So, as someone who used to be an engineer in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, this reminds me a lot of Sematech. That was a joint venture between American companies in the 90's, when there was a concern that we were falling behind Japan. I'm sure there will be people who try to claim otherwise, but my view from inside AMD (at that time still doing its own manufacturing) was that nothing much ever came out of Sematech. It was a lot of hype, but not much result.
If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn't a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).
I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world's advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.
Europe has some successful international projects like CERN or Airbus. Besides, what are the other options?
Europe is in this strange place where collectively account for enormous wealth and power but individually no country is a match to the big boys like USA/China when simultaneously are super unoptimised due to cultural/lingual differences.
The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English, so who knows, maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it's a small country).
At the end of the day, those large Eurpoean projects bring a lot of good. Be it political or simply keeping some talent in Europe. I am also hopeful for some competition from the UK :) Since the collapse of the USSR, finally there's a competition.
> The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English...
English IS the lingua franca in Europe, right now, at this moment, no question about it. Even the in remotest parts Generation Z and younger speak and understand a little bit, it is only the older folks who still remember the EU with borders are reluctant to speack anything else other than their own language.
And there are more and more people picking up a third language as they move around within the EU.
English is well suited for this lingua franca thing because at the beginner-to-mid level the syntax is simple, and you can get by with a few hundred words, much better than in other languages. Also there is a common pronounciation that is different for everyone (and reflects the mother tongue of the speaker heavily), but again, people speak slowly enough that it is possible to understand what they are trying to say.
Which cannot be said about the native speakers (coming from the UK, mostly), so the UK leaving us might actually improve the situation. No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)
To be fair, much of the gap with accents, is to do with exposure, in reality the majority of your media consumption in English is American English not West Midlands English.
Unfortunately the majority of native English speakers (not just from the UK) fail to realise that there is an 'international' business English which has significant differences from how they would speak 'back home'.
From the faux pas I've seen in international teams, my shortlist for the English native speakers:
1. Try to speak slowly and with diction
2. Avoid idiomatic expressions
3. Avoid phrasal verbs
4. Avoid Sarcasm (!)
Do that and 90% of miscommunication in an international setting is gone.
I work with a lot of near-native speakers, where we can understand each other, but we never get to that lively back-and-forth that comes in an L1 (or a fully fluent L2).
It's not a question of relationships -- you can do that well with VERY little verbal. It's a question of nuanced, technical, back-and-forth. I can understand on a mile-high level that they used Python to build an ML system which can recognize whether something is or is not a hotdog, but we never get to the point of discussing finer points of algorithms, nuances of business models, or similar in-depth discussions.
Some of these folks have lived in an English-native country for years, but it's just not quite there yet.
As a native English speaker, I would just like to apologize to all those learning English (as a second language) about the spelling business. We're not really sure how we messed that up so badly. Even the American efforts to improve it actually just made the situation more complicated.
> No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)
I'm confused by this. Are you saying that the native English speaker in the room was the one having difficulty understanding what the other non-native speakers were saying?
This is generally true, native english speakers are usually less equipped to understand weird accents while non-native speakers are used to conversing with non-native speakers. non-native speakers are by definition bilingual which might help.
>>the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it's a small country).
Malta also has English as an official language, though again, it's an even smaller country. On the other hand, in neither Ireland or Malta is English the "first" official language.
While Irish/Gaelic language is a thing it's mostly ceremonial and people on the street know it poorly, with no knowledge to even superficial conversation. Irish language has no use in Ireland. Even tho it is "official", it's useless
Just want to confirm this as an Irish person. The language is of symbolic / nationalist importance only. It's not used in everyday life except by hobbyists or residents of a few tiny 'gaeltacht' areas.
In other words, English is in practice the first language of virtually every Irish person, the vast majority of media, and all business in the country.
Fading. There have been major pushes to try to make it significant again but, as mentioned above, most Irish speak English daily with little change in that trend. The Gaeltacht will probably keep it going for many decades, though; which is/was not the case for Scottish Gaelic (which is in a much more precarious position).
I don't agree it's "useless" but I can see your point. We don't learn it for commerce or for historical/cultural insight. We learn it to know who were are.
Imagine telling a bunch of Jews that Hebrew was a load of nonsense and they're better off learning German, French or Spanish. I would agree though that the level of spoken Irish amongst the general population of Ireland is poor.
For them it's not about more opportunities it's about preserving something meaningful. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.
The expulsion of the Jews is a specially sad part of our history, some families still keep the keys of their old houses after 5 centuries. A few years ago a law was passed so their descendants could claim Spanish nationality without the usual requirements applied to people from other nationalities.
Hebrew has a number of sacred books written in it. This us why it was preserved through centuries by faithful Jews, who read these books basically daily. It was and is a strong part of ethnic and religious identity.
A similar situation is with Quran and classical Arabic, even though it's not an everyday spoken language in (most of) Arabic world.
AFAICT Irish does not enjoy a similar status. If you want to hear a more or less alive Gaelic language in everyday use, visit rural Wales.
Hebrew was a language perpetuated by Jews around the world for centuries before the state of Israel was founded. Even today, Jews anywhere doing a bar mitzvah ceremony must read some Hebrew.
Sure, Israel is the country where Hebrew was restored as an everyday spoken language, but Israelis are not the only Jews for whom Hebrew is important.
Its imporrant either for religious reasons or national ones (zionism). There are many young jews in the U.S who are increasingly neither. Even if they support Israel they don't see a reason why they should actively live there or learn Hebrew. So most don't know Hebrew. Reciting a prayer yes, some do that.
I'm sure there are plenty of Jews outside Israel who have opinions on Hebrew, and I'm sure some are glad it is used even if they personally don't speak it.
Some are glad, others dont care. Depends on how religious you were brought up. Especially in the US, where younger jews are increasingly secularised, I don't think many care that much. Does Mark Zuckerberg care about Hebrew? Last I heard he learned Chinese.
In Northern Ireland there are small pockets of people learning it purely out of nationalist sentiment. Sinn Fein have been trying to force an Irish language act through for years which would see us become more like the south in that regard despite virtually nobody speaking it (the south, at least, has areas in the west of the country where it is actually a first language and therefore justifiable).
It's very frustrating because we do foreign languages so badly but instead of making an effort to improve our foreign language skills they're trying to push a largely dead language for purely symbolic reasons.
What you say is true for most of Ireland, but there are small parts of the country where Irish is a first language – the Gaeltacht. For example, Gweedore (in Donegal) where over 70% of the population have Irish as a first language and all its local schools use Irish as the language of instruction.
The British lawyers who rushed to get Irish qualifications so they could continue to practice in the EU were in for a rude awakening when they were told they had to physically reside in Éire and qualify in Gaelic, not just English.
Malta used to be an UK colony, hardly surprising. Problem is more the cultural divide between Germanic and Latin ethics that continental Europe is split across... although Germany itself is heavily Catholic and is paradoxically the least German of all the northern lot. (Not sure if I explained myself good enough)
Germany is roughly 1/3 catholic (south and west predominantly), 1/3 protestant (north) and 1/3 atheist (east). Regional specifications are very rough, often there is actually a village-by-village variation between catholic and protestant due to cuius regio eius religio in the middle ages. Atheism/agnosticism/dontcare is on the rise roughly everywhere, but has a head start in the east/GDR due to GDR politics.
And I guess you mean to say germany has gone farthest in christianisation, with the least of old german or old norse cultural remains? I guess that might be true.
I'd put the entire east into the protestant bucket too. Berlin might be a special case because it was traditionally "draft dodgers" in the western part and "exemplary GDR citizens" in the eastern part, but especially in the more remote parts religions has survived the GDR (and was even somewhat tolerated later on by the regime - even thought the supression and surveillance of the church never stopped until the end).
Do you have any references of English actually being phased-out in EU? The Politico article was written just a few days after the Brexit referendum, and 4 years later I can only take it for empty sabre-rattling.
Proposing either of those two as a lingua franca (irony aside), would be a sure fire way to start an enormous argument in the EU.
Surprisingly with the UK out of the EU; English is perhaps best placed to fill this role, as it is now a "neutral" language, with only the Irish and Maltese contingents who, broadly speaking, don't wield the same influence as France and Germany.
> Do you have any references of English actually being phased-out in EU?
It's not clear yet if it will be used in official documents after Brexit agreements will be signed, but UK was the only country who chose English as an official language.
There's an hard requirement in EU to translate every official document in every language spoken in the EU, if English is not an official language, that requirement will cease to exist and slowly there will be no official document in English anymore because it's also a very costly operation.
Unless Ireland or Malta apply for English as primary language.
It's also a political stand, Macron is pushing to use French more and more in the EU institutions.
It doesn't mean that it won't be taught in schools or that it will fade as the most spoken language in EU, it still is by a large margin, but that it will move away from UK English and will become more similar to the English 75% of the > 1 billion English speakers in the World speak as a second language.
Native English speakers not understanding or not being understood by non-native speakers it's already a thing, the gap could widen in the future.
> It's not clear yet if it will be used in official documents after Brexit agreements will be signed, but UK was the only country who chose English as an official language.
The official languages of the EU are set by Council Regulation No 1, which declares English to be an official language. Brexit did not change that regulation in any way; it would take a unanimous vote of the Council of the European Union to amend it, and it is very unlikely that Ireland would vote to remove as an official language the first language of the vast majority of its citizens.
Funny side-note: Sweden never registered Swedish as an official language to the EU because they thought it would be a waste of EU funds to translate all documents to Swedish, since most people there can get along in English.
Then Finland went ahead and ruined it by registering both Finish and Swedish as their official languages (they have a Swedish minority there) :)
It’s a good story, but Finland and Sweden joined EU at the same time in 1995, so there wouldn’t actually have been a period when Sweden was a member but Swedish wasn’t an official language.
Of course the Swedes would like to blame things on Finland if they can ;)
What language the EU documents are written in is entirely irrelevant for the EU citizens though (they'll get translations anyway). What matters is what people choose as their second language, and I'm pretty sure English is and will remain the most popular choice.
(and the US cultural influence is the main reason for this, the UK doesn't really matter much in that regard since around the 19th century).
Use of English as a second language, it might surprise you, dropped in the past 10 years, it was spoken by 52% of the population in 2012, now it dropped to 44%.
Not native speakers, English is the fourth language in Europe for number of native speakers, after German, French and Italian (if we don't count Russian, largely first with 120 million native speakers)
Secondly, things can change rapidly.
20 years ago the most studied second language in Italian schools was French.
Thirdly, in Europe countries have spoken to each other for centuries, when I go to Spain I speak Spanish, when I go to France or Belgium I speak French, I can also speak some German.
Of course not perfectly, but we still understand each other better than through English, because of similarities in the languages.
So yes, second language counts, but only when other options are worse (I speak English with Sweds or Dutch - I've been studying Swedish on my own but my progress with the language have been very slow)
In many schools we study more than 1 foreign language.
I studied French in primary and middle school then English and German in high school.
They were regular public schools, far from the best.
It's quite common elsewhere.
My cousins live in Belgium, their kids study French, Flemish and of course Italian in school.
Many Italian researchers, for example, move to Germany and they learn German because it's better to know it when you live there, English is used to bootstrap the social life and at work.
CERN is in Switzerland and even though I believe everyone there speaks English, in Geneva the official language is French, it helps a lot outside of work to learn it, more than English. Move a few Kms and they speak German, go South and they speak Italian and you will still be in small Switzerland.
Where many people are naturally bi or trilingual.
Adding English as a third/fourth it's very easy for them.
Eventually everybody will learn some English, undoubtedly, but it's gonna be foreigners' English, that it's different from proper English and sometimes it's pure nonsense for native speakers and viceversa.
Nah, the amount of English education across Europe is a function of global business and cultural production (Hollywood and the internet). Those will not change even after Brexit.
China is the largest producer of cultural products in the World right now, Hollywood itself made blockbusters there, financed and co produced by China.
It has already changed, before Brexit was even a thing.
From 2013
China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013 the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
You're right that it hasn't translated into advanced "More Moore" logic, but Europe does have some leading technology in the "More than Moore" space - power electronics, image sensors, etc.
Staying up to date on leading edge logic is crazy expensive.
*> maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it's a small country).
I have not looked at it this way, but maybe you are right and this is the big chance for the EU. It would make the EU so much more efficient.
> ... maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language
I mean, this is never going to happen. Name one country in history that completely switched language without external pressure (invasion or colonisation).
It's not about switching languages but making a language the default when people don't have the same native language.
So instead of dealing 24 languages, EU can make English the default for everything international. Local stuff will continue with the local language but all the international dealings can be conducted in English.
That's pretty much the standart on the internet and the younger generations are already used to it. If a website, an app or a game doesn't support your language you simply use English and it's all good. From the admin side it'a also good, many people who are not native English speakers who want to build projects for the global audience would simply start with English as a base language and localise from there.
It works fine for the most international thing we have: The Internet. Should work fine for the EU too.
EU will probably never give English any kind of official status of "linqua franca", because Germany/France/Spain/Italy etc. big countries with long cultural history just won't accept it. Smaller nations are much more flexible because they always have had to.
That being said, English is already unofficial common language between most Europeans. E.g. it's very common for Finns and Swedes to communicate in English, despite Swedish being one the official(!) languages in Finland (also taught in elementary school), simply because many Finns have much stronger English than Swedish skills (and Swedes speak typically more neutral (clear) English than native speakers).
Actually, because English is native language only in UK, that makes it excellent lingua franca for the rest: when both parties speak it as 2nd langauge, the communication is more easily kept in the same level (i.e. not speaking too fast, using exotic words, etc).
That's just how the world works nowadays, e.g. in tech English vocabulary is extremely pervasive. Even in Finnish every-day talk in tech related areas we often use direct loan words from English ("Finglish").
Personally I think the only downside of English is its irregular prononcing, i.e. relatively weak correlation between written and spoken language.
> Name one country in history that completely switched language without external pressure (invasion or colonisation).
IIRC Geneva switched from being bilingual French German to French completely dominating public life in the space of a generation because of the influx of French Protestants because of Calvin.
That's very true. Europe is in a very difficult position now. RCEP agreement has just happened (it will take 1-2 years to ratify it by all countries), but it is a huge step towards Asia economic dominance.
Next, China is sponsoring actively similar agreement for African countries. Africa is a potentially huge market and has a lot of natural resources. It seems that Europe totally drop the ball here, the only thing they have done was to destabilize some of the African countries in the name of supporting democracy - this failed miserably everywhere, new rulers were equally undemocratic and often even more hostile towards Europe.
The same with US, they totally gave up Africa, they could not to come up with something else than mumbling about democracy and trying to impose some post-colonial trade deals. China is playing this game much, much better and, whatever I think of them, they have actually something substantial (investments other than digging diamonds and cobalt) to offer.
Europe will loose Asian and African market, India is building up its economy fast as well, so soon Europe will not have anything to sell over there too. Europe lags behind US for a long time in all aspects (education, innovation). This only means marginalization and the role of destination for cheap crap that cannot be sold on other markets.
It seems that UK politicians sort of noticed that, that's why they decided to cut ties with EU without much fear (brexit without any agreement) as they count on their influence and position in Commonwealth countries, what will give them backdoor access to developing markets and be part of the global economy.
Europe leaders really need to wake up. Stop concentrating on immaterial issues, push for more competitive economy, lower taxes, less regulations, development of innovative companies in a natural way, not buy being financed from some EU founds - this just does not work, as this creates companies that are good in acquiring those funds, not creating market value.
Common market should be available for all EU countries, not only (still) the richest ones - "innovations" like 2014/67/UE directive are not helping - this one hit less developed EU countries - it forces companies to pay local wages for workers who are delegated to work in other country. As a result the truck driver from Poland has to earn the same money as the driver in France, Holland, Germany, depending where the truck is in the given moment of time. This makes new EU countries companies less competitive. And nobody cared that it violates EU treaties and the rules of "free movement of goods and services".
Stop internal fighting with anyone who dares to have different views or elect government that EU bureaucracy does not like (Italy a few years ago, today Poland and Hungary).
There are very noble ideas like reduction of CO2, this is important, but maybe Europe just can't afford being the leader in that effort if the rest of the World just does not really care? Europe need sources of clean and cheap energy. What the biggest EU economy does? Nord Stream 2, to buy gas from Russia. Is it helping? Not really. Why can't Europe start spending funds on innovations in nuclear and fusion energy reactors?
I don't see any leaders that Europe used to have who could push Europe in the right direction, unfortunately.
I am waiting for someone who would just say: hey, maybe moving whole "The European Parliament" every month from Brussels to Strasbourg and back does not make any sense and it costs a lot of money that can be spent better.
Europe is fine. Europe will be to the world, what Switzerland is to Europe.
I agree with you, that it has to focus more on innovation. Regarding quality of life for the average person I would take the stability of a Northern European country over the US or China at any time.
Examples for things Europe is also missing: Opressive governments, gang shootings, school shootings, people without healthcare, social scoring systems, polluted rivers, forced labour camps, denying of facts like evolution or climate change.
