> Don't believe me? Watch Eric Schmidt or Marc Andreessen talk about Europe.
Yes, let's follow the guy who was "proud" of Google's tax avoidance scheme [1] or the guy that's happy that oxycontin and video games exist to keep poor people quiet [2].
If these are the parts of the US you want to import to the EU, no thanks.
You know what would change people's minds about taxes? Actually seeing how those taxes are funneled back to improve the lives of the people paying those taxes in a pragmatic and efficient manner.
What tends to happen instead? The cities/countries with highest tax rates (also in Europe) also seem to have an increasingly high violent crime rates. Public transport gets worse every year. The infrastructure rots and collapses everywhere. The public sector is growing increasingly fat and inefficient (pulling the taxes up with it), the queues for social help programs and payouts grows increasingly large every year (more and more people start depending on government payouts). Out-of-control asylum-driven immigration from 3rd world countries. Out-of-control expenditure on war and arms trading. Currency devaluation and high inflation due to bullshit government policies.
So as a tax payer, at some point, you start questioning everything. What are you paying for? Why? Where is this all going? And once you realize how the system truly works - yes, you start thinking about ways to minimize your tax footprint.
I don't really know much about the two people mentioned above, outside of being tech businessmen.
Tax avoidance is different from tax evasion: one refers to not voluntarily donating money to the government, and the other is a crime. The similarity in terms is misleading.
The characterization of the Andreessen quote is 1) inaccurate, as the antecedent in the actual quote is unspecified, and 2) described in the linked article as not being a direct quote.
Eu/acc does not appear to be promoting those two aspects of those two people. All people are multifaceted and flawed. Probably, the website is referencing them because of their apparent success as tech investors/founders.
Yeah, Schmidt and Andreessen represent the absolute worst of American VC hyper growth culture. They made their money in old models and lack any new ideas other than squeezing the stones of Google etc. Their model will not win the future. They are the ones dragging down the present.
A lot of people go for this crowd and their cartoon amphetamine futurism because the apparent alternative is fear, paralysis, and regression.
If you don’t put forward a positive expansive vision for the future someone else will do it for you, like these guys.
(Edited)
There was a time when leftism and liberalism did this. Leftism put forward a vision of equality that featured workers cooperating to go to the stars. Liberalism and its relatives put forward a world of global trade leading to shared global prosperity and again, to the stars (either literally or metaphorically).
Now it’s all whiny doom and gloom and degrowth, which is a luxury belief for people who are already rich.
One of the biggest things that worries me about our discourse is that only fascists and adjacent types are talking positively about the future. That’s terrifying. Snap out this performative doomer nonsense or fascism is what we get.
> Don't believe me? Watch Eric Schmidt or Marc Andreessen talk about Europe.
This is like saying “Smoking is cool and good for you. Don’t believe me? Watch Big Tobacco talk about health”.
The unfettered addiction to growth and profit championed by the US is turning the world to shit faster. We need that to stop, not chase it irresponsibly and make the problem worse.
Stop treating everything like a competition while misusing the word “innovation” to justify the exploitation of other people.
The argument for growth is ammunition against the kind of cosy deals that are everywhere in Europe, insulating established businesses from competitive pressure. Half the regulations out of the EU are an attempt to level the playing field so that inter-country competition can break up the kind of legalized corruption that forms when wealthy companies are politically connected, but there's a risk of regulatory capture too.
The opposite of growth isn't things staying the same. It's the rest of the world leaving you behind. Not being competitive means being exploited by those currently occupying the nodes of power and money.
This reads like its a group advocating for exactly the wrong kind of deregulation that turns markets into basically unbreakable monopolys.
The EU directly opposes the growth model of the new-era tech startups (ruthless growth financed by investor money, take over competitors, market monopoly) and the regulations aim to keep markets at least a little bit competitive.
We (the EU) do not need or want this kind of deregulation.
