[HN Gopher] IRIS2: The EU's Response to Musk's Starlink
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IRIS2: The EU's Response to Musk's Starlink
Author : marban
Score : 203 points
Date : 2023-02-19 08:41 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reneweuropegroup.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reneweuropegroup.eu)
| amm wrote:
| Too little, too expensive, too late?
|
| Once again the EU is playing catch up with last gen tech.
| Starlink is almost 10 years old - conceptually even older.
| Iridium has been around for over 25 years.
|
| If the EU was serious, it should have invested proactively in
| next gen satellite direct to device tech that is around the
| corner in the US.
|
| AST SpaceMobile is close to starting commercial activity for
| satellite based 5G that is supposed to work with any smart phone.
| Starlink is working on something similar with T-Mobile. G-Sat
| already has minimal D2D capability working with the latest iPhone
| generation.
|
| Also, I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going
| to come from for launching hundreds of satellites. Russia? China?
| viraptor wrote:
| > too expensive
|
| What's your source for good cost of launching satellite
| communication networks? Would you like to show us the reasoning
| here?
|
| > it should have invested proactively in next gen satellite
| direct to device tech
|
| If the current one works - why would they? For defence usage,
| reliable is better than next gen usually. (Something something
| next gen F35 still not usable)
|
| > I wonder where cost competitive launch capability is going to
| come from
|
| French Guiana and other places like most previous launches?
| https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Pr...
| amm wrote:
| > What's your source for good cost of launching satellite
| communication networks?
|
| - falcon 9 - $2700/kg
|
| - falcon heavy - $1400/kg
|
| - ariane 5 - $9000/kg
|
| > If the current one works - why would they?
|
| This is just low quality flame bait. If any of the before-
| mentioned (US) companies succeed commercially long-term, they
| will transform world-wide internet access especially in less
| developed countries.
|
| For clarification: as a European citizen, I want the EU to
| stay competitive in the space tech sector.
| usrusr wrote:
| ...and that's probably with a considerable profit margin
| for SpaceX and at least some amount of "we're happy for any
| launch that keeps the wheels spinning" subsidy for ESA.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Last time I checked launch costs, and tjose are incredibly
| hard to come by, SpaceX prices were the LEO-launch
| equivalent of Ryan Air's 20 Euro tickets. So hard to
| compare. Also, for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was
| already a couple of years ago competitive with SpaceX
| launches. And the only real customer so far for cheap, low
| orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for
| Starlink.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| You should check your sources.
|
| > for a bunch of launches, Ariane-5 was already a couple
| of years ago competitive with SpaceX launches.
|
| Ariane 5 is in no way competitive against SpaceX in
| anything, and hasn't ever been. The only customers
| launching on it at all are the ones that have some good
| reason to avoid SpaceX, and the ones that bought launches
| early as a hedge. It has very real issues attracting any
| competitive commercial launches. This satellite
| constellation plan is, among other things, a way of
| bailing out Arianespace because they will fail unless
| they get more launches.
|
| > And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit
| launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for
| Starlink.
|
| SpaceX launched 60 reusable F9s last year, of which 37
| were internal Starlink launches (of which some had
| additional customer payloads). In comparison, Ariane 5
| launched 3 times.
| panick21_ wrote:
| At the very, very lowest prices that Ariane 5 ever
| offered, they were close to SpaceX in only one specific
| very hard to find setup. They needed 2 Geo sats that
| wanted to launch at the same time and likely only the
| cheaper of those two actually had a price comparable to
| SpaceX.
|
| Ariane was lucky that space launches were contracted so
| many years in advanced in the past. They had many years
| of contracts already lined when SpaceX was only just
| scaling and had huge backlogs.
|
| Even by 2014 it was totally clearly to literally
| everybody in space, that Ariane 5 had to go. It had no
| future, even with all possible help, ESA and national
| launches and insentient launches from EU firms it cost
| would wildly spiral out of control.
|
| That said, Ariane 6 is only a slight incremental
| improvement (in reality its mostly upgrades that were
| already planned for Ariane 5 anyway). It was designed to
| compete with SpaceX as it was in 2014.
|
| Hence why European space people are already planning and
| pushing for more money to build a next generation rocket.
| Despite Ariane 6 being a new rocket then Falcon 9, its
| already outdated.
|
| However Europe (and everybody else) was incredibly lucky
| that Amazon decided to compete with Starlink and to do so
| they had to basically buy every single available heavy
| lift rocket launch for the next half decade. Lucky for
| them nobody everybody outside of SpaceX sucks, so nobody
| sucks. Ariane 6 can compete with ULA even when they can't
| compete with SpaceX.
|
| > And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit
| launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for
| Starlink.
|
| Its kind of funny when people claim things that are so
| easy to verify to be false:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon
| _He...
|
| SpaceX has already flown 2 commercial flights to low
| orbit this just year and its February. And their re-
| usability is not just for low orbit, they reuse the
| rockets if the go to GEO as well.
|
| Ariane 5 flight rate was never more then 7 a year, SpaceX
| is planning more then 10 purely commercial LEO, MEO and
| SSO missions just in the next few months.
|
| - Transporter-6
|
| - OneWeb Flight #16
|
| - OneWeb #17
|
| - O3b mPOWER
|
| - WorldView Legion 1 & 2
|
| - O3b mPOWER 5 & 6
|
| - Transporter-7
|
| - SARah 2 & 3
|
| - Ax-2
|
| I'm sick of doing this, you get my point. Ax-2 is planned
| for May. You can continue down the list for the rest of
| the year.
|
| So your statement is almost hilariously wrong, and
| totally wrong.
|
| The problem is just that SpaceX is launching so often and
| so many Starlinks that people get confused by it in
| comparison to what was normal the last 20 years.
|
| Its seems you have formed your opinion based on a bunch
| of Arianespace propaganda. The have been focused on
| spreading a a bunch of false narrative the last 5-10
| years.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Falcon 9 Success Rate - 173 / 184 (94%) - Most of it LEO
| Falcon 9 Max Payload - 22 tons LEO, 8 tons GTO when all the
| conditions perfectly align and then it still kinda sucks.
|
| Falcon Heavy Success Rate - 5 / 5 (100%) - No track record
| Falcon Heavy Max Payload - 83 tons LEO, 26 tons GTO
|
| Ariane 5 Success Rate - 110/115 (95.7%) - 7 to 10 tons GTO,
| Most of it GTO
|
| Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical, when it has
| barely launched anything in orbit. Ariane 5 works,
| extremely well. Self flagellation about EU space tech
| serves no purpose.
| nimos wrote:
| That Falcon 9 success rate is for the first stage
| boosters landing. The current gen of Falcon 9 is 149/149
| for launch success which would be comparable to the
| Ariane stat.
|
| Looking at both recently they basically have a 100%
| success rate.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Wow this post is peak delusional nonsense.
|
| Falcon family: 208/210 --> 99% (if you want to include
| AMOS its 98.57%)
|
| > Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical
|
| Its cost is unknown (so is that of Ariane 5), but its
| price is pretty well known. And costumers care about
| price and not cost.
|
| > Ariane 5 works, extremely well.
|
| Ariane 5 is end of live. It was incredibly expensive to
| the point where even Arianespace itself flew more
| missions with Russian rockets. It had a peak launch rate
| of 7 per year. Anybody with a brain has known Ariane 5
| needs to be replaced since at least 10-12 years.
|
| Outside of the Arianespace launched mostly Russian
| rockets, they just had a string of recent failures. Not
| to mention that they had issues with Ariane 5 that
| grounded the rocket for a very long time and the Swiss
| government had to provide emergency funding so they could
| make the launches leading up to Webb happen.
|
| Arianespace will also consume more then 5 billion for the
| Ariane 6, a rocket that is mostly a slight upgrade over
| the Ariane 5 built with part that have been in
| development for a long time. This is more then the
| complete cost of the Falcon 1/Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy and
| reusability program have cost SpaceX.
