I am urprised how much money suddenly is available where other future-critical projects are starved of funding while needing just a fraction of that amount, specifically nuclear fusion.
What makes fusion research "future critical"? I honestly don't see any realistic timeline where fusion energy contributes >10% to any nations electricity grid in 2040.
Sure, throwing money at the problem might accelerate things marginally, but you might as well build out renewables, battery storage and invest into grid connectivity, with greater effect (over the next decades), less risk and faster RoI.
It's the same in the UK. Pensioners had their heating allowance removed to plug a £22 bn 'black hole', whilst tonnes of money is pledged to AI. I can imagine the EU is in a similar state.
Removing AI investments will not plug a 22 bn "black hole". This is 200 million europe wide, and the UK is at best 1/6th of Europe if we're very generous.
Your comment is misinformed, you are unfamiliar with the UK context here, but even if your comment would be correct, 200/6 = 33 EUR that would most definitely plug that black hole, however that is not what the comment is about, please look at the actual context before commenting.
The point being made is not about removing AI investments. The OP's comment:
> I am urprised how much money suddenly is available where other future-critical projects are starved of funding while needing just a fraction of that amount, specifically nuclear fusion.
The point is that money is found easily for such projects, whilst other important projects go unfunded due to a supposed lack of money. There is the appearance of dishonesty regarding budget availability.
> The UK is also sending eye-watering amounts of money to Ukraine without a problem, while everyone else is pulling out of the project.
The UK government has never been more obviously out of step with the rest of the West. Like it or not, the global stage is currently being driven by signals from Trump.
> There was also the plan go give the Chagos islands to a country that is ~2000km away and pay them billions for the privilege of using them.
Don't get me started on this. There is quite likely an amount of corruption involved there too.
Many very costly things could happen if you forget the Munich lesson.
It's easier to stop Putin there than to let him have it and spend 10x on the next war.
Many very costly things happen if we forget the Afghanistan lesson, where an insane amount money was plowed into a military riddled with corruption that folded without a fight once the US abandoned the area. On paper the Afghan forces were more numerous and better equipped, in reality most of those soldiers collected their pay checks and went home.
Ukraine's army and soldiers have done everything, above and beyond what could be expected of them, and none "collected their pay checks and went home".
But where do you get this info? This is bullshit. There are no 200k desertions, not even half that, even in the worst estimates. And because of immigration numbers in Europe ALONE we know for sure there are 1m desertions in Russia, from just the Russians that register as refugees in Europe. There were 100+km traffic jams JUST FROM DESERTERS LEAVING RUSSIA. Let's assume at least double that are in other destinations. That's 15 Russian desertions per Ukrainian if we take your numbers, something like 35 Russians deserting per Ukrainian if we take realistic numbers.
I'm fucking trying to hire a Russian deserter. Interviewed him, currently trying to arrange a permit, getting info on what would be involved. For what a shit country it is Russians can be damn well educated, and obviously, are currently available for hire (with caveats of course) in Europe ... frankly at bargain prices even for Europe.
There's a, now pretty famous, Russian deserter that was part of Putin's IT team [1]. There's a famous Russian deserter from the Nuclear weapons team [2]. There's desertions of Kremlin insiders [3].
As for the losing ground ... everyone was sure Russia was going to beat the Ukrainian army and government in 3 days. Then it was definitely not going to take 2 weeks, and now Russia's entire army is in shambles, Ukraine is executing areal attacks against Russian fucking air defence with Cessna "rockets", and that works! There's reports, with video of Russia's army having entirely run out of equipment, using golf carts as armored vehicles.
And yes, Ukraine works by the general tactic of retreating 100 meters leaving a trap, having Russia sacrifice WAY too much dealing with the trap, retreating another 100 meters.
As for the money, aside from the amount quoted being bullshit, the 150 billion dollars that US + EU loaned combined in trade for destroying the Russian army? That's cheap. In fact those amounts are loans, being spent largely in the US, to be repaid by the Ukrainian government. 70% or so is a direct stimulus for the US economy, paid by Ukraine, if they win. It would be cheap even if it was a gift to Ukraine, but it's not.
By contrast, just the Russian actions in the Baltic seas, cutting internet cables are estimated to cost 2+ billion. In other words it's not even possible to avoid spending it. And those damages are NOT loans. We will be paying for that, one way or another, out of pocket, nobody will pay anyone back for that.
Emigration or fleeing is not desertion, if you leave a country before being part of the army, you have fled the country but you did not desert. You have to be part of a military unit to have the ability to desert.
You can look at Ukrainian sources about the desertion problem, there are videos of actual Ukrainian soldiers and commanders talking about this, they made laws around this issue.
> Russia's entire army is in shambles, Ukraine is executing areal attacks against Russian fucking air defence with Cessna "rockets", and that works! There's reports, with video of Russia's army having entirely run out of equipment, using golf carts as armored vehicles.
> And yes, Ukraine works by the general tactic of retreating 100 meters leaving a trap, having Russia sacrifice WAY too much dealing with the trap, retreating another 100 meters.
So are the maps that I'm looking at all fake(including the Ukrainian ones) or the Russian army that is in shambles is till beating the Ukrainian army?
> As for the money, aside from the amount quoted being bullshit
The 100bn came from Zelensky, so is he saying bullshit?
> the 150 billion dollars that US + EU loaned combined
I'm pretty sure the US alone has sent more than 150, but it doesn't matter because it would make the situation look even worse.
> trade for destroying the Russian army
For a destroyed army they are gaining a lot of ground, I'm afraid to even think about what would a not-destroyed Russian army would be capable of.
> be repaid by the Ukrainian government. 70% or so is a direct stimulus for the US economy, paid by Ukraine, if they win
Even if they win, they won't have an economy to pay it back.
> It would be cheap even if it was a gift to Ukraine, but it's not.
It is a gift because the likelihood of Ukraine ever paying it back is one the same level of Hawk Tuah Coin gaining back it's value. It's not cheap because it didn't accomplish much.
> By contrast, just the Russian actions in the Baltic seas, cutting internet cables are estimated to cost 2+ billion.
You do realise that the Baltic sea is far away from Ukraine and even if Russia loses the war they can still send submarines there right?
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I recommend you look at factual accounts of what is actually happening, you can look at multiple sources to minise bias and you should be open to the possibility that your favourite news outlets might not be completely honest with the way they are presenting things because their reporting does not line up with all the facts.
Even if I accept all your beliefs about Putin and Russia, I can still say that most of the money given was wasted compared to spending it on the European side of NATO.
> So are the maps that I'm looking at all fake(including the Ukrainian ones) or the Russian army that is in shambles is till beating the Ukrainian army?
In what sense is half a percent of territorial gain for 400 000 casualties "beating" anyone? It is textbook Pyrrhic victory.
Size of Russian age groups (male), for comparison:
20–24 years: 3.85 million
25–29 years: 3.75 million
30–34 years: 5.02 million
35–39 years: 6.29 million
40–44 years: 5.68 million
Russian "success" consists of rapidly burning through its male population for miniscule and unmeaningful gains. And before anyone says that war is non-linear and massive gains are only a breakthrough away: Russia has no armour left to exploit breakthroughs. Armour is depleted, territorial gains have stalled, daily losses are larger than ever before, and there's no end in sight. For most military strategists, being stuck in unwinnable war like this is a nightmare scenario. The war started with Russian media boasting how they'll be in Kyiv in three days; now they celebrate each time they manage to exchange tens of thousands of lives for an abandoned village in rural Ukraine.