> Europe leaders really need to wake up. Stop concentrating on immaterial issues, push for more competitive economy, lower taxes, less regulations
I agree that our dear leaders have to wake up - but that is not the direction they should go at all. Our taxes are already so low that many countries have problems financing taking care of basic needs like healthcare. Less regulation? This will directly, and negatively, impact the people of Europe because corporations always exploit every legal (and illegal) avenue to cut corners at the expense of the people.
Europe is resource hungry when it comes so social spending. Budgets are huge, and a lot of money is being spent. Some of that money is not even ours, it's just other people buying our debt.
I do question myself sometimes how much longer this can be maintained. Our world is changing fast, and it's not like Europe is losing the game, it's that we are not even playing it.
We will eventually need to do something about it. What exactly needs to be done is definitely debatable.
> Europe is resource hungry when it comes so social spending.
The alternative to that is becoming like the US: homeless people everywhere, people spreading illnesses (not just corona) at work because they can't take any sick days, people getting chronically ill or vastly worse side effects from untreated issues because they can't afford health insurance, people fearing eviction because losing their job.
All while the billionaires made an additional 800 billion in wealth.
> I do question myself sometimes how much longer this can be maintained.
We can maintain the status quo, but we need to tax the rich and international mega-corporations for that. It is unsustainable that the massive profits generated in Europe are siphoned off untaxed to "tax heavens" and foreign countries.
How about fund university research in related technology, reduce regulation that inhibits free enterprise, open financial markets to support capital formation, lower taxes on capital gains, enforce anti-trust regulation, and cross your fingers and hope some comes from it in 20 years.
You could also spend trillions of dollars on a high tech military industrial complex. That helps also.
It is already effectively thus in practical terms, sorry to disappoint you. Any time two random Europeans meet and do not speak each other’s language, the first option they’ll reach for is basic English. There are very, very few localized exceptions (some Eastern Europeans will reach for German).
That's not quite correct as stated. People usually try the local language first, if they can speak it at all. At that point they don't even know what each other's languages are. So two British people meeting for the first time in Germany may well start off by speaking German to each other. I've seen that happen a few times.
But I've also seen a German speak bad English to someone just because they looked foreign. They were foreign, but having lived in German for a while they could speak German better than they could English, and after a while they politely pointed this out. It was a bit embarrassing. It is definitely better to try the local language first.
> Europe has some successful international projects like CERN or Airbus. Besides, what are the other options?
If we have to go back to mentioning Airbus (1970) and CERN (1954) to find successful European projects, I think this show how big of a serious problem there is in Europe no!?
P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
Europe's done big multinational technical-political things many times to varying levels of success. Don't forget Gaileo, Arianespace, Airbus's parent EADS, the ESA, etc. They tend to not be super capital efficient, but the sheer amount of wealth and resources tend to make things that are priorities not completely fail.
> P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
What factors make you want to get out? As an American who's spent a lot of time in both the US and Continental Europe (and elsewhere) I don't see any terrific suck.
One of the most remarkable differences between most of Europe to most of North America is average physical space per person. That difference manifests itself in myriads of ways, from less regulation to being less in your neighbor’s face all the time. It’s just easier to live and let live when you’re a little farther apart.
And I think that is attractive to a percentage of our species, regardless of our birthplace. And being closer together is more attractive to another percentage of our species, as witnessed by people who move from North America to Europe.
> What factors make you want to get out? As an American who's spent a lot of time in both the US and Continental Europe (and elsewhere) I don't see any terrific suck.
At the risk of speaking out of turn, I've traveled extensively outside the US and befriended a lot of folks and had discussions on this topic with them. I would summarize my findings as such:
1. Economic Mobility: In Europe economic mobility, on average, is actually better than the US. But, for those who are educated and driven, economic mobility in the US is much much much higher. Average person may up their income by $10k/yr in PPP or more in Europe from young adulthood to adult-hood, average person in the US tends to stay flat. But driven, intelligent people with degrees in the US can double or triple their income from young adulthood to adulthood, and this simply doesn't happen in Europe. The tech industry is a major factor in this, where senior-level positions in non-FAANG companies can make upwards of $150k/yr in the US, and the PPP equivalent European salary is around half of that.
2. Lifestyle goals: In Europe, it is very hard to be successful as a young person outside of major metro areas. This is somewhat true for the US as well, and while business cultures are different in different areas, it's easier (pre-COVID) to work remotely for a US-based company vs a EU-based company, but usually requires working US timezone hours or relocating to the US. Additionally, Americans tend to lead faster paced public lives, but slower paced private lives, and the reverse tends to be the case for Europeans. Everybody has their own lifestyle preferences, and lifestyle also is a major factor in intra-EU movements as well (I have friends who moved from Belgium to Portugal for instance, due to lifestyle. Friends that moved from Germany to Spain, etc.)
3. Freedom: The US is more diverse and free in some aspects. There's a lot of nuance here, but while you obviously have a lot of history, linguistic, and food diversity in the EU, there's significant similarities in cultural expectations, especially in professional work environments once you enter the middle class. The US is a LOT more free in regards to one's behavior, lifestyle choices, and personal life when you are in the middle class, compared to Europe. This is probably more obvious in the UK than anywhere else, where class hallmarks are as direct as how you speak to someone verbally, where in the US it's possible to have a pronounced Southern accent and still be solidly middle class in a professional environment, even though that's not considered as high-brow as a West-coast accent would be. Europe is in many ways more diverse overall, but not really in the middle class and above environments. Also some people just want to be free to do whatever they want on their own property without anyone nosing in, and this is antithetical to the European communal mindset which is very often enforced legally through direct government regulation.
> The tech industry is a major factor in this, where senior-level positions in non-FAANG companies can make upwards of $150k/yr in the US, and the PPP equivalent European salary is around half of that.
Why does this matter so much when there is affordable healthcare, lots of social programs to save you in case things don't go so well?
I am honestly asking. I am in Europe and my salary is half of what I could make in the US, but it never bothered me. I have a very chill life and more money wouldn't make me significantly happier.
> Why does this matter so much when there is affordable healthcare, lots of social programs to save you in case things don't go so well?
Because when things are going well it means you lose out on a lot of economic opportunity and not everyone feels the same way about the probability of things not going well, or who has the responsibility to cover them in the case that things don't go well. As I said in another comment, increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US. So those factors don't detract people from moving here if they see other benefits to go along with the economic benefits.
Certainly, it is the case that this has it's trade-offs. I'm not making any value judgement on what the correct decision is for anyone but myself, but just trying to share some of the reasoning I've heard (from a probably biased subset of people).
You have affordable healthcare if your making tech money in the USA too, and sadly, if things really go bad you can always move back.
Also by making more money, you can retire early and then work on whatever hobby project you'd like. I know in europe with generous social programs you kind of can do that already to a certain extent, but with money you can actually do that for a long time.
Statutory Maternity/Paternal/Parental leave. No 'fire for no reason' laws (i.e. laws against the Orwellian double speak "at will" employment). Anti-no-compete laws (this exists in California).
Worth noting that many Americans I know in Europe, have no plans to ever come back, they don't see USA as an option anymore once experienced life here.
Source: work for FAANG, I see many one way relocations US>EU, not so much other way around.
Furthermore:
1. yeah, triple the money, quadruple the life costs, and no social security safety net, or at least poor one.
2. what?
3. FREEDOM - very US centric view on the "freedom"
> Source: work for FAANG, I see many one way relocations US>EU, not so much other way around.
I think there's inherent selection bias in the way we perceive this: we see someone "leaving" only if we're involved with them at the moment they depart; we see someone "arriving" if we encounter them any time after they came our way.
EU to US immigration is about 60,000 per year. It's about 20,000 in the other direction. Of course, EU has about 1.5x the population of the US, so it's more like double the rate of immigration, not triple.
> triple the money, quadruple the life costs
My short experiences living in Germany and the UK each seemed more expensive, denominated in dollars, than here, one of the highest cost of living regions in the US.
>Source: work for FAANG, I see many one way relocations US>EU, not so much other way around.
At FAANG salaries I sure as hell bet they love life here since they're basically part of the 1% top earners in Europe but not every skilled worker in Europe can achieve FAANG levels of compensation. In other words, your sample size has too much room for selection bias and is purely anecdotal.
I don't think the number of Europeans coming to the US or the number of Americans going to Europe is massively high in either direction, so we're talking about a pretty specific subset of people for whom this makes sense, mostly for economic reasons.
1. Life costs are nowhere near quadruple, in fact they are roughly equal to lower in the US. I have no idea where you think this costs more, but I feel like this is a politicized statement taking averages and applying them to a subset of people who have the necessary affluence where the transition makes sense. Increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US, as a simple example where this line of reasoning is flawed.
Social safety nets are something that only really matters to people who think they may end up using those social safety nets. People are often wrong about this, but that's just how people think. A lot of the affluent people who see themselves becoming more affluent in the US clearly understand it's partly due to not having to cover the social safety net for others. Actions speak louder than words.
2. and 3. I don't understand your "what?". In regards to #2 and #3, there's a massive difference in lifestyle and freedom of choice in your daily life when you own a sizeable single-family home on a city outskirts or in a suburb vs live in an apartment in the middle of a city. Each of these has pros and cons and attracts different people at different stages of their life. Meaningfully, the sizeable single-family home on the outskirts is mostly out of reach for people in Europe, even highly skilled individuals who would be solidly middle class in the US. This is only one of the myriad differences in lifestyle and freedom and how it affects daily life for someone living in both places.
A simple example from my own life, is that a good friend of mine moved near me from Germany because we both have a shared interest in racing cars. While Germany has fantastic things like the Nurburgring where you can simply drive on during open days to the public, TUV regulations and the significant increased costs of components, as well as difficulty in owning enough property to have space to work on your own cars makes it a lot more difficult to be a serious hobbyist gearhead in Germany vs the US. Here, he has a decent sized single-family home with a 3-car garage with high ceilings and a lift, as well as easy low-cost access to 6 race tracks within a one day drive, all at a fraction of his salary.
Obviously, YMMV and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I loved Europe, but I came back to the US after many visits and living in Europe on a temporary residency for a year, largely for many of these same reasons myself. My sample set may be biased, but the Grandparent asked why some Europeans want to move to the US, I'm just sharing the reasons which were expressed to me. You may disagree with them in your own personal opinion, but it doesn't change that these are reasons which matter to some people.
"1. Life costs are nowhere near quadruple, in fact they are roughly equal to lower in the US."
That is unlikely. Metropolitan areas in the US are expensive as f. But assuming they are the same. Health care and education of your children will kill you financially.
> That is unlikely. Metropolitan areas in the US are expensive as f. But assuming they are the same. Health care and education of your children will kill you financially.
A small number of metropolitan areas in the US are expensive, basically all other metro areas offer near similar lifestyle options while being massively cheaper. I live in the 7th largest metro in the US by population, it's exceptionally diverse and cosmopolitan, my cost of living is 1/6th what it is in the Bay Area and 1/5th what it is New York City. Not every metro area in the US is NYC and SFO. I've lived in numerous places abroad, and my cost of living in this city is on par with places a lot cheaper than Europe and the only places I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon. Everywhere else in the EU was significantly more expensive to live in.
Again, you're repeating the healthcare issue, while ignoring the comment you're replying to. It is standard, basic, benefits in the tech industry (and in many other professional industries) in the US to have quite competent employer-paid healthcare. Tech and Finance are certainly blessed industries compared to others, but even in other industries any middle-class professional will have employer-paid healthcare. The plight of the average person (the majority of Americans are lower-class, not middle-class, which heavily skews the average) is not the plight of tech workers, who are among the most well compensated and most privileged individual contributors in the US economy. If you're single, it's even better. In my entire career, spanning almost two decades, I've never once had to pay even a single dollar towards my healthcare premiums and I've had high quality non-stop uninterrupted healthcare coverage the entire time. I've also never worked at a FAANG and grew up in the Midwest. This is just how the tech industry is, nation-wide. For people with families, they usually have to cover some of the premium cost either directly or being taxed on it as imputed income (if your partner is not your spouse, legally). Even then, most employers cover spouses and children at no premium cost to the employee in the tech industry, although that's not as universal.
Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars (primarily property tax) across the entire US. Different areas have different qualities of public schooling, but a tech worker salary makes it more than affordable to buy a single-family home in an area with good schools in most cities in the US (but not all). If you feel the need for private education, that's on you, but that's a cost you'd have to bear in Europe as well. European public schools aren't really any better than public schools in the US unless you compare to the worst quartile. Suburban school districts in the US are pretty well-funded. College on the other hand, is another story. But if your kids perform well academically, scholarships are very plentiful in the US, and there are tax-incentivized ways to save to cover the cost of college, and college isn't really necessary to enter the middle-class in the US unlike in Europe (however it does certainly help). Since you'd be residing in the US while maintaining EU citizenship in this hypothetical scenario, it's also likely your kids could go to Europe for college at a significantly reduced cost as well.
There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, but for the subset of affluent people we're referring to in the context of this thread, healthcare costs is simply not one of those things. The economics /clearly/ favor the US, many other things do not.
"s I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon."
Lisbon is a bad example. Real Estate is out of control there. A decent apartment will set you back at least 500k, thanks to supply and demand due to the Golden Visa.
" employer-paid healthcare."
If you have an employer and everything goes smooth
"Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars"
There are a few excellent k12 schools if you live in the right place (did we mention real estate costs?). But if you want your children to go to a good school you likely have to pay for private school. Then the universities fees later. I think my school in the US bills you 60k or something per year. 4 years, two kids, this sets you back already about 1/2 million. If you pay for k12 we are talking easily 1 million for education alone.
"There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, "
No sure. If you do the right thing at the right time the US is great. I immigrated, got a STEM PhD, got naturalized and then left to China. Never looked back. And if I see not how my friends that stayed are struggling, it was a really good decision.
> so we're talking about a pretty specific subset of people for whom this makes sense, mostly for economic reasons.
That's the thing that interested me about TacticalCoder's comment: it didn't seem to be some small preference or economic factor but seemed to have a lot of vehemence behind it.
I do agree with you (at least I used to), but lately I've been very reluctant to anything "made in USA" (e.g. the American dream). The sheer amount of injustice that happens there is just way to much. I am not sure I would be able to sleep comfortably living in a country where I would be making 7x or 8x what other families are making at the expense of leaving them with no safety net whatsoever.
Freedom at times kinda looks a lot more like selfishness.
The EU has a lot of other problems, but at least people here does not have to think twice before doing "normal things" like going to the doctor. I mean it is primarily important to think about one self, I get that, but what happens to others is really important and will affect us eventually!
PS: I left Buenos Aires in 2009, now I live in Spain, even though here it is not perfect at least I can sleep without regrets.
> Freedom at times kinda looks a lot more like selfishness.
It very much does. I think that one of the great philosophical debates that's never really been resolved is the moral quandary between individualism and collectivism. Individual freedom, at it's most fundamental level, is the freedom to do what is good for yourself, rather than being forced to do what is good for your community. It is the freedom to make the moral choice of what "good" is for yourself. In many many ways, freedom /is/ selfishness. It's not clear to me that this is a bad thing, except at the extremes. It's clear that the "best" society would be one that finds a balance, but that is very hard to do.
Not at all, those are simply the biggest ones that would be recognised by Americans. Another recognisable project would be the Erasmus program or interrail, or ESA(remember the cute spacecraft philae, yep that was not NASA but ESA https://twitter.com/philae2014?lang=en).
EU has tons of projects with smaller or even larger scale, usually in areas that are not supposed to yield profit but has large impact to trade and life quality of the citizens, preserve peace and food security. Mostly boring stuff, EU is not a for profit company that will design the next iPhone, it's this organisation that does the stiff that individual countries or companies are not willing to do or simply cannot do but it needs to be done.
>By which upper middle class kids get a free year of holidays abroad at the taxpayer's expense. No results expected.
I don't know why you would say that. Me, my brother and a lot of people I know benefited from these programs and we are not even a middle class. Now we do better but back then the times were tough.
Frankly, a semester abroad with Erasmus is more of partying and networking than studying but people keep these connections and the poorer people who could have never been able to afford it can actually afford it.
Many times, poor people stay poor because they lack networking and perspective. Erasmus is a fantastic program, especially for the disadvantaged students, at least they know what's out there and know some people.
I fully agree - travelling and doing something in foreign countries together with people that come from different backgrounds & religions & nations completely demolishes prejudices, helps to learn to adapt and to respect other people and to develop the mindset needed to try to understand how other people think and behave, etc... . 25 years later I'm still using stuff that I learned during that period.
I'm rarely totally in favour or against something but in this case I can see only positive things.
I don't know why OP is so bitter and wants to emigrate but in general, English is not about moving to another place but doing business beyond local.
The Netherlands and Scandinavia accounts for the most of the European global tech output and this is not because Spaniards don't know how to code.
The Dutch and people in the Scandinavian countries are so proficient in English that they do products like the Americans. Knowing English that well makes it possible to understand the global popular culture and think in global scale when doing startups.