|
| The first step in improvement of European space is to not
| delude ourself of where we actually stand.
| mlindner wrote:
| This is one of the most confused takes on EU launch that
| I've ever seen.
|
| Your Falcon 9 success numbers are completely incorrect.
| The success rate is 100% on current models and overall
| having only 1 launch failure (or 2 if you count a pre-
| launch failure).
|
| Falcon 9 launches primarily to LEO because that is where
| the market is. There are just very few satellites that
| want to go to GTO, but those that do generally launch on
| Falcon 9. It's launch costs are substantially less than
| Ariane 5, to the point that Arianespace is now thinking
| of rushing Ariane 6 to end of life sooner than planned to
| focus on a future reusable vehicle.
|
| Falcon Heavy was primarily designed for the US DoD as
| it's primary customer.
| ralfd wrote:
| What are you counting here? Booster landing success
| rates? Then Ariane has a Zero here.
|
| According to Wikipedia Falcon 9 Block 5 has a success
| rate of 100% (149/149) for launches.
|
| Also I don't understand your comment when the parent
| talked about commercial success and that American space
| companies are/will be cheaper than Ariane.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| This is probably something that the US (or other major powers)
| should really think about doing too.
|
| Military tactics and capabilities have generally been driven by
| communications capabilities. For example, radio communication
| technology was at least as important as the tank in for the
| German blitzkrieg. This becomes all the more important with
| drones, etc.
|
| I just punched up some quick numbers to make sure I'm not talking
| out of my ass and it looks like getting to the 12,000 satellites
| Starlink initially stated is approx $3.6 billion in total over
| the years. This is in comparison to the nearly $2 trillion annual
| defense budget. Or in comparison, I believe the military spent
| $15 billion on a software defined radio project that I believe
| never produced a single product.
|
| Sure, I get it that big government isn't synonymous with
| innovation. But relying on the whims of these increasingly
| questionable billionaires for something like global internet prob
| isn't a great idea.
| halJordan wrote:
| The US already is exploring setting up its own low Earth orbit
| broadband constellation, upgrading its traditional satellites,
| and contracting with commercial entities.
|
| https://spacenews.com/dod-satcom-big-money-for-military-sate...
| panick21_ wrote:
| The US is already doing this, and not just once. They are
| already working with multiple of next gen network providers.
| And they are also doing their own.
|
| The DoD will have access to multiple such constellations and
| use all of them.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Doesn't the US already have strong contracts with SpaceX?
|
| ... of course one can question how safe they are given Musk's
| condition.
| taejavu wrote:
| Genuine question, what do you mean by "Musk's condition"?
| anon291 wrote:
| They mean he disagrees with them politically. By American
| standards, musk is still left wing and just doing what many
| Americans are either indifferent to (setting Twitter
| prices) or broadly agree with (his distaste for 'woke'ism).
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Hard to believe that the DoD could ever do this for as cheap as
| SpaceX is doing it, probably better to just work with them.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| Dowwie wrote:
| Good luck to the engineers working on the project. Is this a job
| for Erlang?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 2.4 billions is not enough for such a project given the EU
| overhead in cost. Espacially since the deadline is 2027, so 2030
| with delays really, that means 350 millions a year for paying
| satellite design, build them, send them to space.
| concordDance wrote:
| Does it annoy anyone else that the title says "Musk's Starlink"?
|
| Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and owns
| half of the company, but any project like this is a collaborative
| effort between tens of thousands of people.
| frankreyes wrote:
| Steve Jobs iPhone you mean?
| echelon wrote:
| > Yes, it was his idea and he is the main driving force and
| owns half of the company, but any project like this is a
| collaborative effort between tens of thousands of people.
|
| You named the reason. Another is that Musk is incredibly high
| profile.
|
| High profile individuals accrete accolades and renown. If you
| don't like it, stop working for someone else and build your own
| startup. (I mean this in the sense of encouragement.)
| cypress66 wrote:
| Meh. It's like when the title says "X's wife". Yes, it's a bit
| demeaning, but that extra context is often useful to those who
| are new to the topic.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Those thousands won't get blamed personally if it fails. But
| Musk will be.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Well okay, that's true, but they would lose their jobs and
| not have billions of dollars to fall back on. So there is a
| strong personal element for them. In the classic
| pigs/chickens formulation, Elon is closer to the chicken side
| -- he's got other companies to devote time to.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah, it's always weird to see. I get that it's probably SEO
| related, still seems so dumb. Even ignoring the contribution of
| the employees, it's just a weird way to phrase it. Especially
| in articles like these, since the EU isn't doing this in
| response to Musk specifically owning Starlink, it's doing it in
| response to Starlink not being European.
|
| The other day I saw an article referring to Twitter as "Musk's
| Twitter" which was even weirder because IIRC none of the
| content of the article was actually about Musk.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Larry Ellison's Java
| Zigurd wrote:
| It is now, and that matters.
| Kukumber wrote:
| It's propaganda, the US want to make sure it's clear to you
| that it's not an army project but "musk's project", a bit like
| how they did with google
|
| They are good at it
|
| https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
| solarkraft wrote:
| It doesn't annoy me all that much because that's how things are
| _always_ framed. Owner /driving force is exactly what matters.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Since it seems to be taken as fact that such projects are doomed
| to fail, let me give an example of the opposite: Airbus.
| mlindner wrote:
| There's many organizations that have proposed Starlink
| competitors, but it turns out this kind of thing is hard.
| Starlink isn't the first to try this either, but they're the
| first to succeed.
|
| There's very little hope of this getting funded or even if
| funded, getting developed sufficiently.
| nbevans wrote:
| They still haven't finished Galileo yet; with the project
| seemingly going backwards ever since the British were forced out.
| How will they deliver yet another moonshot project like this?
| They don't even possess reusable rocket technology yet to make
| such a LEO project economically viable.
| danieldk wrote:
| Yet, I can switch on my GPSr, use Galileo and get higher
| accuracy than GLONASS/GPS.
| boudin wrote:
| It's up and running, and like any project like this it's then
| constantly updated and maintained so "finished" makes no sense
| threeseed wrote:
| Is it really a moonshot project ?
|
| ESA has plenty of experience in delivering projects like this
| e.g. Copernicus, Sentinel, EDRS.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| The Sentinel satellites ARE the Copernicus program(me). Why
| are the EU spy sats, sorry, totally-not-spy-sats, so poor and
| so few compared to what the US has?
| threeseed wrote:
| a) Copernicus program is bigger than just the satellites
| themselves.
|
| b) What does a meaningless comparison with the US have to
| do with whether launching a bunch of extra satellites is
| considered a moonshot or not ?
| bionade24 wrote:
| > going backwards ever since the British were forced out.
|
| It was already going badly for years before UK left. Galileo
| was scheduled to be finished in 2021, shortly after Brexit and
| around the same time UK parted from the project.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Galileo has been operational for a few years. Even customer
| mobile devices Support and use it.
|
| Further more the British had a referendum and decided to leave
| on their own. Quite hard to call that force out. In fact it's
| impossible to expell a member state.
| nbevans wrote:
| Operational? Yes. Reliable? No. It has had numerous outages
| in the last 4 years.
|
| How do you explain several non-EU states being members of the
| Galileo programme - namely Switzerland and Norway? Hell, even
| China invested into it in 2003. And yet, the UK which
| invested almost a quarter of its funding is booted out on the
| basis of an unrelated political issue? It doesn't make sense.
| The British even offered to continue funding and investing
| into it. So "forced out" is an accurate description.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| > No. It has had numerous outages in the last 4 years.
|
| That's just plain false. There was one major outage in
| 2019. Since then, nothing of note.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think it has, when compared to GPS or even GLONASS.