> In what sense is half a percent of territorial gain for 400 000 casualties "beating" anyone? It is textbook Pyrrhic victory.
Maybe gaining territory was not really the objective, maybe not all territory is considered equal.
Also they gained 20% of Ukraine along with some of it's population, if they gained more than 400 000(or whatever the actual number is) people, then the exchange was profitable.
It would have been interesting to see how many people would the US have been willing to sacrifice had the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have been averted.
> Russia has no armour left to exploit breakthroughs
They might be fighting with clubs, slingshots and shovels, but they are still gaining ground, so either this is not true, or the Russians are so good that they don't need armour. Since I have seen Ukrainian videos with recent dates that show columns of Russian armour, I would say that it's probably not true.
> territorial gains have stalled
They have actually accelerated, remember how long Bakhmut lasted? Now they are speedrunning it, they capture something militarily important almost every month.
> no end in sight
There is: Ukraine wants to recruit 18 year olds, clearly they are at the end of their rope.
> being stuck in unwinnable war like this is a nightmare scenario
They can freeze the conflict whenever they want, the Russians don't want to because they feel that they have the initiative, that's why it's so difficult to negotiate with them.
> abandoned village in rural Ukraine
In military context small villages can have significant importance. Landfills can be incredibly important as well even though they don't have much intrinsic value.
> exchange tens of thousands of lives
Maybe that's a win for them, maybe they just want to erase military power and even if their exchanges are less efficient it might still be worth it for them because they can absorb the higher cost in lives due to their larger population. I do believe that because the Russians are more numerous and have their own military industry, it's the Ukrainians that suffer more casualties, however it doesn't matter because if it meets their objective, it's a victory.
They have not. In the first 30 days of the war, Russia captured some 22% of Ukraine. Successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in 2022 reduced this to 17-18%. In 2023 and 2024, Russia failed to regain its foothold and still occupies less than at the end of the first month of the war. All while monthly casualties have risen to the highest they've ever been.
The figures I mentioned - half a percent of territory, 400 000+ casualties - are for 2024 alone. All Russians have to show for such insane losses are militarily super-duper-important landfills, as you put it.
For a country with an aging society and already one of the lowest birth rates in the world, this is pure suicide. They will literally run out of young men before reaching Kyiv. The most cynical people in Washington must be real pleased with the way the war is going. Russia is losing people and permanently crippling itself, while the US population has grown by almost 100 million in the last 30 years.
> Ukrainian counteroffensives in 2022 reduced this to 17-18%
Percentage of territory in terms of a war is not a good indicator of progress, especially taking into account the objective and the context here, if the Russians would capture Kharkiv that wouldn't be a big territorial gain, but it would be game over for Ukraine.
The Russians have captured Avdiivka(which was probably the most important victory), Vuhledar, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, Niu-York, Kurakhove and many others, they have also rolled back all of the small gains made by the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Just remember that before it took like around 11 months to capture just Bakhmut and now I can't even count how many comparable victories they are having.
> militarily super-duper-important landfills, as you put it
I did mean actual waste heap, it might be funny to us, but for military purposes a waste heap can be important because it gives elevation same way as worthless fields on hills.
> For a country with an aging society and already one of the lowest birth rates in the world, this is pure suicide.
The Russians probably think that allowing Ukraine to become a NATO military power is even worse, if you look at it from that perspective it makes a bit more sense.
> They will literally run out of young men before reaching Kyiv.
Progress and casualties is not linear.
> The most cynical people in Washington must be real pleased with the way the war is going.
They were, until it started affecting them as well and when they realised what it's like to fight an opponent that has a military industry and all the natural resources it can ever need.
It was also an embarrassment for NATO.
> Russia is losing people and permanently crippling itself, while the US population has grown by almost 100 million in the last 30 years.
The US can grow 200 million this year if it wants to, that's not a good indicator of progress. Russia has also gained people from the territories it has annexed so far.
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For easy consumption I highly recommend the Military Summary Channel[1], they make daily videos and cite all their sources, you don't have to agree with their interpretation, you can check their sources instead. History Legends[2] is also good if you don't want the level of detail you can get from the Military Summary Channel.
For a different interpretation of what is the Russian perspective I highly recommend looking at John Mearsheimer, you can check out talks he gave before the war even started and see how well it holds up today[3].
Reason I believe my sources are better than the mainstream media, is because they managed to stay consistent all these years, whereas the mainstream media fumbled and flip-flopped on things that were easily verifiable.
I don't see how the captured settlements indicate any better progress.
Avdiivka, the "greatest success" of 2024, was a small town with pre-invasion population of 32 000, less than 5 miles of the frontline on day 1 of the invasion in 2022. Avdiivka was literally visible from the windows of high-rise apartment buildings in Russian-occupied Donetsk. It took three years to get there.
All other listed are even smaller: Vuhledar 14 000, Kurakhove 5000. By now they are heaps of rubble where no-one lives. Compared to the capture of Crimea, which did not cost any lives and left Crimea intact, how is losing 400 000+ a year for such places not a total disaster?
> All of these channels are blatant Russian propaganda. They're also full of blatant lies. All 3 of them.
Can you point out examples of lies or do you just label every source that does not align with your beliefs as propaganda?
The Military Summary Channel sources Deep State (pro-Ukraine) and videos made by Ukrainians, are you telling me that these are also lies?
There was that video of a bradley(IFV) managing to defeat a Russian tank on History Legends, why would the Russians make such propaganda?
> Avdiivka was literally visible from the windows of high-rise apartment buildings in Russian-occupied Donetsk.
That's why it was so critical to capture it because the Ukrainians were able to comfortably shell the separatists from there, that's why it was important.
> Avdiivka, the "greatest success" of 2024, was a small town with pre-invasion population of 32 000
It was one of the most and best defended strongholds of Ukraine that was in range of the separatist capital, getting rid of that was huge.
Being important economically is not the same as being important militarily, a village of 1000 people can be more important than a town of 10 000 if it's in the right place.
> All other listed are even smaller: Vuhledar 14 000
It had high rise buildings and it was surrounded by flat terrain, incredibly difficult to approach, was blocking the Russian army for a long time.
> It took three years to get there.
Because it had an insanely high concentration of Ukrainian forces and some of the best defences.
> losing 400 000+ a year
War started in 2021, we are now in 2025, that's 4 years, estimated size of Russian army is ~1 500 000, which means they should have a minus 100 000 soldiers, that does not add up. You could argue that maybe the Russians are just that good at recruiting people at this horrible survival rate, however you would need to account for contracts not being renewed, which makes it very hard to make the numbers add up.
> War started in 2021, we are now in 2025, that's 4 years, estimated size of Russian army is ~1 500 000, which means they should have a minus 100 000 soldiers, that does not add up.
The war started in February 2022, not 2021. I do not recall saying that Russia has seen 400 000+ casualties for each of the three years. Quite the opposite: in the initial weeks of the invasion Russia made large gains with relatively tiny losses, estimated at low thousand a month. That progress has stalled and casualty rate has now grown tenfold to 48 670 dead and wounded for December 2024 (worst month of the entire invasion). January 2025 is narrowly behind with 48 240. The running total is estimated 850k+. The first year contributed 85k. The second year 300k. The third year 400k. Even if the pace of losses stops growing and remains where it currently is, Russia will lose another 12x48=576k this year.
How is this not a disaster? I'd appreciate if you answered with a coherent paragraph instead of sniping every single sentence with a oneliner.