> English is not about moving to another place but doing business beyond local.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
> About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
> "Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
As a dutch subject I have to agree. When Americans talk about social security and healthcare they seem to attempt to do it (read "fail") from a purely selfish angle. What seems like a complete lack of empathy born out of a selfish culture where no one has your back is really just my linguistic shortcommerings. Jokes aside (not really) Its pretty funny if you think about it. Europe wants to build a cute union that nurtures the citizens into a bunch of weaklings while team America wants their country to be this big hungry monster that hunts you down and eats you. Clearly non of this is right but migrating from the US to the EU would seem the best experience.
The EU exists to matter on the global stage in the age of superpowers, to keep alight the flame of European economic imperialism that was being smothered bu US/USSR (and now US/China). It just so happens that most people here think the best way to go about that, without massive societal upheaval, is to guarantee prosperity for all. There is little “cute” about the project, any “cuteness” you might see is the result of strategic positioning.
Mostly it exists so we don’t kill each other -European imperialism is a direct outgrowth of being the most warlike continent for hundreds of years. When they talk about “civil war times” in the history of China ... that’s the whole history of Europe. I have 300 castles around my hometown ... I can find WW2 bombs and Munition from the 30 years war in the forest.
So true - and the comparison might not even be possible, but Europe had very small units fighting each other and at the same time there was a feeling of common religion and culture. That is pretty unique and uniquely stupid. So let’s state it a bit differently we are complete idiots and we were mostly governed by 5 families over 1000 years and these 5 families fought each other and burned everything into the ground and then married each other. So to be no longer governed by complete idiots that fight each other mostly for entertainment there is the EU.
Not my experience. Away from some parts of Eastern and Southern Europe for lack of opportunities, but generally out of EU, no.
And anyway, if your kid goes to college, he or she is very likely to be of legal age and have, like, opinions of their own. Yet you make it sound like you're raising cattle for yourself or something.
>you make it sound like you're raising cattle for yourself or something
To me, it sounds more like they identified common trends and desires within young people in Europe, determined those desires to be beneficial/making sense, and are trying to give their kid the prep needed to execute on those desires in the future, in case the kid decides that this is what they want to do.
Sounds pretty normal to me, I would only raise an alarm if the parent commenter was just pushing this against the child's wishes. But just giving the prep needed is not in itself wrong. Especially when it comes to something as useful as english language, which will serve the kid very well even if they decide to spend the rest of their life in EU.
P.S. Yes, I wish I got more english prep when I was a kid, because doing it all in my late teens was not the most pleasant experience on earth, because at that point in life you got tons of other worries that every other teenager has, on top of worrying about english (college entrance exams/standardized testing, schoolwork, etc.).
Sorry, but you are trying to speak on my behalf and I strongly disagree. I learn english for various reasons but leaving the EU is not one of them. The EU has lots of faults and I won't deny it, but so does any other place. So what? One day I might leave to retire on a caribbean island, but it won't be out of bitterness. If you don't feel the same way, be honest and don't project it on others.
I'm european, know people from many european and non european countries, i know absolutly nobody who want to leave the eu.
Young people learn english because it's taught in school, not because they're caught in nasty political bullsh*t that tries to put every nation against each other.
> P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can.
This is absolutely not true. English is tought in most schools simply because it's used worldwide. Also, most of the people I know are very happy to live here, and most who may have wanted to emmigrate to the US lost any desire to do so after the four years of Trump.
My experience is exactly the opposite: I was eager to emigrate during Trump term in the office, despite him making it difficult. Now that Biden has won, I know that emigration should become much easier, but it also became pointless.
It's not because immigration became harder - they are all MScs or PhDs, some even already did internships in the US, so moving shouldn't be hard. It's because we think that the US is no longer a desirable place to move to.
It's been kind of hard for me, because my visa process was impeded by USCIS. My compay has moved people to US before, under Obama presidency, and the process was much easier back then. And you're right, US is no longer a desirable place to move to, now that Biden has won.
Because Trump was all about "business", America's prosperity.
Biden is all about things I personally don't care about, like anti-COVID measures, or fighting global warming, which will very likely destroy US economically. Emigrating to a country that's on a brink of the worst crisis in its history is indeed pointless.
The worst consequence of COVID will be thousands of people dying from other disease, because healthcare system focused on COVID neglected them, and the economic depression caused by lockdowns.
The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
In both cases we would be better off doing nothing.
>The worst consequence of COVID will be thousands of people dying from other disease, because healthcare system focused on COVID neglected them, and the economic depression caused by lockdowns.
The reason we went into lockdown and went under all these draconian restriction measures wasn't because the virus was considered deadly. It's not that deadly for the majority of the population actually, especially for younger people.
No, the reason we went into lockdown was to avoid the hospitals overflowing with patients. If you let the virus spread around like wildfire through the population with its spread rate of 2 to 3, then you would very quickly make a lot of people very sick and need hospitalisation. This isn't to say that the majority of people would get very sick. You only need a small minority of the vulnerable population to get very sick suddenly all at once in order to shock the hospital system.
So, if indeed we care about treating people with other diseases as you say, our priority should be on making sure we have as many beds and doctors available in hospitals. And the only way to achieve that is with coronavirus restrictive measures. It's much easier to get doctors and hospitals to treat other. "doing nothing" as you suggest would be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve.
patients if they don't have to constantly worry about their COVID-19 patients.
If the hospitals were full and you e.g. broke your leg while on your motorbike, would you like to be told at A&E that "sorry we're full, we have all these COVID-19 patients that are dying"? I wouldn't.
>The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
You only need to take a simple cursory glance that the IPCC report to realise that it's not that simple.
Hell, ask the CIA! They consider global warming a serious threat to national security. If the CIA considers it a threat, shouldn't we worry?
Relevant videos that show how climate change is already having detrimental effects on our daily lives:
UBERs total funding was 25 Billion, that might not be the best example but funding on this scale is not possible in Europe. The core limit is the market size (every EU market needs specific teams) and the funding.
>If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing
TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.
"TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few."
TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.
bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.
When TSMC was founded, they were not in foundry as services business. UMC actually invented it and TSMC joined the game later. Some people said UMC made the wrong decision to invest in China too early. That effort took too much of UMC's resource. TSMC focused their resource in Taiwan and was able to move forward faster in technology when compare to UMC. When UMC made the move to China, Taiwan government were not happy, so I believe government direct resource to TSMC in retaliation to ensure TSMC has the edge. it is no wonder TSMC won the technology race.
Just wondering if in the light of this announcement and the China's attempts at taking over the TMSC control, wouldn't it be better if TMSC relocated their HQ to Europe?
Not saying they should move completely, but to strategize to limit their operational risks. I am sure they'd receive some nice grants from EU.
China taking over TSMC control. How, exactly? China isn't looking to invade Taiwan any time soon, unless America puts bases in Taiwan first. And an invasion of Taiwan would immediately result in the destruction of TSMC, thus invasion is not a viable strategy to gain TSMC.
Seems to me like a scenario where a pro-china party moves Taiwan closer to China, until it is essentially re-integrated, is basically inevitable if China continues to grow at its current pace.
That is probably next step, but not for the concern of China. It may come from the pressure of government, if EU pushes a little bit. It is extremely hard for China to sneak the TSMC. It is a big ecosystem. The only way to take control is invasion, but that would lead to WWIII and is almost impossible to get the original TSMC. It would be destroyed during war. And, the market would be shared by other companies.
> nothing much ever came out of Sematech. It was a lot of hype, but not much result
It may be that nothing much will come out of this initiative, but what choice does Europe have? Europe simply has to have control over its computing/communications infrastructure, if it wants to be truly independent.
> In concrete terms, this means that when it comes to technology, Europe needs to build its own solutions in order not to depend on American or Chinese technologies. If we are dependent on them, for example in telecommunications, we cannot guarantee European citizens the secrecy of information and the security of their private data, because we do not have this technology. [...]
> The same goes for the extraterritoriality of the dollar, which is a fact and not a new one. Less than ten years ago, several French companies were penalised to the tune of billions of euros because they had operated in countries that were banned under American law. In concrete terms, this means that our companies can be condemned by foreign powers when they operate in a third country : that is a deprivation of sovereignty, of the possibility of deciding for ourselves, it weakens our position immensely.
> Unfortunately, we grasped the full implications of this when it came to the discussion on Iran. We Europeans wanted to remain within the framework of what we call the JCPOA. With America’s withdrawal, no European company was able to continue doing business with Iran for fear of sanctions from the United States. Hence, when I talk about sovereignty or strategic autonomy, I am bringing together all these issues, which at first glance seem very different.
Lets not forget that some of the core tech that sits at the heart of semiconductor manufacturing (asml) is already European. It will be daunting, but something just might come out of it.
I agree, their problem wasn't lack of resources it was they stopped believing in Moore's law. They started to believe that 5 and 3nm advancements were not coming and didn't make the hundreds/thousands of new inventions needed to get them there. At least that's what I get reading between the lines here... Jim Keller talks about this in this in the Lex Fridman podcast: https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=1892
With the success of Apple M1, TSMC and Samsung will grow faster than Intel. Taiwan,Korea,Japan and US will control the semiconductor industry in the near future unless a game changing technology is introduced. Taiwan semiconductor companies's stocks are going banana after US slap sanction on SMIC. UMC stock has not changed much in years jumped 250% in last few weeks. (UMC invented foundry as service, then TSMC copy them)
How near is your near future? Isn't China planning to achieve major progress until 2025? They aren't bound by patents in the same way as western companies. Why should they not be able to reproduce the knowledge? For nuclear energy, solar cells, moon rockets and high speed trains, they have already been successful.
China is weak in semiconductor industry and they simply do not have the capability to overcome the obstacle in 5 to 10 years or maybe never. Let me give two examples of obstacle. US has monopoly in the software tools that engineer use to design IC. Japan has the chemical that semiconductor fab foundry need to make IC. US now has slapped sanction on China's top fab foundry SMIC with intention to kill China's semiconductor industry. China's semiconductor companies's stocks are dropping stone while Taiwan semiconductor companies's stock are rising like crazy so a lot people are pessimistic about semiconductor companies in China. Semiconductor is a very expensive game to play. China has big domestic market but it is not large enough to sustain a semiconductor business. This is very different from other industries.
Only knowing HN comments about IC design tools, I got the impression that they don't seem to be that good. Which means that China could come out ahead because they can work with better tools if they make them by themselves.
And as far as I know, China is a huge supplier of chemicals for biological engineering. If they know that much about chemistry, is the gap still so big that they cannot transfer their knowledge?
WW2 resulted in diverting a substantial amount of resources to R&D and hence the explosion in innovation & science everything from Radar, automobiles, computing, nuclear energy, not to mention jet engine and computing.
Today China is on a one sided war of technology dominance while the rest of us are sleeping or bickering over patents & tech protectionism, anti competitiveness and blocking acquisition.
China has the scale, money, leadership and capability to pool resources on a literal war footing to develop what it can not buy. Let us not fool ourselves.
It's worth noting that the Chinese state is able to pool resources and direct a national effort in a way countries like Japan and the U.S. are not. It may take longer than 10 years but they'll get there.
I suspect that a long-term path out of this sort of thing has two key ingredients:
1) The commoditization of foundry technology.
2) The hardware equivalent of the reproducible build.
The first is necessary for nation-states to feel comfortable building and maintaining national-security infrastructure.
The second is necessary for the rest of us. If we are able to purchase an open-hardware CPU and verify its integrity through hardware/metrology checksums in addition to a software checksum, society will have made a step forward.
The hardware checksums might be expressed through moire-patterning visible in x-rays, for example. The CPUs on which such technology might be developed need not be fancy - if a proof-of-concept works on cheap chips, the extension to the high end is apt to be feasible.
The commoditization of foundry technology, at least for the smallest geometry (i.e. highest performance) semiconductors, is going in reverse. There are fewer and fewer companies that can perform at the leading edge, and now you could probably count them on one hand without needing all the digits.
Europe already has successful semiconductor companies, including: Philips, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, and the crown-jewel the entire world depends on: ASML.
Aside: how did the Netherlands become such a semiconductor powerhouse?
Sematech would have succeeded if the U.S. government had any interest at all in protecting its domestic manufacturing, or if Japan had better labor protections. Now everything is offshored and I can't fly my drone on military bases because all computer chips come from China. Pretty bad move in hindsight.
I wish they'd just pushed for TSMC to open a fab in Europe, with incentives and protections.
Micron has one in Italy that is basically shut down. I was once told that to avoid payouts, required by Italian Law, for letting employees go the factory had been put on a sort of "pause" everyone sent home but not let go. If things like this still go on I see no hope for a European electronics/Semi manufacturing industry to ever take hold.
Doesn't AMD mainly exist as it is because US military contracts had second source requirements imposed on Intel? There were lots of lawsuits and stuff as well hat went into their IP sharing, but that military stuff in some ways made Intel+AMD into a partially government-coordinated consortium.
The EU doesn't have a unified military in the same way as the states.
Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML
The US companies do what they do best: innovate business models and find ways to vendor lock in and own the market.
But who's been doing all the research keeping moore's law alive? Lithography?
For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing all the world's chips (answer: no, it would force other place to invest highly in competition out of strategic interest).
Hence the strategy of being long term profitable and to just sell the machines to everyone at the same price.
It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.
As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management".
So don't expect anything from this. The future most sold chip will still be Apple Silicon or Samsung Exynos in TSC's foundry or Samsung foundry on a machine by ASML using IP from ARM and NVidia
> It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.
ASML machines do not produce chips, they're just ones doing the etching. There is a ton around what you do with it, and how all the rest of the chip is produced.
They don't come with pre-programmed transistor gate templates. Each fab company has its own libraries of extremely specialized designs, doing different optimizations and tradeoffs. As mentioned plenty of times before, the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach. You have to appreciate that a defect that impacts high-volume yield today could have its roots in a design that was put on the roadmap years before.
> As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
If H2020 is anything to go by, the majority of that money will be salaries of people working on big research projects. At worst the project outcome is useless. I don't see how any of the way these projects are structured benefit the pocket lining of managers.
A point of clarification.
ASML does lithography, which creates the patterns for the chips. The big players in etch (removing layers of material following the pattern) are Lam Research and Applied Materials, both American companies.
And yet it's enough to spark a geopolitical war to block China from acquiring these machines[1], which basically means China has massively ramped up it's EUV investment if you look at semiengineering investment news.
At the same time you can trust that TSMC secrets are no longer secret[2]. A lot of the Taiwanese companies are actually quite bad at security despite Taiwan have some top notch security engineers. I guess it's just old industries general problems.
Sorry but it looks as if you had a view and then googled articles to back this up. The second article is about IP theft and gives no reason to doubt TSMC's integrity. Nor does it give any reason to think Taiwanese companies are worse at opsec than e.g. US or Dutch players.
Sorry it's you that didn't read it. China has had a massive cyberop and stole pretty much every secret TSMC had. It doesn't matter whether Taiwan is trustworthy or not if their cybersecurity sucks. Good job for not reading, not understanding and then using a random fallacy to respectfully diss me.
> the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach
Can you point to some industry literature that explains this?
If this is true, it is a lot more surprising that Intel is talking about going fabless. You build a lot of expertise by rolling the dice on new techniques that don't pan out on the first iteration. People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.
The consensus on HN (search for Intel 7nm, cobalt, ...). It's all speculation at this point. I doubt that Intel would publish details on their processes and its defects so soon.
Intel buying some TSMC capacity does not mean it is going fabless. Nor does it mean Intel is abandoning being vertically integrated.
I like your Boeing remark. It's better to fail at doing something aggressive than to fail to innovate.
> It's better to fail at doing something aggressive than to fail to innovate.
I don't think that's a particularly useful way to divide up failures. I think it's better to fail in a way that doesn't kill people than a way that does. Whether you kill people by being too conservative or too aggressive with your design is pretty irrelevant compared to that.
It's paywalled but Charlie later published something else referring to that article as talking about COAG problems so I don't feel bad sharing the info at this point.
> People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design
Well... yes. That's called judgement, and execs at firms like Boeing get paid positively stupid sums of money to provide the good kind. Which they didn't.
"What's the big deal? If I had left the vat of acid unattended in a locked room, everything would have been fine."
Are they talking about going fabless? I thought they’ve only discussed making some parts at TSMC, not all of them.
They’re not on the first iteration at this point. They’ve been on 14 nm since 2014. 10 nm and to a lesser extent 7 nm is failing after many iterations and many years.
>People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.
Unfortunately Boeing doesn't have a huge list of customers that are willing to spend what it costs to switch to a new airframe. They sell to airlines what airlines want to buy. Airlines wanted a 737 with higher bypass engines and that's exactly what they got.
Boeing deserves what they get for pushing a faulty design out the door but they didn't do it as some nefarious cost cutting measure. They did it because American and Southwest said they wanted nothing to do with a "797" and threatened to switch to Airbus.
> they didn't do it as some nefarious cost cutting measure. They did it because American and Southwest said they wanted nothing to do with a "797" and threatened to switch to Airbus.
> For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing all the world's chips (answer: no, it would force other place to invest highly in competition out of strategic interest).