|
| https://insidegnss.com/galileo-logs-a-5-hour-timing-
| related-...
|
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/galileo-accident/
| justeleblanc wrote:
| The second link is the major outage I'm talking about,
| yes.
|
| The first one is indeed significant, but to call it an
| outage is a stretch. You're linking to some blogspam that
| is basically [copying the official
| statement](https://www.gsc-europa.eu/news/galileo-
| nominal-service-resto...). To link that without linking
| to the [follow-up explanation](https://www.gsc-
| europa.eu/news/further-information-on-the-ev...) is,
| well... Not exactly an okay move. In that follow-up,
| you'll read that only ill-configured receivers (that
| ignored satellite health) were affected.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Ah that would make sense! I wonder though, is my
| perception of Galileo as being less reliable accurate? Or
| are those issues normal for GPS too? My (probably
| ignorant) understanding was that the structure of the
| Galileo program made it inherently more brittle,
| considering how the first major outage went down.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Switzerland and Norway negotiated special treaties to join
| Galileo.
|
| The UK were in because of their EU membership. No one could
| have taken that from them besides they themselves.
|
| And once you are out you get treated like any 3rd party
| state. If you want a special deal you better bring some
| time and be prepared to start fresh.
|
| The desire "to get Brexit done" in a very tight timeframe,
| pushed by populist politicians, did not allow for that.
|
| The whole deal of the EU is to make cooperation between
| countries easier and to act as a single voice.
|
| The UK reaps what they sowed
| nbevans wrote:
| The UK was trying to negotiate a special agreement/treaty
| regarding Galileo. But the EU did not want to even
| consider it. Indeed even today the UK has not really
| given up on trying to be friends with the EU and
| continues to remain open to rejoining Galileo and Horizon
| programmes. Bizarrely, the latter of which, the EU
| seemingly had a moment of weakness during the
| negotiations by agreeing that the UK could remain members
| of Horizon - but then later had a change of heart and
| decided to break the agreement (international law?) in
| choosing to cut the UK out to this very day.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The EU is waiting for Britain to abide by the current
| treaty they signed (Northern Ireland etc) before
| proceeding to new areas.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I hate these takes. If the goal of the EU is to make
| European cooperation. Why then was the attitude 'Britain
| wants to leave, fine fuck them'. Like just because they
| didn't want to be in the EU anymore, now the EU is no
| longer about cooperation? All of sudden the EU acted more
| like a geopolitical opponent of Britain.
|
| The idea that there was not enough time to negotiate is
| nonsense. This was the EU punishing Britain for leaving,
| its as simple as that. If the EU was really about
| European cooperation, then they should have wanted
| Britain to stay in the project.
|
| ESA existed before the EU and cooperation on space goes
| back way before the EU. It was short sighted politics
| with the goal to inflict punishment on Britain and make
| sure nobody else leaves.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| [flagged]
| sofixa wrote:
| > Meh, the EU (where I live) is an ossified behemoth whose VIPs
| (Germany and France) don't really understand or appreciate tech
| and cannot innovate their way out of a paper bag.
|
| It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together
| that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come
| an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good
| mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of
| people with proud signs "Commune fibree"), and vast government
| digital services. The last time i had to interact with a
| government office physically was to file the (online prepared)
| form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for
| verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives
| access to all government services online, for free.
|
| There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check
| the FrenchTech's Next40).
|
| > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce
| basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
|
| Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health
| appointments, a single platform to book one, send your
| documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market,
| fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world
| companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and
| starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence,
| Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised
| health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your
| documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market,
| fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc."
|
| Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people
| who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low
| single digits?
|
| Compared to Google or Meta or Apple or Microsoft, these are
| _not_ successes. And yet, France with its relatively big
| population and relatively good schools, should theoretically
| produce at least one or two comparable companies.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| A company is a success only if its market is the whole
| world, or at the very least covers the USA where most of
| HN's users live? That's an interesting take.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| And a pretty mainstream one. One of the niceties of
| software is that it scales quite easily and that if it
| really solves an important problem, it can grow
| explosively all over the world, where people do have the
| same problem that needs solving.
|
| Specializing in a niche corner of the market can be
| called a success, but a cunning dwarf is still a dwarf.
| For one, it lacks the necessary capital to invest into
| something more risky but potentially more rewarding.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| None of the listed examples were purely software. You
| can't build a website that store health data about
| patients and scale it to the whole world and its dizzying
| regulatory variations overnight. You can't setup a shop
| for second-hand electronics that serves the whole world
| overnight. Etc.
| vidarh wrote:
| A whole lot of US unicorns haven't even tried to crack
| markets outside the US.
|
| That the US by itself forms an easily accessible largely
| single-language market is one of the reasons they do
| disproportionately well.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of
| people who know at least one of those names is likely to be
| in low single digits?
|
| And that's fine because those companies are serving the
| French market first? I don't expect French people to know
| about Zelle or Konbini payments.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "fine".
|
| It is certainly not _bad_ , but it makes no sense to
| pretend that they play in the same league as the global
| giants, or even just one level under them.
|
| At this level of significance, countries like Thailand or
| Turkey can play, too. I would expect more from France,
| one of the heavyweights of the Western civilization and a
| cradle of Enlightement.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Zelle and Konbini are both also tiny dwarfs, that aren't
| really good examples of at-scale success, esp with
| anything that has any adjacency to tech.
|
| I say this as an avid Zelle user.
| lispm wrote:
| > downvotes without rebuttals
|
| you are trolling.
|
| Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has
| high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it
| world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data
| from the World Bank.
|
| The city I live in has roughly four times the GDP of Estonia.
| We have for example one of the largest civil airplane
| manufacturing sites here. 40000 people are employed in
| aerospace in the larger region -> more revenue than estonia has
| GDP.
|
| There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are
| ignoring.
| petterparker wrote:
| Also ignoring that estonia has a population of only about 1.3
| million, let alone the geographic size. It's a tiny country,
| which makes it easier to build infrastructure. Estonia has
| received heavy subsidies from the EU which went towards
| infrastructure projects. Germany on the other hand is the
| largest financial contributor to the EU by far. [1]
|
| The plan has worked, to share the success of the big economic
| powers within the EU with the lesser fortunate so that they
| could be competitive in the future and even the grounds. It's
| not a surprise that coming out like the original commenter
| isn't exactly well received.
|
| [1] https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage
| /ne...
| panick21_ wrote:
| Funny that Germany managed to provide good internet
| infrastructure for new EU countries but in their own
| country Deutsche Telekom has managed it that Germany is now
| behind those countries.
| lispm wrote:
| It's great to see those countries making good progress.
| Investment is important, but the countries need to make it
| work, which Estonia is a positive example.
| nip wrote:
| Strongly agree.
|
| Estonia is miles ahead of other EU countries when it comes to
| software culture and hygiene: other countries (such as France)
| still mostly see IT as a center of costs / necessary evil.
|
| Estonians think from first principle and bring software early
| in any new endeavors.
|
| Add to that the "show don't tell" culture necessary in a world
| where Estonia is (still) an underdog
| kybernetyk wrote:
| [flagged]
| sofixa wrote:
| > The EU is a religion based around big state
|
| What is religious is the outright aversion to state
| intervention without good reason.
|
| No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is
| needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been
| possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same
| goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive
| rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now
| Type C) and a million other things.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's funny that the leftists simultaneously believe EU is
| based on a religion of liberal capitalism and big
| corporations.
|
| Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and
| more complicated than either of these extremes.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the EU.
