I'd say being able to compete instead of trying. I bet a lot of euro companies would love to compete against nvidia, amd, intel or tsmc, globalfoundries, etc. They just can't.

To give a idea of fun regulations. This is one regarding imports that my partner is dealing with recently.

A new regulation when importing into Europe, is that you need to show that import materials do not have toxic substances, ... on ... shipping labels (meaning the physical labels are free from harmful chemicals like BPA, PFAS, or PVC).

You need from every company that ships from China, they need to provide certificates that their shipping labels are toxic free.

Pulled from AI because i hate summarizing this...

* EU Ecolabel: The gold standard in Europe. It officially guarantees that a product has low aquatic toxicity, a reduced environmental footprint, and strictly limited hazardous substances throughout its life cycle.

* EN 13432 Certification: If using compostable labels (like those from Better Packaging Co.), this mandatory European standard ensures the label, liner, and adhesive break down safely in industrial composting without leaving toxic chemical residues.

* FSC (Forest Stewardship Council): Certifies that the paper backing and label face stock are sourced from sustainably managed, non-destructive forests.

* Phenol-Free / BPA-Free Declarations: Thermal printing labels must formally declare compliance with EU Regulation 2016/2235, which legally restricts bisphenols in thermal paper across the European Economic Area.

Its a mess of paperwork ... We have not talked about a ton of others, and those are on the import side.

We had some fun discussions about vitamine pill manufacturing, where importing materials made it "made in China".

But if we imported the raw material, and the capsules are made in Europe, and its mixed / bottled here. Well, made in Europe. But the prime materials that goes into your body is from China ... Does not matter.

But wait, if the capsules are made in China and mixed / bottled here in Europe, then its still made in China. Because the capsule somehow made the difference?! I do not remember the details but the amount of easy customer cheating that can be done with "Made in EU / Germany / France"..

I can go on with some of the insanities i get told about ... There are good rules but a lot are like this mix that make no sense, and you can almost hear that somebody pushed for exceptions when the rule was designed. So you get this odd crap that half the time makes no sense.

Hard to do business when the rules are often a issue.

FWIW I view Japan as still a player, just more specialized (although yes, TSMC is often still involved.)

Specifically, imaging sensors. Canon still makes their own sensors in Japan, and Sony makes all sorts of sensors that are used both by competitors in the camera space as well as Phones, (e.x. Apple after over a decade is only now starting to diversify with Samsung US Fabbed sensors,) Dashcams and Security Cams(Even a lot of the Chinese built ones, if you see STARVIS it's a Sony sensor)

That said, Imaging sensors do hit a curious level of 'needing bleeding edge but is not necessarily as complex as a cpu'. i.e. you're striving for precision and quality but the part itself is a lot more 'repetitive' across the silicon area compared to a CPU.

> none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.

TSMC Arizona is a "gigafab" built in phases. The 4nm fab is already built and in volume production of chips for Apple and Nvidia. The 3nm fab construction is complete, and the 2nm (current SOTA) is under construction slated to start chip production in 2028.

Yes, but but but evil regulations and bureaucracy

The energy prices in Europe are also up due to regulations and bureaucracy, without which the continent would be full of nuclear plants.

ASML is selling $300 million dollar machines that are fairly small for it's price point. Regulation is going to have very little impact on producing something like that vs mass produced widgets, cars, or chips.

But 0 orders definitely does mean 0 machines.

400 machines could be anything between 400 and one order, btw.

What "material markers" would this be? EU economy is certainly growing over this time frame (and also today, even Germany).

Well, canada is knocking at the door. They have energy to spare, from sunlight to uranium.

What's special about fossil fuel? Is a kilowatt-hour from burning carbon magically able to power an economy better than one from a solar panel, a wind turbine, or a nuclear reactor?

I think you could make that argument (at least structurally) as late as the 2000s when batteries and solar were still un-economical. Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels in almost every sector except long haul trucking, a few industrial processes, and aviation, and those together are a small percentage of overall fossil fuel use. Aviation and trucking are less than 10% of oil use.

Europe doesn't have an energy shortage that's not self-inflicted. Becoming dependent on Russian gas combined with anti-nuclear in Germany probably contribute. German greens are basically an advertising arm of Gazprom. (Just like how America's huge inflation is self-inflicted via dumb tariffs and unnecessary wars. We should pay politicians an extra bonus to do nothing.)

The most likely explanation for Europe's stagnation is a mix of stifling bureaucracy, low birth rates, brain drain (mostly to the US), and policies that are explicitly growth-limiting.