I used to work for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer a long while back so am familiar with that industry. ASML works on just lithography but there are dozens of other processes needed to manufacture semiconductors. The biggest of those in market share are the US companies Applied Materials and Lam Research. They make a quite a few of those machines. So ASML is an important part but not the only part.
> Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML
FYI, a LOT of the critical components in ASML come from the US. There's no one country that can make the latest tech end-to-end relying on it's self. China seems to be trying, but it'll be inefficient.
If you refer to Cymer, they're doing the light source. A critical part of the system certainly, but not the whole. Then mirrors are done by Carl Zeiss in Germany. The blank photomask come mostly from 2 Japanses companies. On such complex systems there's room for many critical providers. Still, the integrated product comes from ASML.
The light source is by a very wide margin the most difficult and critical component of an EUV tool. The US still dominates wafer fab equipment - Cymer plus Applied Materials, Lam, and KLA. The only major non-US supplier is Tokyo Electron who is also quite strong. ASM International is a good but niche European supplier.
Cymer is the linchpin of ASML's leadership. Other litho machine developers like Canon and Nikon almost dropped out of the industry because they couldn't develop functional EUV light sources. ASML got around that by buying Cymer. And ASML has multiple other R&D labs and offices in the US handling critical technologies like software and robotics
A quick Google search suggests ASML bought Cymer for the patent portfolio, while the tech didn't quite pan out. It seems like Trumpf is the current supplier of the EUV source.
Yeah i'm always wonder just because the company is located in the EU, does it mean its actually a EU company? Given US institutional investors who probably have big voting power own majority stake in those tech companies.
I think ASML's connection to NL is solid, you could say it's a Dutch company. The R&D, world headquarters are in NL and board of directors includes many Dutch people, including the CEO.
Do you have a reference? AFAIK it's 2 other German companies that are key in the production of EUV photolitography machines; Zeiss for the lenses and Trumpf for the lasers.
I see reference for a company bought by ASML in California, HMI. They were bought in 2016 but the development of EUV technology predates it by many years so I find it unlikely that it had an important role in it.
ASML is heavily reliant on the IP of Cymer an American company they bought in the last decade. And a great deal of their R&D is in the US, including things like software, measurement systems and sensors, robotics and automation, and so forth. What the US does best is quietly prop up international companies like ASML (and ARM, whose texas R&D center has been the leader for years) that wouldn't be able to hack it on their own without American talent.
In addition to Cymer, ASML a big R&D and manufacturing footprint in Wilton Connecticut.
Semiconductor manufacturing is really a global effort -- most device makers have fabs full of equipment mostly from US, European and Japanese suppliers. Korean equipment suppliers are also becoming more prevalent. Chinese suppliers are starting to try to gain some market share as well.
> It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management".
100% agree. Considering the incredible education system and engineers we have, the 2 only things restraining Europe from reaching Silicon Valley level are corrupt politicians and risk-adverse VCs.
>Considering the incredible education system and engineers we have, the 2 only things restraining Europe from reaching Silicon Valley level are corrupt politicians and risk-adverse VCs.
I find it telling that it's mostly europeans who make these types of comments. The EU has tremendous barriers to labour mobility that most europeans don't even realise - differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant. And i cannot emphasise the bureaucratic hurdles enough when moving countries. Despite the EU crying itself hoarse about labour mobility, only around 5% of EU citizens relocate between EU countries. The majority of that 5% is people moving from poor to richer countries. The comparable number in the US is 20%.
Most rational people realise that despite all its flaws, some of the most key factors in US tech dominance are the existence of a large talent pool, all of whom speak the same language, the existence of a large market all of which operates in the same language and finally VCs willing to take on risk.
Corrupt politicians are not hobbling European tech success any more than corrupt US politicians are hobbling its success. The EU will not reach Silicon Valley's levels of success, at least not in my lifetime.
> differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant
It has never been cheaper and easier to operate in several languages. Seriously, translation and internationalization is as cheap as it can get (and most folks in Europe are at least bilinguals!).
What they need to focus on is a unified marketplace and harmonized regulation. Now each tiny country has it's special snowflakes regulations (how to accept payment, who and how to pay taxes, huge amount of paperwork to get employees and ultra-restrictive labor laws). I mean it's good as a job program to keep EU civil servants employed, not so much to bootstrap a tech ecosystem!
I get the feeling you're European. Language is a massive barrier and simply hand-waving that away by claiming that internationalisation is cheap is silly. Language drives a whole host of things and operating in several languages is far from easy. You are also being very generous with claiming that most folks in Europe are bilingual. They may have basic knowledge of multiple languages but can likely function fully in only one. The generations below 30 are likely to be almost completely bilingual. Look at Belgium for example. How many Flemish people can function in French and vice versa?
The fact that the US operates entirely with the global lingua franca is a gigantic advantage that can crush competition before it even begins.
The unified marketplace is one problem but look at what has already been done - EU labour is free to move. Degrees are almost always mutually recognised. What stops further integration? It ultimately boils down to language. This is why a Greek doctor can't just move to Germany. Also why a Spanish lawyer can't easily move to Sweden. Language is a much bigger problem than people here seem to think.
> It ultimately boils down to language. This is why a Greek doctor can't just move to Germany. Also why a Spanish lawyer can't easily move to Sweden. Language is a much bigger problem than people here seem to think.
These are all customer service positions (you get a prefix in front of your name but still).
That matters less with tech. You'll have a localized sales team/customer support sure, and that adds expenses, but it's not a huge burden.
Dealing with a huge amount of paperwork, taxes, special local laws of the N jurisdiction you're operating in, now that's a barrier to entry.
It's actually quite common for Swedes to travel abroad in the EU to study medicine since the entry-requirements to our national medicine programs require very high scores on the high school degrees or aptitude tests (University while free only has limited number of spots assigned out to the best students. If memory serves me right even with a max score on the aptitude test, reserved to some 0.3-0.5% of the test-takers, you will still be put in a lottery pool for the best medschools).
Law degrees might be harder to transfer generally though (easy to transfer in the Nordics at least iirc) but even in the US you need to take the bar in different states, so maybe that part isn't too different anyhow?
Actually, Might become easier in the EU in the future now that post-brexit there isn't any common law countries within the union and with mostly civil law systems it should be easier to unify principles in some sections of the law.
Even if a bunch of Europeans from different countries do talk in perfect english, understanding every word, cultural differences will make true communication hard. The style of work, management and relationships is just too different. And you just can't give everyone 20 cultural awareness courses...
I don't know exactly how realistic this is. But from this side of the pond [Europe], it seems like, in the US there are VCs willing to throw millions [billions sometimes] at companies which are little more than a couple of guys with a silly idea, which would get you laughed out of your bank manager's office over here, if you went in asking to borrow a few hundred euros/pounds.
I don‘t subscribe to this at all. If there was such a huge opportunity in investing in European startups VCs would take it. Its not like they are nationalistic, they would equalise the arbitrage opportunities in no time
That not how VC's work, they invest in places where they know the laws, customs and markets. It is more common for teams to nove to place where there are VC's, thanthe other way round.c
>- labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries)
That's just not true now and hasn't been the case anymore since like the 2009 financial crisis. In most of Europe it's trivial to fire an underperforming non-unionized employee as the countries have adapted more business friendly laws to remain competitive after the financial crisis. Sure, there may still be some grey beards somewhere with old bulletproof contracts but for anyone entering the tech workforce now, getting fired is a rubber stamp basically especially since tech workers are not unionized and sometimes benefit from less protection than even some blue-collar professions which are unionized.
For example, in Austria you can fire anyone for no reason at all as long as you give them their notice period(usually 1 to 3 months) without them being entitled to any other financial compensation from their employer. Moreover, non-competes are legal here without any form of compensation and you can even fire employees while they're on sick leave. All this legally!
The whole you can't get fired in Europe maybe only applies to Scandinavia or France but it's mostly a meme nowadays.
Actually, contrary to popular belief, tech workers in California might enjoy better protection than tech workers in some European countries. Let that sink in for a bit.
Compared to the US it's still very hard to fire people in most EU countries. In large parts of the US you can fire anyone at anytime [1].
On the other hand Silicon Valley is in California and has some of the strongest labor laws of the US, so if this is such a huge factor why is everyone in SV?
Even under the assumption that it's an important factor, would it be worth it for EU to adopt such policies considering the very real human cost?...
I live in Switzerland and the legal status of (tech) employee is roughly the same to what you describe. I wonder if the difference isn't that firing people "at-will" just is less culturally accepted here. I feel we're in kind of a weird spot between Japan and the US in terms of how the general public conceives the relationship between an employee and an employer.
I heard about this here in Austria that Swiss laws are way more business friendly at less worker friendly than here, basically reaching at will employment.
It "at-will" in the sense that your employer doesn't need to justify firing you. But I wouldn' compare it to what they have in some states in the US.
However you still have at least 1 month notice, and often more depending on the industry and seniority. Here in Zürich the standard in tech seems to be 3 month (anecdata though).
Where it gets kinda business friendly is that if you are fired for an illegal reason, it's up to you to prove that you were instead of your employer having to prove he fired you for something reasonable. The settlements are also nothing that would deter a company to behave badly I guess.
There is also a good tradition of union-like structure in the professions that need it (the ones where one is easily replaceable basically) that give workers a nice protection and benefits. It's not like in France of course but it's far from the US, based on the stories I gleaned about on HN.
Non-competes are illegal in California. That’s likely a big reason why it is so successful. As an example neither Intel not AMD would exist if non-competes would be allowed there. Iirc Nvidia too.
It's not hard at all in Germany, I already had to do it a few times. It's just regulated, i.e. you have to follow a defined process (two written warnings first, only then the dismissal) and have proof of what happened.
The range of reasons include coming too late to work, insulting coworkers and even underperformance.
Labour laws are a nightmare in every country due to bureaucracy but that doesn't mean it's always difficult to fire people. Most companies be it in FR, DE, wherever, have good lawyers on the payroll to advise them o the easiest legal path possible to get rid of undesirable employees. If a company really wants you gone, they'll make it happen one way or another.
France was famous for their approach of making an employees' life miserable in order to make them leave as they couldn't fire them easily. Honestly, I'd rather just be fired and get on unemployment than be subjected to psychological torture every day in a poisonous work environment.
> If a company really wants you gone, they'll make it happen one way or another.
Well they usually do it by compensating the employee quite heavily. Psychologically torturing an employee isn't that good for team morale, even if the employee was underperforming. I also don't think it's as culturally prevalent as you imply.
>Well they usually do it by compensating the employee quite heavily.
Where outside of the US/UK does that happen? Never heard in Europe that you get paid more so you leave when they can boot you out for free and I talked to lawyers about this. The reasoning behind the generous safety nets in Europe is also to make it easier for employee-employer terminations in case it doesn't work out. The laws here are that employers aren't allowed to abuse you, force you into unpaid overtime, etc. but fire you for free they can otherwise nobody would dare become an entrepreneur/investor in an environment where it's impossible to fire someone.
I live in the Netherlands. After 3 years (used to be 2 years up until very recently) a worker has to be moved to a permanent contract. That makes firing a person very difficult.
> when they can boot you out for free
You can't really. It's extremely difficult and no lawyer can magically change the fact that the culture and the courts are in favor of the worker, not the employer.
Now the laws might change a bit, making the terms of termination a bit easier for the employer in the future (we'll see what the next government brings), but in general I expect it to still be quite difficult. So it may be easier to pay the employee 30K extra compensation to let him go then trying a game of psychological torture.
And if that sounds unreal to you, know that in the Netherlands employees can get paid up to 2 years if they have a nervous breakdown. And nervous breakdown is quite common culturally. So employees have dirty tricks of their own if the employer wants to play dirty.
Now of course, there are obvious disadvantages to this approach, not necessarily for the employer actually. The employer can protect himself by simply not hiring anyone for more than a couple of years, making "flex work" a real problem in NL. But yes, firing could be hard and I'd be surprised if it's much different in Germany/France etc.
>the fact that the culture and the courts are in favor of the worker
As much as I like being on the side of the little guy, in any civilized society, the courts should be impartial and not favor the employer nor the employee and pass verdicts based on the law and not based on the culture and if the law says you can fire someone who continuously underperforms over a period of time then that law will be applied.
>After 3 years [...] a worker has to be moved to a permanent contract.
That sounds pretty poor IMHO. In most of the EU you're permanent after passing the first year of employment. I've never worked more than 3 years in a place so far, so in the NL I would have never reached permanent status, continuously being at the risk of on the spot termination. I dunno man, sounds pretty bad for me IMHO.
>And nervous breakdown is quite common culturally.
That actually sounds legit bad IMHO if mental issues are the becoming the norm in employment relationships.
>The employer can protect himself by simply not hiring anyone for more than a couple of years, making "flex work" a real problem in NL
I used to work for a top NL based company and this situation was often discussed around the office that NL companies are abusing expat workers from poorer countries by promising them riches in exchange for hard work and sacrifice and instead using them for 2-3 years then rotating them with new workers until they get fed up with this and move back to their home countries. Rinse and repeat. Sounds really good for Dutch business though.
> I used to work for a top NL based company and this situation was often discussed around the office that NL companies are abusing expat workers promising them riches and instead using them for 2-3 years then rotating them with new workers until they get fed up with this and move back to their home countries
I really haven't experienced this at all. Tons of expats I know are on permanent contract (btw - many employers offer a permanent contract after 1-1.5 years if they're happy with the emplyoee, at least that's what I see in tech). Of course people in the hotel/entertainment business may have a different experience. I bet flex work is more common there.
> That actually sounds legit bad IMHO if mental issues are the becoming the norm in employment relationships.
I didn't say mental issues are the norm in the Netherlands, lol. Far from it, it's one of the happiest countries in the world according to research. I'm just saying - the law enables you to take a LONG paid leave if you have burnout. Now some employees actually get burned out, and some are probably abusing it a bit. When you're protecting employees there'll always be people who dishonestly try to take advantage.
> Except that in any civilized society, the courts should be impartial and not favor the employer nor the employee and pass verdicts based on the law and not based on the culture and if the law says you can fire someone who continuously underperforms over a period of time then that law will be applied.
Laws have huge margins left for judge's interpretation of what is fair and just in a given case.
In Germany it's common for larger, well performing companies to retire older, less productive employees by way of 'Abfindungsprogramm' - programs that offer these employees generous monetary compensation (up to ~2-5 annual salary) in exchange for them retiring early. I know of four people who took such an offer.
I've grown to be extremely suspicious of anyone taking labour laws as a barrier to be brought down, as it's always come from people who've got nothing to lose from it and weakening them seems to systematically translate into lower standards of living and higher income inequality.
Disjoined markets aren't necessary such a big issue. Israel manages to do well, for example. Usually opening a US office is the common method overcoming that issue.
In my opinion you've hit the major reasons. I would also include that culture, and especially founder culture is different too, and that hampers these "massive scope" ventures. A somewhat more fractured local market (languages, laws, markets, habits) also plays against it.
There's also the push-factor of the yawning black void of poverty in the US if you choose to pursue your passion rather than your comparative advantage.
"corrupt politicians"... really? Do you have any examples of large scale corruption inside EU? I don't. I think the majority of EU politicians are doing fine.
In return:
Do you have an example of where the EU paid anywhere below 200% of industry standard price for anything?
I'm not arguing its more corrupt than say the US Congress. Its on par, with some weird extremes. For example: Berlusconi, a prime minister, spending public money on under age prostitutes, serving today freely as a member of the EP. That kind also owned most media companies in his country and implemented favourable regulation and tax exemptions for himself.
Here in the Netherlands, there is something referred to as the 'job carousel'. Where favourable regulation by politicians is rewarded in the future (after a political carreer) by very highly paid gigs in the industries and companies they favoured. Technically legal, and very hard to legislate against. Its a refined form of corruption, but it has all the same downsides. During Corona for example, the Netherlands had trouble getting its testing in order. Turned out we had excluded big commercial labs from consideration because we had represenatites of the 'small artisinal labs' in our taskforce lobbying. A small scale corruption, with heavy economic distortion as a result!
I'm also not perse blaming corruption on the politicians themselves. We are all together responsible for the corporate and governance culture we breed. Yet we shouldn't pretend we currently have the ability to spend/invest money effectively and fairly as a collective.
> Turned out we had excluded big commercial labs from consideration because we had represenatites of the 'small artisinal labs' in our taskforce lobbying.
The lobbyist, part of the Outbreak Management Team, is Ann Vossen. And she argued from her experise that there should be specific requirements that effectively kept larger laboratories from being able to be suppliers. Ironically, the trick used was the Tower of Babel (pretending language differences could be a risk)
Nothing that would meet some arbitrary, establishment defined definition of 'corruption.' The fact that the sons and daughters and son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws, extended family and close friends all end up in cushy no-show non-profit chairmanships where they launder corporate donations to family foundations, drive their fleet of foundation owned cars, live in foundation owned mansions and accrue their foundation pensions is the sort of perfectly legal corruption people have in mind. The sentiment appearing here is correct; not a cent of the money invested by the EU in semiconductors will escape the clutches of establishment grandees and instead find its way to anyone that knows how to compete effectively with prevailing foundries, so don't expect to find any European manufactured chips troubling TSMC et al. in this lifetime.