|
| There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU,
| especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an
| extension of the French model and without the British, it
| really started leaning heavily into the protectionist
| bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those
| tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by
| people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
| sofixa wrote:
| If you have to compare the UK and France on free market vs
| "protectionist and bureacratic" (i disagree, there are but
| notes of protectionism sometimes - e.g. Alsthom power was
| sold to GE without the most important bits, but it was sold
| nonetheless), which is better for the everyday humans? A
| couple of examples spring to mind, all of which are
| extremely disfavourable towards the UK, so please help me
| have a more nuanced argument:
|
| * The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated
| disaster
|
| * The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy
| industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes,
| shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the
| majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned.
| Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer
| are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work
| there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain
| shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good
| level.
|
| * Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in
| part due to the English language, in part due to money
| laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens;
| and the startup scene - again the English language surely
| helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has
| been slightly relaxed in France).
|
| Anything else come to mind?
| throw009 wrote:
| [flagged]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Nope, there wouldn't be a chronic debt crisis in the
| Eurozone if the Germans really held so much sway.
| gizmo wrote:
| Britain after Thatcher got a rich financial center while
| the countryside impoverished. The market-friendly changes
| didn't produce the promised tide that would lift all boats.
| I recognize that the UK produces more market-friendly
| rhetoric, but outside the handful of wealthy city centers
| the UK is shockingly poor.
| scrlk wrote:
| To quote "Yes Minister" (British political satire from the
| 1980s):
|
| "You know what they say about the average Common Market
| official. He has the organising ability of the Italians,
| the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the
| French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the
| Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence
| of the Irish."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > This is due to massive, shaping French influence on the
| EU.
|
| True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job,
| though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have
| been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard
|
| (The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she
| really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.)
|
| I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French
| influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake
| their entrance exams in another language if they originally
| took it in French. We should also form an alliance to
| automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't
| speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation
| hearings in the European Parliament.
| baq wrote:
| Everybody has seen what Starlink does in Ukraine. Expect
| similar initiatives from China, India and Russia (once the
| shitshow is over.)
|
| Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a
| Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go
| more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went
| from 'interesting' to 'paradigm shift' overnight, nothing to
| be surprised about.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I certainly do believe that there will be _initiatives_ ,
| but I am really curious about their _results_.
|
| One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I
| just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies
| developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional
| rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| You know you're living far into the future when you hear
| "traditional rocket industry" said unironically.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, solid-fuel rockets are a pretty old tech (medieval
| China) and even if we restrict ourselves to liquid-fueled
| rockets that crossed the Karman line, the first German
| A-4 did so several years before the transistor was
| invented :)
| baq wrote:
| Oh I agree. But now the situation is quite different: the
| impractical became necessary, both in cheap launch
| capacity and leo comms infrastructure. They must make it
| happen.
| zisuzon wrote:
| thanks
| zisuzon wrote:
| thanks 2
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I think it's similar to the sub-5 minute mile in the
| sense that once something is shown as possible, others
| will achieve it as well.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is also possible to land on the Moon, we know that.
| But no one else tried for more than 50 years.
|
| The barriers to becoming an agile space company are
| formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many
| space startups from that period are now defunct and
| forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Carmack's was very much a part-time venture. It was
| interesting to read their blog and watch their videos. It
| was clear that they were very good at certain things
| (code + welding) and not very good at others
| (electronics, fire-proofing, planning, testing, finite
| element analysis, any kind of simulation that Carmack
| didn't write).
|
| An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as
| they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their
| rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then
| they floundered.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > But no one else tried for more than 50 years.
|
| Was there a good enough reason to go again?
|
| In contrast, there is a good reason to have re-usable
| rockets and quick deployment now.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is a good argument.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I think it's because the moon has no immediate benefit
| besides
|
| Star-Link and reusable rockets now have tremendous
| military uses which are being demonstrated in Ukraine.
|
| Monetary concerns will take a back seat to that.
| sschueller wrote:
| That is just not the case.
|
| Look at companies like AMSL which no one comes even close. It
| is likely that every device you own has a microchip made with a
| machine by AMSL. Is it sexy? Is there a narcissistic tweeting
| CEO? No, but there is inovasion at the highest level.
|
| The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU".
|
| What the EU has little off and what you are probably
| complaining about it throwing money at a hundred things to see
| what sticks. Those methods cause things like Theranos to spawn.
|
| Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die. You may get
| a few unicorns with some inovation but you can get there
| without the suffering as well.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU".
|
| Why did BioNTech have to partner up with American Pfizer to
| get anywhere with their (groundbreaking!) technology? Why did
| we give the Americans the secret sauce?
|
| > Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die.
|
| Ill-informed but strongly held attitudes like that are a big
| problem in the EU. There would be a lot fewer people on Earth
| and they would suffer a lot more if we didn't have
| Capitalism. They would suffer even less if we had more of it.
| sschueller wrote:
| I am not saying no capitalism, I am saying regulation is
| good. Such as in no child labor[1] and enforced safety
| standards[2], which yes, slows down innovation but safe
| lives. Sadly most regulations are made in blood.
|
| No regulations are fine and dandy unless you are one of the
| first 346 to die from Boeing's MAX disaster until the
| "market corrects itself".
|
| Even the EU has been complaining how expensive it is to run
| rail through Switzerland. The reason being regulation which
| prevent such disasters as in Ohio. [3]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/nov/02/child-
| labor-laws...
|
| [2]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-
| sa...
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwx_rumXUAw
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Paper routes and other forms of light work are good for
| children.
|
| The bad kinds of child labour disappear as poverty
| disappears. No need for any hard regulation there.
|
| I actually looked at the reported workplace safety
| violations and the reported workplace accidents for Tesla
| a couple of years ago to see whether the reporting was
| biased against Tesla or not -- turns out it was. It still
| is.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The bad kinds of child labour disappear as poverty
| disappears. No need for any hard regulation there.
|
| I'm sorry but that is extremely cold hearted, mostly
| useless and bordering on the sociopathic. _As an excuse
| for child labour_. Just "fix" everything, have enough
| money and no children will need to work in risky
| conditions? You should go and tell the DRC government
| that, as well as the families whose children are
| dying/poisoning themselves for their whole lives, they
| would be overjoyed.
|
| It is not a solution in any way a form, it's a desired
| state. Hard regulations banning these kind of undesirable
| practices will be an immediate (ish, with time for
| enforcement) fix and literally save lives.
|
| Is your view similarly useless and sociopathic with
| regards to all regulations? Building codes are only a
| chore and increase housing prices, once everybody is rich
| all housing will be of good quality (until an earthquake
| or hurricane or poor living conditions strike and kill,
| but who cares, right?).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Production capacity, as simple as that. Nothing else.
| touisteur wrote:
| And even there, if you look at the sheer amount of R&D
| projects funded by the EU... Anyone serious can't say the EU
| doesn't invest massively in R&D. Interestingly enough, most
| of what I see funded and successfully becoming products are
| incremental development (increasing wireless bandwidth for
| specific apps or constraints, improving industrial
| productivity or getting to next gen for any tech) and few
| moonshots. I work with a lot of tech SMEs and most consider
| these projects key to their survival, as they get put in
| touch with (international) customers to work on hard but
| specific use cases and they get funded for R&D, improve their
| portfolio...
|
| But as you said, it's not very sexy, there's a little bit
| (not that much really) of management/bureaucracy (and most
| actually understand that state of things as the european
| equilibrium between corruption and too-much-red-tape) and
| it's not that hard to get funded on small to medium projects.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This kind of incremental development has been criticized a
| lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from
| trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more
| efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat
| inventing e-mail.
|
| Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process,
| risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important
| actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Who again came up with the first mRNA Covid vaccine?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You are playing into my hand.
|
| Most of the groundlaying work on mRNA has been done by
| Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian scientist who moved to the US
| to continue her research in better conditions.
|
| The history of mRNA research is pretty tangled, but its
| majority took place at the American side of the pond.
| Unless you want to cherry-pick one particular moment and
| disregard all others, then no, mRNA technology is not a
| European, or even majority-European invention.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Absolutely not. The most common Covid vaccines originated
| in Europe (AZ, BionTech) with the exception of Moderna
| (US).
|
| To take an example were all the ground work was done in
| Europe and later propelled US companies to riches: MP3.
|
| But hey, if you want to play Super Trump with countries,
| and the US to win, fine for me. The US win by virtue of
| being the most exceptional country on earth.