> I do not recall saying that Russia has seen 400 000+ casualties for each of the three years.
Thought you meant to say it was every year, my bad, I had no intention to misinterpret it.
> I do not recall saying that Russia has seen 400 000+ casualties for each of the three years. Quite the opposite: in the initial weeks of the invasion Russia made large gains with relatively tiny losses, estimated at low thousand a month. That progress has stalled and casualty rate has now grown tenfold to 48 670 dead and wounded for December 2024 (worst month of the entire invasion). January 2025 is narrowly behind with 48 240. The running total is estimated 850k+. The first year contributed 85k. The second year 300k. The third year 400k. Even if the pace of losses stops growing and remains where it currently is, Russia will lose another 12x48=576k this year.
> How is this not a disaster? I'd appreciate if you answered with a coherent paragraph instead of sniping every single sentence with a oneliner.
Not sure what your source is, but in general it's only the Russian Ministry of Defence that know the actual casualty numbers, but they aren't telling, other than that it speculation and depending who you ask you can get wildly different results.
Casualties include wounded and typically you have 4 wounded for each dead, which with your numbers would mean 170k deaths over 3 years, considering what they are up against this is to be expected, so in military terms I would not call this a disaster because if both sides are well equipped, it's just unavoidable. You can look at the Vietnam war for comparison.
Is it bad for society to lose this much of the male population? Of course it is, but one possible alternative scenario is that they get into an Israel - Gaza situation, which one can argue is even worse.
Do you think the US would have been willing to absorb similar levels of casualties if Mexico decided to join a military alliance with Russia or China?
> Do you think the US would have been willing to absorb similar levels of casualties if Mexico decided to join a military alliance with Russia or China?
No, certainly not. Russian losses are totally insane. The US lost 107 903 killed in action and 208 333 wounded in the entire Pacific theater of WWII, over four years that saw massive aerial and naval battles, unrestricted submarine warfare, large-scale amphibious operations, and savage fighting in the jungles across Southeast Asia.
Mediazona, which tracks Russian losses through open sources like obituaries in newspapers, has identified over 90 000 dead Russians by name and estimates the true number of deaths to be in the range of 138 500 to 200 000. Each death is accompanied by several wounded and permanently disabled cases, so as unbelievable as the Ukrainian estimates initially seemed to everyone, they appear to be roughly correct.
The consensus among military analysts is that after the initial months of 2022, Russia has seen only tactical-level successes, at best operational victories. There have been no strategic gains. For this, Russia has paid a higher price than the US did for fighting its way across the Pacific to Japan and forcing its surrender.
I think we can agree to disagree on that one, we are talking about a country that started wars for far less.
> Russian losses are totally insane. The US lost 107 903 killed in action and 208 333 wounded in the entire Pacific theater of WWII, over four years that saw massive aerial and naval battles, unrestricted submarine warfare, large-scale amphibious operations, and savage fighting in the jungles across Southeast Asia.
You don't have as many men on the ships as you need to cover ground.
You should check the Russian losses in WWII, compared to that, this is just a walk in the park.
> There have been no strategic gains.
If they keep categorizing all Russian gains as non strategic then of course there are none. The problem with this narrative is that it makes the Ukrainians look incompetent for sacrificing so much for these unimportant places.
Either the Ukrainians were complete morons for defending these places for so long or they were actually important and the media just likes to spin it the other way when the truth is inconvenient for their narratives.
> US did for fighting its way across the Pacific to Japan and forcing its surrender
You kind of forgot to mention one other player in that game and a certain type of weapon.
> You should check the Russian losses in WWII, compared to that, this is just a walk in the park.
Indeed, let's check them:
Battle of the Dnieper (Aug-Dec 1943): 1 200 000 killed and wounded
Dnieper-Carpathian offensive (Dec-Apr 1944): 900 000
Lvov-Sandomierz offensive (Jul-Aug 1944): 300 000
Russia has already exceeded German losses from 1941-1942 for capturing Ukraine (including Crimea). At a rate of less than 1% of territory gained for 400k+ casualties per year, Russia would exceed the total Soviet losses for all of Ukraine before even reaching the halfwaypoint at the Dnieper river. Russia hasn't even reached the hardest part yet: major urban areas like Kharkiv (pop. 1.7m) and Zaporizhzhia (840k), where the heaviest fighting could be expected, remain in Ukrainian hands.
Note the timeframe too. Both Germany and the USSR rolled through Ukraine in 12 months. In a week, the Russian war against Ukraine will enter its fourth year.
Capturing Texas wouldn't enlarge Russia too much percentage wise, because it's already massive, not that this metric matters at all.
You keep assuming that Russia needs more territory that's why this war is happening, whereas in reality Russia does not want a powerful Ukraine armed to the teeth with NATO gear right next door, that's it, that's what the Russians have been saying all along, their position has never changed, you can look up the Mins k agreement.
> 400k+ casualties per year
It's not per year.
> Russia would exceed the total Soviet losses for all of Ukraine before even reaching the halfwaypoint at the Dnieper river.
You are assuming that Ukraine has their forces uniformly distributed across it's territory which would make it the dumbest army in the universe, in reality most of it's armed forces are near the front, if they are gone, there won't be much left to defend the rest of Ukraine.
> Russia hasn't even reached the hardest part yet: major urban areas like Kharkiv (pop. 1.7m) and Zaporizhzhia (840k), where the heaviest fighting could be expected, remain in Ukrainian hands.
They don't have to, they can bleed the Ukrainian army by dragging them into a meat grinder elsewhere, Russia does not want Ukraine, they just want to destroy the Ukrainian army and permanently make sure Ukraine will never have an army that is a threat to Russia. The crazy thing is Zelensky is doing the work for the Russians with his media stunts like Kursk and Krynky.
> Note the timeframe too. Both Germany and the USSR rolled through Ukraine in 12 months. In a week, the Russian war against Ukraine will enter its fourth year.
Wonder how well both would have done with drones and HIMARs involved.
> You are assuming that Ukraine has their forces uniformly distributed across it's territory which would make it the dumbest army in the universe, in reality most of it's armed forces are near the front, if they are gone, there won't be much left to defend the rest of Ukraine.
I fully understand that you hope to see sudden breakthroughs, but they are clearly not happening anytime soon. In the early months of the war, we saw large armoured spearheads, such as the one destroyed at the Siverskyi Donets river crossing in May 2022, which consisted of 80-100 vehicles. Advancements in drone warfare on the Ukrainian side and equipment shortages on the Russian side have made it impossible to assemble such spearheads anymore. So even if there are breaches in Ukrainian frontlines, they cannot be (and haven't been) exploited on a massive scale as they were earlier in the war.
Besides that, any rapid Russian advancements in Ukraine would likely be countered by the deployment of a multinational European force. This seems to be currently in preparation even without any breakthroughs.
> You keep assuming that Russia needs more territory that's why this war is happening, whereas in reality Russia does not want a powerful Ukraine armed to the teeth with NATO gear right next door, that's it, that's what the Russians have been saying all along, their position has never changed, you can look up the Minsk agreement.
Europeans are expected to officially announce a 700bn defense package after the German elections on Sunday. 700bn is many times more than has been provided to Ukraine so far, by the entire world, combined. The longer the war drags on, the more modern equipment Ukraine will receive to replace the destroyed Soviet stocks and the more closely it will be aligned with NATO countries.