There's ways to make life for small-entrepreneurs easier.
I need this kind of deregulation. Example, i m taking microtransactiosn for my game. Giving out VAT invoices for all of them is an impossible task. You need to account for the different VATs in the area (and how they change over time). The cost of the accountant for all this would be many times more than the tiny amounts of the transactions. So i have outsourced the money collection to a US-based merchant-of-record who withholds a large cut and pays out once.
I think a lot of people can point to friction like this in all the places. This has nothing to do with "rughless growth by investor money", but with common sense. There is too much BS work going on in europe, much more than should be allowed
I am European but ur reply perfectly represents why the EU is doomed to fail. The monopolistic super companies will be created no matter what EU does. They are and will be just created somewhere else and EU will be left with nothing just bunch of tier2-3 suppliers to these behemoths.
Agreed; this criticism comes from the POV of "the US is richer, so let's do what the US does". Instead, we should see that the US is struggling across many, many dimensions and the inordinate success of American Big Tech / Big Business has a lot to do with it. It's like looking at Dubai and saying "oh they are doing great, let's start drilling".
Instead Europe should focus on what's stopping EU companies from scaling and leveraging their strengths: lower costs, better infrastructure, more diverse customers and employees.
As a founder on both sides of the Atlantic, I would keep it simple:
1. The EU needs a common credit rating system, similar to Duns & Bradstreet in the US (which is a private company mind you, so very possible) and more competition between banks that should be allowed to do business anywhere in the EU. The EU banking system is much better than the US one, but the above stop it from scaling across the continent.
2. EU needs to give higher incentives to EU companies to do business with EU startups. The fragmented EU market means that most valuable European companies end up being very conservative in how they spend their money (because competition is weak / settled). Therefore they are much less likely to do business with startups for normal business risk reasons. That's a chilling effect for B2B companies who are more likely to get traction in the US rather than the EU. A simple insurance or tax credit scheme would go a long way to reduce risk --and would help the EU get their money back from many startup / VC programs they are subsidizing anyway.
Regulation protects old, big incumbents that are slow to innovate. How is that a competitive market? Meanwhile innovation, wealth and power is created elsewhere.
Goodness. I'm struggling to respond to this without any snark.
The US has how many states? With how many different rules and regulations between them? I'm sure some things are easier in the US than in the EU. But many things are not. There are some regulations, sure, but I can start a company within 2 business days and do business across the entire EU.
There are some differents in VAT across member states, but those are easily solvable by talking to an accountant. And sure, things get a bit more tricky when you grow to a multinational scale, but then I'm sure you can hire a few more accounts and other pencil pushers.
And hey, we've had free electronic payments across the entire area for nearly two decades. No friction of paper checkbooks here.
The difference between EU member states is _vastly_ more than American states. Like hugely different, to the point trying to compare them is worse then useless.
"Europe" is not USA. I don't know why the author wants it to be. Germany and Spain are different countries, even if we have some degree of a unified market.
> From consumer markets, languages, laws, education systems, taxes, to funding – Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
"Europe" does not ACT AS, it IS a network of "small" (not quite) countries.
I think these guys are doing themselves a disservice by donning the mantle of Defenders of California-Style Capitalism®, a thing that nobody likes outside of oligarchs and aspiring oligarchs.
Their first project, smoothing out and equalizing the process of creating a new legal entity, seems like an unqualified good thing. Nobody likes notaries, outside of notaries and aspiring notaries. Having Estonia's level of simplicity in business creation would be a good thing for reckless 'disruptive' startups, but it would be a good thing for small brick-and-mortar artisans and shops too.
If one of their subsequent projects is going to be 'let's make tax laws nicer for billionaires', then yeah, screw those guys. But the first one is already a tall order and I frankly think they're unlikely to get political momentum (see: first paragraph.)
I love the comments to this article. Time and again when such "EU is not friendly to business enough" stuff is posted to HN, Europeans come out and say they like it that way.