>It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.
My understanding is that Intel believed EUV would be very late. As such, it committed to Intel 10nm (TSMC 7nm) without EUV, which turned out to be too complex. At the same time, TSMC banked on EUV early. This gave them a headstart over Intel once Intel started down the EUV path.
The tables could have been reversed. EUV could have been very late, and 10nm non-EUV might have worked better. Hard to know these things when you are making plans 3-5 years ahead.
If they can execute, which I very much doubt, given the history of similar EU initiatives. The only example I can think of is Airbus. Those funds are usually funneled toward bullshit vendors that are specialised in milking such EU programs, with nothing to show for it afterwards.
Exactly. This is just money down the drain. A giveaway to companies that are politically connected.
I’ve met a CEO of one such company. A filthy rich scumbag that has half the government in his pocket. Ensuring that he gets the big government contracts and muscles out other companies for EU funds.
Airbus predates the EU, it was formed as a consortium between Sud Aviation, VFW-Fokker and Hawker-Siddeley back in 1966.
It was fortunate for Europe that the consortium had a longer-term objective as opposed to other pan-European aircraft projects like Panavia and SEPECAT.
And even Airbus is widely thought to being dependent on under the table government funding to keep it afloat, and keep its pricing competative. The line between private and government is blurred when EU is usually involved as well.
When slapped with tariffs later judged to be illegal the Trudeau government didn't do anything, allowing Airbus to get ownership of their flagship plane.
Rather over-the-table. France pushes Toulouse every chance it gets, the city basically only consists of plane and rocket factories. When the A380 project went to search for other sites to manufacture some parts of the plane, European cities and governments went all-in with dubious offers, fast-tracks and regulations-be-damned to get the site. E.g. for the Hamburg site, read about "Mühlenberger Loch".
Exactly my thought, ST Microelectronics is producing microchips in Grenoble, France, not far from where I live.
And ST Micro chips are heavenly used in IOT. Maybe it's more than the semiconductor sector and includes telecommunications, networks equipment, phone/pc CPUs.
There is no need for advanced nodes for micro-controllers. Typically even advanced µC use 40nm, planar, where the TSMC leading node is 5nm FinFET. ST also does FD-SOI 22nm if I remember well, but that's the densest node they have and nowhere near the current state of the art at TSMC.
The thing is, micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes. They don't have a lot of logic (it's all relative, but compared to a PC CPU or smartphone SoC), so would be "pad limited" on advanced nodes: the area of a chip depends on the logic (and memory), but also on the I/O pins or pads, which take area. So if you used a too advanced node for a chip with (relatively) little logic and still enough I/O pads, some die area would be wasted as the minimum area would come from the pads. It's a situation you want to avoid, as there's no point paying for a more costly finer nodes (with more leakage) to waste it by not using the silicon area.
Another factor is that micro-controllers also embed Flash on their die, to have a very integrated solution with logic, RAM and Flash storage on a single die. This puts a limit on the node density. Flash is OK down to 40nm. Then from then one must move to more advanced, and still young and costly, alternatives (MRAM).
So if your business is driven by micro-controllers, there's no real point in pushing toward node density ("low" nodes). ST does process optimization as everyone, but at "medium" nodes best suited for µC. There's no business drive for them to chase TSMC.
It's similar for other Eurpeans silicon makers: they tend to be on specific segments where going for "low" nodes like 5nm simply doesn't make sense. The relatively advanced fabs in Europe are from Intel and Global Foundries (both US). And GloFo stopped the race to advanced node at 14nm, as it was too expensive.
> micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes...They don't have a lot of logic
Why MCU-bound application logic are simpler than PC apps? If that is the case, we shouldn't have seen improvement in embedded MCUs in 20 years, yet every year the clocks are increasing, the flash/RAM size is doubling, ...
I have a theory/fear that in future, the line between embedded-dev and web-dev would be blurred...
Given how eagerly all those GCP/AWS/AZUR "IOT frameworks" run out of memory on the most beefy microcontrollers a mortal can buy, I'm afraid, you are right.
As long as mcu's with less ram/flash will be sold for less(which is standard business strategy to optimize revenue), in high volume designs people will use c/c++ to optimize.
As for low volume designs, if reliability is important, rust would be a good candidate.
And don't forget about the new Starlink flat antennas! The biggest surprise from the tearing videos for many EE I know was that the custom chips doing the DSP magic are made by ST, and not Analog Devices or TI. Undersampling in KU band on cheap silicon is not a trivial undertaking.
Just a guess, but there's been some press about China luring TSMC's talent by offering outsized salaries. Also, there's the increasingly aggressive military presence of China (flying bombers and jets over Taiwanese airspace with ever greater audacity) which suggests it's only a matter of time before China officially takes Taiwan. I honestly don't see the world doing anything to stop that.
US is doing everything they can to kill semiconductor in China. US and Japan have most of the key tools, components necessary to design and fabricate semiconductor. After US announce the sanction on SMIC, the writing is on the wall for China's semiconductor industry. Just this week we saw huge rise in Taiwanese semiconductor companies's stocks price and huge drop in China's semiconductor companies's.
Only 14 out of 193 UN countries recognize Taiwan as an independent state. Given how Hong Kong was forced to bend the knee recently, I'd say this is a reasonable worry.
But many do provide support "unofficially". And HK was already under "one country, two systems", while Taiwan is de facto independent even if the PRC claims it.
Absurd comparison. HK was returned to China in accordance with a previously signed contract.
After it became part of China again, it is not possible to interviene militarily in Beijing - HK relationship - that would be an invasion of China and violation of international law. You could not phisically station an army in HK.
Even if China has violated an agreement with UK regarding HK autonomy, thay does not give you legal grounds to start a war.
In cotrast, you could deploy the entire US military in Taiwan tomorrow, it would be legal and peacefull (provided Taiwanese Gov. Invited it). Additionally, invading Taiwan is actually extremely difficult because of terrain, just because you have a massive land army does not mean they can just teleport to Taiwan.
It would be basically a D-day style effort against a well entrenched opponent.
So it is unlikely we will see phisical takeover of Taiwan in the near future, as so far we have no indication that China is looming for a causualty heavy war with little gain.
HK doesn't have its own military. its a 99 yrs lease to UK that UK hand back.
Taiwan's history is complicated. it have its own military. its people pay taxes to Taiwan, not China. Taiwan's safety is its own responsibility. its more than possible that China can take Taiwan by force but at what price. its not like Taiwan's military have no teeth.
A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would be war between two advanced industrialized economies that is unprecedented in modern times since perhaps the end of WWII. It's not comparable to the PRC government reaffirming their dominance over territory they already had control over. At the very least, China would be hit with many sanctions in the event of such a conflict.
China's economy with all its issues has definitely far more potential for growth left than the EU or the USA... It's still a developing country for the most part. Better learn Chinese if you want to stay relevant in 30 years... wait better learn it now. In the hardware world, Documentation about new chips etc. is increasingly available in Chinese first.
How is the PRC's economy going to double in the next 20 years when their working class is the largest it will _ever_ be right now? Their demographics are extremely poor, and their population pyramid is about to violently invert.
This is what we see happening in the world right now. Previously the only consideration was, "Is it cost effective." Now there are a myriad number of other considerations up to and including geopolitical considerations. The US, for instance, has always been able to manufacture lith machines. Economic considerations obliged them to innovate elsewhere. Yet it's obvious that were the EU to threaten US access to lith machines, the US would start manufacturing those machines on their own.
Lith is not even the hard part. TSMC and Intel have the same lith machines. Why is Intel having so much trouble? Because there is so much more to this entire enterprise than doing the lithography.
Journalist or, more likely, EU press release office not very knowledgeable on the semiconductor industry choosing to mention the three largest countries by population in the headline, and the rest in a list embedded in the article. Journalist at Reuters probably just took the official press release and edited the grammar/wording a bit. I agree that the selection should probably be Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy if looking at the relative importance in semiconductors, but probably choosing by country population is a standard thing they do to avoid complaints.
Perhaps it's because at least in NXP's case the reason why headquarters are there and not somewhere else is that the Netherlands are a tax haven for IP-heavy companies.
Are you thinking about STMicroelectronics perhaps? They are incorporated in the Netherlands.
NXP has a long history in the Netherlands. It started as a division within Philips (Dutch company) and it has done a lot of production work in the Netherlands.
Small countries like NL and Ireland don't really have a choice. Without giving tax incentives multinationals would just choose the bigger markets (China, U.S, India, Germany maybe). Is it "fair" that the U.S and China dominate everything between themselves?
Yes sure, but in the scope of geostrategic developments, opening with Germany and France totally makes sense with regards to the general public, as they won't read NL and think "oh, it's on".
Perhaps that's the point? If NL feels like they already have an effective domestic industry for their needs, there is no need to sign-on and invest resources here.
However, for these other countries, they have concerns that are not strictly economic, but also related to national security and economic flexibility.
I don't know their plans, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pragmatic solution wouldn't be to co-invest in domestic fab facilities with existing incumbents who agree to comply with domestic interests as relates to sourcing, labor practices, IP sharing, local hiring, training, and environment controls.
It doesn't necessarily mean "spend money to beat TSMC at the tip of the spear". I mean, at least, I hope it wouldn't. Not at first.
Measuring sales isn't how you do that usually, market cap is the way to go (and then ASML dwarfs the rest). But even by sales seems like NL is leading.
In kind of a similar vein, many years ago Germany decided to become kind of the silicon valley of optics and photonics (e.g., lasers and their ilk). While I don't think they are the dominant player today, they are certainly a force to be reckoned with, and they seem to have a developed a decent pipeline of ideas and people from university and government labs to a private sector that is probably subsidized.
Granted, it's a smaller business than semi, but it suggests to me that a national program to strengthen an industry isn't guaranteed to be a failure.
It's a very programming-like phrase, actually. Just parse it from the inside out: (isn't (guaranteed to be (a failure))
An equivalent might be "has some chance of success" but that misses the sense that the presumption is failure. More verbosely, the phrase might be: "One might presume that a national program to strengthen an industry would be a guaranteed failure, but this suggests to me that it might have some chance."
"Just because it is sponsored and coordinated by the governments, doesn't mean it must fail."
The implied notion is that the governments and their agencies are usually too incompetent and anything but innovative, so programs like this are oftentimes just a way to extort the money for some and a chance to pose in front of the cameras for the politicians.
Optimistic. I would say: Definitely not a failure.
And I apologize for using unclear language. I should be thinking about a wider audience when writing in an international forum. Thanks for pointing it out!
For me (Eastern US) “is not definitely a failure”, “won’t necessarily fail”, and “isn’t guaranteed to be a failure” all indicate that something would be expected to usually fail, but might not.
To me, they can be optimistic or pessimistic based on what the baseline is. I read the GP’s post as optimistic, as they come from a perspective of these kinds of government programs always failing. However, from a baseline of these kinds of government programs often succeeding, any of the three versions would be pessimistic.
The EUV source inside ASML's lithography machines is from the German optics company Zeiss, and the lasers used in that system which generates EUV wavelength light by bombarding tin droplets is also from another German company, Trumpf.
Isn't the problem that European tech companies are sold to American companies? There are and have been countless of European chipmakers but they are usually bought by Americans.
European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments.
I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and also private wealth to accumulate and grow easier than European counterparts. The American government simply allows its business and private individuals to accumulate money via off shore companies in the Caribbean. The US deliberately allows this.
Disagree. Research has consistently shown that American multinationals consistently apply better corporate management practices than their European counterparts.[1] This is especially true in IT-intensive industries.[2] This is true even when comparing American multinationals operating in Europe.
Any sufficiently large company in a globally integrated, competitive industry, is going to reap potentially large efficiency gains by replacing European management with American management.
Nicholas Bloom the author of both papers is British.
Also, it's not like in economics/business science there's a European vs American distinction in publications. The European Economics Association is quite small and most European departments hire out of the American association's market, for instance
Genuine question - Has any major tech innovation/ product come out European industry (mainland EU) over the last couple of decades ? (not Academia)
Their biggest tech companies are Spotify and Skype. That's pretty underwhelming given that Spotify's biggest innovations are in product development and Skype became a subsidiary of an American company within 2 years of its existence.
Additionally, the 2 companies that seem to have industry tech talent: UK and Sweden, are not part of this deal.
ASML comes to mind. Dutch company building large lithography machines being used to create semi conductors.
The tech scene in mainland Europe operates completely differently from what you might be used to from Silicon Valley, but there is lots of stuff going on. If you only look at the European car manufactures and the endless amount of small-to-medium sized businesses involved in the supply chain. Lots of stuff going on.
EU power is in niches. There are many companies specialised equipment, are worth billions and if you are not in that niche you probably never hear pf them. For example most of electron microscopes are developed and manufactured in EU. (Actually more than 60% of world supply is manufactured in my home town of 350k)
Short answer: yes, there is plenty of innovation taking place in diverse domains ranging from elevators to energy grids to robotics to pharmacology/biotech to medtech to defence to telecommunications to green tech and so forth and so on.
If the criteria of tech innovation is a cloud-based xAAS then the list will be unfortunately short.
The semiconductor push was really expected for a longer time already and is (I think) obviously part of the aspirations in the strategic autonomy continuum. If the roles were reversed, that is, EU with some Asian countries owned and controlled the majority of all chip fabrication, it would make perfect sense for USA to start chip production of its own on its own soil.
25% of the worlds research is done in the EU and a lot of that leads to something. Sounds to me like you look for software for the average Windows user only. ESA and CERN alone leads to huge innovations.
The lazy answer is ofcourse that they made something useful and then shared it with others. Have you heard of http? Maybe you've heard of x-rays or electrons being used for imaging?
Skype was great software, came out in 2003 (!) , at the time when whatsapp, facebook and twitter didn't even exist!
It was the first practical videocall software and pioniered the niche. It did more to improve my life than all social networks combined. I backed it with hard cash, paying for Skype premium or whatever it was called.
Then in 2011 MS bought it, and best as I can tell, has delivered no real improvement for the consumer.
The client was rewritten twice, now it's in JS, glitchy, slower and serves adds.
I think the world would have been better off with independant Skype, Zoom should have never become a thing.
You know, tech includes things like trains, aeroplanes, biotechnology, power, scientific instruments, chemistry... But yeah, it's HN, tech here means only FAANG.
What will actually happen: some countries will spend a trivial amount of money in a PR stunt with not coordination between the countries and result in no advance for the EU countries participating.
The EU is ahead of the US in crude steel production, but we're about 6 times behind China.[0]
ARM is in the UK and not the EU. It's owned by a Japanese company and soon an American one.
Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications. [1] Some European countries are ahead when measured per capita, but only some and that's not an important figure here.
The rest I'm unsure about, but I would like to note that as a market China would easily dwarf Europe. As China becomes richer Europe will become less important in comparison.
> The EU is ahead of the US in crude steel production, but we're about 6 times behind China.[0]
Steel isn't a relevant metric these days. Almost all developed countries can make as much as they need. China needs and produces more because they have to catch up.
> Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications.
Except that ARM has many offices outside the UK developing important IP. Their Mali Bifrost and Valhall GPU architectures are mainly developed in Scandinavia by former Falanx Microsystems of Norway, aquired by ARM in 2006, hence the norse naming.
>"The EU is ahead of the US in crude steel production, but we're about 6 times behind China."
People often throw around numbers like this without any context. In the other thread people were trying to judge economics of electric powerplants by total weight.
Why is this a relevant metric? Why would you not expect China, which is 2x the population and is building infrastructure to refine more steel? Like they also produce more food and plastic, so what?
It also is hardly correlated with wealth, wages or GDP. There has been a glut of steel on world markets for the past few years.
Are the kinds of steel produced even comparable, i.e. only recently China could produce ballpoint pens
Because the parent poster brought it up. Also, Japan produces about the same amount of crude steel as the US despite being less than half the population.
There are many EU-based multi-nationals, nobody is arguing that. OP is talking about the efficacy of EU-initiatives to create specific industries within the EU - the track record of those isn't so great and are usually PR stunts.
I've always found it funny that Germany is internationally known for its engineering when Chemistry is equally or even more important. Bayer, Lanxess, BASF, Covestro, Evonik Industries are some of the largest in the world. Their factories in Germany are rivaling small cities in their size.
Yes, but each of the numerous political announcements (on the French level as well as on the EU level) of "we're going to build a giant of [this industry], this time for real" which were made since the 90s have always ended up in something ranging between complete vaporwave and utter failure. Basically all French industrial successes were recorded between the end of WW2 and the end of the 70s/ beginning of the 80s, for the last 3 or 4 decades it all has been going down. That was not helped by the motto of the 90s, when the 'glory' was to become "a company without factory"...