This is another measure by which the Russian invasion has been a complete failure. We went from Obama refusing to provide lethal aid to Ukraine in 2014, to Ukraine's air force flying F-16s and Mirages in 2025 while Rheinmetall is building arms factories in Ukraine.
This is far more than any NATO ally has received since the Cold War.
All of these channels are blatant Russian propaganda. They're also full of blatant lies. All 3 of them.
And as for the second channel ... sorry man WTF. An attack on Chernobyl's protection is NOT A FUCKING SUCCESS. That is a dumb failure on 10 different levels. It's not a military target, it was probably a stupid mistake, it's a waste of what looks like an expensive drone, it could cause yet another Russian nuclear disaster, ... the list goes on.
If this is how they prove how well the Russian army is doing, I'm going to have to start saying that even Trump is smarter than the Russians.
It makes more sense when you realize that all the money being thrown into Ukraine is likely being funneled out as tax-exempt gains by one billionaire or another who gives kickbacks to the politicians who enable this grift.
It's a giant grift, Ukraine has always unfortunately been a very corrupt country that enables such.
> It makes more sense when you realize that all the money being thrown into Ukraine is likely being funneled out as tax-exempt gains by one billionaire or another who gives kickbacks to the politicians who enable this grift.
The Western governments give Ukraine money, the money gets spent on weapons, the weapons are being bought from the West, Western government officials are stakeholders in weapons company growth & success.
Some government officials have a strange habit of multiplying their net work several times whilst in influential positions whilst on a relatively lower salary than would allow such gains.
The EU grants are ridiculously red tapey. Companies have entire departments dedicated to the red tape that European grants require, from the initial participation / auction with hundreds or thousands of pages of documentation, through various stages of thorough checkbox ticking, to the final reception of the project.
Only the usual players with well established "EU Funds" departments can realistically get them, such as Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Microsoft etc.
I have seen (and worked in) a number of startups that did receive research grants including AI research in Germany. This notion of terrible European bureaucracy is exaggerated. It’s not worse than anywhere else in the world.
I've helped the EU Funds departments at my previous employer with auctions participation and other similar checkbox ticking exercises, they're impossible to navigate for regular companies.
I suppose the amount of red tape depends on the type of grant. In my case, I once helped with national level grants to enhance the border protection systems, deployment throughout an entire country. The amount of time and effort to simply participate in such an auction was absolutely ridiculous.
In any case, none of the auctions or checkbox ticking exercises would have been manageable by startups, companies definitely need entire departments dedicated to these funds, and I'm not referring to project management, but strictly red tape.
>none of the auctions or checkbox ticking exercises would have been manageable by startups
Generally startups should not be in government supply chain unless it is explicitly permitted / requested. They are by definition too risky for public to rely on their services, so it's ok that they cannot pass the checkbox ticking exercise. In rare cases where their presence is desirable (e.g. to boost innovation or find radically new solutions), government can always step in and offer them sherpa service (as it usually happens) to go through the paperwork.
Whether the whole regulation is necessary, is another question. I think it does, but the process must be more cost-efficient. It can be. I have seen in some places how the government has put focus on bureaucratic efficiency and it worked, but that often means a strategic horizon of a few decades, which is not within the reach of most democracies today: you need a stable government and public consensus.
As a German, I have to disagree. The bureaucracy both of Germany and the EU is terrible. I have multiple friends who left Germany, and the bureaucracy played a significant role.
I work with EU grants and it’s really not. The amount of wasted work that goes into them is insane. Admin overhead is massive and it’s spent not just from the grants but also from all the companies that apply and don’t get them.
I have no experience in this whatsoever but I feel like it's good to have some transparent bureoucracy even if it's slightly inconvenient if the alternative is to toss around billions in an opaque and corrupt manner like the way bookkeeping (or lack thereof) in global scale climate funds works. Note that I don't have experience in the latter either nor sources to give, yet this is the impression I have. Feel free to correct.
Can confirm. I experienced EU EC research project red tape to similar than DARPA.
Most of the red tape comes from excesses or abuses from the past. Government agencies tend to slap an extra layer of rules every time the grant money is being misused.
Those kind of rules also reveal what is being interpreted as misuse or abuse. For instance, you cannot expense a meal that includes an alcoholic beverage on an US federal budget.
I am European and I tend to agree. The way it's currently going, it'll self-select for people who are good at filling out forms, which will either be the giant companies that can afford to hire what are effectively tax-funded civil servants (they happen to be employed by companies, but only exist because of the government and are effectively a tax on business).
Or there'll be a common European subgenre of "startups" that exclusively draw funding from EU/govs because they're great at filling out forms and telling paper pushers what they want to hear. Then they ship some hypercompliant product nobody wants to use.
Some regulations are definitely good—like food quality standards—when applied correctly and without giving a free pass to other countries (e.g., Morocco, Ukraine).
But then you have bad regulations, such as NIS, salary "transparency," nuclear energy restrictions, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act, and Farm to Fork, among others.
On top of that, there’s the massive cost to taxpayers just to keep those people in Brussels.
That is how it feels sometimes. The regulators want to be in control, as if "they are responsible for anything good that comes", while the truth is that they are only able to somewhat restrict or nudge a process, while any strong process will happen regardless of it.
Meanwhile Europe still doesn't have a cloud hyperscaler, so most of these €200B will end up in the coffers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the real winners.
I've been thinking recently this is where the EU should start. I don't know if it could be achieved with some top-down initiative, but it would definitely need investment to become one day competitive against the US providers.
Yes, but what kind of AI? LLM chatbots or military robotics? LLMs seem to be drawing most of the money these days and I don't think that should be the focus of the EU. We need advanced drones and anti-drone defense systems, advanced air defense against hypersonic missiles and glided aviation bombs, high precision artillery systems, anti-tank weapons. I don't see LLMs making any breakthroughs in those fields. Maybe transformer neural networks can be tuned to solve some prediction problems in these areas. Maybe some vision models can be tuned to detect and track aerial threats, or movements of troops. My point is, we need investment in AI for defense not in customer support chatbots. Unless it's chatbots that generate smart military moves on the battle field...we don't need them. Let the Americans and the Chinese play with their chit-chatbots. We have bigger fish to fry.
Yes: if Germany acts as a serious and honest partner in defence.
No: if Germany refuses to be a responsible security player and swings back to Russia as soon as it can. If Germany reopens the gas pipelines and throws the balts to the wolves I think that they may find that when they need help, there will be no help.
Also the UK and France have very limited nuclear capability. Yes, it's really helpful in the context of the Nato alliance. The uncertainty that the european weapons adds into any calculus of escalation really enhances the overall deterrent. Once the USA is out of the picture there is no escalation ladder, it's national extinction (and)or bust. Very unstable, untenable. I see no evidence at all of this position being altered or updated. If Germany could depend on France or the UK in a nuclear blackmail scenario then I would expect (at the least) a crash tactical nuclear weapon program to be up and running in either one or both. I also think that a four vessel continuous deterrence capability is inadequate, so I would expect much more co-ordination between France and the UK on the at sea element and/or a shift to five+ vessels.
France and the UK have nukes precisely because they did not believe that a country would be willing to risk total destruction to protect another country.
It's been very important to the Nato stance to have multiple nuclear armed states, it made Soviet calculations extremely difficult. With the USA leaving the alliance I think that either a joint Euro bomb needs to be developed or Germany needs to acquire one. Perhaps a polite fiction (continuing the current one by the USA) of France providing nukes for German, Dutch, Danish and Polish war planes could be used.