Perhaps. Who cares? It is a publicly traded company with widely disperse ownership.

It's not.

But no state of the art ones, which would need to use ASML. All good ones are in Taiwan, Korea or the US.

The best Europeans are 10x worse, only China is catching up with only 2x worse.

> most HN people have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes "tech" (= web commerce and adware)

The grandparent literally said "it would pack more punch if ASML wasn't the only go-to example European company accomplishing something in tech."

Do you consider ASML to be a web-commerce or adware business? If yes, then I am not sure you could be helped.

If not, then how is this relevant to the discussion?

Exactly this. The process is super complex and expensive. The result, a cpu, is sold for a few dollars. To be profitable, the scale / volume has to be absolutely massive!

I doubt I could even work in a fab having psoriasis.

seems like doing this in a vacuum would be more economical

> Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.

I think that is not even possible in China, let alone in the USA.

Why would the turnaround time need to be so small?

There are plenty of locations with redundant power supply, and even building a new power line from another substation would generally not be too expensive given the short distances (unless NIMBYs block it, which they do).

And what's so special about 200 MW? Many factories in Europe use these amounts and they run their own power plants. The only edge here is that the US has cheaper fossil fuels, which it amounts to.

> Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.

Like the offshore wind farms in the US? I think Europe and China are building these things much faster. ;)

I wonder. Had any privatisation in NL any net benefits for the population? Not talking shareholder revenues.

Even worse: the right-wing politicians blocked all preemptive grid investments, as it would lead to "needlessly high" grid transport fees.

TSMC alone uses 1/8th of Taiwan's electricity (and rising). They make it work.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-could-accoun...

I get the feeling you're suggesting it's due to government regulation or 'socialist' policies.

But no, this failure is due a mixture or privatisation and politicians looking no further than the next election, leading to structural underinvestment.

Oh, and the energy transition going faster than even the most forward looking scenarios anticipated.

The problem is that constructing a cutting-edge fab is stupidly expensive, and you can only pay for it by selling chips at quite a premium - and nobody is paying a premium for 5-year-old CPUs.

So that brand-new fab has to pay for itself within the first 3-5 years, or it'll simply never pay for itself. But indeed, once it has paid off its initial construction costs it'll happily keep running for another 10+ years, churning out pure profit.

An additional problem here is that the costs have been rapidly increasing as the nodes have gotten more advanced. The tech for something like, say, the 40nm node is now mature enough that building new fabs isn't too expensive, so there's a decent market for building new ancient fabs for cheap mass production. But with EUV everything has gotten so complicated that there's no reasonable way to make it cheaper as it matures, and scale-wise you're well into the diminishing returns for everything which isn't logic. It is very much doubtful whether building brand-new 7nm-and-smaller fabs for mass production will ever make economic sense.

Yes, and many applications don't need / work on the latest node.

Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.

The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.

Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.

The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.

"Trapped capital" is not why Intel has doubled down on Ireland.

It's because whenever Intel asks for anything, the Taoiseach, IDA, and Invest Ireland will move mountains to do it.

Ireland is extremely business friendly because their leadership actually listens to industry.

I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this

2019: Kick-off

2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months

Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon

Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography

2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn

2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn

Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027

So now we're suddenly talking about living standards and not environmental regulation?

Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.

> comparable living standards

So vague as to be utterly meaningless.

And slow moving regulation literally incentivises high capex long-horizon investment.

Lately specifically because of Intel having financial issues, they already started building their fabs in Dresden and Wrocław when they cancelled last minute.

This was strategically planned with EU as part of bringing back production locally, similar to CHIPS Act in the US.

A probably non negligible weight is that decadence is bearish.

Those alive invest in long term planning, those with a dead drive get conservative in their action.

They kinda did that to themselves, but it's slowly changing. My partner's iPhone 16 is made in India. They really do lack waste management infrastructure though, and it's pretty crucial for this type of manufacturing. They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.

But it would be hard to keep up with a country which has grown its GDP by 50 times since 1990, like China did.

For whatever reason, India had quite a lead on pharma manufacturing and still runs carries its own pretty well

Indian GDP per capita is predicted to reach $13k (China's current level) around 2050, so closer to 20 years behind.

Thirty? Try more like 10, and that’s only for the advanced nodes. Everything else, we will have capacity coming online soon enough.

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).

I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.

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.

You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.

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.

China has a legal caste system in the form of birthplace registration and limits on internal migration.

I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.

Is it evenly distributed in China or the US?