And whenever the planned giant at least comes to reality, even if it is as dwarf; the politicians who previously made great announcements, distributed millions, created random office, launched parties and cut the ribbon of the project in front of cameras, then don't even feed it with public commands, but give them to the very American or Chinese giants those projects were supposed to counterbalance.
I don't think anyone here believes this kind of announcement any more: there has been so many similar ones already, that are already forgotten and replaced with yet another announcement 9 months later, and again, and again.
In short, pretty much all of them were either established or sustained by the government. Even to a greater extent than in the US, as a several of the EU giants descent from privatized national companies.
Pretty much. I mean in theory someone could build a new fab in Europe, using European-built machines (from ASML). In practice, it'll involve government involvement so it HAS to become a multi-national endeavour where every country wants to leave their mark on it, and of course said countries' work culture / ethic.
Even if it is a standalone company, it'll be vying for that dank european subsidy.
Might give GlobalFoundries another crack at their 7nm technology. Currently they are stuck at 14nm at their US fab and 12nm at their German fab (they rolled that out last year iirc).
Gf had access to 7nm through the ip transfer from IBM. They chose not to build new facilities because they didn't see themselves competing at leading edge in the long term. They weren't very good at innovation. Their 14nm was licensed from samsung and their unused 7nm was transferred from IBM who was leaving the industry.
Doesn't seem like that's the case for Airbus, ESA or CERN for instance. I agree that there's a lot of bureaucracy in Europe but still stuff gets done from time to time!
For Airbus I would agree but ESA isn't on the same level as NASA and CERN is competitive but only in a field where there is no real reason to be competitive (no money is made).
If the only reason to do anything is money, sure. I think most people here in HN know how valuable scientific research is, and the kind of advancements that come from it. The World Wide Web came from CERN.
The World Wide Web coming from CERN is not getting stuff done. It is getting lost in side-projects and doing the non-obvious, non-cheapest, non-fastest thing because it is interesting and there is a tiny chance it might be worth it in the long run. Very much not plain getting-stuff-done.
NASA's budget is almost three times the size ($22.6bn vs €6.68bn, which is approximately $8bn). ESA gets quite a lot done per Euro invested. It's just really hard to convince the member nations to pay for a good PR team.
Member States join forces for a European initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies
”
Appreciate your cynicism but maybe Brexit along with competition from China, the Far East and the United States will focus European minds. Let's not forget the many EU-wide research and development initiatives that are successful. I can provide a list if you so wish.
Are you Finnish? I'm really curious what happened to all those hardware and electrical engineers developing phones for Nokia/Microsoft before they went bust, respawned as HMD, packed up and moved their production and R&D to China.
Did they pivot to other industries in Finland? If so, which industries? Were they valued as much in the other industries or did they take significant pay cuts? Or did they have to pack up and move elsewhere where they would be valued? If so, where?
I'm asking since I met a few ex-Nokia people looking for work in Switzerland/Germany/Austria years ago.
Basically they went to work to other companies and spun up lot of new ones.
There are lots of small and medium sized companies in Finland that are operating in technology and hardware.
I presume a majority of them had similar salaries as earlier. Engineers have never been well payed in Finland and Nokia knew the market rate very well. It rewarded few individuals very well, but the general salary range was probably nothing special.
Finland has lots of engineering activity - always has had. The problem has been marketing this knowhow to external markets.
Explosion of Nokia was a blessing for Finland. It was too large for a country this small, and it started domineering investments in all levels of economy.
From geek consumer point of view it is a shame their engineering was run down by poor management.
But the company was fixed on this course from it's early years. It basically trusted on two things - that radiotechnology would be it's secret sauce for all eternity, and the main point of competition would be it's logistics network.
When the radiotechnology used in handsets became commoditized, China basically levelled the playing field regarding logistics and outsourcing, and the software development inside the company remained a second tier effort, it could have not ended any other way (in retrospect).
I'm Finnish, worked with a bunch of ex-Nokia software engineers on Ubuntu touch after Nokia went bust. AFAIK people generally dispersed, many started to work for US (and some Chinese) companies, and quite a few IoT startups were started, especially in Oulu.
Indeed. Is there anything impactful that is somehow European (not from a single European country, but as a collaboration between) with the exception of airbus and CERN? It’s not that there aren’t skills and talents in space, cars, pharma, construction, energy, etc.
A lot of the Euro banking industry is collaborative, both in terms of financial instruments and infrastructure.
In information technology, ARM is ostensibly British but key parts of their portfolio were Euro collabs that became acquisitions or whatever (Keil, Adelante, EuroMIPS etc.)
In space technology there's a fairly strong Euro theme. E.g. i live near Glasgow, Scotland. There's a few really cool Space firms here but the larger ones appear to have strong collaborative elements with other firms in Europe (and in some cases, ownership models now that span Europe).
In farming and food supply there's a lot of large impactful collaboration across Europe.
Transport and logistics is another one where specialist firms, a lot of them Dutch for some reason, have all sorts of unexpected collaborations.
In Scotland we have a few small parts of Europe's wind turbine manufacturing industry but that's grown thanks to some euro collaborations.
Erm, the entire university system in Europe is built on collaboration between countries.
ESA is a thing. ITER is a thing. But mainly all those small international projects that simply would be too niche or small for a single country or market. Im talking about stuff like wave power startup, on land fishfarms, salvage operations in the baltic, cofinancing of highways (or powerlines so that green energy may find its way across the union), et cetera..
What collaborations has the EU ever created for us? Apart from Airbus, CERN, ITER, ESA, a single market and a stack of successful multinational companies?
So, what would a new bleeding edge modern architecture and instruction set look like if one could start from scratch? I assume general computing so cell phones and servers are the target.
I personally would love to see a frontend architecture that more closely resembles the backend: dataflow execution.
It's been researched in the 80s/90s, with some hybrids popping up in literature from time to time (TRIPS, ADAM, etc)
Counterpoint: processors have gotten so good at extracting ILP from a sequential ISA that I wonder how much benefit you would gain from a dataflow ISA. The downside is that it would require to completely rethink and redo the software stack. (efficient par to seq is just as hard as efficient seq to par)
We already have x86-64 (guarded licenses), ARM (less guarded but still uncertain) and SPARC, Power, RISC-V (open source).
Should a new ISA be the focus of major economic plans? Maybe if one of the objectives is protectionist ISA licensing, but that seems like an insular mistake.
An ISA ecosystem is a lingua-franca, so choosing a well established one is the most sensible basis for growing different semi/IT industry flows around.
In terms of discovering new technical benefits, new ISA's should be explored in academic circles and startups where they won't waste everyones time and money on boondoggles.
As interesting as the Mill looks on paper, it's hard to keep faith in this architecture ever coming to fruition with the decreasing press coverage [1] (8 articles in 2013, only 1 each in 2014, 2015, 2017, several about fund seeking) and lack of activity in the Implementation section of their Forum [2] (one nearly 1 year old thread and others nearly 3 years old or more).
While the Transputers vanished eventually, their legacy is living in absolutely all modern multi-socket workstations and servers.
The Transputer method of partitioning a multiprocessor system, into processor chips provided with memory interfaces (now DDR), I/O interfaces (now PCIe) and communication interfaces for interconnections with the other processors, instead of using shared buses as before, was revived in some later DEC Alpha CPUs, then it was used in AMD Opteron (many AMD designers came from DEC Alpha), and then it was adopted by Intel (in Nehalem) and by everybody else.
In avoiding the morass of stupid patent rulings that allow manufacturers to camp on an ISA.
There is no reason that anyone shouldn't be able to take someone's databook for a processor and produce a legal work alike. But since we can't do that.
The whole industry is forced to create a new ISA for the sole purpose of saying it is ok to produce work-a-likes.
Under this line of thinking, EU or Britain should think twice about approving Nvidia's purchase of arm. Arm's British's one of the most influential technology company in the world. And with Apple's M1 and other arm chips movements lately, the future of computing will be moving to arm from x86. Arm is not financially strong right now, but there are so much potential to improve it's financials. Make arm remains an British company and build it in Britian should be one of the method to realize this semi dream
The co-founder of ARM, Hermann Hauser is pushing for blocking the deal. I'm not hopeful it's going to be stopped. The UK has too much hanging on a trade deal with the US post-Brexit.
Actually, there are some rather successful EU wide projects, CERN, ESA, Galileo etc. so I wouldn't make plans per se but not doom it from the start either.
How will they be keeping talent? I heard workers in IT are paid low compared to other jobs and especially compared to similar jobs in North America, what stops them. from just going to US/Canada?
I think they mean 'going to' as in working for them. You can work for a US or Canadian company remotely. I've done it my whole career. I've never seen anything even remotely approaching a competitive offer from a European company. They can't compete. What incentive is there to work for a European company?
Free healthcare, somehow reasonable housing prices outside of huge city centers, proximity to elderly parents, generally higher quality of life, to name few reasons.
You are right about the part about making money in the US and being ok. I would argue though that the higher standard of living in Europe across the board has a compounding affect. When you know that your neighbors are taken care of and you don't see as much social rot out in the streets, you tend to feel happier, less stressed, more willing to continue supporting and being a part of your community. At least that is my personal experience as an American living in Germany. In addition, it is not just about making money, you get a lot more time off, holidays and as many sick days as the doctor says that you need, within reason of course.
As somebody living in a country with a strong middle class, I wouldn't want to permanently settle in anything else. It permeates the whole society, the safety, the environment we bring up our children and their values. If you can leave your kids play outside. And so on.
US is a great place in many aspects for top 1%, but progressively crappy as you move down the scale. And even good-earning IT worker is one long-term debilitating illness/accident away from financial catastrophe. Let's not forget completely fucked up US university system.
Overall, when I was young and relatively naive, US seemed a great place to be. Now that I have kids and seen the world a bit, I see it as one of the alternatives (to say Australia and New Zealand, compared to Europe), but with way too many issues, high criminality, us-vs-them mentality. Also the very obvious class system based on income/wealth, we don't have it here so pronounced which I consider much healthier.
One last point - we europeans generally (maybe except for UK) strongly disagree with all wars US is waging in past 30 years or so. Deaths of millions, misery for hundreds of millions for generations to come, pure evil for very little good. There is no way around this if you work in US - your taxes are directly supporting this, everybody a little. We hear a lot about voting with our money - well not living there is also that kind of vote. Passive resistance if you want.
If you want to go down that route I would say the opposite [0] plays a much bigger role why some Americans can't accept that their country ain't "The best thing ever since sliced bread, #1!" [1].
In reality different people have different priorities, so no single country ever can be "the best", as that solely depends on the individual priorities.
It's also not like RT and Xinhua are making up the stuff they use to agitate against the US, like most propaganda it's usually based on at least a kernel of truth.
For example the US incarceration rate is a pretty blatant outlier, particularly among developed countries, a factual reality that clashes very harshly with the self-propagandized idea of "Country of the free". The regular "race riots" in the US, and their scale, are a clear indicator to still unresolved issues on that end.
Disregarding these as "It's only Russian/Chinese propaganda!" is exactly the kind of mindset that leaves these issues unresolved and tolerated as "normal".
Even if you read only American news it does not seem like a good place to live in. This is coming from an immigrant who chose the EU over the US by the way.
Even if you're in a comfortable situation, you have to worry about friends and family, and ensuring your children will have similar careers. When raising children, it just feeds into the rat race.
Well you gotta worry u won't lose your job though right? Which becomes more and more realistic as you age. So just when you need insurance the most you may lose your insurance - nice system.
Not just age, an accident, diagnosis with a disease, etc. can happen to young people as well. Then you suddenly discover that your american insurance doesn't pay, or only a small fraction of the price...
Insurance policies are not hard to understand. They have a deductible and an out of pocket maximum. Most employer provided plans have a very affordable out of pocket max. Mine is $4000. After that I don't pay anything. In the event of an accident, I'd be fine.
Basing anything on the horror stories will make you think everything is bad. Many americans think Europe is a communist hell hole where people steal your money through taxes overrun by islamists.
To explain, Europeans aren't happy when they learn about either of these "features." They typically can expect more protection in Europe, albeit with the tendency of worsening in the last decades, where the influences... come over the Atlantic.
Some people don't want to maintain the kind off dissonance required to turn a blind eye to the widespread failings and cruelty of American society. If I had to choose between going to sleep at night knowing that the people around me wouldn't be made bankrupt or homelessness should they have the misfortune of becoming sick, over circumstances where I was slightly more wealthy, but forced to justify all this, I'd choose the former every time.
There are millions of Americans working to help others, pushing for more socialist policies. But not everyone agrees, and in our country, you have the right to disagree and vote for who you want.
I find the holier than thou attitude based on European insecurity quite entertaining. Europe is great - you don't have to denigrate other places. But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.
> I find the holier than thou attitude based on European insecurity quite entertaining.
I’m an American and my sentiments are based on watching what this country has done to my working class friends and family. I’m glad those things don’t happen to people in Europe.
> But not everyone agrees, and in our country, you have the right to disagree and vote for who you want.
Just about every parliamentary democracy in Europe is more representative than the American system and nowhere near as corrupt.
> But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.
Quite familiar with that history, as well as our own of chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous people.
In germany there is definitely no free healthcare.
It is just, that when you are employed, your employer has to pay it. When you freelance or are a student, or unemployed you definitely have to pay for it. But in a nice way, based on your income.
Depends. There is Bafög for studends and ALG1/2 for unemployed (plus health insurance). Also you can work as student (limited mostly)
But even if you have no income, you still have to pay for health insurance(lowest fee). I know that quite well from some time ago. You also cannot just quit health insurance, as long as you life in germany.
I believe everyone understands this. Still, as far as anyone is concerned, it's "free", as in, if I break leg I don't have go homeless, instead I just pay a small sum and get it fixed.
Well for one, I and everyone I know happen to live here.
I guess if someone can suffer the US' shitty conditions, I guess there's nothing stopping them from going there... except for the US's stringent immigration policies. Can't just hop over the pond to go work there, and I'm fairly sure it's easier for a US citizen to work here than the other way around.
Of course, that too is deincentivized thanks to US tax laws (still having to pay income taxes even though you don't live or work in the US).
First, you admit that "you and everyone you know" live in Europe. Perhaps consider not making sweeping generalizations about places that neither you nor anyone you know live.
Second, the many US States are far from perfect, as are the many EU member nations, but conditions in the US in general are hardly "shitty."
Other's have pointed out the extraordinary number of immigrants to the US -- there are more immigrants living in the US (40M) than citizens of Poland (38M)[1]. Those are normal people making intelligent, reasoned, self-interested decisions. They didn't leave their homes behind for a downgrade.
But more to the point, generalizing "conditions in the US" is utter foolishness. The US is very much like the EU v0. In the same way that my time living Italy didn't give me a great deal of insight into life in Belgium, a stay in New York City doesn't tell you very much about life in Idaho, or almost any other place in the US. The states are highly autonomous by design, and life experiences vary widely between them.
Yes, New York and San Francisco in particular are having a hard time due to acute housing crises, and some other cities are dealing with housing issues to a lesser extent. Yes, healthcare here is a problem if you don't have insurance.
But fortunately, the majority of the country is not SF or NY, and 92% of people have health insurance[2].
I don't mean to take away from anything else you've said, but that statistic is incredibly misleading. It specifically states 92% were insured for at least part of 2019. It also ignores the quality and effectiveness of the insurance.
> In the first half of 2020, 43.4 percent of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 were inadequately insured.
> The adult uninsured rate was 12.5 percent. In addition, 9.5 percent of adults were insured but had a gap in coverage in the past year and 21.3 percent were underinsured.
> A quarter of those who were continuously insured and did not meet the threshold for underinsurance also reported problems paying bills.
> People who reported problems paying medical bills experienced lingering financial problems including damage to their credit ratings and depleted savings.
I do see your point that it could sound like “everyone wants out,” but FWIW to me it didn’t come across that way.
I read the GP as asking “how will the EU stop the people leaving when they prefer to work elsewhere,” which implies that most people are moving for personal preference reasons rather than jobs. I doubt that is the case - I suspect that most humans would prefer to have both an elite job and their family relatively nearby, thus keeping talent locally is pretty easy if you have elite jobs to offer.
But since the GP didn’t elaborate on why they think people are leaving it’s difficult to argue about the posters intentions.
The US' "shitty conditions" aren't limited to healthcare or housing (but also last time I checked, having health insurance doesn't mean you're actually going to receive the healthcare you need). Look at measures like wealth inequality, police violence, parental and other forms of leave, infant mortality, child hunger and poverty. The US underperforms Europe on many of these metrics.
Also, that the US accepts more immigrants is not an argument for its inherent superiority, especially given how vilified and abused they've been in the past four years. All it means is that there are countries worse than the US, or that better ones have more restrictive immigration policies.
Yet the US has more immigrants than any other country, with an immigrant percentage comparable to Germany (on the high end of larger European countries)[1]. This sounds like more of a "Nobody Goes There, It’s Too Crowded" argument...
"if someone can suffer the US' shitty conditions, "
So crap, that people around the world are fighting to get in, what for those jobs that pay 2-3x, and real exciting projects to work on, and for the most part people that actually don't care about your funny accent.