The only current threat to EU territory is from USA to Greenland.
There is no threat from Russia, as Ukraine certainly isn't part of EU and Russia has never shown hostility to EU, except in retaliation from EU hostile acts.
So I would agree we need to become capable of defending ourselves, but to do so we should very quickly normalize and reestablish friendly relations with Russia and China, then make ourselves economically independent from the USA, ask them to remove all of their military bases from EU, and start to produce our own weapons.
In some parallel reality, perhaps it's so. In this world, Russia has been remarkably hostile for a very long time, to the point where the entire 1300 km border between Finland and Russia - except for one crossing for freight trains - remains closed since 2023, because Russia ferried migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Artic circle and forced them to cross the border into Finland to destabilize the country.[1]
This kind of hybrid attack was launched on even a larger scale against Poland, by Belarus, with Russian support once again.[2][3]
Not to mention smaller acts such as desecration of memorial sites in Latvia[4], vandalizing the car of Estonian interior minister[5], and smuggling incendiary devices on board of DHL cargo planes[6].
Greenland belongs to Denmark, and just today, Danish intelligence (FE) issued a new threat assessment[7]:
According to FE, Russia is undergoing significant military reforms aimed not only at sustaining operations in Ukraine but also at preparing for potential engagements with NATO countries. /---/ While the report does not conclude that a large-scale war in Europe is inevitable, it warns that such a scenario is increasingly plausible if NATO does not reinforce its military posture. The findings indicate that European countries must accelerate their defence efforts to prevent Russia from exploiting weaknesses in the alliance.
All of this happened after the EU started sending weapons to Ukraine for the purpose of killing Russians, sanctioning Russia heavily, freezed $300 billions in assets, not to mention the destruction of northstream 2. Reciprocal hostility is perfectly normal.
None of these actions is severe enough that we can't establish friendly relations again, to our mutual benefit.
> Greenland belongs to Denmark, and just today, Danish intelligence (FE) issued a new threat assessment[7]:
DUH. They're facing the collective military industry and intelligence of NATO in Ukraine, there have been multiple threats from France and UK of sending their troops in Ukraine, prominent EU officials have been publicly talking about balkanizing Russia and you expect Russia to not prepare to face those threats? They'd be stupid not do it.
This is ridiculous. It's like poking a bees nests and then complaining about their aggressiveness when they react. How about you stop poking first?
> Oh, you mean the monument to nazi collaborators?
No. But name-calling everything a "nazi" does not surprise me one bit. To hardcore Russian nationalists, the mere existence of Latvian nation and state is "nazism". Since they were kicked out in the early 1990s, they've promised to return, murder everyone who opposes them, root out Latvian people and culture, and make Latvia theirs. Such revenge fantasies have been a common theme on Russian state media for decades.
> All of this happened after the EU started sending weapons to Ukraine for the purpose of killing Russians, sanctioning Russia heavily, freezed $300 billions in assets, not to mention the destruction of northstream 2. Reciprocal hostility is perfectly normal.
I expected you to say this - as an indication that you don't know what you are talking about.
The hybrid attack against Poland started in 2021, a year before the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine and everything that followed it. The long chain of such hostile border violations, including extreme examples such as the attacks on Lithuanian border guards and their execution[1], goes back to early 1990s.
Dude, you are literally upset, and I’m just paraphrasing what you said) about Western „coup” (as you refer to Maidan) spoiling Russian coup (installing a puppet leader to drag Ukraine away from EU). Who are you, a Russian agent?
Let's not make shit up. Yanukovich was democratically elected.
I am very upset btw, as this kind of idiotic and aggressive foreign policy we pursued brought us closer than ever to WWIII, caused millions of unnecessary deaths, worsened our (Europeans) quality of life, damaged our industry, put us in a very vulnerable geopolitical position, etc.
> Who are you, a Russian agent?
The more you speak, the more you sound like a fascist.
Putin and Lukashenko are also „democratically elected”.
I am not going to attempt discussing the rest of your argument. You repeat the after Trump that millions of people died (a lot of people died but „millions” if factually incorrect), you blame the problems of EU on EU not going to bed with a dictator… and you’re upset with EU not bending to a dictator. I’m out of this discussion with you.
You literally just called me a Russian agent. I don't think there's any point in continuing a debate with you, as you're clearly not honest in your intents.
I haven’t called you anything. I questioned your integrity based on your claims. You sound like one and you keep going on about this whole situation in that manner.
I was raised in 1980s Poland. I remember the soviet mir. Just the imagination of it coming back makes me sick.
I haven’t called you anything. I questioned your integrity based on your claims. You sound like a fascist and you keep going on about this whole situation in that manner.
> I was raised in 1980s Poland
I couldn't care less about your memories of USSR. I wouldn't destroy my quality of life and put my family at a risk of WWIII just because of the fears of someone who sounds like a fascist.
> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3] Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,[4][5] fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[6][5][7]
I’m far from it. But it sounds like Putin’s Russia, which you appear to be craving for. Here’s a tip for you. If you’re missing the mir, move to Russia.
> They were literally fighting together with the Germans against the USSR. Learn your history before making audacious claims.
Perhaps you should learn a thing or two yourself before making such remarks.
In the first two years of the WWII, Germany and the USSR were allied. They divided Europe among themselves with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact[1] on the eve of the invasion of Poland, and then invaded Poland from both sides, and held a joint parade when both forces met in the middle of Poland. Other invasions (Finland, France, Denmark, etc) soon followed.
The same secret agreement with Hitler left Latvia to the USSR. After the fall of Poland, USSR started issuing a series of ultimatums against Latvia, which culminated with the Soviet invasion and occupation of Latvia. Independent Latvia ceased to exist in June 1940[3], and the independence was not restored until 1991. Latvia as a state was not fighting together or against anyone because it simply didn't exist 1940-1991. Latvia was under Soviet military occupation 1940-1941, then under German 1941-1944, and then again under Soviet occupation 1944-1991.
One of the excuses for the initial Soviet invasion in 1940 was that Latvia was too sympathetic of the plight of Polish people and too unfriendly with the Soviet ally, Germany. :)
The Soviet-German alliance is best illustrated by the frequency of the word "facism" in the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/13chr5f/mentions_of... In August 1939, they sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In June 1941, the war between them breaks out. During the two years from mid-1939 to mid-1941, they coordinated their attacks and destroyed the independence of not only Latvia, but many other European countries too, until there was no-one else left between Berlin and Moscow.
To this day, this is big source of tensions between Russia and its European neighbors, because Russia refuses to acknowledge its role in the first two years of the war. Present-day accusations of "nazism" coming from Putin's totalitarian dictatorship against modern European democracies are just pathethic attempts to distract from its own aggression, and serve as further examples of hostility instead of the path of reconciliation that Germany took.
The closest thing Ukraine ever had to a foreign coup is constant Russian meddling with Ukraine's internal affairs. The best example of this is the 2004 poisioning of Ukrainian president. The before and after pictures, taken only a few months apart, tell the story of what a friendly neighbor Russia has been for the longest time: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-43611547
Let’s not make stuff up. First of all, it’s Russia who invaded Ukraine, not the other way around, regardless of the reasons. Hitler also had „reasons”. Weapons are sent to Ukraine so Ukraine can defend itself against the invasion. That Russians are killed from these weapons, duh… that Russians are attacked in some parts of Russia… duh. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Second, it’s not clear who destroyed NS2. It could have been Russia, Ukraine, or the US. Everyone has different theories but there’s no smoking gun pointing at anyone.
