When the EU's biggest competitor to Apple, Google, and OpenAI is Spotify and Booking.com, there's a serious problem with the EU.
It shows that the region is barely capable of encouraging innovation that will meaningfully advance technological progress, which is the single biggest predictor of quality of life in human history.
Yes, the EU might be nicer to work in, more vacation days, less layoffs. Such a view is shortsighted and does not consider how suffocating innovation impacts humanity long-term, because your 15 extra vacation days simply will never measure up to the literal humanity-changing advancements technology provides.
In essence, you have improved QoL today but sacrificed it for generations to come, because your region has decided that it's not important to craft regulations that balance entrepreneurial spirit with consumer good. Ask any startup how difficult it is to deal with GDPR, I have literally seen startups give up over this.
(Is GDPR good for consumers? Of course. Was it designed with literally any feedback from people interested in starting a business? No.)
Perhaps the US has too far on one side, but the EU has clearly gone too far on the other. And the EU can continue to freeload off the US's advancement, but if the EU's current model were to become global, there's precedent that human innovation would grind to a standstill.
> When the EU's biggest competitor to Apple, Google, and OpenAI is Spotify and Booking.com, there's a serious problem with the EU.
Whoa, where are you getting Apple and Google from? They’re outside of your arbitrary window, too, and Apple massively predates modern startup culture, even though I can understand why you want to claim some profitable companies to avoid having to make the claim that US quality of life is massively improved by companies trying to cause massive unemployment (OpenAI) or profit from it (Uber, DoorDash, etc.).
It is interesting seeing how focused you are on GDPR, because the only businesses that prevents are the ones which rely on users not controlling their personal data. There have been a lot of those because it offered easy paths to high user numbers, but they also tend not to be great for consumers - for all your lofty talk about “literal humanity-changing advancements”, most of the US startup market has been far less dramatic attempts to pull an Uber on some existing market.
It shows that the region is barely capable of encouraging innovation that will meaningfully advance technological progress, which is the single biggest predictor of quality of life in human history.
Yes, the EU might be nicer to work in, more vacation days, less layoffs. Such a view is shortsighted and does not consider how suffocating innovation impacts humanity long-term, because your 15 extra vacation days simply will never measure up to the literal humanity-changing advancements technology provides.
In essence, you have improved QoL today but sacrificed it for generations to come, because your region has decided that it's not important to craft regulations that balance entrepreneurial spirit with consumer good. Ask any startup how difficult it is to deal with GDPR, I have literally seen startups give up over this.
(Is GDPR good for consumers? Of course. Was it designed with literally any feedback from people interested in starting a business? No.)
Perhaps the US has too far on one side, but the EU has clearly gone too far on the other. And the EU can continue to freeload off the US's advancement, but if the EU's current model were to become global, there's precedent that human innovation would grind to a standstill.