I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system

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

Isn't every country like that?

I don’t understand why people replying to you are defending a caste system like it’s an ok thing. This site blows my mind sometimes.

The road to gigatonnes of CO2 is paved with the good intentions of the Greens in every country.

Ok. Soviet influence operation.

Why do you think that in 1998 Russia was not influencing Germany to use its gas?

Moreover, Russia and its coopting of the German Left and Greens is well documented.

Gerhard Schröder, chancellor 1998-2005, is well known to be best buddies with Putin and later (three weeks after leaving office!) worked for Gazprom. He is nicknamed "Gas-Gerd".

Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".

Most of the population wanted to get of nuclear power. The greens never had enough control over the government to do it alone.

The one where you couldn't safely eat anything from the Bavarian woods for a decade. And that was during years without major droughts. People are fast to forget. Nowadays loosing a harvest to a nuclear plume during a drought would be devastating.

Also, even the nuclear plants near the coast are often shut down during the summer. E.g. France's Gravelines was running only half it's generators due to jellyfish nearly shutting down the cooling system (at least) the second year in a row.

And we mustn't compare it with the ecological impact of using gas in a democracy instead of nuclear under a communist regime

The countries with the cheapest electricity in the EU all have nuclear:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/char...

Furthermore, old nuclear is already paid for, and hence often the cheapest option where available:

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/...

There is nothing contradictory about a country that is a relative shithole having a very effective propaganda machine. Russia puts a lot of their resources into foreign propaganda, and it shows. It is still a shithole when it comes to economy and standard of living.

IMHO, democratic countries should do the same. I want pro-Western, democratic, liberal propaganda bots to flood the internet, just like the Russian ones do. But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.

You just need to use a little brain, that’s all, no brainwashing needed.

> "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"

It is insignificant on a large scale war against united West, short of using nukes. At the same time it doesn’t mean they can’t terrorize Europe for decades or slowly chip it bit by bit.

Think of it as a delinquent, poor neighbor constantly throwing shit to your back porch, and alternating between threatening you with a knife and a grenade (nuke). Constantly trying to bride, and recruit citizens of your home for its goals.

> Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!

I don’t think anyone in their right mind thinks that Xi is bought by Russia. On the contrary, it is widely believed that modern Russia is China’s vassal.

You have to remember that people on the left side of the political spectrum fancy themselves as the intellectual elite. They've never been wrong about anything, and if in hindsight it appears that way (like shutting down nuclear plants), well, surely that was because of a highly sophisticated brainwashing operation by Russia.

That's the point. France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.

We actually need both. Part of the industry certainly needs “PC chips”

We both know that feature sizes became marketing names over a decade ago. The "12 nm" for that fab are of course the marketing name. In any case, it's a seriously old process at this point.

Are you talking about Intel? That's the 7nm class and I've never seen anything about plans for the 20A/2nm generation at that fab.

You probably mixed it up with the Infineon Smart Power Fab.

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.

Bosch never said that though, the "AI" stuff was about the production methods used in the fab (along with a couple other buzzwords), it was never claimed that the fab produces chips "for AI". Instead these are fairly simple controllers for the automotive industry.

Can you share any official communication where somebody claimed this fab was for AI?

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 claim in OP is that "ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe". A single chipmaking machine purchase into a fab in Europe would be enough to prove that claim wrong. The number of fabs in Taiwan is irrelevant to this claim.

Very different from Europe? It is part of Europe.

> But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies?

An economy is there for the people. If that larger number of people have a higher quality of life than in the US, aren't they wealthier?

And if they do it for less money, aren't they wiser?

> They invented the Industrial Revolution.

And a lot more, my friend! You're welcome.

Europe manages to give a measurably better lifestyle for more people for less money than the US. Europe’s a success.

It appears to me that in most of Europe there is an unspoken bargain: society provides you with a reasonably comfortable and secure life where your basic needs are guaranteed at least to some level, and in exchange you are supposed to stay in your lane, make sure your ambitions match and follow one of the approved tracks, and leave things like starting businesses to a hidden aristocracy with family money, who for their part generally accept higher demands on their contributions and avoid "vulgar" displays of their wealth in exchange.

The American intelligence community choose to jumpstart the Surveillance Industrial Revolution which is what has enabled companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to dominate.

Europe didn't choose to do that.

The same is true for several US companies - not doable without published research funded by the EU (or other countries in Europe outside the EU). We all freely share our publicly funded research, and whoever wants to use it for commercial success can try. That's how it works.