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| Katalin Kariko moved to the US in 1985, from a Warsaw
| Pact country.
|
| She did her research at UPenn and accepted a demotion and
| pay cut in 1995 because grant agencies decided this weird
| mRNA stuff wasn't worth funding.
|
| In 2006 she founded startup company RNARx, funded with
| 100k USD of government grants, but didn't come to an
| agreement to license patents of her own work which UPenn
| held.
|
| So in 2013 she joined German company Biontech, funded
| with 150m EUR of venture capital, which was finally able
| to productize the research.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
| touisteur wrote:
| I said most, but if you're looking at the projects funded
| by the EU, there's plenty of heavy projects such as the
| EPI (that can be criticized of course) and contributions
| to many fundamental research projects.
|
| Incremental research is needed, and as a collaborator or
| downstream from many of these projects, the developed
| tech is often disruptive in many ways, be it cost
| reduction (keeping the industry competitive) or creating
| new features, improving safety of security of the
| products. Yes, developing a slightly better telegraph has
| its use and it doesn't beat inventing email but email
| itself was a incremental progress from telegraph, telex,
| fax, BBS, internet... Haven't seen a 747 assemble itself
| from a DARPA project yet.
|
| A lot of the cutting edge stuff on all kinds of wireless
| or fiber communication is funded through the EU and I'd
| say looking at funded projects year after year you can
| see lots of research lab work percolate quite quickly to
| a large network of SMEs that then provide new services to
| lots of European companies.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > This kind of incremental development has been
| criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages
| scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a
| slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still
| does not beat inventing e-mail.
|
| I'd be surprised to learn that it would have been
| possible to run packet data on the original telephone
| system.
|
| I'd be less surprised to learn that decades of
| incremental improvements ultimately enabled packet data
| to run on top of telephone lines.
| csydas wrote:
| I'm from the US originally and emigrated about 10 years ago; I
| think you're conflating different aspects of technology. The
| boom of US tech isn't superior infrastructure, it's that tech
| is a very lucrative investment vehicle so it gets a ton of
| attention. (Well, it was anyways, not sure what 2023 is going
| to do to this)
|
| While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're
| observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is
| thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar
| technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same
| attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional.
| It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an
| extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU
| nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more
| costly for end users.
|
| Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the
| infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities
| (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US
| cities.
|
| This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good;
| far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main
| difference between the tech you read about in US that gets
| millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles
| on like any other business is simply the high attention from
| investors looking for investment vehicles.
|
| Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US
| has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and
| the EU version is often even a bit cheaper.
|
| The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the
| US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon
| Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having
| any real control or input over the way that money is spent by
| Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that
| everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars
| of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's
| been fully legalized and approved.
|
| I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to
| be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for
| the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the
| incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as
| little as possible while still technically qualifying for the
| subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare
| minimum requirements are met.
|
| Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech
| companies get as always being great innovation; investors want
| a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the
| vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's
| something that has a way of providing good returns on
| investments, including short term fads.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by
| the US government
|
| No, it's not.
|
| (No, "SpaceX's US government launch contracts = US government
| subsidies" is not true.)
| hef19898 wrote:
| This question was, lest say, discussed between the EU and
| the US for litteraly decades regarding Airbus subsidies and
| Boeing subsidies. The former came directly the latter came
| through government contracts. Government contracts are one
| of the easiest ways to subsidize a company, and SpaceX got
| plenty of those.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I am well aware that EU claimed for decades that Boeing's
| military contracts were some sort of hidden subsidy for
| its civilian business. That does not make said claims
| accurate, or why McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed would not
| have sought to benefit from such subsidies, as opposed to
| selling itself to Boeing and exiting the airliner
| business, respectively.
|
| SpaceX gets plenty of government contracts because it has
| proven, reliable, and volume-capable launchers of
| government payloads. Many within NASA were fiercely
| opposed to SpaceX for years.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Whether or not government contracts can be considered
| subsidies was the question of the related WTO dispute.
| And it was never ruled that they are not. Since the WTO
| is the highest authority in those questions, everything
| else is just an opinion.
| troad wrote:
| You are right, though I'd add that the EU correctly reflects
| Europeans' policy preferences here. European voters, more often
| than not, seem to believe they can have their cake and eat it
| too: free public services that remain competitive and cutting
| edge, somehow efficiently run by the government and delivered
| on time and on budget. Ask those same people about how <insert
| any existing government service> is run, and they'll have a
| litany of complaints.
| t43562 wrote:
| The flip side of it is exploitative large commercial almost-
| monopolies which do their best to make you spend money you
| shouldn't on things you don't need. Markets full of almost
| exactly the same deal dressed up so many different ways that
| you don't realise you're going to be stiffed any way you go.
| Cheap initial prices hide very expensive prices later on etc
| etc.
|
| The amount of effort to evaluate everything and work out
| where the "catch" is ..... it's just understandable that we
| might look for our governments to shoulder a bit of that
| burden in the critical areas. At least our healthcare systems
| usually help us that way.
| vidarh wrote:
| > In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into
| something highly subsidized that no one will ever use.
|
| Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article
| focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after
| Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are
| really that concerned about widespread peace time use.
|
| > Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce
| basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
|
| A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and
| immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them
| much more recent). Most of these have raised between
| $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:
|
| Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market,
| Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio,
| Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto,
| BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology,
| PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path
|
| Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups
| than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK
| and Germany in terms of tech startups.
|
| Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in
| terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to
| McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed
| companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally
| (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the
| US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years,
| what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were
| growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and
| more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding
| capital back into VC funds.
| seszett wrote:
| > _Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce
| basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small
| nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their
| weight._
|
| I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish
| airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit
| misplaced.
| nip wrote:
| OP words are dramatic, but he does have a point - bigger
| players in Europe could (and should) do better.
|
| You are on the other hand setting unrealistic expectations
| for Estonia / Finland.
|
| Hardware is obviously a lot more costly than software, hence
| why you hear more about software tech from Estonia (Skype,
| Transferwise, Pipedrive, Veriff to name a few) than hardware
| (Milrem robotics, Co-Module, Woola...) as the latter are of
| much smaller scale (respective to the size of Estonia) than
| the former: software scales a lot better.
| arlort wrote:
| Tech is only tech if it runs on javascript
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yeah like a Tesla.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| totally random but had me laughing my ass off...
| k__ wrote:
| I hope it gets a bit better now that Germany got rid of it's
| conservative government.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The SPD is every as bit as psychologically conservative as
| the CDU/CSU, a party of the 65+ electorate and 65+
| membership.
|
| The FDP and the Greens are the more modern ones, but there is
| an anti-tech undercurrent in the Green party that distrusts
| anything industrial. The space industry has a nontrivial
| carbon trace; its development in Germany would be, at the
| very least, pretty controversial.
| k__ wrote:
| Baby steps.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Europe bashing on HN is so lame. A German start-up developed a
| working mRNA vaccine the same time an American start-up
| developed a stupid blood test fraud. You wouldn't hear the end
| of it if it was the other way round. What big tech came out of
| the US the past decade? The juicer? If it's about Europe, every
| quibble is used for sweeping blows, when it's about the US, the
| failures are all swept under the rug.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| All the recent major advances in generative AI appear to have
| come from the US. The US is an extremely innovative country,
| no matter its faults.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Do you know where stable diffusion was developed?
