European politics

[Goodspeed]

You don't really want to incentivize them to triple their efforts to catch up though because they eventually will and then you are SOL.

It's probably also just a whole lot more complicated than "just ask for more." You'd probably immediately lose something somewhere else. Not like China is just gonna roll over and give it to you without using their leverage to negotiate.

[Dolan]

You don't really want to incentivize them to triple their efforts to catch up though because they eventually will and then you are SOL.

It's probably also just a whole lot more complicated than "just ask for more." You'd probably immediately lose something somewhere else. Not like China is just gonna roll over and give it to you without using their leverage to negotiate.

Yeah, that's the case, if you ask for more you push them towards investing in developing their own. But currently they're nowhere near getting the tech that the Dutch ASML has. It would take them some years and that means either no production or producing older tech.
There are good reasons why Taiwan right now is cracking down on Chinese firms over tech theft:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 022-04-08/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/taiw ... 022-07-15/

A lot of China's tech advancement came from IP theft or cloning Western blueprints. If you stop making them available, it'll get harder or close to impossible for them to copy. Then bargaining power will shift back to the actual regions where these technologies originated. There's no reason why assemblers and cloners would hold so much leverage, we need to turn this around.
And we also need to do this for strategic reasons, because if we keep going like that, Western tech will eventually be used by countries that are openly against the West and are arming themselves to gain an advantage. If China used Western tech to develop those hypersonic missiles, for example, and start threatening neighbours, then it's the West's fault that it enabled them through access to its technology. And eventually those hypersonics might be used against the West itself or the threat of using them will be used to counter any attempt by the West to help Taiwan, for example.

Ig what I'm asking is for Europe to start acting more assertive and leverage its strong points better.

[Dolan]

@scarm What's the price of fuel (E95) in Germany right now? I can see some stats online, but I'm more interested to know what does someone see at the pump.
I heard the government cut some taxes to push fuel prices lower, is that right?
I also heard that they introduced a countrywide 9€ three month social train ticket to make sure transportation stays affordable.

[Goodspeed]

You don't really want to incentivize them to triple their efforts to catch up though because they eventually will and then you are SOL.

It's probably also just a whole lot more complicated than "just ask for more." You'd probably immediately lose something somewhere else. Not like China is just gonna roll over and give it to you without using their leverage to negotiate.

Yeah, that's the case, if you ask for more you push them towards investing in developing their own. But currently they're nowhere near getting the tech that the Dutch ASML has. It would take them some years and that means either no production or producing older tech.
There are good reasons why Taiwan right now is cracking down on Chinese firms over tech theft:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 022-04-08/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/taiw ... 022-07-15/

A lot of China's tech advancement came from IP theft or cloning Western blueprints. If you stop making them available, it'll get harder or close to impossible for them to copy. Then bargaining power will shift back to the actual regions where these technologies originated. There's no reason why assemblers and cloners would hold so much leverage, we need to turn this around.
And we also need to do this for strategic reasons, because if we keep going like that, Western tech will eventually be used by countries that are openly against the West and are arming themselves to gain an advantage. If China used Western tech to develop those hypersonic missiles, for example, and start threatening neighbours, then it's the West's fault that it enabled them through access to its technology. And eventually those hypersonics might be used against the West itself or the threat of using them will be used to counter any attempt by the West to help Taiwan, for example.

Ig what I'm asking is for Europe to start acting more assertive and leverage its strong points better.

China also has a ton of leverage. It's a bit arrogant to think that we, randos on the internet, know better how to leverage Europe's position than the people in charge, who actually have access to the data necessary to make these decisions. Not saying they're perfect, but from where we're sitting it's very easy to make oversimplified representations of problems and pretend we know how to solve them when in fact we have no idea what the actual parameters are.

[Dolan]

You don't really want to incentivize them to triple their efforts to catch up though because they eventually will and then you are SOL.

It's probably also just a whole lot more complicated than "just ask for more." You'd probably immediately lose something somewhere else. Not like China is just gonna roll over and give it to you without using their leverage to negotiate.