You have been already told that but the hybrid war on Polish-Belarusian border started in 2021. Today they’re fighting a war with troops from North Korea.
Russia is the only remaining nation on the Eurasian plate stuck mentally in the WW2 phase and crying out loud that the job hasn’t been finished in 1945. And I agree with this statement… Allies should have finished the job by going forward with Operation Unthinkable. We’d all save ourselves decades of struggles on this continent.
> First of all, it’s Russia who invaded Ukraine, not the other way around.
Yes, and we couped Ukraine before that.
> Weapons are sent to Ukraine so Ukraine can defend itself against the invasion. That Russians are killed from these weapons, duh…
You seem to be conveniently forgetting the fact that Ukraine was neither in EU nor NATO, nor in any military alliance with a western country. Thus sending weapons to Ukraine is a direct act of hostility to Russia.
Imagine what would've happened if Russia aided Afghanistan or Iraq with weapons and intelligence when the US invaded. Be intellectually honest.
I agree, I think they are trying to cargo-cult Silicon Valley ecosystem without realizing that it will never have a chance in European's clueless bureaucracy, massive social safety nets etc. It doesn't mean nothing can be built, but it won't ever be as effective and bleeding edge for various good and bad reasons and mere fraction of whatever goals aimed for.
And defense spending is a must, how in 2025 they could NOT invest easily 5% of GDP into security is beyond me, thats not a bad requirement from trump actually (if some time is given to reshuffle budgets). There are threats from all sides - one genocidal dictator on our borders repeatedly keeps stating how he will wipe out few hundreds of millions with atomic bombs aimed at our cities. Inner threats with Hungary and Slovakia now.
Then there are global threats, be it China or maybe even US if trade wars will go on 100%, and who knows what Turkey actually wants. Yet Leyden's blind focus on green deal when whole world literally abandoned it, killing our industries while making 0 difference long term is... I don't have a nice word for it. If there is actually some sound logic behind those moves she failed remarkably with communicating them to literally everybody.
They can't invest 5% of GDP in defense because they don't have the money. Germany does not want to raise it's debt ceiling and France is basically broke and hasn't had a functioning government for the last 7 months.
NATO has been treated as a free ride by Europe.
They were supposed to invest a certain % of their GDP each year in their defense spending but because the US was always there as backstop, they basically never did.
Now a lot of countries in the EU have to play catch up and make up the under investment of the last 20 years which will take many years and even possibly decades before it is reversed.
Also Macron is on his way out and the most likely politician to come after him is from the far right. His voice and power is waning and since he has lost the majority in the assembly, he is a lame duck with very little power to change things.
The irony is that if we don't invest into defense, war would still likely break-out, but we may suffer less (or die less) because of a quick loss.
Now we have a weak army in the EU, if Russia invades one of our friends, then the war will be over in two days because France, Germany, USA will do their usual "we condemn blablabla, we send you prayers and sympathy", but there would be no long-lasting war.
A bit similar to Ukraine, it's a half-assed initiative, drowning billions of USD, but not efficient enough.
If the answer had been much stronger, it would have worked, but now we get the worst of the two options (doing nothing, or going all-in).
Also not to forget, that at the end of the rifle, it's not people saving their house, it's about protecting a system that supports the wealth of politics.
The main difference for the invaded people would be to whom they pay taxes, and ironically, could now be facing sanctions from their supposed friends (like the living folks in Crimea, who got punished by US/EU; punished because they have been invaded and victims of a war).
In the second case, if EU defense is increased moderately (like currently plans), war would still breakout but it may drag for longer, and casualties without increasing odds of winning.
The third case, where EU alone without the US is significantly stronger than China, Russia and North Korea, it's nice but I don't see it happening.
Like you said, Macron is likely going to be replaced with pro-Russian Le Pen / Zemmour-like.
If you think that with russians rolling over whole Europe the only thing changing is to whom you pay taxes that's a grave mistake on your understanding and borderline insulting to those of us like me who grew up under direct soviet cough cough russian oppression and have their parent's lives very effectively ruined by it.
Ever wondered why eastern part of EU is so vastly different to western EU regarding mentality? Why east has corruption as BAU at all levels, is a bit nihilistic in world view, and certainly doesn't trust at all some centralized Brussel control? It wasn't nearly as bad right after WWII. But we had it all from them, oppression, absolute lack of freedom on North Korea level, political executions, people gone to gulags or uranium mines with basically no ticket back for the horrible crimes of ie fighting nazis as allied pilots in Britain. The damage to whole nations is still felt these days, countries being shadows of their potential, natural resources literally stolen without any payment back (former Czechoslovakia's massive uranium deposits as a random example), especially if you compare them to places 'just across the fence' which experienced freedom, market economy and ie weren't forced to reject Marshall plan.
Russia has absolutely nothing good to offer to any democratic country which was true 100 years ago and is still the fact now, just a spiral downfall into mediocrity and further, rampart corruption and theft and rule of stronger compared to rule of law. Basically a mafia state, they just can't create anything better.
For now, I see (from the EU perspective) that the presidents of the US (Donald Trump and Elon Musk), are absolutely unreliable partners, and that the EU is alone with the problems.
France population is never going to war, Germany also, Italy also, etc, to me it sounds like something that Russia may see as an opportunity.
The best in this situation (like it was with the soviets situation you described) is to prepare a plan to not be stuck in the cross-fires, because it's not the politicians in their plushy beds in Brussels or in Moscow that are suffering.
Its hard to not get 'stuck in the cross-fires' when one side is very directly aiming right at you, wants to kill you, steal your house (or wristwatch like in WWII in massive scale), maybe have fun with your wife and enslave your kids and their kids.
We in western Europe (where I moved just to clarify) are closely aligned with US values and way of life, which russian elite sees as direct attack on their comfy stealy mafia way of life and existential threat. What general russian population thinks is unfortunately irrelevant here, it doesn't manifest in anything concerning rest of the world.
Also look at end of Soviet union - every single member state ran the fuck away from russians with 99.99% speed of light, and will do just about anything to resist being forcefully merged back, including Belarus with lukashenko, or Kazachstan with quite recent demonstrations and subsequent shooting of protesters also helped by russian special forces (friend of ours from there witnessed it firsthand, executions on spot of cca 2,500 protesters one after another, whomever they caught in the streets). They know darn well what they reject and fear, no 'panslav' bullshit made up lies is ever changing that.
Don't think for a second that one can be some really impartial and respected 3rd side, even ultra-neutral Swiss are now much more aligned with west than east (politically, values, but also militarily - check whether their guns work with NATO ammo or russian ones - thats 101 of waging a war and picking up side well before that). There are cca impartial sides out there, but not in Europe or anywhere else near russia.
/rant, I could go on like that for a very long time
Didn't Cambridge-alumni and London based researcher Sir Demis Hassabis - who co-founded Google DeepMind btw - just win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Comparing the enterprise value of the top 10 companies in Europe versus the U.S provides a poor insight into the actual health of AI research as opposed to capital generation. Both DeepMind and Featurespace are European startups for example.
Nobody's arguing that the talent isn't there, but it's very hard to commercialize results compared to the US. Which is why a good chunk are employed in US companies or immigrate to the US.
Maybe they host it on Gaia-X, the failed attempt to compete with AWS and other US cloud providers. Money burns quickly when you give it to EU megacorps that are experienced getting EU subsidies.