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Fair point, not all, just the hours of ChatGPT got to me.
| That said I was replying to someone who seemed to think
| nothing major had come out of the US in ten years and
| like, well, as mentioned my ChatGPT usage begs to differ.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "A German start-up developed a working mRNA vaccine the same
| time"
|
| True, but not very relevant. A continent with 25 per cent of
| humanity's wealth is expected to produce at least something
| sometimes.
|
| But just look at the brain drains. How many Nobelists or
| other important scientists moved from the US to Europe and
| vice versa? We are losing our most talented people to a
| better research environment.
|
| There is no shortage of European workers in Google or SpaceX,
| where the main limiting factor is actually ITAR laws, not
| lack of interest. How many Americans moved to Germany to work
| in SAP or to France to work in Arianespace?
| justincormack wrote:
| Thats not a great comparison given Wirecard.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And Wirecard isn't even close to Enron.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Lets think what came out of the US - social media, big data,
| adtech, EVs, cloud computing, XaaS, machine learning,
| military advances.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be pro or anti
| USA
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Neither, but every one of those impacted all of us.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends on whether you are facing a disinformation
| campaign on a social network or whether you need to crush
| Russian armor rolling over the border.
|
| Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you
| can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to
| worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and
| triggering heresies.
| malermeister wrote:
| Spotify? Stable Diffusion? Elastic? Mastodon?
| tifadg1 wrote:
| There is no country called EU and there is no single market in
| that a startup could scale seamlessly in all 27 members - it'll
| still have to follow local laws. So it's mostly a matter of
| scale - if you can't outscale US/China/India, you can't compete
| with those that can.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That is somewhat of an indictment of the "single market"
| idea, or, more precisely, of its implementation.
|
| We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in
| _food quality_ across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia,
| Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in
| Germany and b) less good. I can 't imagine the same happening
| in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with
| worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different
| economic power.
|
| To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and
| resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am
| totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or
| a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences
| businesses and consumers.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse
| cheese than Newyorkers only because their different
| economic power.
|
| And yet, it's the case ? Sure, you can find the same
| products if you go looking, but the average food quality
| between those two states will be wildly different. And
| that's without taking into account that the average food
| quality in the US is awful.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to
| be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good.
|
| I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember
| recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that
| exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to
| the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason.
|
| I don't understand why food would be more expensive in
| countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that
| different.
|
| https://taxation-
| customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/v...
| jq-r wrote:
| It's still a thing. A lot of people in Croatia still buy
| specific food products in supermarkets like Lidl and
| Muller because they carry the same products as in Germany
| or Austria. So of much better quality of course.
|
| The price at the time is generaly considerably higher
| than in neighbouring countries because VAT is just a part
| of the general taxation scheme. Whatever taxes companies
| get saddled with just get transferred to the general
| population via prices on the stuff they sell. And
| taxation in Croatia is crazy high unfortunately for
| everyone.
| panick21_ wrote:
| And in Switzerland Lidl is basically looked at incredibly
| low quality food provider.
| voytec wrote:
| There's a similar situation between Czechia and Poland
| currently. Folks from .cz travel to .pl to buy food,
| cigarettes, medicine and even coal. I have no comparison
| of goods quality, but Poland is cheaper for Czechs.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Cross-border shopping used to be a big thing for Danes as
| well but mostly for soft drinks, alcohol, candy, and
| petrol. They all used to be a lot cheaper in Germany but
| that was because of our taxes in Denmark. It was our own
| bloody fault.
|
| There are Danish supermarkets right across the border in
| Germany for the locals because things are still a bit
| cheaper there but most of us no longer bother driving all
| the way to Germany with a trailer on the car just to buy
| stuff. It used to be common to do that a couple of times
| a year.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "I don't understand why food would be more expensive in
| countries with lower wages."
|
| The multinationals do what they can get away with. A fine
| from a Bulgarian authority is likely to be trivial to
| them, and if it actually bites, they can always withdraw
| from the market as a retaliation.
|
| No one wants to lose market access to Germany, but the
| smaller countries don't have as much leverage.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| > and if it wasn't for a few outliers in Scandinavia and the
| Baltics, it would be negligible
|
| I agree that Estonia is doing great and a role model in many
| ways, but the by far biggest EU software company is still
| German: SAP
|
| Also, have a look at the very successful ELISE AI initiative:
| https://www.elise-ai.eu/
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| SAP legitimately seems to be to be one of the least
| innovative software companies out there. Are they doing
| anything even mildly interesting? And it's not like they've
| found some global optimum - they just benefit from having
| been around so long that trillions of dollars now depend on
| them. Not due to any other merit though.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| SAP is also 51 years old. There is no shortage of big, old
| companies in Germany. There _is_ a visible shortage of
| successful young companies.
|
| In my comment edit, I mentioned the 20 year limit
| specifically, because the ossification in last decades is
| real. The US generates a lot more startups, even the London
| scene is livelier than the rest of Europe taken together.
| lispm wrote:
| There are roughly 1500 mid-sized companies in Germany which
| are among the world-leaders in their tech sector. You may
| never have heard it, but Elon Musk runs his factories with
| process automation from Germany (he bought a company) and
| robots from Kuka/Germany.
|
| Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-
| champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech.
|
| Europe lacks the large internet and software companies.
| Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides
| the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is
| much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think
| Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and
| hardware are a crucial factor for those.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Mittelstand is pretty much the only reason why
| Germany's prosperity is still a thing. Countries like
| Italy and Spain, which lack this backbone of mid-sized
| companies, are in deep trouble and unlikely to get out of
| it.
|
| But there were times when German companies actually were
| world leaders in the big things as well, not just
| reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you
| count this as a regression?
| lispm wrote:
| > But there were times when German companies actually
| were world leaders in the big things as well
|
| We have the world leader in civil aerospace in
| France/Germany, Many high-speed trains in the world are
| coming from France or Germany. There are many large high-
| tech sectors.
|
| It's nice that Estonia is successful, but it's not where
| the next big chip manufacturing sites will be build.
| Intel and TSMC are in talks to move to the former East
| Germany (Saxony has roughly 70000 employees already in
| the chip manufacturing industry). The big Internet
| exchange node is in Frankfurt.
|
| The EU has a lot to catch up in many countries, but it's
| not that we have no high-tech.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I love trains -- but planes are usually a better solution
| than high-speed trains.
|
| They will be an even better solution when we have small
| electric jets, especially for inter-European flights.
|
| Do you think the first practical electric jet will come
| from a subsidized EU development plan -- or from a VP
| funded US company?
| lispm wrote:
| > but planes are usually a better solution than high-
| speed trains
|
| I was traveling this week with both, an Airbus from
| Lufthansa and high-speed trains from Siemens.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| And which one was taxed and which one was subsidized?
| lispm wrote:
| Both? Good and broad infrastructure is expensive. I was
| using a new plane with onboard Internet, two modern
| airports, three modern high-speed trains, three large
| train stations, driving through a clean and nice
| landscape. My local train line in my home town is fully
| digitalized and prepared for autonomous trains. Plus I
| made a stop in a town where Carl Friedrich Gauss was born
| in 1777, which was inspiring.
| sofixa wrote:
| > love trains -- but planes are usually a better solution
| than high-speed trains.
|
| Not for short to medium distances they're not. Everything
| under 3-4 hours of train is faster, more comfortable and
| with much less hassle than flying (going to an airport,
| security checks, uncomfortable seating, interruptions for
| take off and landing, long queueing).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "The EU has a lot to catch up in many countries"
|
| The trouble is that this has been known since at least
| the late 1990s, discussed quite often, plans made, and
| yet the gap hasn't grown appreciably smaller. It has
| arguably _widened_. 15 years ago, you could choose from a
| plentitude of European feature phones. Now the vast
| majority of our own mobile phone market is dominated by
| US or East Asian products.
| lispm wrote:
| The more important is to use the EU to create the large
| market which is needed.
|
| Btw., I'm a happy user of a bunch of US tech products.
| It's not that I need to replace all that. I want the EU
| to be competitive, but I'm also using other stuff. Apple
| in the recent years made some excellent product
| technology, like their chips, which are produced in
| Taiwan, also with a lot of technology from Europe.
| hef19898 wrote:
| There is, unless I miss someone, only one US ohone player
| left, Apple. Everything else is Asian.
| malermeister wrote:
| Google is American!