Thus I'm skeptical this article will change anything. Europeans have looked to America, and said no. (Or, gave up and moved there.)
EDIT: to be clear I think Europe should be the way Europeans like it.
Can you tell me why we should make EU like the USA if we just can invest into the USA startups and reap the monetary benefits and once they figure out the good and the bad aspects of it, we can adopt it in a regulated manner? It's not like any tech by those "tech" companies didn't made it into Europe.
Sure, experimenting at scale it creates talent in these areas but it also disrupts public life. Let Europeans live like Europeans and Americans live like Americans. Not everyone needs to operate the same way.
European economies always have lived of long term, large scale technology companies. This is the case especially for Germany and France.
Germany especially does not want startups to exist, they want to have companies which are large and succeed over the long term. The employee protection laws in Germany (which are often praised on this site) make it extremely hard to run a startup without violating the law. E.g. if you want to employ someone you need to pay their healthcare and pension insurance. They can't work for more than 10 hours a day, no this doesn't mean you aren't allowed to compell them, you have to actually stop them if they wanted to. How do you build a product while figuring out that bureaucracy?
The European model will succeed if and only if those large corporations are actually able to innovate at the same pace as American or Chinese companies. Which currently looks very unlikely.
If the way you are building a product requires you to risk the well being of your employees, which these laws are designed to protect, you and your product are not welcome here.
What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.
You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"
As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.
If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.
German here.
There are plenty of ambitious people who work more than 10h/day and nobody cares. Law companies who should know best, are especially known for their dumb working hours. That rule is rather in place to protect workers that are not in a powerful negotiation position. Which is fine I guess.
About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?
The bureaucracy is a pain... the taxes are a pain... but otherwise, it's more of a cultural issue than a legal one.
Finding people who'll work for free in the begining is hard... unless you're personal friends, no way. Working more than 8 hours a day is a no-go for most people, especially professionals in whatever field you need. 5+ weeks of vacation is a must (both legally and in a sense, that everyone will want and expect that). On the other hand, wages are lower than in US.
There are things that can be optimized.. i'm a coowner/employer in a small eu country, and we require workers to pass a health check to start work + additional ones every 5 years or less (5 years for office work and other "normal" jobs, and less for eg. truck drivers, pilots, etc). But somehow, those health checks are not transferrable between employers, even if it's the same kind of work (eg. office job -> office job), so if the employee of one company went through a check two months ago, changes a job to another office job, the new employer has to pay for a new health check which will check the same things as the previous one two months ago, so it's a few hundred of euros of cost and sometimes even a few weeks of wait time.
Need a really short-term worker (eg. organizing a concert/festival, need someone to work for two days only?)... no way, you can only get student workesrs, because the hiring process is too long, noone will change a job for two days of work, and you can't get the unemployed to do it, because they'd have to restart their unemployment process again (a lot of work), to get benefits back.
But you don't have to go further to see similar criticism of US bureaucracy for example.
I absolutely advise against people trying to do this on their own without consulting with specialists first. In the same way people shouldn't do this in the US (like opening an IT company in some random state).
But I'd say the attitude and market problem in Europe is harder (even in some more "market-oriented" countries)
Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government (or regional governments) in the first place? This is what I see as eu/acc's focus: You shouldn't be doing proverbial song and dances as a small to mid size company to appease cushy government employees with Annexure B.5 page 12 section 3 subsection 25 form D every time you want to change the wifi password.
Running lifestyle or smal to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world. And yes, you can be a startup without wanting to be a unicorn.
It is possible to want to make money AND not have your soul drained in the process.
They're ignoring start up successes within Europe. I suspect most complaining about this use Spotify - started in Sweden. Revolut is also very popular for people after a crypto-friendly bank. Monzo is credited with revolutionising bank accounts within the UK.
Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?