That includes the majority of the big tech companies, and why the US tends to throw money on importing expertise for these companies (for example AI frontier labs).

The logic is backwards. The research was already there, so ASML licensed it. If the research wasn't there they would have developed it, and/or find another way to make it work using a somewhat different tech. This is but one of the dozen large technical issues that needed to be solved en route to EUV.

Aren't basically all high tech companies the inheritors of basic research funded by highly developed countries?

ASML is definitely a fully globalist enterprise.

The heart of the machine, the light source, is from San Diego.

That's just globalisation. Wouldn't europeans be fools if they never used american research??? And vice versa?

ed: and also to the above point, those optics companies look frightfully european...

    > The top ten companies by revenue, worldwide, features zero European companies.

This is expected though, right? Even in Europe, unless you're a verysmall country, most business you deal with is domestic. Do by default, the largest companies mare going to be in the largest economies. Doesn't mean you can't get lucky every now and again, but you are handicapped by not having a large domestic consumption base protected via political independence.

China and the US are continent-scale megastates. Obviously a mid-sized Atlantic island like the UK, or smallish peninsula like Italy, are not going to compete on scale.

It would be very hard for a country to force it's most ambitious to not leave if there are other places eagerly recruiting them.

But when such a pull exists, it's very hard to counter that. Consider the number of non-SV places in the US that have tried to replicate that environment and basically failed. Even the famously "business friendly" places like Texas or Georgia that are success stories for poaching tech companies or film production largely work by having companies move there once they've left the high-growth phase and are no longer chasing strictly the most ambitious would-be-best-and-brightest talent.

The success stories there (that aren't just resource-extraction) have come from significant protectionism, essentially forcing a country to build its own version of the mega-companies even if it's a money-loser with copycats building shoddy copies for decades at first.

There's no easy way for Europe to magically change that with "culture." There's too many already-established mega-talent-bases in other places to think you can have people just pass up on that in a fully-global-market situation.

I would ask instead: why let those foreign mega-corps be so integral to so many basic services of modern life?

Perhaps not just Europe, but the entire world, would be better off if we had fewer monoliths and more variations, with more flexibility for local markets to develop different solutions or in different directions.

Your children need the number go up?

To state the obvious: Because Europe isn't adding any new fab capacity. That is crazy in the 21st century. They should be helping TSMC and Samsung build new fabs in Europe. What happened to the plan by Intel to build a modern fab in Europe?

When I visit the US everything strikes me as overbuilt to the point of being dull or in the case of vehicles, downright dangerous. The dullness part, especially, is a real pain. Cheap concrete sidewalks. Cheap looking infrastructure everywhere, etc.

There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.

I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.

Out of curiosity, how so?

SV in 1990s was effect of 60-70 years of hardcore government funding that was not only not stopped, but amplified by WW2 whereas Europe was heavily wrecked by it (UK finally stopped wartime rationing of food in 1954!). In comparison, in 1945 USA was trying to redirect wartime production surplus into other sinks to give "soft landing" to industry and invented new approaches to discriminate women from workforce to create openings for returning soldiers.

Could something be done starting with 1990? Probably, though the much fragmented by natural borders (if not regulatory) markets with resulting less cash-flush companies had issues fighting against US competition being able to underprice them with politicians ensuring there were no barriers for american companies "or else".

Some of it was at worst mostly local (if with American "advisors"), like in Poland - we started technically from same position as Taiwan when it came to semiconductor manufacturing, but instead of investing "shock therapy" destroyed it. At the same time... can you mention a taiwan major business that is not TSMC, or part of semiconductor manufacturing chain? Without thinking too long or googling?

They had two world wars and devastated cities to rebuild. They also had the very real threat of further escalation with the raging Cold War. Meanwhile, the US had no real threat of further violence. Most of those with the adventurous spirit found their way to the US to continue the westward expansion and seems to be Europe's biggest export.

Then as somebody who predicted Claude Code and the current state of AI in 2023 January, you must trust me, that Krugman is right.

Or rather, you shouldn't appeal to authority.

The discussion here is a mess. This specific article about ASML is more about outlook, than Krugman's, which is about the current state. This will be a problem in the future. Currently, Europe's quality of life is at least on par, or probably even better in some parts of Europe, but these are signs that this won't last.

If the current positive sum game is eroding more, then there are two options. Embracing the feudal times as in America, or keep pretending. In the short and mid term, the former is better. However, in the long term, if you pretend for the following decades, then you will win. Unfortunately, there is only a slim chance that you will be able to, but all of those countries will win in the end.