In the end, even if there is some moderate success, the EU won't be able to keep the AI researchers because the high tax rates hit hard when you earn top salaries.
* that money will go to "big corp" who know and have to time to build application forms... even if they don't have the knowledge ("take the money and run")
* that money wont to the "real disruptors" that are small corps because they don't have time or knowledge to build application forms to get the money
There's typically much less red tape for smaller funding programs from the EU, so if you're only getting a couple hundred thousand you'll deal with a lot less requirements than a company getting tens of millions. There's still bureaucracy, but it's not as insurmountable as some make it out to be.
The thinking in Europe when it comes to AI, is "AI for industry", or "AI for science". Like they think of AI as providing a supporting role in industry or science, but they do not think of AI as a goal in itself.
This thinking is analogous to the way EU leadership treated "tech" for the past three decades and look how well that turned out for us...
If we had good leadership, these funds would be used to setup 2 or 3 competing AI labs. Forget all that "AI for industry" and "AI for science" nonsense and just catch up to the US and China, and have something competitive, for once.
EU can always get a discount on that once they ratchet up regulations. I don’t understand Europe, why don’t they just focus on hyper growth with limited oversight like America?
> I don’t understand Europe, why don’t they just focus on hyper growth with limited oversight like America?
Well, you've kind of answered it yourself, because the EU is not America. It's an economic and political union formed of very different countries with diverse interests, though those interests primarily are centered around the individual and their rights, and not the corporations' profits, like America is.
You think the EU cares about it's citizens rights when it's been trying for the last 3 years to pass the Chat Control law in order to read all your emails, text messages, analyze all your photos and basically treat you as criminal without having any recourse about it?
Is this the kind of rights we are talking about just to be clear?
Don't make ridiculous generalizations based on a bad example. Right to repair, strong consumer rights, net neutrality, and more can't be discounted because you dislike a proposal.
EU is not a homogeneous single entity. Every state is driving their own agenda, and every state is divided into multiple parties often pulling in different directions. It slows down decision-making, in both good and bad. Oftentimes it's hard to sell a Pan-European long-term benefit, if it's cost is that some member states have to lose something in the short term.
You could make the argument that similar problems exist in the US too, but I'd argue it's worse in the EU.
There is no European (capital) market and the national markets are too small to compete with the US or China. European companies are therefore unlikely to gain trust from investors that they will be able to compete.
Hence these kinds of top-down iniatives are in a sense the best they can do given rather poor ircumstances for private investment.
I believe it's because they have this massive monster in Brussels that needs something to do (chiringuitos) to extract the maximum amount of money—corruption.
Because people in Europe are generally scared of a free market without strong social security, but believe in government oversight (no matter how often it fails).
In the spirit of HN rules, actual answering instead of snark:
1. The memory of Nazis using centralised industrial might and information to kill millions of people (google dutch insurance records Nazis)
2.a much stronger history of workers rights and distrust of rich people together with a different attitude to gouvernement making it politically challenging
Can hate it or love it, but the median life expectancy in Europe is much less correlated with wealth and _I think_ is higher from memory, child hunger and food insecurity is much lower and homelessness and other corporate abuse is much less of a problem corrected for wealth and population.
Whether we manage to keep this remains to be seen, but I think it's a reasonable set of different preferences
>1. The memory of Nazis using centralised industrial might and information to kill millions of people (google dutch insurance records Nazis)
We can't stop developing and using modern technology just because one time in the past modern technology was used to kill people. Imagine if prehistoric humans stopped using fire because one time some retard burned down the village, or if they stopped forging steel because swords were used to kill people one time. People kill people, not technology alone.
And people who bring in the Nazi atrocities as a joker card against progress in an argument, usually do it for emotional manipulation to move the goalposts and push an agenda, similar to "won't someone think of the children" to push online surveillance. Most normal people don't think of the Nazi atrocities at every decision they make in life, most people think about the problems we have right now.
>2.a much stronger history of workers rights and distrust of rich people together with a different attitude to gouvernement making it politically challenging
Yeah well the problem is it's always the capitalistic rich people that create jobs and drive innovation. Putting the government in charge of creating jobs and innovations don't end up working well long term.
Most normal people don't think of the Nazi atrocities at every decision they make in life, most people think about the problems we have right now.
I don't want to get too Hitler ad reductio, but that's probably what the Nazis thought too. It hasn't even been a 100 years since this all happened man. It's only sociopaths that constantly play up the past is the past nonsense. There's an incredible bravado to it. It's not the past, it was barely yesterday. The only thing I'll grant you is that its probably not happening again only because in the grand time line, less than 100 years is pretty much still happening, we're still INSIDE the chaos of ww2 and nazism. The same way we are all still inside the big bang, expanding outward.
But yes, sociopaths need to forget this, similar to how they need to forget an affair or a crime. It is what it is.
Nazis though about a lot of things, like investing in infrastructure. Is everyone who invests in infrastructure now a concern because they're doing something the Nazis did? People who can't critically think and dethatch the actions from the group and resort to blindly putting people into boxes based on superficial things taken out of context are unwell.
> It's only sociopaths that constantly play up the past is the past nonsense.
Wrong. It's the enlightened pragmatists and realists who want the world to progres instead of wasting efforts squabbling over past events that do that, while it's the sociopaths that constantly want people to live with the guilt of the original sin because that's easy emotional manipulation for the masses to push them towards an agenda, which is why politicians keep bridging up the past national glories and traumas in their speeches.
Well, you see the devil has a very beaver like discipline. It’s in the details of that intricate Dam building that the nothingness of the Beavers simple life is hidden (simple != moral).
Some Beavers are nazis that build Dams. Infrastructure they call it.
Not all Beavers are nazis. Not all Dams are Nazi Beaver projects. I get you, I really do. But I’m going to pay attention anyway.
”while it's the sociopaths that constantly want people to live with the guilt of the original sin because that's easy emotional manipulation for the masses to push them towards an agenda”
Why don’t you just literally say you don’t share the same values as Christ!
Pretty sure that was his whole game. I really thought this needed its own reply, because Christ just literally showed up in your post. Like, the literal inverse of him. It’s not your fault, the world is possessed lately.
I have a theory that the Great Pyramids were not some incredible technological advancement. Rather, it was God’s punishment for man’s perverted pursuit of stacking rocks on top of rocks toward the sky, like a beaver. He had them slavishly stack the rocks to the top, for nothing. To this day the other beavers don’t know what it was for, but that’s literally the lesson. Don’t do stuff like that (building pyramids) because it’s a waste of a life.
Everything is perspective, I agree. You cannot forget our sins just because time has passed. You can remember it in a more comfortable way if you want. For example, I’m sure it’s more comfortable talking to me about it online (versus, in church? At work?). Regardless, we are doing the meditation and that’s key.
In fact, I spent an hour or so reflecting on your reply. I’m positive I saw the world’s richest man , unelected, purchased the White House and address the public yesterday. And then I come here to be told I’m an obsessive of the past, with the signature tone of a literal (I mean literal, define anti, and define Christ), literal anti christ slogans. Just a pure outright rejection of Christ and tacit apology for Nazism.
This is not a hard retort by for me at all. Your post is so filthy I may take a walk past a nearby Church, and I’m not trying to insult you. I am literally looking for a sign from the Universe that everything is okay, and that there is less of your type of heart than I’m imagining (anything god, show me a butterfly or something).
Wow, I just read all the comments which are currently here (at my time of reading), and the level is worse than on Reddit. Not the HN I remember...