Also ignoring that some of the economic activity created by these companies can be a net negative benefit to society, cases like: startups trying to solve the mess that healthcare is in the USA, it will generate income, have customers, etc. but it is just providing a service that shouldn't exist at first, similar to how natural disasters will increase a country's GDP because of all the construction required to deal with the aftermath, economic activity generated by patching issues in society is not necessarily a positive. Same with everyone requiring a car to go places, amazing for car sales (and increases in GDP from the production chain) but it's not the most beneficial way for a society to transport itself, incurs recurring costs on car maintenance, insurance, increased road/infrastructure maintenance, injuries/fatalities from road accidents, etc.
The USA has a lot of startups trying to solve issues that probably shouldn't exist in the first place (filling income tax reports for example, what the fuck?) but those bullshit products generate wealth to some people.
It’s not just in startups. Even in finance space we just paid lawyers to deal with all that stuff like notaries and act as a buffer. I can see startups not having that kind of money though - we spent million on lawyers.
Tech side there is a wider issue though imo: Much of the EU thinking is unfortunately directly orthogonal to what’s required.
eg Google is basically one giant ad tech tracking co. That obviously clashes with EU thinking on privacy.
Not saying either is right or wrong but does seem like at least part of the clash is quite fundamental rather than being a pure red tape issue. Facebook Insta TikTok - they’re all fundamentally in same ad space
A lot of comments here seem to only be focusing on the startup -> unicorn/corporate/big tech pipeline of eu/acc instead of also the solo/lifestyle/small/medium business side as well.
EU already has things like the OSS VAT scheme in the regard of making things easier for businesses across the union. More things like it to simplify admin for the rest of us is a good thing.
> It is very much the bureaucracy that’s holding it back
If by "bureaucracy" you mean "not being allowed to blatantly break the law(s)", then yes, it is very much so.
> The corruption then makes it worse.
Blaming issues in Europe/EU (two different things by the way) on corruption seems to indicate you don't really have a perspective on corruption as an issue in the world. Take a look at South America or various Asian countries to see corruption as something actually having a huge impact.
> Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
What countries are you referring to here exactly? I don't I've visited a single country in Europe that didn't have some sort of "ride sharing" (app taxis?)
Sure, but they each wield billions of dollars, and there are plenty saner industrialists with a similiarly grim (and undeserved imo) opinion of Europe.
How easy/hard is it for someone in Europe to set up a company in Delaware and then pay themselves dividends to transfer the earnings into their personal income?
Would that shield them from all the European bureaucracy?
Or would their government say something like "Sorry, since you are here personally, we consider the company to be here as well"?
It’s challenging to incorporate in a country where you are not personally tax resident. Permanent establishment and controlled foreign corporation rules make it complicated to manage it correctly
Overall it could be a good idea to have a solid and attractive european solution. It would have an effect on the national solutions but Europe took already their first credit so it’s not far away to start taxation.
[+] [-] bantunes|1 year ago|reply
Yes, let's follow the guy who was "proud" of Google's tax avoidance scheme [1] or the guy that's happy that oxycontin and video games exist to keep poor people quiet [2].
If these are the parts of the US you want to import to the EU, no thanks.
[1]: https://www.itpro.com/644638/eric-schmidt-proud-of-google-ta...
[2]: https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andrees...
[+] [-] csmpltn|1 year ago|reply
What tends to happen instead? The cities/countries with highest tax rates (also in Europe) also seem to have an increasingly high violent crime rates. Public transport gets worse every year. The infrastructure rots and collapses everywhere. The public sector is growing increasingly fat and inefficient (pulling the taxes up with it), the queues for social help programs and payouts grows increasingly large every year (more and more people start depending on government payouts). Out-of-control asylum-driven immigration from 3rd world countries. Out-of-control expenditure on war and arms trading. Currency devaluation and high inflation due to bullshit government policies.
So as a tax payer, at some point, you start questioning everything. What are you paying for? Why? Where is this all going? And once you realize how the system truly works - yes, you start thinking about ways to minimize your tax footprint.