For not the 1%, feudal logic is obviously not good at all, but they are still voting for them. Even in Europe. Those European countries which stay democracies will win.

How many Nobels do you have to win to post a credible opinion on the Internet, in your mind?

Meh, judge the ideas, not just who they came from. He has cited some articles if you’d like to read them and evaluate the info yourself.

no way silicon valley is only 840B

You can't really compare the economy of countries on two different contintents just based off of a single macroeconomic metric and expect to capture anything. It's way more complicated than that

> As if we don’t have tariffs. My AliExpress packages are taxed over 100%

Is it contradicting - does it mean the tariff is "over 100%"?

The guillotine is probably the only time I physically cringe as it gets romanticized due to people only remembering the 1st part:off with the king's head and not the countless innocent people beheaded equally due to one man's paranoia which was his own downfall and he too was guillotine'd.

If anything it should symbolize the cautionary tale of the how to have the power to exact punishment can and will come back to you.

    > Container shipping

    > Wind turbine technology

The EU is not a single country. It feels like a lot of Americans at the moment think of the EU as a single homogeneous entity that they often also just confusingly refer to as “Europe”.

Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.

GDP per capita does also not give you the whole picture. It is a number. Other numbers are median life expectancy, shootings per capita, PPI, median income, average vacation days, average distance to nearest high-speed rail station, physicians per capita, average number of pupils in a school class. Unemployment rate. Air quality.

GDP per capita is one indicator among many that says something about the country’s or region’s inhabitants, but in itself it is just a measure of how much money is being moved around annually. And it is potentially quite misleading. You could have a high GDP per capita and a poor population, if all the money went to large cooperations and billionaires.

I am not saying that everything is rosy in the EU, but just that there are also other important indicators and that it is a lot more complicated than just looking at GDP per capita across the entire EU.

An economy is there for the people. The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life than those on the other side of the Atlantic, don't you think?

Yeah compare the GDP per capita of Mississippi to Germany and then tell me which has a better quality of life.

That totally depends. If you're focused on tech, then that's one thing. But if you want overall quality of life, I can't imagine this is true. Work/life balance seems way more balanced in pretty much any part of Europe. It also probably depends on one's age.

Have you been to San Francisco lately? Huge swathes of the city look like scenes from Resident evil

> Where in US and where in Europe?

FAANG, west coast.

I firmly believe my quality of life where I live is many times better than in places like San Francisco or Seattle. In many ways, this was likely the best decision I ever made.

Not getting too specific to avoid having my HN account being in any way related to my real identity. In fact, it is about time I should create a new account and retire this one.

That's why it has so many competitors, right?

They're referring to the idea that a particular Toyota pickup (Hilux) has become oddly popular for any group with the means and motive to bolt a machine gun onto a consumer vehicle.

Not from any wrongdoing on Toyota's part, but a combination of it being cheap, reliable, repairable, etc.

Nothing but it would be more ironic if they were driving Mercedes.

> Airbus proves the EU can do this

*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.

> Airbus proves the EU can do this

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.

I’ve seen someone explaining why it’s not as easy with semiconductors: Airbus can spread several different factories for different components around the EU. For semiconductors that’s not as feasible. Thus countries would fight which one would have the semiconductors factory. I think it was more or less this argument, which seems to make sense.

Don't you mean Morris Chang/張忠謀? He was the founder. Also, this near-meme level phrase "received zero equity" is meaningless when you are paying senior executives millions per year. They just buy shares with their earnings. He was one of the highest (if not highest) paid executive in Taiwan for more than a decade.

Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.

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.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-24/tsmc-s-ar...

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

Do you have local sources we can look at? I’m not familiar with Taiwan but would be interested reading more about the issues

Every ridiculous thing Labour does in the UK is a hilarious slap in the face to the Tories who are still not preferable to all this stupidity.

There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.

Don’t buy too much into the propaganda. Back when the US was a reliable partner that still understood how much it was gaining from global trade, it would have been idiotic to focus on building European military capability.

The thing that seems to have changed is that both the US and Russia are determined to destroy their own future.

Good relationships won't do much when China puts the squeeze on Taiwan. Obviously there are other fabs in other countries, but the EU won't be the only market looking for alternatives.