It's unwise to discount one of the US's fundamental, perennial and systematic advantages as somehow a drawback.
Like it or not - the US has been sucking in global talent since it's inception.
You have to look which countries people are actually migrating from.
Net migration to the US from the richer EU countries is about 0, i.e. about the same number of US citizens are moving into the EU as are moving from those EU countries into the US.
>Net migration to the US from the richer EU countries is about 0, i.e. about the same number of US citizens are moving into the EU as are moving from those EU countries into the US.
Not true. 10-17% of Canadian, British, Australian, and Swiss scientists move to the US. (https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the_...) These are percentages of all researchers, whether they emigrate anywhere or not. (By contrast, only 5% of US scientists leave theiir country.)
Among the general population, there are 824,000 Britons living in the US, compared to 159,000 Americans living in Britain. Given that the US's population is about five times that of Britain's, that means that on a per-capita basis a Briton is 25 times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Britain.
Of course fewer Europeans migrate to the US than in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or compared to Latin American countries today, but they still come and the net flows are still considerably in the US's favor. There are 1.2 million German-born people living in the US, for example, versus only 150,000 American-born people living in Germany, although the US has four times Germany's population. Sweden and Norway? 15,000 Americans in each, compared to 54,000 Swedes and 36,000 Norwegians in the US. Sweden has 10 million people—the size of Los Angeles County—so there would have to be 1.62 million Americans living there to match those going the other way on a per-capita basis. There are 49,000 Swiss born in the US, compared to 24,000 American born in Switzerland. The US's population is about 37 times larger, so a Swiss is 75 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. There are 71,000 people born in Austria living in the US compared to 7,700 Americans in Austria, implying that an Austrian is more than 300 times (!) more likely to move to the US.
Same with non-European countries; for example, 945,000 Canadians in the US versus 279,000 Americans in Canada. Since the US's population is nine times that of Canada's, on a per-capita basis a Canadian is 27 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. Yes, the US has a nicer climate than Canada, but this is consistent with other Anglosphere countries; 75,000 Australians and 26,000 New Zealanders are in the US compared to 54,000 Americans in Australia and 13,000 in New Zealand, respectively, so on a per-capita basis Australians are about 20 times more likely to move to the US and New Zealanders an amazing 140 times. Etc., etc.
See the line chart at about the middle of the page, with three lines in black, blue and red. The chart shows net migration Germany <> USA. The red line shows German citizens only, black shows people formerly living in Germany, but without German citizen status. In 1998 there was peak in emigration to the US, but from then on the trend moves towards net immigration from the US.
I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.
>See the line chart at about the middle of the page, with three lines in black, blue and red. The chart shows net migration Germany <> USA. The red line shows German citizens only, black shows people formerly living in Germany, but without German citizen status. In 1998 there was peak in emigration to the US, but from then on the trend moves towards net immigration from the US.
Thank you for pointing me to the document. The entire press release is a marvel of sophistry. From its first sentence ("Das Ergebnis der 59. Präsidentschaftswahl der Vereinigten Staaten am 3. November wird mit Spannung erwartet") to the later claim that "Seit 2017 ziehen mehr Personen von den USA nach Deutschland als umgekehrt", is the federal statistics office's communications office trying its best to claim that "Orange Man Bad so fewer Germans are moving to the US" without actually using Trump's name or, more importantly, with data actually supporting the claim. Most people are going to only read the headline and perhaps the first paragraph, and not see that the US hasn't been the most popular destination for German emigrants since 2004, so the recent trend is not a result of the Trump presidency. The US is still the third most popular destination as of 2019, only behind two German-speaking countries; it is ahead of every other country, including the UK and other countries that Germans can move to easily because of the EU and Schengen. Rather than Trump, it looks like the trend is a return to the pre-1990 norm. (More on this later.)
Regarding the chart you mentioned, the black line is presumably mostly Yugoslavian War refugees who used Germany as a stopover to get to the US (thus the late 1990s peak) and would not be applicable in showing native Germans' intent regarding moving to the US.
The red line does not show a recent trend toward "net migration from the US" (impling more Americans moving to Germany than German citizens moving to the US) but that, as the text says, recent population flows between Germany (German citizens) and the US have been almost even in gross terms. This is a reversion to the pre-1991 norm, as opposed to something unprecedented. Further, given that the US has about four times as many people as Germany, this implies that a random German citizen today is about four times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Germany.
Of course, these flows are not necessarily permanent; most are likely students, or workers on temporary assignments. Obtaining ciitzenship is a more meaningful indicator of interest. In 2019 4,745 German-born people obtained US citizenship while 1,205 Americans obtained German citizenship. This implies that a random German citizen today is 16 times more likely to obtain US citizenship than an American is to obtain German citizenship.
Further, 75% of those Americans obtaining German citizenship in 2019 do not live in Germany but are taking advantage of the right of return (encouraged, from 2006, by the German Citizenship Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Citizenship_Project)), while the US does not have a similar law. Only about 300 of Americans obtaining German citizenship actually lived in Germany. This implies that a random German citizen today is 48 times more likely to obtain US citizenship and to move to the US, than an American is to obtain German citizenship.
>I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.
Thanks for the reply. I fully agree that the Trump framing is horrible, BTW, though it's hard to properly deep link to the data tables on that site. There was no intention to add spin to this discussion :)
And: I dont' have an axe to grind here, I just objected to the notion that there is mass emigration from the EU to the USA, because I remembered the numbers for Germany.
What makes meaningful comparison of the numbers nontrivial are differing definitions.
Citizenship is probably a problematic category because it is quite hard to achieve citizenship in Germany. There a millions of persons being born in Germany that don't have citizenship. Compared to the USA, Germany has an essentially racist basis here, though it has been made easier in recent years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis).
We've banned this account for political, ideological, and nationalistic flamewar. That's not what this site is for and we asked you repeatedly to stop.
"semblance of basic humanity"... Obviously you have your own metric on that. The United States takes in more immigrants than any other nation and has done this for hundreds of years.
You just have hate within you and it shows.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.
Please also stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly ideological or political battle-style comments. That's not what the site is for. We want curious conversation, not opposing-side-bashing.
I know. My mother was an immigrant to the US. I've also seen family members go broke and commit suicide after being unable to afford medical care that would otherwise would have been provided to them in more humane countries. Apologies if this colors my view of America's "humanity."
It's not narrow mindedness. The healthcare system in the US can destroy you financially in a couple of years (or even months!), even if you do all the right things and work a job with a good salary, save, etc.
All for what? For being unlucky and contracting cancer? For having a chronic disease that needs daily medication? Is that what sick people deserve, to have all their finances wiped away?
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but watching someone who worked very hard their whole entire lives be blamed for their misfortune, humiliated, and denied access to treatment by the American system of benefits (not just healthcare, this included disability and other services) doesn't result in narrow-mindedness. It results in an accurate appraisal of what is happening to poor people in this country every day. You can find plenty of news stories, just post-pandemic, about people treated similarly by unemployment benefits systems that were designed to be punitive instead of helping people in need.
If those realities are uncomfortable for you and you want to dismiss them, that's perfectly fine, but these stories are out there in plain sight, across the US, for you to observe.
Having lived in both (and being a citizen of neither): quality of life. Your headline salary in the Us is higher but disposable income is often lower. You spend more time managing your life in the USA with less time left to live it.
Some people enjoy that of course. I do find the working environment better in the US, and I enjoy my work, but on most other parameters it’s inferior.
Self reply: It was early in the morning and I didn't read correctly. My comment makes no sense (although I certainly meant to ask about the purchase power relative to cost).
I agree with your overall sentiment, to each their own. There are definitely a good number of valid reasons for why someone would choose to stay in EU despite lower salary. However, there is one thing you mentioned I have an issue with.
>Your headline salary in the US is higher but disposable income is often lower
Even rough napkin math doesn't check out here. Let's say you are a senior engineer in Bay Area/SF (one of the most expensive places to live in the US, so I am not going for some outliers like Austin or Seattle where the math ends up being even more in favor of the employee), and you make $300k/yr total comp at one of the big tech companies (which isn't even that good for a senior engineer at Google/Netflix/Dropbox/Uber/etc., this is rather a low end of the comp at that level at those companies, https://levels.fyi has a pretty accurate data on compensation that matches with what I've seen in real life myself). I used one of the online calculators to see how much you take home after taxes in CA (https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...), it came out to around $7.5k semi-monthly or $15k/mo.
So you get $15k in cash every month after taxes. Let's say you want to live on your own in a new really nice 1bd apartment in the middle of the city. I will overestimate and say that you will pay $5k/mo on rent+utilities. After all of that, you got $10k left. Let's say you spend $2k/mo on food and other various random small expenses (again, overestimating here for the sake of the argument, realistically you will spend much less on both food and housing). After all of that you got $8k of disposable income left, and that's while living a very good quality of life (most engineers I know in Bay Area who make that much don't spend even nearly this much on housing and normal expenses btw, they are putting it in savings/401k/etc. in hopes of retiring early and such). Employer-provided insurance is usually amazing. My personal one is fully paid for by employer, and my out of pocket yearly maximum is $2.5k (so even in the worst case scenario, I won't ever spend more than that in a calendar year on health expenses). Also, most of the people in senior positions at those companies I listed make noticeably more than $300k/mo.
I guess the bottom line is, is there even a way in EU to have $8k+/mo of disposable income as an IC software dev? How difficult is it to make it happen? From my experience in the Bay Area and Seattle, it isn't the easiest thing on earth, and not everyone in those places makes that much, but it is far from "special" or rare.
" US specifically starts to feel weird for non US citizens". - The US is the largest importer of immigrants now and for many decades prior. Weird, right?
Weird for non citizens to live in US, not weird that one of the countries with highest capacity to absorb immigration and with highest salaries in the world has big immigration flows.
Besides that I think some people from US might be biased on the feeling of Europe towards US. If you just know Europeans living in US you will have a wrong perception, mostly because Europeans living in US are here because they want to do so not because they were forced to move.
Besides not wanting to work/live in the US/Canada for cultural reasons (I personally don't want to raise children where school shootings are so frequent that not all of them are even reported in the news anymore), there is also the visa situation, natural disasters (earth quakes, raging wildfires on the west coast, hurricanes on the east..) and then some.
While none of these rankings are perfect they show clear trend that some of the European countries are doing better than US.
Also you should keep in mind that money is not everything. (Which is why we have the above stats anyway). People have friends and family and a way of life that they might not be willing to abandon. As other have mentioned before migration to US is non-trivial and requires quite and effort. In contrast to that you can move much easier within EU. Which is what is happening anyway - if you want high salary you go to Switzerland / London / Paris or any other high income area and you can do so without being treated as an immigrant.
I work in IT in the US, and if someone offered me a job with a visa in Europe, with the potential for permanent stay. Even if it was 1/2 my current salary I would probably take it, depending on the country it was in.
In most places the cost of living is pretty low compared to the US, so even the admittedly lower engineer salaries in Europe can give you a very comfortable lifestyle.
Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
For the top end of talent there's always freelancing, with a different, higher band of earning levels.
>Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
Except that how many devs outside of Paris make 60-80k?
Most French engineers I met in Germany left France because of low wages outside of Paris which is so expensive that most of your wage gains evaporate anyway unless you have a baller job in finance or management consulting.
In my anecdotal experience 60k is typical for developers with 5 years of experience in larger cities, but often you do need to get into management to reach 80k.
I think it’s also getting better as all employers need to compete on salaries with remote offers from companies in Paris.
I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.
>I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.
That's kind of a catch-22 right there.
If it weren't for those "ludicrous immigration laws", tech salaries in the Bay Area would get watered down significantly while becoming even more expensive to live in, making the whole place less attractive to emigrate to over time, eventually reaching a state of equilibrium with wages probably close to EU level.
Think of it like a fancy nightclub. The more exclusive it is, the more people are willing to queue outside for hours for a chance to get in.
You don't see this happening in London where EU citizens are generally free to move until recently - still after decades of free movement you have much higher salaries there than elsewhere in EU.
That might have something to do with London being the biggest financial center in the world after NYC and less with immigration. It's much simpler to reach some easy money when there so much cash slushing around looking for the next hot thing.
Plus the CoL in London also matches the high compensation and sometimes exceeds to the point where despite the high salary it's difficult to feel well paid when you find yourself competing against people with Mc.Mansions.
Yes but it's not really easy to make 60-80k in France in the tech industry outside of Paris. I used to be in charge of part a product and lead a small team for a formely state-owned large industrial company in the suburb of Paris and was making less than 50k when I left (given the other advantages I was actually making more). I could probably have been paid four times more in the USA (admitedly I could have been paid more in France too but the job was interesting).
30k sounds like entry/mid-level salary in Central Europe. With over 10 years of experience I currently make over $90k
Also, if you take median salary in software industry, which is probably closer to $65k, in my country it buys you much better lifestyle than 200k in the Bay Area does. Me, for example, I was able to buy 2 bedroom, 900 sq ft apartment in the capital city with cash, no mortgage required. Other expenses don't really register on my radar. I'm piling up cash for early retirement.
EDIT: fixed some of my numbers.
EDIT2: After my country joined EU I never emigrated to Western Europe, because it didn't make financial sense to me. If I ever find myself emigrating to California, that would be because of the weather, not money.
For the unaware, Central Europe is a narrow band that comprises Czechs, Slovaks and Polish. Who can get very offended if you even dare to suggest that they belong to Eastern Europe.
The term "Central Europe" makes sense when talking about stuff common to Central Europe, in particular Germany. Otherwise, the term you want here is Eastern Europe.
And yes, there is this particular kind of people who feel offended by this. Largely the same people who get offended by gay marriage. Why should we care?
It doesn't. The map in the infobox sums it up pretty well. Poland is both Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but there's no point in using the latter term when describing something that doesn't apply to all of Central Europe.
Except that real estate in EU has value and also price, which, compared to local tech wages is quite a high price compared to the ratio in US.
Just ask anyone living in Munich for example, how much a house there costs (almost 4 Million Euros[0]) and what the typical dev wages there look like, but sit down first so you don't fall down.
Average property price in Munich is basically the same as in the Bay Area (aprox. $10k/square meter in both cities with Munich reaching up to $35K/square meter in the desirable areas[0]!!!), but salaries are half that at best.
>what stops them. from just going to US/Canada?
reply
For the US, the thing that stops them is the incredibly hard immigration process. The US is a very protectionist labour market. I've looked into it myself as a Greek, and it's very fucking hard.
They can try making the wage gap not huge, it doesn't have to be 100% U.S money, 60-70% is probably enough. Not everyone is gonna migrate for 30% more cash. Some will, some won't.
you don't want workers in IT, look at the USA, other than silicon valey (1 state), they all hire from India, and the salary from other states are comparable to what you find elsewhere in the world, including China
> you don't want workers in IT, look at the USA, other than silicon valey (1 state), they all hire from India, and the salary from other states are comparable to what you find elsewhere in the world, including China
None of this is even close to true.
What are you smoking that leads you to believe non-Silicon Valley US IT salaries are comparable to Chinese ones?
More demand for qualified labour will tend to increase the salary of people offering these skills. Salaries are not written in stone and evolve depending on market conditions.
I hope others will chime in with followup sources, but if you want a book for historical background The Idea Factory covers the creation of the transistor and touches upon Shockley, the Traitorous Eight, and Fairchild Semiconductor which is sort of the inception of the US semiconductor industry. It's not exactly the focus of the book, but everything it covers is tied together.
AFAIK, KiCAD got its recent boost from CERN. It would be a common good if europeans go further to push up development of open source tools for IC manufacturing. This will loosen world's dependance on US backed proprietary and extremely expensive technologies.
Is it just me, or do you also worry that something like this could easily head down the path of "design by committee" given the many countries and politics involved? Equal-to-current-best-practice is not good enough as a goal.
What something like this needs is a leader driven by a huge personal product/technology belief and vision, backed up by personal technical capability, and his/her ass on the line. Versus what I could see is some generic credentialed CEO being put in to the top position to "manage", with little penalty for failure.
Semiconductor sector usually has a No. 1 player which takes more than 50% of the market share of a specific application or business model. It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders. Unless Europe has a game changing technology or business model, I am not optimistic about the outcome. They should think about working with Taiwan or South Korea instead of going alone. US end up persuades(orders) Taiwan to make sure TSMC builds a new plant in US.
That's very much the tone I get when listening to any german public figure within the political game talking about these things.
Sadly, at this point I wouldn't even expect a solid strategy, it's gonna be blatant actionism. But maybe that's just the cynic in me hoping to be proven wrong
> usually has a No. 1 player which takes more than 50% of the market share
> It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders.
With more than 50% market share it's the least crowded field there is, basically a monopoly formed by a very high barrier of entry, because not everyone has billions to risk on complex long term projects, private investors prefer shorter term returns. But it doesn't mean it's difficult to catch up or that the leader produces something good, on the contrary, monopoly means low quality, slow innovation, high price, easy to catch up by just throwing money at it, it just takes government involvement to do it.
This is likely a backup plan. What these countries are trying to avoid is ending up in a situation like China and Huawei where your leading tech corp. is kneecapped due to an unpredictable US political climate.
