There has been a much stronger capital supply than in a shattered group of countries.
The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.
Tech companies are the least capital intensive of any industry (pre-LLM bubble). Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K. China has kept out foreign competition and applied heavy censorship across its tech companies, but they arose and competed as a free market amongst themselves, not by central planning.
> Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K.
It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.
The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.
Of course, it is true. The EU also does not have a reserve currency and cannot print 2 trillion a year. Where do you think the majority of these 2 trillion goes?
Your suggestions are far off from realpolitik. This is the recipe followed post-WW1, which brought us WW2. Europe itself is the proof that cooperation and good relationship among neighbours are the policies that bring peace and prosperity.
And Putin is not an idiot to attempt expansion to lands with no ethnic-russian population. Such thing is clearly not feasible without the power structures of the former USSR.
WW2 was brought by the humiliation and starvation of the German people by the European winners and by their own politicians, and Hitler easily capitalized on that making his rise to power a slam dunk.
People like to think that if they would have assassinated Hitler early on, WW2 wouldn't have happened, but that's wrong. That would have just left the power vacuum empty for someone else to capitalize on the German populations' grievances and start the war.
The history lesson is to make sure the masses of people are taken care of by their leaders, not to start censoring, imprisoning or assassinating political opponents who capitalize on the peoples' unhappiness.
Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Asking your politicians to lie to you is not a substitute for changing their incentives.
The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the population as well. It's such a dumb political move, it seems like it could only come from extreme fear, greed, or manipulation. Switch it around and make them afraid of the alternative.
>Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!?
Not quite a fan of deportations, but I'd rather risk people going back on their word than the alternative here.
I wholeheartedly refuse to vote for anyone who publicly supports this. It is integral to democracy itself. If my only alternative is "The party of kicking kittens and opposing chatcontrol" I will 100% support them.
Kicking kittens makes it sound simpler of a choice than it really is, because you're not a kitten and you could protect yours. Would you vote for "the party of beating people like Levitz and opposing chat control"?
I'd probably start playing with the idea of leaving the country and advise people I know to do the same, at that point the country is not a democracy anymore either way. Hopefully I don't have to point out how there's a massive difference between that and considering mass deportations.
The surveillance state in europe is being created to make it illegal to oppose mass immigration policies, because apparently the powers that be have realized that not enough people like mass immigration so it needs to be forced down everyone's throat with a combination of censorship, surveillance and party-banning. From your comment, it seems like you support mass immigration policies but also do not support censorship and surveillance (maybe only for practical reasons because it might eventually be used against things you like?). The question for you is: what if you couldn't choose? What if you could only have both or neither? Because that's whats on offer.
Can only speak for Germany and the mass deportations here are done by liberals. They also let 40k+ people drown in the Mediterranean, support literally every single war, support multiple genocides and export weapons to all dictatorships known to man. At this point I'm not sure the actual Nazis would be worse than liberals.
Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather
Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war
I don't want to get too political, but calling the CDU/CSU liberal is pretty misleading in this context considering that they are part of the EVP (conservative) on a European level and not Renew Europe (liberal).
What has anything I said to do with the European parliament? I'm talking about the same parties in general. Greens are even further right than cdu/csu who have the same policies in 99% of cases as libs
>I don't want to get too political
Do you practice self censorship like the German media?
> What has anything I said to do with the European parliament?
This whole thread is about EU politics.
> Greens are even further right than cdu/csu who have the same policies in 99% of cases as libs
Trying to paint the greens as further right than CDU/CSU is just plain wrong by any measure. The greens are a green/social liberal party while the CDU/CSU are conservative center-right party. None of their politicians would ever argue that they are more left than the greens which is pretty obvious when looking at a quote from Friedrich Merz (German chancellor and party leader of the CDU/CSU) where he quite literally says that the greens are more left. [1]
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/merz-gruene-10...
English: "In the coming weeks and months, we will once again significantly intensify the debate with the Greens and, above all, counter the impression that we are always looking to the left and saying that we absolutely must form a coalition with them at some point."
The one I responded to was talking about something else.
You trust what the parties are saying rather than what they're actually doing? Is this a joke? The biggest warmongering party the greens are supposed to be left? This is tagesschau levels of propaganda.
You are talking about greens, the party that wants to deport everyone who criticizes Israel, sues everyone who insults them, and they literally warned against a "linksruck".
Keep reading Tagesschau. Remember, everyone who's against war is right wing and pro war and pro genocide is the new left position. All those germans who talk about what they "would have done" in nazi germany. If you look at germans today the answer is clear. Look away or better yet help the war effort.
What "mass" deportations in germany are you talking about? I can only find any news references to two flights, totaling ~100 people in the past year. Surely even a normal level of deportations, let alone "mass" deportations, would generate more deportations than this?
And you're really not sure this is less draconian than nazis?
The vast majority of these deportations are just shuffling people around the EU in what seems like a game of hot potato over who is supposed to be responsible for a given migrant. Deportations that actually get people out of the EU seem to be extremely rare afaict.
20k people were deported in 2024. That's not insignificant.
Anyway, let's assume germany deported 0 people. It's telling that you're focusing in typical liberal manner on a single issue and disregarding everything else (war, genocide, recession, submission to usa as a vassal state etc.)
Problem is that very few “normal” people are even aware of this. Very few people particularly interested about most policies on the EU level. So they pretty much have free reign to do anything with minimal repercussions.
For better or for worse the EU itself is about as much of a democracy as some of the European empires were back in the in early 1900s with their sham parliaments which had very little real power.
You still belive that vote solve anything? Divide and conquer is strong indeed. We should focus to abandoning giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
I agree. But also: I've been doing that for a long time already. The problem is that these surveillance laws don't get enough attention by the general public until they come into effect. For example: The UK's online safety act.
practicing computation is important in math education, I think Eastern Europeans and Asians often have an advantage due to working through 5-10K problems / year
> practicing computation is important in math education
no, 100% no on this -- we have computers that can compute for us, and we have since the 50s
the problem that this company is perpetuating is the idea that humans need to learn how to compute, we don't
we need to learn how to identify that a problem we're facing has a mathematical solution and how to translate the problem into an equation that a computer can solve for us
The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.