Of course Amurica will not do it themselves, Amurica will outsource the job to someone else.

lol China wouldn't bother bombing anyone

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)

its political stability and relative prosperity makes it an important consumer market, sure, but it's increasingly clear that Europe is no longer "great" great. its wealth was a product of being ahead of the rest of the world for a long time technologically and militarily, but the colonial era is over, so many others had caught up and are now eating their lunch. even the big three -- Germany, France, and Britain -- are in cultural, economic, and demographic decline. the alliance that binds them is loose and incoherent, promoting stagnation rather than innovation. the US brain drains its brightest while Europe itself frantically replaces its aging natives with whoever is willing to cross its undefended borders.

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 mean the EU got its diplomacy so badly wrong that it sparked one of the deadliest wars this century in Europe and the EU countries appear to be rearming in preparation for the state of war spreading. The EU seem to be in the process of destabilising the state that controls the largest cache of nuclear weapons in existence.

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.

Cool. What's your semiconductor project? Have you put something in Tiny Tapeout, or made a garage transistor?

This is not remotely racist. It's simply a fact, and the result of a lack of nationalist ideology.

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.

China perhaps... but US? really? personally I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.

From my point of view is as awful as it can get: stark inequality, literally hundreds of thousands of homeless people roaming, no basic health care, but to be honest just the number of guns pro capita is enough to keep me and most of other Europeans away for good, it's just insane for what we're accustomed to. And I'm not even referring to the dystopian situation worsened daily by the current administration.

Unless you're the kind of person who confuses absolute numbers (e.g. money you can spend per month) for actual wealth / quality of life / freedoms / rights protection / etc. Then perhaps USA is the right place, I guess?

If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc, I'd put my money on Europe. Europe also has the advantage of seeing 5 years of Russia throwing their best at Ukraine, having their air defenses repeatedly breached by Ukraine, even deep into Russia using slow low-tech drones - they know many of Russia's weaknesses.

Yes. The US defense industry depends on European one. Take a look at F35 and where the components are made.

Ah yes, the only country that matters /s

> they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.

We already did that. Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live. Plus we're also paying the price in higher housing costs thanks to housing millions of Ukrainians.

It's easy to want a higher reduction on welfare services when you're not the one needing them. It's easy to write cheques that other people have to cash.

> If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help

Why do you think an entire continent with multiple and (sometimes even conflicting with each other) culture, priorities, national interest would do that? EU is an economic union. Not a federation like US

Europe has been stepping up a lot recently, given Trump's reluctance to push back against Putin - looks at UK/France supply of missile and anti-missile systems and IP to Ukraine, stepped up air defense based out of Lithuania (anticipating Kaliningrad as the first front of the war), etc.

the geopolitical takes on this website are something else man. I would say don't bother, but letting this type of rhetoric go would also be unfortunate

That's why diplomacy is important. There is no scenario that Europe, let alone Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia (a country with nuclear weapons). I understand defending the territory. But what is the end game? fight forever? or mutual destruction?

> Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it

What is the source for this? I have seen some news articles with this narrative, it was more on the line of fear-mongering rather than providing evidence.

You need to travel rather than just hearing about boogeyman stories online. Most of the world is relatively poor. Who do you think is about to catch up? Indonesia? India? Have you seen these places? Their economy is big largely due to their population size.

You’re defining collapse in a very unique way here

A lot of the "growth" is debt and money going in circles. We'll see how much of it actually stays around next year. So far the US already has to bail out the datacentre expansion by funding transmission lines upgrades instead of asking for money for it from the companies.

> Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…

I believe you've chosen the wrong tense there

This is… a mathematically correct but practically useless way to compare migration flows. Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore. Mathematically true, and tells us much about the relative sizes of these two countries, but very, very little about relative attractiveness as a place of living.

And healthcare, better food, better public transport, security, human relations, lifespan... and above all, happiness.

The american dream is dead, US is a country for working, not for living.

Absolutely also a testament to escaping Trump too. I have met many all over Europe, all ages – UK, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Ireland etc who mentioned it. Including many previously living in California, Florida, Colorado etc with a decent climate, who were earning very good money.

Definitely a testament to each country too - presumably they have a fairly wide choice. They wouldn't go somewhere they disliked the culture that much. We know how discerning US folk are.

Emigrating is not an easy task (even with money), think why they do it and why the don't want to live on the country they were born.

Think about it... a hint, it's not about money.

Being pedantic America is the continent. So a chilean should be as "American" as Donald Trump.

Are you looking for money or are you looking for a good life?

My country offers them both, people from lots of countries como here looking for money and also for a better way of living.

The lesson explains itself.

> That's an Island of less than 5 million people,

The Republic of Ireland has more than 5 million people. The Island has well over 7 million.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0824/1588997-cso-popul...