[+] [-] encody|1 year ago|reply
Tax avoidance is different from tax evasion: one refers to not voluntarily donating money to the government, and the other is a crime. The similarity in terms is misleading.
The characterization of the Andreessen quote is 1) inaccurate, as the antecedent in the actual quote is unspecified, and 2) described in the linked article as not being a direct quote.
Eu/acc does not appear to be promoting those two aspects of those two people. All people are multifaceted and flawed. Probably, the website is referencing them because of their apparent success as tech investors/founders.
[+] [-] skywhopper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] api|1 year ago|reply
If you don’t put forward a positive expansive vision for the future someone else will do it for you, like these guys.
(Edited)
There was a time when leftism and liberalism did this. Leftism put forward a vision of equality that featured workers cooperating to go to the stars. Liberalism and its relatives put forward a world of global trade leading to shared global prosperity and again, to the stars (either literally or metaphorically).
Now it’s all whiny doom and gloom and degrowth, which is a luxury belief for people who are already rich.
One of the biggest things that worries me about our discourse is that only fascists and adjacent types are talking positively about the future. That’s terrifying. Snap out this performative doomer nonsense or fascism is what we get.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] latexr|1 year ago|reply
This is like saying “Smoking is cool and good for you. Don’t believe me? Watch Big Tobacco talk about health”.
The unfettered addiction to growth and profit championed by the US is turning the world to shit faster. We need that to stop, not chase it irresponsibly and make the problem worse.
Stop treating everything like a competition while misusing the word “innovation” to justify the exploitation of other people.
[+] [-] progbits|1 year ago|reply
Excessive bureaucracy? Sure, let's improve that.
Taxes? No need to turn into US and have barely functional government with no services for the poor.
[+] [-] barrkel|1 year ago|reply
The opposite of growth isn't things staying the same. It's the rest of the world leaving you behind. Not being competitive means being exploited by those currently occupying the nodes of power and money.
[+] [-] hjanssen|1 year ago|reply
The EU directly opposes the growth model of the new-era tech startups (ruthless growth financed by investor money, take over competitors, market monopoly) and the regulations aim to keep markets at least a little bit competitive.
We (the EU) do not need or want this kind of deregulation.
[+] [-] seydor|1 year ago|reply
There's ways to make life for small-entrepreneurs easier.
I need this kind of deregulation. Example, i m taking microtransactiosn for my game. Giving out VAT invoices for all of them is an impossible task. You need to account for the different VATs in the area (and how they change over time). The cost of the accountant for all this would be many times more than the tiny amounts of the transactions. So i have outsourced the money collection to a US-based merchant-of-record who withholds a large cut and pays out once.
I think a lot of people can point to friction like this in all the places. This has nothing to do with "rughless growth by investor money", but with common sense. There is too much BS work going on in europe, much more than should be allowed
[+] [-] mathverse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cm277|1 year ago|reply
Instead Europe should focus on what's stopping EU companies from scaling and leveraging their strengths: lower costs, better infrastructure, more diverse customers and employees.
As a founder on both sides of the Atlantic, I would keep it simple:
1. The EU needs a common credit rating system, similar to Duns & Bradstreet in the US (which is a private company mind you, so very possible) and more competition between banks that should be allowed to do business anywhere in the EU. The EU banking system is much better than the US one, but the above stop it from scaling across the continent.
2. EU needs to give higher incentives to EU companies to do business with EU startups. The fragmented EU market means that most valuable European companies end up being very conservative in how they spend their money (because competition is weak / settled). Therefore they are much less likely to do business with startups for normal business risk reasons. That's a chilling effect for B2B companies who are more likely to get traction in the US rather than the EU. A simple insurance or tax credit scheme would go a long way to reduce risk --and would help the EU get their money back from many startup / VC programs they are subsidizing anyway.