Yeah, that's the case, if you ask for more you push them towards investing in developing their own. But currently they're nowhere near getting the tech that the Dutch ASML has. It would take them some years and that means either no production or producing older tech.
There are good reasons why Taiwan right now is cracking down on Chinese firms over tech theft:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 022-04-08/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/taiw ... 022-07-15/

A lot of China's tech advancement came from IP theft or cloning Western blueprints. If you stop making them available, it'll get harder or close to impossible for them to copy. Then bargaining power will shift back to the actual regions where these technologies originated. There's no reason why assemblers and cloners would hold so much leverage, we need to turn this around.
And we also need to do this for strategic reasons, because if we keep going like that, Western tech will eventually be used by countries that are openly against the West and are arming themselves to gain an advantage. If China used Western tech to develop those hypersonic missiles, for example, and start threatening neighbours, then it's the West's fault that it enabled them through access to its technology. And eventually those hypersonics might be used against the West itself or the threat of using them will be used to counter any attempt by the West to help Taiwan, for example.

Ig what I'm asking is for Europe to start acting more assertive and leverage its strong points better.

China also has a ton of leverage. It's a bit arrogant to think that we, randos on the internet, know better how to leverage Europe's position than the people in charge, who actually have access to the data necessary to make these decisions. Not saying they're perfect, but from where we're sitting it's very easy to make oversimplified representations of problems and pretend we know how to solve them when in fact we have no idea what the actual parameters are.

On a conventional level, I'd agree with you, in the sense that, yes, there are smart people at the top, yes, they are well-informed, and they have already started working in the direction I'm pointing (of bringing chip manufacturing to Europe).
This comes late, though. I've been saying stuff like this for at least 5-6 years, way before the Corona crisis made the West aware of its critical vulnerability to Asian supply chains. So I think to some degree maybe I earned the right to be somewhat arrogant on this subject, because I know I used to talk about it when virtually nobody did. Nobody publicly, if you talked about this 5-6 years ago, you would have been considered fringe or alarmist. And it's not the first thing and not the first time I raised this kind subjects. I remember like back in 2015-2016 when US elections loomed large and I wrote in the US elections thread that there's a real danger that the US federation might dissolve in the next decades and gibson replied to me saying: nah, that's completely unrealistic, I have Republican friends and we get along well, people are not gonna just split the country over political stuff. Now, such an idea is not that far-fetched anymore, is it. There are now "serious people", influential podcasters with a large following in the USA debating an issue like this. It's no longer some fringe group from Texas that has been doing it since the 80s or something. It entered mainstream concern.

Going back to the intial subject. The EU is a problem in this equation, because these corporations that produce innovation in the EU operate according to both national and EU laws, but they also have shareholders that come from a global background. So you have a very complicated mix of stakeholders whose interests don't align so well, to put it nicely. Like if ASML has lots of global investors, those guys don't necessarily want to see the EU succeeding in building its own chip manufacturing base here, so they might push the ASML board to adopt a decision like moving some of the technology and manufacturing to the US. What should the EU do in such a situation and what will the Dutch political establishment think should be the right approach to steer things in a direction that doesn't lead to seeing Europe or the NL lose a strategic asset because the ASML board includes lots of American interests too. The EU is a problem because public perception expects it to act like a sovereign state and protect the interests of its members on the global stage, but institutionally it doesn't have the legal tools to do that. All it can do is try to negotiate with its members a common view.

Why am I bringing this subject here... Because people at the top of the EU are aware of all these things, but given the limitations of their positions and of the EU itself, it takes ages for them to negotiate a decision on the whole EU level and even more time to implement it. So I haven't been saying these things because I think they're clueless, but more because I know they cannot move fast, even though the situation requires them to move fast. And relocating manufacturing is also hardly a thing that can move fast.

[scarm]

@scarm What's the price of fuel (E95) in Germany right now? I can see some stats online, but I'm more interested to know what does someone see at the pump.
I heard the government cut some taxes to push fuel prices lower, is that right?
I also heard that they introduced a countrywide 9€ three month social train ticket to make sure transportation stays affordable.

Couldn't tell you, moved (back) to Brussels and planning to sell my car back home. My brother recently said something about 2,10/l.

Also yeah the fucking 9€ ticket is a literal and metaphorical trainwreck. Infrastructure isn't built to support tha amount of demand yet.