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Many high-speed trains in the world are coming from
| France or Germany.
|
| Sadly that isn't that many. And China and Japan are doing
| their own. The US plans to use Japan technology (Texas).
| So does Indonesia.
|
| Its just a smaller industry.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| My latest smartphone is mostly EU with Taiwanese manufacturing.
| It's the best phone I've used yet. The only thing Google adds
| is branding. True enough about search engines though.
| fooker wrote:
| >The only thing Google adds is branding.
|
| Which phone is this?
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Probably some kind of privacy phone. Seems like every EU
| country now has privacy-focused smartphone startups.
| fweimer wrote:
| I think IRIS2 is actually an extension of the EU's GOVSATCOM
| initiative:
|
| https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-policy/...
|
| This means it's for government use, and is not really comparable
| to commercial end user services.
| arlort wrote:
| Yeah, don't know why they posted Renew's page instead of the
| official press release but here they are:
|
| https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/adoption-europea...
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/STATEM...
| gizmo wrote:
| > IRIS2 will be a constellation at the cutting edge of
| technology, to give Europe a lead, for example in quantum
| encryption. It will therefore be a vector of innovation.
|
| Quantum encryption?? Can anybody explain how this is related
| to satellites?
| uoaei wrote:
| Lots of high-entropy phenomena in space.
| T-A wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurherman/2022/10/20/the-
| qua...
| arlort wrote:
| Don't know how it's related to the project but I guess
| they'd want to use the satellites for the quantum key
| exchange
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, in Europe most palces can be reached either by fibre or
| 5G relatively easily, it is a quite densly populated cintinent
| after all. Let's ignore Germany's utter failure to build out
| fast internet, which is story of its own and totally unrelated
| to the EU in general.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Even here it's becoming kind of okay
| culturestate wrote:
| The release specifically addresses commercial use:
|
| _> This future satellite constellation infrastructure will
| allow for synergies with private sector to develop commercial
| services and provide with high-speed internet and communication
| in all EU territory, including over isolated regions where
| terrestrial and broadband connection remain scarce._
|
| As does the page you linked:
|
| _> The system will also allow mass-market applications
| including mobile and fixed broadband satellite access,
| satellite trunking for B2B services, satellite access for
| transportation, reinforced networks by satellite and satellite
| broadband and cloud-based services._
| arlort wrote:
| All official releases only mention government use, I think
| the idea might be to use a government contract to help the
| industry develop know-how for private use later on
| culturestate wrote:
| _> All official releases only mention government use..._
|
| The second quote I pulled above is from an official
| source[1]. It seems pretty clear to me that it's intended
| as a dual-use constellation, with government services
| coming online first and an allotment for commercial
| services later. One of the two key objectives in the
| downloadable fact sheet[2] is:
|
| _> Allow for the provision of commercial services by the
| private sector, to enable the availability of high-speed
| broadband and seamless connectivity throughout Europe,
| removing dead zones._
|
| 1. https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-space-
| policy/...
|
| 2. https://defence-industry-
| space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/202...
| Havoc wrote:
| 2027 seems quite ambitious.
|
| Curious what launch vehicles they're planning to use.
| tpmx wrote:
| Perhaps eventually Ariane Next/SALTO, with an architecture very
| similar to Falcon 9?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_Next
| panick21_ wrote:
| No, Ariane Next is not even being seriously worked on. For
| this rocket to exists there will be at least 3-5 years of
| political discussions. The Ariane 6 has not even flown yet
| and Ariane 6 was already very decisive.
|
| If Ariane 6 first flies this year, don't expect funding for a
| new rocket for at least 5-10 years and then at least 5 years
| of development.
|
| Any Ariane Next will not exist before 2030 and likely not
| before 2035.
|
| The only viable European rocket is the Ariane 6. And that has
| already been booked by Amazon. So unless they want to kick
| out Amazon, there is no way this will launch before 2027.
| tpmx wrote:
| Sounds like the EU I know and loathe. /EU citizen from the
| north
| usrusr wrote:
| Nice, good to see them acknowledge that a slightly better
| "pre-f9" rocket won't cut it. Doesn't say anything about
| their chance to succeed, but better than trying something
| that's essentially worthless even in the best case.
| danieldk wrote:
| If the timeframe is 2027, why not Ariane 5 or 6? Ariane 6 is
| supposed to have its maiden flight in 2023. Ariane 5 is
| already in use.
| T-A wrote:
| Ariane 5 is EOL. There are only two left, to be launched
| sometime this year.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Ariane 5 is done. Ariane 6 will launch maybe once this
| year. And then its already massively overbooked. So much so
| that many of its launches will likely fly on Falcon 9.
|
| And on top of that Amazon has bought a huge amount of
| launches. Flying these will take many years.
|
| Its unlikely that they have capacity. Realistically this is
| a ~2030 at best, not 2027.
| gizmo wrote:
| > This future satellite constellation infrastructure will allow
| for synergies with private sector to develop commercial services
| and provide with high-speed internet and communication in all EU
| territory.
|
| Satellite internet isn't great for speed. Europe is also so
| densely populated that full 4g coverage is totally doable. I
| think satellite internet is cool, but it doesn't serve a real
| need and I expect this project to flounder.
|
| Also, notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals
| and merely tries to keep up with one guy.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| >Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is
| totally doable
|
| Whenever this is brought up a lot of Germans will reply that
| the 5G/4G situation in Germany is hopeless and only Elon Musk
| can save them. But looking at the 5G/4G coverage in Denmark and
| the rest of the Nordic countries it becomes obvious that the
| problem is Germany and not 5G/4G.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Satellite internet isn't great for speed.
|
| It's great for speed, but not for latency.
|
| > notice that an entire continent has less ambitious goals and
| merely tries to keep up with one guy
|
| This doesn't have to fully compete with starlink. A working
| secondary provider is a great goal in itself if the network is
| independent. Currently the critical military communication in
| Ukraine depends on how he feels today for example.
|
| On a policy level, there are likely also issues with using a
| private US company for critical EU communication.
|
| Having a single global provider is never a great idea. It's
| even worse when it relies on someone like Musk.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _satellite internet is cool, but it doesn't serve a real
| need_
|
| Starlink's 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European countries
| fixed averages and most's mobile medians [2].
|
| Also, the second sentence of this article cites the need:
| "critical scenarios where terrestrial networks are absent or
| disrupted, as observed, for instance, in the unfolding war in
| Ukraine."
|
| [1] https://bigtechquestion.com/2022/01/10/broadband/how-fast-
| is...
|
| [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Up to 100Mbps
|
| Good luck getting half of that. Especially if you want to
| service any significant number of customers.
|
| Meanwhile I get 600Mbps for about $30 in Poland.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > Starlink's 100 Mbps [1] is faster than many European
| countries fixed averages and most's mobile medians [2].
|
| But Starlink also doesn't deliver those 100 Mbps reliably.
| Starlink is an awesome choice if you are in an underserved
| region but in most EU countries most people have better
| alternatives.
|
| The capacity of Starlink is very low for many countries in
| the EU. If people were to actually use it at scale it
| wouldn't work.
| danieldk wrote:
| I am not sure how fair that comparison is. E.g., in my
| country most people can get 1GiB downstream/50 MiB upstream
| through cable internet (even in small villages), more than
| 50% of the households can get fiber with 1GiB downstream/1GiB
| upstream.