[+] [-] rmnwski|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] elric|1 year ago|reply
The US has how many states? With how many different rules and regulations between them? I'm sure some things are easier in the US than in the EU. But many things are not. There are some regulations, sure, but I can start a company within 2 business days and do business across the entire EU.
There are some differents in VAT across member states, but those are easily solvable by talking to an accountant. And sure, things get a bit more tricky when you grow to a multinational scale, but then I'm sure you can hire a few more accounts and other pencil pushers.
And hey, we've had free electronic payments across the entire area for nearly two decades. No friction of paper checkbooks here.
[+] [-] dukeyukey|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mik1998|1 year ago|reply
> From consumer markets, languages, laws, education systems, taxes, to funding – Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
"Europe" does not ACT AS, it IS a network of "small" (not quite) countries.
[+] [-] piaste|1 year ago|reply
Their first project, smoothing out and equalizing the process of creating a new legal entity, seems like an unqualified good thing. Nobody likes notaries, outside of notaries and aspiring notaries. Having Estonia's level of simplicity in business creation would be a good thing for reckless 'disruptive' startups, but it would be a good thing for small brick-and-mortar artisans and shops too.
If one of their subsequent projects is going to be 'let's make tax laws nicer for billionaires', then yeah, screw those guys. But the first one is already a tall order and I frankly think they're unlikely to get political momentum (see: first paragraph.)
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|1 year ago|reply
Thus I'm skeptical this article will change anything. Europeans have looked to America, and said no. (Or, gave up and moved there.)
EDIT: to be clear I think Europe should be the way Europeans like it.
[+] [-] mrtksn|1 year ago|reply
Sure, experimenting at scale it creates talent in these areas but it also disrupts public life. Let Europeans live like Europeans and Americans live like Americans. Not everyone needs to operate the same way.
[+] [-] StrLght|1 year ago|reply
Yet there are a bunch of unicorns in EU. How did they manage to do that in such a hostile meme culture?
[+] [-] raverbashing|1 year ago|reply
I think we need an EUFO group (similar to NAFO) to counter those attacks
[+] [-] bdlowery|1 year ago|reply
It’s not even close man.
[+] [-] constantcrying|1 year ago|reply
Germany especially does not want startups to exist, they want to have companies which are large and succeed over the long term. The employee protection laws in Germany (which are often praised on this site) make it extremely hard to run a startup without violating the law. E.g. if you want to employ someone you need to pay their healthcare and pension insurance. They can't work for more than 10 hours a day, no this doesn't mean you aren't allowed to compell them, you have to actually stop them if they wanted to. How do you build a product while figuring out that bureaucracy?
The European model will succeed if and only if those large corporations are actually able to innovate at the same pace as American or Chinese companies. Which currently looks very unlikely.
[+] [-] hjanssen|1 year ago|reply
If the way you are building a product requires you to risk the well being of your employees, which these laws are designed to protect, you and your product are not welcome here.
Please build it somewhere else.
[+] [-] dns_snek|1 year ago|reply
What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.
You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"
As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.
If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.
[+] [-] rmnwski|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|1 year ago|reply
Finding people who'll work for free in the begining is hard... unless you're personal friends, no way. Working more than 8 hours a day is a no-go for most people, especially professionals in whatever field you need. 5+ weeks of vacation is a must (both legally and in a sense, that everyone will want and expect that). On the other hand, wages are lower than in US.
There are things that can be optimized.. i'm a coowner/employer in a small eu country, and we require workers to pass a health check to start work + additional ones every 5 years or less (5 years for office work and other "normal" jobs, and less for eg. truck drivers, pilots, etc). But somehow, those health checks are not transferrable between employers, even if it's the same kind of work (eg. office job -> office job), so if the employee of one company went through a check two months ago, changes a job to another office job, the new employer has to pay for a new health check which will check the same things as the previous one two months ago, so it's a few hundred of euros of cost and sometimes even a few weeks of wait time.