For Europe to see it a success it does not need to be better than the established alternatives, it only need to reduce the prices by increasing competition.
Now, invest about the same in EU media and we might have some more influence. A majority of audiovisual media that people see and hear is made by USAian companies that project a USAian view onto the world. They took advantage of a broken Europe after the second world war and have been reaping the benefits ever since.
Regarding the discussion below, here is a very relevant video about tech companies in the EU (and why there don't seem to be that many): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
It’s interesting to see a return to national “strategic” industrial development. This type of activity used to be common throughout the west until the 70s and 80s and served in part to ensure that there was always competition in “core” industries.
I interpret this as: We are sovereign entities and we need to be able to use technology without having to worry about any backdoors and other threats to our national security. As such we're going to build our own tech, and we might even slip some of our own 'medecine' in there too ...
They're not going to get anything from this. When federations attempt stuff like this, each participant will want something out of it besides the final product. i.e. they'll want some phase of manufacturing to be done at home. This will break them.
This is an excellent point regarding a critical geopolitical matter. In some ways, it's not unlike the space race, or the race to acquire nuclear weapons. The nation that controls the most advanced chips can make the most advanced weapons and hold sway over the rest of the world.
One aspect that is less explored is the actual depth and breadth of the semiconductor supply chain. Moreover, that supply chain is bound with technical expertise at every level. You may have the fastest car at Le Mans, but you're not going to win without the best driver.
Chip design starts with design software. The most sophisticated software is made in the US. To use it, you need a variety of highly experienced designers of the right ilk (think neurosurgeon vs. cardiologist), supported by program management, organizational management, test and validation engineering and other disciplines. This synthesis of expertise and tools and equipment has to be at the highest level of capability all the way up and down the supply chain before you can get a 7nm chip to boot up.
Additionally, there are about 40 different types of process equipment used in chip fabrication. Every one of them requires dozens of product development engineers to design and build. Those teams rely on decades of both personal and organization experience to build on before they can produce tools that can, for example, apply a material like, say, tungsten, to a 12" slice of pure silicon in a layer that can be precisely measured in atoms, uniformly, across the 'wafer'.
Of all the 40 process tool types, the most complex work of science is the lithography tool made by ASML in the Netherlands. This thing produces the light needed to print the chip circuits at 7 nanometer geometries by emitting droplets of molten tin into a vacuum chamber and hitting the droplets with a 25,000 KW laser that vaporizes the tin and produces the light. It fires at 50KHz[0]. ASML has spent more than 20 years, employing 100s of engineers and scientists, in order to produce this wonder. There is no company (and certainly no government) on Earth that can catch up to ASML in any reasonable amount of time.
Next in the chip production chain is called 'Assembly' where the wafers are cut into individual chips and packaged into what you'd recognize. That node in the chain has it's own set of non-trivial equipment and expertise.
All of this is to say that there are vulnerabilities all up and down the supply chain, bouncing all over the planet. No one country has the technology to build state of the art chips from both the supply chain and expertise standpoints all within its own border. As soon as a nation has a deficit of one aspect of the overall technology required, that nation is no self sufficient.
The same people that want to weaken encryption, demand upload filters and try to make search engines pay for links to news sites, spending 145 billion euros on "digital projects". Couldn't they come up with cheaper way to produce hot air?
European alternative to Google, European alternative to Visa/Mastercard, European alternative to Chips. lol. When I think about where this approach succeeded only Galileo (alternative to GPS) and SEPA payment (but US sucks there) comes into my mind.
It is not small. It is just that other tech companies you are comparing to are relatively overvalued, because branding and speculation inflate their worth.
I like to think of it like this: if magically the whole semi-conductor industry vanished overnight the world would be much poorer. We would be in a crisis. If magically the whole of Apple vanished overnight, we'd still have smartphones and laptops and tablets and basically all the tech that Apple makes.
Just goes to show that what the market values and what is actually valuable in aggregate are not metrics that are in tune.
At the start of this century, some famous American investment bank (Citigroup ?) came up with a report that said that in the near future (today) stocks which are luxury items will grow much faster than stocks that are essentials. And that is exactly what seems to have happened.
The report said this was due to increasing economic inequality. Basically the middle classes of the first world have money to spare so they buy Apple Iphones and Tesla cars. The poorer people have less money and none to spare.
They said "market", which is the place where things are bought and sold. That's why it's fairly clear that they refer to revenues and not companies valuations.
Because it's quite standard to mention sales, you know, actual revenue, not market cap, which can be 1 today and 1 billion tomorrow, depending how the hype trains move.
Why would they mention market cap without specifying? When financial articles say, "20% of the market", they're always talking about revenue by default.
“Decadal Plan calls for $3.4 billion annually in [US] federal R&D funding to address seismic shifts in chip technology and pave way for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced wireless communications”†
So that would make proposed annual US federal funding in semiconductor R&D like .0016 Apples
You're right – when you put it like that it does appear very small.
Arguably the most technically advanced EU country Sweden always avoids Franco-German initiatives and the leader in chip technology in Europe is the brexiting UK with the globally dominant ARM platform (soon to be acquired by NVIDIA from Softbank).
In semiconductors Sweden was never more important than between 6th to 15th position in Europe.
The only well-known company that might have made semiconductors was ASEA, which might have made some thyristors before disappearing 33 years ago, after the fusion with Brown Boveri.
Now ABB has the headquarters in Switzerland. It has various sites in Sweden, but so have some US companies, without any of them being considered as Swedish.
Even the Eastern Block countries, during the Soviet hegemony, produced more diverse semiconductor devices than ever done in Sweden.
The most technically advanced countries in semiconductors in Europe, before the global fashion of mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs that obliterated most traditional semiconductor companies starting around 1999, were (in no particular order):
Netherlands (Philips)
Germany (Siemens)
France (Thomson CSF)
Italy (SGS-ATES)
UK (Plessey and a few others)
Relics of the former European semiconductor companies can be found now mostly in Infineon, NXP and ST, but all these present companies are the results of long chains of mergers and acquisitions of various companies spread all over the world, so it is difficult to define them as belonging to Europe, US or to any other specific country or group of countries.
The fusion with Brown Boveri was like you say a fusion, not an acquisition. The HQ needs to be somewhere, but ABB is apart from that about as much Swedish as Swiss. Asea was one of the companies within the influence of the Wallenberg family and their company Investor were as of 2015 the largest individual shareholder of ABB.
You are right. I agree that it is correct to view ABB as half Swedish.
I was exaggerating a bit, as a counterbalance to the weird statement to which I was replying.
Nevertheless, while ABB is a great company, its importance as a semiconductor manufacturer is minimal. ABB sells electronic equipment, which is made with components made elsewhere, except for some high-power thyristors that are made by themselves.
Thyristors are the easiest to make among semiconductor devices that are still used. The only really difficult part to make are the high-quality silicon wafers from which they are made, but ABB does not make the wafers. Most likely they purchase the wafers from Japan, or maybe from Germany.
Yes, as a European, the past two decades were maddening. Europe had no vision concerning strategic industrial assets.
Advanced steel production was sold to India. Key assets in the energy sector were pillaged by GE. The UK sold a leader in chip design to Japan and despite having ASML being at the forefront of photolithography there still is no credible fab in the EU. The pandemic really highlighted some major shortcomings regarding the EU production capacity.
These are major failures. Hopefully, as this was mostly due to constant sabotages by the UK, the situation will improve now that they are gone. Sadly, their constant push for enlargement can't really be undone and might still doom the union in the end.
But certainly, the UK has been against any kind of concerted efforts by the EU which might go further than the single market for as long as they were a member. They lobbied heavily to be left out of the common agricultural policy and tried to diminish as much as they coud, were against Maastricht and were not a member of the Eurozone, pushed heavily for enlargement ensuring they would be no political cohesion in the union. Leon Brittan as a trade commissioner was a staunch opponent to any kind of state aid in the 90s and single handly significantly weakened the European industry.
Don't get me wrong, I like England. Great country, nice culture, shit partner. As far as I am concerned, Brexit is probably the best thing to ever happen to the EU.
I agree. The UK never really wanted to be part of the EU. It only wanted to cherrypick the best parts and nothing else. Once they decided to leave I wasn't thinking a single thought about the EU crumbling but rather "good riddance". Other than the northern Ireland dilemma it is a win win situation.
Of course the UK will take a hit in the short term but failing to prepare for that is on them. It was their decision.
> the UK has been against any kind of concerted efforts by the EU which might go further than the single market for as long as they were a member.
Conservative politicians were the driving force behind the creation of the single market in the first place
> They lobbied heavily to be left out of the common agricultural policy
the UK is still part of the CAP
> were against Maastricht
which is why the UK signed it
> pushed heavily for enlargement ensuring they would be no political cohesion in the union
this is a common conspiracy theory, but it has no basis in fact
> Leon Brittan as a trade commissioner was a staunch opponent to any kind of state aid in the 90s and single handly significantly weakened the European industry.
yes, you make your industry stronger by protecting it from competition by providing it with taxpayer subsidy... right?
I'm not 100% on this, but I've heard it said that the UK was often a 'shield' for the more frugal EU countries (mainly the Nordic countries), as they often voted with us. As we were the bigger country, we were usually seen as the 'bad guys' though.
UK was in a lot of ways not a great fit for the EU sometimes but sometimes I do think it was good to have a larger player in the UK take a different position. I'm a big fan of the EU but they do seem to make mistakes, and completely ignore certain problems (like immigration).
They have number dispensers at the meat or bread counters in supermarkets which is quite neat. You do not have to wait in a queue and can do your other grocery shoppings until the display shows your number. ;)
I don't see Sweden leading in tech so much as being 'tech progressive'.
Sweden is ahead in some things related to tech, particularly their own version of startups. Spotify remember, is related to the fact that Sweden is a pop-music powerhouse - there is definitely industry synergy there.
They are generally well organized for a small country, they make Jet Fighters (quite a feat) which is also related to the fact they are a few degrees more 'sovereign' in that they are not part of NATO and have historical antagonisms with a much bigger power, Russia. They had one of the world's largest air forces back when individual fighters were only the price of a few cars.
Those synergies resonate with one another but I don't think it's in silicon.
I would say generally the swedes are progressive as you say. For example, not alot of cash is being used, most use credit cards/apple pay/swish(like cashapp I guess).
My guess would be that most swedes haven't even seen the new paper money design.
Unfortunately, does anyone even takes the EU serious nowadays in tech?
The more I follow the European tech scene, the more disappointed I become. EU's biggest tech company aside of ARM is Spotify... Almost every second startup I read about in https://www.eu-startups.com/ is a fintech/budgeting app which is trying to "disrupt" banking.
Revolut is the biggest player, yet they are literally throwing money to achieve a miniscule growth, if you have a shitty product, your ad spend won't save you..
I feel like there is a need for a fundamental shift in mindset in Europe..
These kind of startup focused news sites are quite biased towards B2C/C2C software/*tech places, as most of their businesses need the public attention to succeed. Most B2B startups don't care much about outreach to these outlets, as most of their clients don't read it.
It's a recurring theme when discussing US and European tech companies on hn. US tech giants tend to be more visible as most are consumer facing brands (Apple, Facebook and so on). The European multinationals are mostly like ZF Friedrichshafen: Noone has ever heard the name, yet in 2019 they had $45 billion in revenue.
What is your definition of a "big tech company"? Do you only mean very young startups? Going by valuation, Revolut is pretty small. ASML is 40x larger than Revolut and 4x as large as ARM. NXP and Adyen are both about as large as Spotify at 50-60 billion.
The startup scene is less vibrant: valuations are typically lower and funding is not as easy to get as it is in Silicon Valley, but you shouldn't discount established players that innovate and mature startups.
The biggest tech firm in europe is SAP, which is the largest non american software company. Although it is not a very "cool" company compared to startups.
Europe specialises in companies that you will never hear about. These are massive corporations that don't directly face consumers. We aren't into consumer technology or consumer electronics as much as the US is.
I find it quite off putting, that the general approach of EU institutions is to direct resources and economic activity from the top. It not only has demonstrated to be a failure economically, but it's an arrogant attitude by politicians, giving the message they know better than individuals, and that a free market leads to preventable bad outcomes. Also, it's tied to price controls and redistribution concepts. They will assign the money to each person they find moral. Which at the end means a mix of connections and sentiments.
[Edit]
I mean I don't know why I waste the time arguing with useless commies online.
They have a long history of failures and disappointments and still stick to this emotional garbage ideas, at this point it's not something I can fix since I am not a psychologist.
It's kind of amusing that HN has such slanted audience, given that startup funding is the biggest exponent of hypercapitalism.
Although Microsoft really started as a subcontractor for IBM, which again shows the knock-on effects good government subsidies can have. Hadn't the DoD started SV, most of these companies wouldn't exist today.
This push probably won't work because it's a push by politicians. They've managed to create conditions that are not suitable for the organic growth of the semi-conductor industry in Europe. Now they're slowly realizing that it's a problem, but it's a bit too late. You can't force an industry to appear and expect it to be competitive on a global scale. People are still going to be buying devices with chips manufactured in Asia.
They will probably have a similar realization about software in a decade or two.
Why on earth a productive company would move to Europe, where your revenues are automatically slashed by 50% in taxes, and you are constantly exposed to whimsical unfettered politicians..
They could start here. Why Facebook, Google, Amazon don't open massive headquarters in Paris, Madrid, Rome or Berlin, and they rather stick to UK and Switzerland?
Also software managers won't move to Europe for the same reasons. European politicians have the upper hand and the last word in negotiations.
The free market does not care about EU sovereignty and such geopolitical issues, so the EU cannot rely on the free market to make the EU competitive in tech.
Also in any case no private entity has been banned from participating in these markets.
Also in the whole article there is no mention of funding. It is probably a tech sharing and licensing agreement more than anything.
While those are fair points about the origin of Silicon Valley, the picture today is pretty different.
And there's a huge difference in values. The American ethos is "you're free to do great things, if you can". The European ethos is "You need the state to protect you from everything and you shouldn't try to be different or independent"
It sounds like what this initiative is doing is Europe trying to create a Silicon Valley (probably far from the first time), not sustain it indefinitely. They have to learn to crawl before they run. So the focus on origins is valid.
Considering the workforce surplus nothing will be lost even if all of the money was 100% wasted. However, the effects of fixing the rest of the economy will still massively pay dividends.
In some cases it works better than others, and often it's needed.
Consider that in the US, the decisions are also 'made from the Top' but often from large investment firms that decide where the money goes.
When an industry is small and new, it's more open.
But for commercial aircraft like for regular airlines, there is zero hope unless the government coordinates it. There's no 'hey, invest $20 Billion in my startup, maybe I will have customers some day'. No - you need a national strategy with the airlines buying in.
That said - concerns over central planning are real - not so much in impetus, but in execution.
If Europe could snap it's fingers and for $10 Billion just have competitors to Intel just magically appear - it would be a good investment. Very good.
But unlike roads, tunnels and bridges, you can't just buy innovation.
It's going to take the right leaders, the right investments, the right kinds of innovation.
Which is extremely hard.
I don't know the industry but it may may more sense to come at it from the periphery: possibly by creating design and fabs for more common chips.
Or maybe it makes sense to come at it from an academic/open angle, and get the top Universities to publish open source designs that if industry buyers want, they can get subsidies for fabs.
Finally ... the other parts of the ecosystem are not there as much: there is no more Nokia. There is nobody making computers. There is no 'OS' to guide deep integration.
I think it's reasonable to be wary of this kind of top down sentiment as it's risky and not preferable, and prone to fluffy words without action, at the same time, it's reasonable to address the issue.
'Boom' is a tiny little venture company that may or may not make actual commercial viability, in a niche sector.
Boom is not remotely trying to enter the market for real commercial traffic, which is essentially impossible for a regular private company.
There are no successful airline manufactures that exist without the expressed coordination of a national strategy.
Boeing is a 'strategic asset' - they are supported by massive military contracts and other industrial subsidies. They have Federal level support from the diplomatic corps and may involve themselves in foreign policy. Sales of aircraft may be tied to other mechanisms of statecraft.
Airbus - even more so, practically a creation of European governments.
To give an example of what happens when nations are not powerful, look at Bombardier in Canada - which was squeezed out of a more niche are of commercial aircraft by state actions.
Boeing complained to Donald Trump about 'unfair competition' - the US - against NAFTA treaty - imposed a 250% duty on Bombardier jets. To get around this, Bombardier had to drop their pants and do an ugly deal with Airbus. Eventually, this inability to flex material power in conjunction with other state assets ... and it's a flop for Canada, and a 'win' for a bigger entity backed by a more powerful state entity as the commercial aircraft business was sold off to Airbus.
If Canada had a huge domestic market, this probably would not be the case.
Edit: it's possible Boom eventually develops into a much bigger entity, maybe in 40 years, using their 'smaller, currently niche but growing industry' as an entry point. But taking on Boeing is tantamount to taking on Microsoft directly.
If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn't a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).
I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world's advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.