[RefluxSemantic]

The wheels are starting to move, finally



A pilot episode from the "bring chip manufacturing back to Europe" series

In a few years photonic chips will be the new rage and NL will be leading in this area and I will be getting fat money because Im working in the industry.

But maybe this is wishful thinking

That's great. You know what you guys should do. Stop beind modest and charging only a couple of millions for the tech you're selling to Asia. Start asking for billions.
Because the "Asian miracle" was built on Dutch innovation too and now some Asian countries are acting like they're world powers and the 'West is crooked' and Russia is the good guy in the Ukrainian conflict.
We have a saying in Romania "if you don't let someone die, they won't let you live".

We need to turn this situation around, this situation in which we in Europe pay the highest prices for imported electronics in the whole developed world, even though those electronics are built with European tech and tools.
And then Americans pop on the internet bragging about how Europe "doesn't innovate anymore" and Asians brag about how we couldn't have any electronics without them.

On the one hand, you might be right. But on the other hand, geopolitical power isnt the only thing in the world. These technologies could for example vastly reduce energy consumption for data distribution centra, which is something that all of humanity should benefit from.

[Horsemen]

Petition to rename thread: 'Europoor politics'

[duckzilla]

Also yeah the fucking 9€ ticket is a literal and metaphorical trainwreck. Infrastructure isn't built to support tha amount of demand yet.

I have an opposite opinion on this topic. The 9€ ticket is a huge success and, so far, cases of completely overrun trains have been limited. It is much less of a mess than expected and a real help for a lot of people who otherwise couldn't afford a ticket to travel across Germany or just within their city.

[Dolan]

9€ for three months of train commuting is an incredibly good price even for Romania.
But then in a city here it's possible to get a free bus ride if you do 20 squats in 2 minutes

[harcha]

bad form

[Dolan]

Spain

[scarm]

Also yeah the fucking 9€ ticket is a literal and metaphorical trainwreck. Infrastructure isn't built to support tha amount of demand yet.

I have an opposite opinion on this topic. The 9€ ticket is a huge success and, so far, cases of completely overrun trains have been limited. It is much less of a mess than expected and a real help for a lot of people who otherwise couldn't afford a ticket to travel across Germany or just within their city.

This is obviously subjective but: long distance connections seem to have suffered, i myself and many other people i talked to that regularly do business trips seemed to also notice that the DB is having even more issues than normally. The people in my close vicinity that actually used short distance trains (where the effects of the 9€ are more direct and less abstract) also so far have only reported slow, delayed, or straight up annulated trains. But i do agree that it shows that there is a potential demand for train lines if prices were reasonable. So we should start investing more into our railroad network in the mid and longterm, as we should have done for the past 30 years i suppose.

[Dolan]

https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/sta ... 2248717318

https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/sta ... 4920497154

For a while I thought Liz Truss would win the race, but idk now, all Tory leadership candidates seem so terrible, anyone could win it

@Horsemen
Liz Truss is gonna be the next Tory leader

[Horsemen]

https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/sta ... 2248717318

https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/sta ... 4920497154

For a while I thought Liz Truss would win the race, but idk now, all Tory leadership candidates seem so terrible, anyone could win it

@Horsemen
Liz Truss is gonna be the next Tory leader

yea we are fucked

[Dolan]

Isn't she a feisty lil cookie

[lejend]

Truss is known for her economic libertarian views and support for free trade. Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs, a free-market collection of parliamentarians arguing for a more entrepreneurial economy and fewer employment laws.[158]

In June 2022, Liz Truss was asked by a committee of MPs about the UK’s relations with the Gulf nations. Labour MP Chris Bryant questioned her foreign policy objectives with respect to Gulf, and also raised the case of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder on alleged orders of Mohammed bin Salman. Truss described the Gulf states as “partners” and “important allies” of the UK, stating that her focus at the moment was “the threat from Russia”. Bryant asked if Truss has ever raised the human rights concerns with the Gulf, but she declined to give details of private discussions.[152][153][154]

May 2013 - Truss is one of 117 Tories to vote in favour of marriage equality.

