature size", not "gate size" from the beginning intentionally.

You probably could make a transitor with a gate size of a similar order to the "feature size", it'll just perform awfully to be completely useless.

So you seem to know more about ASML's business than the ASML executive quoted in this article.

1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).

2. Executives lie all of the time.

Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.

even more so it is reasonable to assume their (executive) statement was a simplification ignoring small for the overall statement irrelevant exceptions

like ignoring there being a factory build which is small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips and is for the car industry only

because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU

Will lie for billions of taxpayers money.

oddly cheering for this but I doubt it will end well

* https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...

When China leads chip making the rest of the world is just vasal states.

It's well known tech that is used globally, just not to that degree as yield and throughput goes way down

they'd just tell all their export ships to turn around and stop all exports

US would collapse in 30 days

it would be like the blockade US is doing to Cuba except 90% of every product we use and they wouldn't have to fire a single shot

they could also sell off the billions in US bonds and other assets

US economy would be utterly destroyed, we'd never recover because even the middle-class would be living out of their cars (now dead because all the parts for them are made in China)

In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.

Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.

Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.

Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.

Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).

Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.

I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.

How many people do you think could conceivably work in manufacturing? And who buys all those manufactured goods? The social problem isn’t solved by quotas.

India's data collection is much worse than China's but we can also look at other metrics like exports. India exports less in total value than a resource-starved, tiny nation like South Korea.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/3aba98a3-cba1-49d8-bcb4-869...

Thus, India could at least add another 100 million manufacturing jobs, along with an additional 100 million service jobs to support manufacturing in logistics, trade, maintenance, customer support, insurance, and food service.

Given the structure of Indian constitution which gives very little power to local governments to raise revenue and build infrastructure, India is structurally limited as of now from ever becoming as developed as China, let alone western countries.

I see India becoming more like Brazil than China. That's not necessarily a bad thing since even Brazil is 4-5x richer in per capita than India.

That’s great, but does not translate well to ..say.. manufacturing modern chips or jet engines.

US patents are only valid in the US. India is not "ignoring" anything by not following foreign laws. Can someone with an Indian patent enforce it in the US?

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

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

"A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."

So, actually, No.

Depends on what you mean by "a little behind". Reading Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China) made me think otherwise.

I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.

IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.

Yes, that sums it up. The biggest problem is government officials who get in the way of starting or running a business, ask for bribes, and generally make it impossible to do any non-software non-backoffice business work. Plus taxes.

- As another commenter has noted, modern China is Communist only in name.

- Your analysis of how simple creating new wealth is, or how people only stay poor when a "gun forces them to" makes it painfully obvious that you and I grew up in different wealth classes. It's not that simple to acquire wealth, and poverty is a massive feedback loop. Wealth compounds, and so does poverty. This is the nature of capitalism.

Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.

> Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.

No shit!

However, when I discuss the issues with wealth distribution here in America, no one goes, "But India has a caste system!"

Yet apparently pointing out issues with India's wealth distribution, I'm met with deflection, blame games and a horde of people patronizingly assuming without cause that I live under a rock and have no grasp of global economics, politics or history.

Comparing the lack of a legal caste system because “of some sort” to a legal framework is quite the leap.

Coloreds are still hugely overrepresented in the criminal "justice" system, they're still much poorer on average, are still disenfranchised en-masse through gerrymandering and voter ID requirements that accept shooters' club membership cards but not ID cards poorer blacks might possess, etc.

For all intents and purposes, the USA has a caste system that has evolved from an earlier system that was apartheid in all but name.

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

For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.

Seems like it isn’t a system worth defending. China has so many issues, it also blows my mind that people around here defend and praise China like they’re doing good things. They aren’t.

There are some pockets where this is not true, but they are exceptions.

And those comments aren't defending it.

Upward mobility is available in India, too. But remember that to have "upward mobility", there needs to be place at the top. For a country which has been under hundreds of years of regressive colonial rulers, there is not much place at the top.

Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.

India's government jobs, elite engineering and medical seats have a legal 50%+ quota for "lower" castes people. Did you know that? So, I am saying, 50%+ students graduating ALL elite engineering and law and medical and nursing schools, etc. are from these "lower" castes. Did you know that?

I have always been taught that greatness is in work (karma), and not in birth (janma), and honestly I have seen it practiced.

A "lower" caste High School teacher gets visibly much more respect in our society than a random priest from "higher" caste.

Not to say it isn’t a problem. But race is still a problem elsewhere too.

Yet, we also outlawed slavery and Jim Crow laws in the US and yet my local prison in the Deep South is filled with 90%+ Black people. We outlawed redlining and yet the modern credit score system does an excellent job of continuing the purpose of preventing Black people from getting loans and leveraging their wealth.

All this to say, my understanding is the sentiment and infrastructure are still in place regarding India's caste system.

This is like saying America's racial quotas (or former ones) put you in a 'bucket'. Caste is essentially race / genetics. You are not bucketed, it is simply a reality of your ancestry. Of course you can't change it.. you cannot change your genetics. This is a ridiculous goal post.

Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.

If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.

Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.

I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.

The people who suffered are dead. The people who committed discrimination are dead. Yet the whole nation has to accomodate. Reservation must be done on Pro-Rata basis. If one state like Kerela is advanced, doesn't do caste discrimination and another like Bihar is very much into it. Then only Bihar state should reservation, not whole of India.

> Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.

I agree and will go further to point out that the "rags to riches" story of the US is mostly a fairytale propped up by a few exceptions. I grew up impoverished and have seen over and over how it affects the trajectory of my life in ways out of my control. Any remarkable success on my part would be in spite of the American economic system, not because of it.

As for changing caste... You only need to reference it if you're seeking government benefit. If you don't care about it, stop keeping track, and don't share it with your kids... They'll never know and just get assigned general or whatever they call it. Of course, since caste is literally genetic, anyone doing a genetic test will quickly figure it out. However a gene test is not enough for seeking caste benefit status if I understand correctly, so this is as erased as you can get

> people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems

This is a straw man; The US is a shit show. China has major problems. The topic is wealth distribution in India.

> While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better ... outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly

I am allowed to study and comment on the state of any government I please. Being from the US doesn't change my ability to think critically and again, the topic of my comment is not "a benchmark of all countries fairly", it's a discussion on future wealth distribution in India.

> All countries have social inequality

Sure! Doesn't change a thing.

> If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet.

Besides the point. No one here is arguing about where India fits into some arbitrary ranking of countries.

> For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.

China has massive wealth distribution issues as well. We all remember the recent bank runs. That doesn't mean India doesn't have its own problems, which I have brought up.

So did India until 1843 (legally) and, like the rest of the world, still has many people in forced labor and human trafficking in essentially slave relationships.

Even if there was something, like I said, its nothing different than what others had at that time. So this whole obsession about stratification in Indian society seen as something unique is baffling.

---

absolute OT trivia that I needed a place to drop: the Indian karma system do not consider beings outside of animal kingdom, e.g. a roadside tree, to be alive and directly involved in the karma and reincarnation and all that, and apparently so did not the original Indian Buddhism. It was originally Chinese, and more prominently Japanese, exposition and localization of Buddhism that changed it up to be the current Studio Ghibli form of it that yes mountains and rivers and 100 year old Italian combat biplanes can all be alive and sentient and that you just ate a carrot is a sort of your original sin and even strictest of vegetarianism is not guilt-free. Your LLM can elaborate on this if necessary...

I educated myself and didn't participate. I resisted. I have little sympathy for those who cannot do the same in their own lives. It's a choice to adapt toxic culture into your life due to social pressures. We all have the internet now.

All I see is cultural and national biases coming out. I simply did not comment on China's own economic and democratic issues, but everyone assumed I either was ignorant or am playing favorites.

China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.

India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship

It was also designed for a clear purpose (slowing down migration into cities that weren't ready to accept it) and was pretty successful, it just outlived its usefulness and became corrupt. Not the same as something based on ancient class divisions that was probably never that useful in the first place.

People work illegally because getting a stamp legally is hard if you don't have money or contacts in the local administration. Same reason as illegal immigrants anywhere else. The central government has been pushing to raise registration quotas and make the process easier but it's clearly not enough.

Does India's caste system work like that? Can a lower caste person apply to be in a higher caste?

The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.

Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.

The iPhones that are “made in india” contain sub-assemblies that are made in china, that contain chips that are made in taiwan, made of metals that were mined in africa, wrapped in plastics derived from middle east oil.

A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%. This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.

Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.

I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apple started making phones in india in 2017, back when the tariff situation was merely a twinkle in epstein’s best friend’s eye. I think back then it was about general supply chain diversity, more than tariffs specifically. Useful in cases of natural disasters, or trade embargo, and leverage in business negotiations.

By 2024 they were making 36 million iPhones in India, you don’t get to that capacity if you start in november, after the election. Way I see it india was the backup system, and tariffs are the reason they are using the backup system - not the reason they built the backup system in the first place.

> A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product;

I agree, that’s a useful metric, especially in this case. But it’s also not perfect. E.g. it’s easy to have a >50% “made in USA” product if all the parts are made in china but the last assembly step takes time. Labour in the US is more expensive, so 5-10min of clicking parts together can easily cost more than the parts themselves. You could increase the capacity of that type of manufacturing indefinitely without ever gaining any real independence.

That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.

Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.

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

If the government plans to try free-market capitalism then I'm in favour of the plan.

"One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."

Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.

There are a few more SEZs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin... but none did as well as Shenzhen, probably because of location factors.

Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.

I lived there, Mister Confidently-Incorrect!

It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.

* Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.

* Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.

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

[1] https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172

It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. None of political ideas has an exclusive lock on providing the factors. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.

Govt do work as long as beneficiaries are good friends - tatas and adani for example. I cautiously optimistic

Europe will keep making manufacturing equipment, but leave the actual production to those who have the grid capacity and capital.