Talking about the actual news, as usual with this kinds of programs, a lot of the money won't bring results, but that's also true for most investments from VCs. If just a few good ventures come out of it, that's already a great result. Trump is showing that the EU simply can't outsource most of its IT to the US, it's just too risky.
You do understand the difference between VC money and government money right?
As a citizen of the EU I care greatly when governments spend money that for one they do not have, therefore saddling me and everyone else with more debt,and two when that money is spent not in the most efficient manner but given to the established players who can fill forms the proper way as highlighted in the numerous comments above yours.
If a VC like Softbank blows 100B on a bad investment It doesn't affect me but when its my hard earned tax money that could have been spent on other things, then it matters very greatly.
It's a good thing that EU leadership is finally waking up to the urgency of renewed competitiveness, but the greatest problems are not addressed or even mentioned:
1. Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally. Europe has many talented engineers and many founders who aim for "reasonable" success, but that's really not sufficient.
2. Big investments only work when success means outrageous profitability. That's not how it works in Europe. Businesses are supposed to make at most a "fair" amount of money. Greed, for lack of a better word, is not good. In the US businesses invest 100s of billions in AI hoping to profit trillions. No European business will be allowed to make that kind of money.
3. EU funding is laundered through established players who understand how the game is played. Giving handouts to incumbents harms competitiveness in the long run.
Your analysis points out some real problems, but I think they are more systemic rather than just cultural. (This is not to say that the cultural issues are not real)
1. Startups mostly leave because Europe doesn not have a private capital ecosystem and hence entrepreneurs can not get sufficient funding for growth.
2. There is some truth to this statement in the sense that some people have this mentality but is not true in general. There are profitable companies in Europe and there are jurisdictions (Denmark, Ireland, Estonia, etc) where it is reasonably attractive to have a company. The data does not show that this makes a difference: the biggest startup markets are still in the larger countries that have a larger (capital) market, even though these countries are usually more hostile to business.
3. Yes, that is the case with all government subsidies, however often their founding documents claim to wish to support small and new things.
1. There is no shortage of startup capital in Europe. European VC funding is almost half of US venture funding. Startup funding in Europe just doesn't produce big winners.
2. There are moderately profitable companies in Europe, and most of them were founded 40 years ago. With regard to the data I think you've got cause and effect reversed. The capital market is smaller because EU startups get out-competed badly. Startups are winner-takes-all. No prizes for 4th place.
3. It's simply not true that subsidies necessarily favor incumbents. Governments are free to structure their subsidies however they like.
Those are fair points but I think there are some important details that are missing.
1. There is no European VC market. This is important. When people talk about EU VC funding they are just adding together national numbers. In reality EU countries have seperate capital markets with different rules serving seperate national markets - when it comes to services there is no single market. This means none of the European markets come close to having the scale of the Chinese or American ecosystems.
Even though the amount of VC funding of the EU as a whole may seem to be of similar order of magnitude, being around 1/3rd of US VC (although as I wrote above, this is a virtual number) there are several important differences. About two-thirds of European funding is provided by governments or (risk-averse) banks, whereas about two-thirds of US finding is from private sources that are comfortable with higher risks and long periods of unprofitable money shoveling (see Amazon, Uber, Tesla).
Furthermore, there is a large difference in the size of funding (about 5x bigger in the US per company) and the amount of it being for late stage growth (very little in the EU). These are big barriers to creating 'big winners' in winner-takes-all markets.
You raise a valid question about the direction of causality here. It could be that European companies are just inefficient because they are overburdened by regulation, and investors know this. I think that is probably partly the case, and definitely in some sectors.
However, there is some evidence that regulatory burden and productivity are currently not the limiting factor. First of all there is quite a lot of diversity in regulatory burden and productivity between countries in Europe. But regularitory burden and productivity does not seem to correlate much with the size of the startup markets in Europe. The biggest startup markets are found in the capitals of the countries with the biggest markets (Germany, France and the UK). These countries are not known for being particularly business friendly or efficiënt, but they are the biggest countries. It seems likely that network effects and market scale are dominant forces here.
Indeed, it seems that the higher cost and complexity of having to scale internationally across different regulatory domains are a bigger problem for potential European big winners. A company that wins scaling in the US dominates the biggest market in the world and is likely to be the global winner. National big winners in Europe do not have the size to compete, unlike those in China. And establishing Europe-wide winners is difficult.
(In fact, it is mainly European business that push for moving regulation from the national to the European level, precisely to make Europe-wide activity easier)
One more piece of evidence is that the US VC ecosystem is centred in SF, California, probably the place in the US most burdened by regulation. They even suffer from a GDPR-light.
2. The big correlate for profits is size and Europe has very few very large companies that are of recent vintage. However, those big companies that do exist have similar profits to large US companies. If you think there is some hard limit I'm curious to hear what you think is the mechanism.
3. Maybe, but this kind of funding always comes with the art of writing the right words, doing the right compliance, and sometimes knowing the right people and having a big and well known name. But maybe I was a bit too black-and-white.
1. I broadly agree with your points, especially with your points on the regulatory burden. I also agree that it's much harder to win a fractured EU market than a single market. Here we can point to US startups that struggle to win individual markets in the EU despite having already won in the US. The most striking difference I see is how badly US founders want to win. When a EU founder makes a few million they think they've hit the jackpot. The EU founder will take the early exit almost every time. EU founders are unwilling to do what it takes to scale up. I'm generalizing for clarity here, but I think this broad difference in mentality is key.
2. Apple made 35 billion last quarter. The best EU tech companies make maybe 3 billion. A 10x difference. European tech is nowhere to be seen on this list: https://www.financecharts.com/screener/most-profitable. There are no EU winners of any vintage on the global stage. It's true that Europe's large cap businesses do about as well as their US counterparts, but mega caps don't exist. Is it fair to compare Europe's biggest winners to the runner-ups in the US?
> Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally.
Good. We've all seen Silicon Valley.
We'll keep our Engineers, Scientists, and large inter-union projects and organisations like CERN.
> Europe has many talented engineers and many founders who aim for "reasonable" success, but that's really not sufficient
Not under a US metropolitan HCOL existence, sure. For most in Europe, however, wealth-generation isn't the metric of success or human worth. Work-life balance is of significantly more importance than the higher-compensation/'at-will employment' trade-off.
This other tidbit from the article was funny as well: €109 billion investment plan for AI projects in France in the coming years.
How can a journalist write this verbatim when the likelihood of this happening is next to nil. France had a massive budget deficit last year, it had to pass a law to increases taxes (yet again) and is basically broke.
So where is this magic money going to come from? That is the question and theses announcements are never followed by any real investigation from the journalists that are parroting them.
If the SEC is a portal between private Finance and government, then AI is a portal between tech and government. It’s a way for money people of a certain tribe to legally funnel money between the government and private sector in full duplex (bi-directional. Government gives you money, you take money and make more money, use it to buy more politicians, who then “invest” more money into … you).
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
• strengthen the EU's generative AI talent pool through education, training, skilling and reskilling activities;
• encouragement of public and private investments in AI start-ups and scale-ups, including through venture capital or equity support
• development and deployment of Common European Data Spaces, made available to the AI community
• GenAI4EU: support the development of novel use cases and emerging applications in Europe's 14 industrial ecosystems
• expansion of computing infrastructure to "100 000 last-generation AI chips"
Overall it sounds very similar to last year's announcement:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
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