Need a really short-term worker (eg. organizing a concert/festival, need someone to work for two days only?)... no way, you can only get student workesrs, because the hiring process is too long, noone will change a job for two days of work, and you can't get the unemployed to do it, because they'd have to restart their unemployment process again (a lot of work), to get benefits back.
etc.
[+] [-] raverbashing|1 year ago|reply
But you don't have to go further to see similar criticism of US bureaucracy for example.
I absolutely advise against people trying to do this on their own without consulting with specialists first. In the same way people shouldn't do this in the US (like opening an IT company in some random state).
But I'd say the attitude and market problem in Europe is harder (even in some more "market-oriented" countries)
[+] [-] TheCapeGreek|1 year ago|reply
Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government (or regional governments) in the first place? This is what I see as eu/acc's focus: You shouldn't be doing proverbial song and dances as a small to mid size company to appease cushy government employees with Annexure B.5 page 12 section 3 subsection 25 form D every time you want to change the wifi password.
Running lifestyle or smal to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world. And yes, you can be a startup without wanting to be a unicorn.
It is possible to want to make money AND not have your soul drained in the process.
[+] [-] tennis_80|1 year ago|reply
Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?
[+] [-] piva00|1 year ago|reply
The USA has a lot of startups trying to solve issues that probably shouldn't exist in the first place (filling income tax reports for example, what the fuck?) but those bullshit products generate wealth to some people.
[+] [-] Havoc|1 year ago|reply
Tech side there is a wider issue though imo: Much of the EU thinking is unfortunately directly orthogonal to what’s required.
eg Google is basically one giant ad tech tracking co. That obviously clashes with EU thinking on privacy.
Not saying either is right or wrong but does seem like at least part of the clash is quite fundamental rather than being a pure red tape issue. Facebook Insta TikTok - they’re all fundamentally in same ad space
[+] [-] TheCapeGreek|1 year ago|reply
EU already has things like the OSS VAT scheme in the regard of making things easier for businesses across the union. More things like it to simplify admin for the rest of us is a good thing.
[+] [-] Laaas|1 year ago|reply
Yet Uber operates in most European countries.
It is very much the bureaucracy that’s holding it back, and the bureaucracy stems from the culture.
The corruption then makes it worse.
Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
Fragmentation is an excuse.
[+] [-] omnimus|1 year ago|reply
There is pretty popular EU one https://www.blablacar.com/ but its used mostly by students and people wanting to save. It’s not glamourous.
And most countries have Bolt and local taxi apps like Freenow or Liftago.
[+] [-] CaptainOfCoit|1 year ago|reply
If by "bureaucracy" you mean "not being allowed to blatantly break the law(s)", then yes, it is very much so.
> The corruption then makes it worse.
Blaming issues in Europe/EU (two different things by the way) on corruption seems to indicate you don't really have a perspective on corruption as an issue in the world. Take a look at South America or various Asian countries to see corruption as something actually having a huge impact.
> Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
What countries are you referring to here exactly? I don't I've visited a single country in Europe that didn't have some sort of "ride sharing" (app taxis?)
[+] [-] sandis|1 year ago|reply
What? https://bolt.eu/en/cities/
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] karma_pharmer|1 year ago|reply
I dunno about you, but I definitely don't believe those two powerclowns.
[+] [-] dukeyukey|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TekMol|1 year ago|reply
Would that shield them from all the European bureaucracy?
Or would their government say something like "Sorry, since you are here personally, we consider the company to be here as well"?
[+] [-] datarez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] colesantiago|1 year ago|reply
Why does the EU need to accelerate it is fine as it is?
Accelerate what exactly? Everyone out of a job with AI?
No thanks.
[+] [-] constantcrying|1 year ago|reply
If European companies don't succeed European states will collapse into poverty.
[+] [-] beardyw|1 year ago|reply
I would go for the latter.
[+] [-] sharpshadow|1 year ago|reply