July 2019 - Truss votes to permit same- sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Two months later, she becomes Minister for Equalities.

May 2021 - Truss vows to ban conversion therapy, suggesting an end is in sight to a process started three years earlier after a similar pledge by former Tory PM Theresa May.

In 2000, Truss married fellow accountant Hugh O'Leary. The couple have two daughters.[164] Truss and O'Leary met at the Conservative Party Conference in 1997.[17] Truss had an extramarital affair with Conservative MP Mark Field, reported to have taken place between 2003 and 2005,[165] which resulted in the end of Field's marriage.[166][167]

[RefluxSemantic]

I feel like humanity is pretty fucked tbh ngl. Reading about the current state of affairs and politics makes me so incredibly bitter. At the very least, I see NL as a collapsing empire. Every week there is a new way in which the government failed to do its job in the most morally corrupt way, and then I see the polls and people either vote for those in power (the people that are failing) or they are planning to vote for moronic populists. Its hopeless really.

[duckzilla]

I feel like humanity is pretty fucked tbh ngl. Reading about the current state of affairs and politics makes me so incredibly bitter. At the very least, I see NL as a collapsing empire. Every week there is a new way in which the government failed to do its job in the most morally corrupt way, and then I see the polls and people either vote for those in power (the people that are failing) or they are planning to vote for moronic populists. Its hopeless really.

The beautiful part of democracy is that everyone can get themselves involved in it.

[Dolan]

I feel like humanity is pretty fucked tbh ngl. Reading about the current state of affairs and politics makes me so incredibly bitter. At the very least, I see NL as a collapsing empire. Every week there is a new way in which the government failed to do its job in the most morally corrupt way, and then I see the polls and people either vote for those in power (the people that are failing) or they are planning to vote for moronic populists. Its hopeless really.

NL could become Europe's Taiwan

[Horsemen]

I feel like humanity is pretty fucked tbh ngl. Reading about the current state of affairs and politics makes me so incredibly bitter. At the very least, I see NL as a collapsing empire. Every week there is a new way in which the government failed to do its job in the most morally corrupt way, and then I see the polls and people either vote for those in power (the people that are failing) or they are planning to vote for moronic populists. Its hopeless really.

I think the main problem is that no one who is competent and level-headed wants to go into politics.

https://www.ft.com/content/7bf59f37-bcf ... d7f3c17223

Western democracies have a talent problem

Rishi Sunak does politics as though he is just back from a residential course called How to Do Politics. There is something rote-learnt about the gestures of hand and speech. There is something formulaic about the tactics: now woo the right, now pivot. In a thriving democracy, he would be a good Downing Street chief of staff with a hawk’s eye for a vacant parliamentary seat.

As it is, the former UK chancellor is plainly the best candidate for prime minister in a dire Conservative field. By all means, deplore the lack of competition in Westminster as he rose in recent years. But don’t assume that it would have been much stiffer elsewhere. In the US, the two most senior Democrats are a pensioner and his maladroit vice-president. The last German election pitted Olaf Scholz against Armin Laschet in a pageant of nondescriptness. None of the last six Australian premiers have impressed enough to log four years in office. For the second time in a decade, Italy has a globocrat called Mario corralling a domestic political class that lacks stature.

Western democracy has a personnel problem. It has been in the works all century. With a good brain and a plausible manner, it was absurdly easy for David Cameron to become Tory leader within five years of entering parliament in 2001. When Dominique Strauss-Kahn combusted through scandal a decade later, the French Socialists’ recourse was the plodding time-server François Hollande. Look around the major democracies now. Emmanuel Macron, it is true, would have sparkled in any white-collar profession. But who else?

If voters were turning down world-historical figures to choose third-raters, we could diagnose all this as a demand-side problem. But supply is the larger issue. Able people of a liberal or moderate bent don’t go into politics in adequate numbers. The reasons are intuitive enough. The pay gap with finance, corporate law and other graduate careers has grown over the past generation. (Consider the haste with which Cameron, not a pauper by birth, made up for lost earnings once he left power.) So has the personal exposure of elected office. The press kept John F Kennedy’s secrets, and François Mitterrand’s. Even if they were so inclined now, a citizen with a camera phone and a Twitter account need not be.

