It's even more wasteful when you realize that the USG is trying to force governments around the world to buy Californian almonds, even in places where almonds are traditionally grown and harvested.
And then there's the matter of Saudis coaxing farmers to grow alfalfa which is then exported to Saudi Arabia to feed cows there (!).
Well he didn't take it lightly and was very upset. They apparently did a pre-recorded version of his answers that the producers of that segment specifically told the night shift to air online, but the night shift didn't, which further exasperated him.
I mean, that 7 billion USD amount also includes some of us on the other side of the pond placing bets based on the very obvious shitpost patterns of your highly stable president.
These are outlier trades by size alone placed minutes before news broke.
This isn't just people betting on TACO or NACHO or pathological lying and whatnot. These are ultra, ultra high-conviction bets literally large enough to move commodities markets placed minutes before news that, astoundingly, moved the market in exactly the right direction!
Their loss if they don't move to regional pricing. AI will continue to remain an upper-management luxury then, and won't reach the mass adoption required to justify their outsized valuations.
Regional pricing makes sense for products that don’t have ongoing costs or where most of the input cost can be offset by local labor. You’re not buying server racks nor electricity at 1/3 of the price to serve poorer markets
Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects. There's the Digital Euro and then there's Wero and Target and a bunch of other shit that doesn't reach consumer scale usage or attention.
And your point is what? That nothing should ever be investigated, trials, or invested in until it has as you call it "consumer scale useage".
The EU is not perfect, but these kind of black and white comments highlight why it can be slow to align everyone to get on board with an idea. The empty vessle makes the most noise.
No, my point is to focus on one thing and get it done right. The right time to build an EU-wide payments processor was pre-COVID, as is the case with Pix, UPI, WeChat Pay, etc. If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade, what stopped the EU? Project managers and CV padding bureaucrats who really weren't serious about doing a good job. Compare that to the concerted efforts by the central banks in India and Brazil to actually work with the private sector to build out this system.
The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.
Again, that's a silly argument, when you're saying "It should have been done before" but at the same time saying "Europe spends way too much time and money on various Fintech pet projects."
> If developing countries can build one over the course of a decade
What countries are you talking about ? The EU countries have some, we also have instant IBAN transfers without any payment processor, we have PCI compliance in all banks to allow it. This feels like another example of you not knowing what you're talking about when you say 'The EU has had the plumbing needed for this since at least 2 decades, yet has not managed to create this.'.
The foundations to never rely on payment processors is already there, now we need to remove the dependancy on payments like visa and mastercard because of nescessity. And as someone above posted, it in progress, it will be done standardised across the entire EU, in Brazil, it's one country.
Edit : There was also never a demand for it because the EU reasonably assumed it could rely on US partners to cover areas in which the EU didn't focus. Only recently those priorities changed, politics has that effect here of dealing with the most pressing issues and not those that are lobbied for the hardest.
The 737 MAX is fine enough. But it's not like you can order those for immediate delivery either. There's almost 5,000 pending orders, and Boeing can make on the order of 500 of them in a good year.
Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?
Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.
The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.
My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.
But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.
If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.
To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
I'm not going to include Russia or Serbia or even Turkey, when talking about European statistics on entrepreneurship, because the EU is the overarching force that dictates widespread European policy. Talented entrepreneurs from Russia or the Balkans go to London or the US to set up shop anyways (my cofounders being an example).
The UK's business policy since Brexit has been largely dictated by factors outside its control, in the hallways of Washington DC and Brussels. The UK is no longer the forcing function on EU business policy that it was before - it's quite frankly the other way around now.
On founder culture and aspirations, it might be fair to say that the social welfare net provided by the EU countries is generous enough that it discourages entrepreneurship, compared to say the US or China or even India. I won't fault the social net ever, but the fact of the matter is that a growing economy is necessary to facilitate a growing social net. But EU policy has been drafted to strongly favor the incumbents over the startups, to favor the Goliaths over the Davids - even if David happens to be a middle market company trying to make its mark. It's also why EU companies in that position strongly favor American partners instead of European ones - Goliaths don't want to innovate, but they want new innovation regulated so that it doesn't hurt their bottom line.
Another factor is that 10 years since Brexit, the EU still hasn't created a viable enough exit alternative that could replace the London of the 2010s. While it's much easier for an American company to go public, EU policy does not make it easy. Which is why founders look at acquisitions or PE as a much more viable route to exit.
> I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
That's already happening across the EU, and herein is why it's very difficult to create homegrown champions. American companies and Chinese companies are encouraged to control the entire vertical chain, it being a matter of policy in the latter. EU companies have to resort to licensing agreements and a potential future acquisition.
Throwing shit on the wall so that something sticks? At this point, I really don't get what they're after. What about hiring Jonny Ive to create some AI widget to chat with? Gone nowhere?
More like refugees flowing out, which Egypt doesn't want to deal with.
The Palestinians didn't help their cause with Yasser Arafat's Black September uprising in Jordan. Then they topped that up with strong support for Saddam when he invaded Kuwait. Like the ones in Kuwait were literally betraying Kuwaitis to the Iraqi troops.
Oh, and did I forget Lebanon? They literally fomented the civil war.
And then there's the matter of Saudis coaxing farmers to grow alfalfa which is then exported to Saudi Arabia to feed cows there (!).
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