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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.

Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.

No growth since 2006 is a serious indictment on Europe and the EU. Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years? Don't we have better automation, better machining, mining, medicine and so on? In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

The fertility crisis is a major problem. I suspect increasing the ratio of dependents is sucking out wealth from the real economy. Fewer capable young people means less innovation. The rest of the EU bureaucracy isn't helping either. Singapore shows us that one can have good growth even with minimal fertility.

Most top European talent also immigrates out. Its impossible to start a new industry upending business in Europe because of regulation. Spacex, Uber, and many others could never have started anywhere in Europe because they would have been regulated out of existence.

Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years?

Not really; the last major revolution in computing was VT-100s that fit in your pocket and networks for them to talk to and everything since has just been minor revisions that allow development of those services to be as fast as possible. The iPhone, combined with the refusal to go full Great Firewall at that time, was the final nail in the coffin for European technological competitiveness- now, not only is all the institutional knowledge gone (to American companies that acquired them) but the Union arguably wouldn't survive Facebook and Twitter disappearing given the now total dependence of the population on those services.

While it's true that much of the modern Internet infrastructure serves European software (web browsers) from European software (Linux) on hardware whose instruction sets are European English-designed (ARM) and fabricated on European machines (ASML), those things don't actually give Europe any strategic leverage in the sector to spread its culture of US-imported moral mediocrity. It's not that they couldn't do it- they actually do have technical chops and China has quite clearly demonstrated they can outdo US companies- but if they try they'll have have to accept the hate fact that the WEF won't invite them to any more dinners.

Well the World Economic Forum is based in Europe, so they ought to be sympathetic to the bureaucratic leviathan that is the EU. Especially if the EU is doing more regulation to make the internet more 'democratic' or whatever abstract noun they're shamelessly skin-suiting to cover up their ambitions. The WEF is all about increasing social-democratic governance, reducing people's freedom and so on.

Also, I was mostly thinking of Moore's Law based improvements. Back in 2006 we were dealing with 65 nm chips as state of the art, now we're down to 3nm. That should have some economic effect. There are surely all kinds of industrial applications that benefit from more processing power, AI first and foremost.

In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

Never underestimate the ability of government to absorb all gains (and then some).

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