We will keep working on philosophy, theory and arts. Let the rest of the world get their hands dirty building things.

EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.

I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.

Which wouldn't do Europe a lot of good at this point. EU needs a TSMC and an Anthropic/OpenAI.

Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?

The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.

What do you mean by this? Ukraine is not part of the EU.

The project has not scored well on matters of war and peace. And there is still a far too likely possibility here that after re-arming and in an era of war the Europeans fall back to their old tricks and descend into a state of war against each other again, given that the adults keeping them peaceful seem to have left the building.

You're going to have to really spell it out for us how Russia invading Ukraine is the EU's fault.

The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).

The three main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:

1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.

2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.

The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.

Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.

The top 100 wealthiest Austrian families own two thirds of the country's wealth <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755835>, and none of the wealth came from tech companies. The same is likely true of Germany with one exception: SAP.

Put another way, the two wealthiest German-born tech people (except the founders of SAP) are Peter Thiel and Andy Bechtolsheim, both of whom earned their billions in the US.

Yes, It is not sufficient but I would argue it was necessary. In case of China it allowed them to have a set of domestic copycat companies like Baid, Alibaba and Tencent, that enabled high demand for local engineers to serve their needs and that allowed to have a large pool of competent domestic engineers which now can benefit other emerging sectors too. It keeps surprising how many top contributors to large OSS projects are from China.

Maybe in terms of valuation. In terms of tech itself, I would say they are pretty close, few years behind maybe with gap closing

I don't want the problems those kind of companies bring. The world would be better without Facebook and Instagram in particular.

Maybe, but it's also better to have our own alternatives for those than to rely in so many cases on US tech only

Turns out if it's more economically efficient to simply import skilled workers, or outsource, then that's what will happen. Breeding and educating your own citizens in a first world country is very expensive. So you don't do it.

The only reason not to do this is national preference. Economically it makes sense, on a national level it makes sense, individually it's genocide.

It's petty and anti-nationalist to demand that your nation destroy it's own economy to fit your arbitrary political mold.

No, you don't need to accept migrants. You need money. You can get money in many many ways.

The best way for this to happen for the general prosperity of citizens is for the state to enrich themselves from the work of others, non citizens, and give that money to citizens. This is what Norway has done through it's sovereign wealth fund.

If you do not want to defend Europe's front lines with teenage conscripts and geriatric riflemen, you need a way to bring warm bodies into the fold. Refusing lawful immigration will undermine domestic security, doom the elderly and ruin pension funds for future retirees. No sovereign wealth fund is worth losing your sovereignty over.

I told you what the requirement was. Money. You have simply arbitrarily decided instead it's just people for no reason at all. As though magically people will spawn resources from their finger tips. According to you the richest countries in the world must be the most populous.

Obviously this is idiotic to even a cursory examination.

The next assumption you've made is that birth rate is completely random, a roll of the dice, an unchangeable fact of the universe. The reality is of course it's a result of policy and economics. This can be solved extremely easily.

Europe's troop deficit is just as immediate and pressing as the economic and policy problems. It would be nice if we could ignore it, but you can only expand your domestic middle class if you don't condemn them to the conscription lines first.

No. What I said is just a fact. There's no assumption, the requirement is a fact. You need money to pay for goods and services for the people no longer working.

There's no assumption there? What's the assumption, that goods and services need to be paid for?

So stop bringing up migrants for no reason at all. The actual issue is money, and there are many ways to obtain money.

The nonsense about troops is of course ridiculous. Just a fantastical statement divorced from reality. Who is this enemy Europe is facing that will require a ww1 style meat grinder of 10s of millions of troops, which of course took place when the european population was half the size.

No, you don't have to.

Are you enlisted? Do you want to be? Europe needed to figure out it's defense plan yesterday, not in 20 years. If Europe won't ally with migrants, then maintaining European sovereignty is nearly impossible.

You can do it even today. But you can't bring back manufacturing from China. You gave them your techology and the market.

I guess you mean EEC in 1958, because EU was officially formed in 1993. And normally people would count the period of the two World War and starting to count by the end of it. Either way it is a lot more than 30 years.

if the US or China had disappeared tomorrow, it would affect the rest of the world. what does an average person outside of Europe own that was made in Europe or couldn't be made in China instead? even ASML, its crown jewel, is built upon American tech and would be rebuilt in the US within a decade if there was necessity to do so.

I'm from the EU and glad to be a part of it. I just wish it was easier to do multi-national projects (I think anything aerospace or military related shows how little the countries want to collaborate) or even just tackle large projects and undertakings better.

Hell, in regards to chips I'd be happy with at least 2020 level performance chips for servers, desktops and laptops, even ARM ones. Okay maybe that is aiming too high cause my current Ryzen 7 5800X is from 2020 and so is my M1 MacBook Air and I don't see the need to upgrade, even 2016 would be good enough. Just more domestic production, CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, everything else.