The turbulence of the past decade makes more sense in this context. Intellectually, it is de rigueur to pin the crisis of democracy on structural forces: on the loss of manufacturing jobs, on the rise of new media. In our view of history, if not economics, my trade has become Marxian to the bone. For all its outward philistinism, though, the Great Man theory, the stress on individual agency, has something to it. Perhaps liberalism is just running out of great men and women. Or even very good ones.

It is hard to emphasise the individual without seeming a snob. To stipulate, then, there is no automatic equation between a person’s academic-professional bona fides and their usefulness in public life. Harry Truman was a failed haberdasher. He was also, through Nato and the Marshall Plan, the architect of the second half of the 20th century. Robert McNamara at one point had maybe the best résumé in America. He could hardly have been a more ruinous defence secretary.

The question is whether, over a large enough sample size, a country can survive the sending of its ablest people to the private sector. In a sense, democratic capitalism is self-eroding. In allowing for private careers of such lavish pay and privacy, it makes politics into a mug’s game. The resulting decline in laws and institutions in turn threatens the economy. If the Tory circus distresses you, consider that, in Labour’s shadow team, the experience comes from someone who has spent a quarter of a century in parliament without leaving much mark (Yvette Cooper) and a failed ex-leader (Ed Miliband). Autocracies at least allow officials enough scope for graft and the indulgence of peccadillos to keep the talent coming.

The newly published diaries of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, are meant to be an elegy for that place. They end up leaving the reader wistful, yes, but for a certain genre of politician. Smart, administratively able, undoctrinaire: Patten wasn’t even the outstanding member of a Tory cohort that included a lawyer who took silk at 40 (Ken Clarke) and the builder of a commercial fortune (Michael Heseltine). By way of comparison, Britain might soon be run by someone who tried to get the word “cock” into a parliamentary speech as often as she could. The crisis of democracy is the crisis of the restaurant trade and of Heathrow airport. You just can’t get the staff.

[Dolan]

@Horsemen
Yeah, I saw this leadership crisis since I was at uni, doing my degree. I saw it in my own country when Romanian parties became unable to identify figures that were not worse than the previous leaders. Like when the social-democrats elected Victor Ponta, the leader of the youth organisation. He was just an opportunistic slimeball that climbed the party ladder because that's the kind of skills that internal party life rewarded: superficiality, opportunism, brazenness, and generally putting on a facade of confidence when you're actually shit on a stick.
Then I noticed the same happened in France and then later in the USA. The leaders just got worse with each election.

I realised something was going on, it wasn't just a local phenomenon. So then I thought there must be some kind of socio-cultural dynamic going on that was somehow connected to the zeitgeist. It's like people were appreciating appearances more and lost all patience for depth and gravity.
There's definitely some kind of connection between what's going on in culture and how leaders are picked: the shortening of attention spans, people focusing more on visual impressions, style, on projecting image rather than demonstrating competence, etc.

Obama's election is part of this same trend, because he basically spearheaded this trend of electing baby-faced leaders that hypnotise their voters with charisma and they manage to go from not having achieved much before to the top spot in the power hierachy through this sort of "inspirational story".
And this matches what happened in pop culture: TV shows that sell this story that you could become a celebrity overnight if you just go in front of cameras and turn your talent into a circus for the mass audience, quiz shows that turn being knowledgeable into a circus of pulling out trivia from memory, over-dramatised family reunions and breakups in reality shows, investor shows in which the "guy with the idea" is picked and becomes a story of rags to riches, etc.
Imo, there's a deep connection between what's going on in the zeitgeist and culture and the way leadership selection today works based on short attention spans.

Gaming is the epitome of this short-attention span age, as it draws you into this superfast stimulus/reward feedback routines in your brain, from which you can't disconnect until your get your dopamine feeling of 'winning'.

[iNcog]

The Euro is actually at a lower value than the USD.

[spanky4ever]

Germany need to fuel their atomic facilities. Then there will be no energy crises. And nobody will need Russian gasssss

[spanky4ever]

I do not know what you have "realized" @Dolan but that was another wall of nothing? We do not like good looking politicians? is that it? And if it is a SHE, she def should not go out partying