This is absolutely not true. Europeans not investing and selling off every bit of innovation they produce to american vulture capitalists is the reason we are behind.

Also what have tech companies to do with the environment? Sure now the AI BS is a strain on energy consumption, but it’s not like EU started lagging only since 2022. China is doing generally much bettet wrt electrification than eg the Germans.

like arguing for slave labor a la chinese labor market, to compete!! we cannot entertain a race to the bottom, that is already being done, as a species

GDPR was a good move. Hopefully others are soon on the way.

what does “socialised software” mean?

How will it work ? If there is no profit because of open source and socialised software. Then how will companies hire people. Already there are many open source softwares on the market like linus. Open source will not become big like USA silicon valley.

One of old lines against left is that it’s just people who want free stuff.

Left ideologies are not, in fact, about getting more free stuff (and the “bread and circuses” thing originates earlier than right or left liberalism, and is used just as well by right factions, and Rome is generally loved by the right more than by the left, making a funny comparison to Sparta which is more loved by the left, while Athens is again loved more by the right).

Still, see, in a situation where European nations are gradually becoming less and less democratic, without significant resistance utilizing modern technologies for building a dystopia worse than cyberpunk books promised, and the questions in computing revolve around dependence on governments and corporations in all things done with computers, - in this situation you write about “open source and socialized”.

Not about using those same technologies for building a direct democracy before “elected representatives” use them to make us serfs or surplus biomass. Not about using them to track all state officials’ locations and their finances (if they don’t want that, they can pick another job). Not about revision of patent systems benefiting corporations and in practice making any truly free system of communication on the Internet dubiously legal.

No, about “open source” - which is the “circuses” here, for things to be cool and interoperable, and about “socialized” - which is the “bread” here.

Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go

Finally, first real feasible comment about EU catching up to US and China. This is how countries like Korea, despite how tiny it is compared to the EU, still grow so well economically and stay #1 in various areas of competition. They play ‘catch up then compete’ game so well and are probably the best at it. They become #2 or top 5 or whatever in many things, synthesise them together to become #1. Even integrated solutions of these #2 offerings combined are what makes their packaged offerings so compelling.

China is way ahead of the US, this will take a long time and even then will never work.

European politics is far from perfect, although it is arguably better and less corrupt than in the US now. But it was not politics that killed European mobile phone industry - it was competition along with mismanagement and miscalculations of the European mobile phone manufacturers. Symbian was just a weak and clumsy platform compared to iOS and Android, it could not compete in a changing market.

Yes. Also Silicon Valley is a wrong example.

Old Nokia is a good example, Acorn, ARM of old.

Except what those people want is exactly a second Silicon Valley, just loyal to them.

“chinese style surveillance” Oh please this is just sinophobia

In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.

A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there’s a reason it’s as broken of a system as it is.

who has run out of water due to a data centre?

secondly that sounds like a local government issue

And without surveillance and that surveillance capitalism that only helps fascists and people from Pinochet to Duterte to Trump to do human right violations. Europe has data protection because it has human rights, and it has human rights because our history has taught bitter lessons about totalitarism. We need a way forward - not back.

Then it has to be tax funded and will never be self sufficient unfortunately. That means if political winds change, these products will die.

This is just me being a realist. I would of course prefer all of Europe to move to FOSS for the public sector.

So not monetizable. Will never happen, too many interests, and EU is always weak to bribes.

Yes, please!

The EU is slow moving. That can be detrimental to techhnological arms races sometimes, but the stability it provides also has a lot of benefits. Currently they are consulting start-ups in a bid to streamline innovation and incentivize venture capital. Germany is now actively trying to make business administration easier. So the necessary steps are being taken, but it will take time to implement as is the wont of the EU and its member states.

All change starts with talk, but I do think that European politicians see the acute need for a new innovation framework that is tailored to the times. Even when that framework is in place it will take several more years to visibly notice results. But then the EU per definition looks at the long game, so it’s not a bad thing per se.

But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.

The EU puts the interests of its elites and bureaucracies above all others. Because the EU is its elites and bureaucracies, that’s how it’s built.

OK, I don’t even live in an EU country (OK, suppose in like 50 years by some miracle Armenia joins it, and suppose I get Armenian citizenship before that …).

But - it’s not EU’s particular problem.

EU is sort of a system built entirely of “liberal democracy best practices” as they were seen in year 1999. And all its faults are highly average and general for liberal democracies.

It’s the crisis of liberal democracies as a thing, because modern technologies allow representatives to guide their populations like a Victoria II player does. Like in a global strategy. And it works. It’s not even only modern technologies, it’s also “political technologies” like what was normal for USA for many years, but to the rest of the world has spread only in the 90s and 00s. In USA those were, until some point around Reagan, balanced by functional journalism and protest culture.

Except the fact that it works in the sense of having necessary feedbacks and controls and computing power is only one side of the coin, the other side of which is that direct democracy can work too. This removes direct democracy’s disadvantage of impracticality, and removes representative democracy’s advantage of stability (the opposite of what politicians call stability, stability of democracy is the direct opposite of stability of elites, culture, morality, economics, laws and policies).

And the fact that it works in the sense of political technologies means that representative democracy gains a significant disadvantage of not being really democracy anymore. Those unfortunately work. Those can still work when voting for decisions, not people, but it’s harder to make a populace support two inconsistent (from the point of propaganda) actions than it is to make them support a politician who’ll support both and then make them doubt the inconsistency.

So to adapt for changes liberal democracies must become direct liberal democracies or turn into Russias. I have spoken.

Europe is an exception to the rule as are others. As a native speaker I’d never even noticed this; but An European immediately sounds wrong; just like putting ‘an’ instead of ‘a’ UFO/unit/one etc… sounds wrong.

English eh, Why would it be consistent?

It’s not so much whether the word is spelled with a vowel, but whether it makes a vowel sound.

In English, the y sound is considered a consonant when at the beginning of a word but a vowel elsewhere.

Europe makes a similar y initial sound as, e.g., yurt, young, yellow, yell, youth, etc. so in those cases the words take the “a” article instead of “an”.

A yurt, a youth, a yell, etc.

Likewise Euclidian, European, Uranus, ewe, union, user, universe, unit, usage, all take the “a” article instead of “an”.

And in the reverse, words like hour and heir become “an hour” and “an heir” because the initial sound is a vowel even though the first letter is a consonant.

I don’t think that they haven’t been innovative. Moreso, there’s a deliberate strategy by FAANG/MIC companies to buy (or bury) smaller startups that are innovating.

Then those bigger companies mothball the tech with no plan to sell or market their acquisitions, nor release the IP rights on what they own.

It’s not so much that there’s no innovation, it’s just good old fashioned tech monopoly behavior.