|
| Yet the average fixed download/upload speed is 123/40 MiB.
| Why? Most people just want enough bandwidth for Netflix (TV
| is reserved separately), Youtube, and basic surfing. So,
| they'll go with the cheapest subscription, which is usually
| 100MiB downstream (except on budget providers), pulling down
| the averages. Starlink-like bandwidth is really cheap on
| cable/fiber. Heck, I have unlimited 5G and I think it's only
| 25 Euro per month, less than a third of a Starlink
| subscription and the bandwidth is usually much better. Even
| in the small village my parents live I get 100-200MiB
| downstream.
|
| At any rate, it is no problem at all to get 1GiB downstream
| in most of the country and much cheaper than Starlink (we
| currently pay 35 Euro p/m for 1GBit up/down). For European
| countries that can't offer this yet, it makes more sense to
| invest in 5G and wired broadband.
|
| That said, I think the EU should also do this. Satellite
| internet is good for remote areas and in the case of
| calamities (war, disaster, etc.) and crucial infrastructure
| should be in European hands.
| hkpack wrote:
| > Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is
| totally doable.
|
| The main goal here as I can see is to learn from the Russian
| invasion of Ukraine, when the main infrastructure (including
| electric grid) was targeted.
|
| The issue is much broader than you may consider. Besides the
| obvious benefits for military communication, consider the
| following points (all from my experience living in Kyiv):
|
| 1. Modern society depends on the internet heavily - banks,
| shops, eCommerce. Your ATMs need internet to allow you to
| withdraw cash. Your enemy will target your power infrastructure
| to stop economic activity very early.
|
| 2. In case of long-term power outages, you can expect most of
| the land lines will stop working after 12 hours when batteries
| on the ISP sides start to be depleted.
|
| 3. Your 4G network will become less and less useful very
| quickly, the more people will start losing wired internet and
| switching over to 4G. The cellular will not be able to fulfil
| demand and eventually will halt under the load.
|
| 4. It is very difficult to power wired internet with mobile
| generation, as the infrastructure is huge and requires power
| generation in multiple places at once.
|
| Satellite internet solve this miraculously:
|
| 1. you can get internet where you need it without reliance on
| any other infrastructure - i.e. bank, office, ATM, etc... Just
| plug the dish to the nearby router.
|
| 2. Mobile power generation becomes much more useful, as you can
| have it only where it needed (i.e. to power satcom).
|
| 3. It is VERY cheap considering the alternative.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Europe is also so densely populated that full 4g coverage is
| totally doable.
|
| Broadband via fiber (fine, let's save money and use VDSL for
| the last mile) is totally doable for the population centers.
| But we can't even manage that reliably at scale.
|
| In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once
| you're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of affairs.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Germany's problem is German, not European. Germany also used
| to have waiting lists of many months for getting an extra
| line (+ they were expensive). Apparently, that was a Good
| Thing because it was because the state monopoly was protected
| against competition from Evil Capitalism (usually Foreign as
| well).
|
| Allow competition and good things will happen.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Germany's problem is German, not European.
|
| I'm not sure if you've noticed who's calling the shots in
| the EU. Germany's problem is the EU's problem.
|
| I often feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding in
| German politics which then spreads to EU politics. They
| make the same basic mistake the Soviets made: believing
| that people are perfectly rational, don't react to
| incentives, and will do what's best for everyone if given
| the chance. Why have competition, you'll just waste
| resources. If someone says they're not able to work, surely
| that's true, so just give them money. If we just give
| billions to academics, surely they'll spend it wisely and
| get us a first class satellite internet. If we elect
| someone, it's always wise to give them plenty of power so
| they can make their job efficiently, there's no way they'd
| abuse that power. If we establish a bureaucracy, surely
| they'll focus on being efficient and nobody will try to
| grow their department beyond necessary just to increase
| their status.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I'm not sure if you've noticed who's calling the shots
| in the EU.
|
| Yeah, the EU.
|
| > Germany's problem is the EU's problem.
|
| Certainly not with regards to infrastructure. All
| countries around Germany are strictly better for mobile
| and broadband infrastructure.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Cambodia was better almost 15 years ago. That Germany's
| internet is the mess it is, is purely Germany's fault.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Germany's problem is the EU's problem.
|
| Let me try again: Germany has bad internet because
| Germany is German, not because the EU forces Germany to
| be German.
|
| I agree with the other sentiment you express: that
| Germany's bad German ideas cause problems for the entire
| EU due to Germany's size and influence. France's bad
| French ideas are of the same dumb variety and they also
| cause problems for the entire EU due to France's size and
| influence.
|
| All member states have their favourite dumb ideas. That's
| not much of a problem if they balance out with each
| other. It's a big problem when they don't.
|
| And of course the EU would be better with less German and
| French influence. The EU would also be better if the UK
| could Brenter to counter the Big State and Big Planning
| ideas of not just Germany and France but also Italy,
| Spain, Greece, Portugal, etc. The "Frugal Four" certainly
| can't do it alone.
| danieldk wrote:
| _Broadband via fiber (fine, let 's save money and use VDSL
| for the last mile) is totally doable for the population
| centers._
|
| Why VDSL and why only population centers? 50% of the
| households in The Netherlands have access to fiber internet.
| My parents live in a small village and have fiber (their
| village is about as remote as a remote German village). Heck,
| they are even hooking up farms out in the fields to fiber. It
| just takes some subsidies from the government, but it'll last
| for decades, so it is well worth it.
|
| _In Germany, mobile internet of any speed gets spotty once
| you 're outside of the cities. It's just a sad state of
| affairs._
|
| Internet is just hopelessly behind in Germany. We have lived
| in an economically strong area in Southern Germany. But wired
| broadband was deplorable (slow on paper, even slower and less
| reliable in practice). And mobile internet is not only
| spotty, the pricing is insane. E.g. unlimited 5G was 90 Euro
| per month last time I looked (I pay 25 per month).
| ben_w wrote:
| There are a lot of places with surprisingly poor mobile
| coverage even inside the Berlin city limits.
|
| I think one way Starlink could massively improve the digital
| infrastructure here is to be a demonstration that it's possible
| to be better; the existence proofs of other nations doesn't
| have the same emotional valence as the existence proof of your
| coworker.
| gizmo wrote:
| Serving the inside of a big city via satellite internet is
| ridiculous. Cell towers and fiber are what you want in all
| cities and towns.
| ben_w wrote:
| > ridiculous
|
| I'm suggesting ridicule is necessary, because embarrassment
| is the only way to make the incumbents to do better.
| sys42590 wrote:
| Sounds fantastic, but if we look at the history of the EU's
| Galileo GNSS [0], massive delays can be expected.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There are entire palettes of fantastically sounding plans to be
| found in Brussels. Don't get your hopes up.
| yvdriess wrote:
| Europallettes, yea
| Ambolia wrote:
| Remains to be seen how the German economy evolves and if they
| are going to pay for it, because other EU countries probably
| won't.
| viraptor wrote:
| Do you actually have information about the funding of this
| project or just joining the EU-org-bad crowd? ESA has a
| decent budget + optional projects. Those are agreed fairly
| early too
| https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Funding
|
| Citations welcome.
| permo-w wrote:
| that's not really how the EU works
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Germany has a huge demographic problem and I don't believe
| that the recent influx of Afghans and Syrians is going to
| be a panacea to that, regardless of what the optimists
| claim.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Most europeans countries have worse demographics than
| Japan if you don't count migrants.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| And even worse if you count them. The age distribution is
| not nearly as important as the skills distribution.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| True, but we were speaking about Germany's ability to
| pull economic growth specifically.
|
| Italy won't be saving European economic growth anytime
| soon, possibly ever, even though I actually love Italy.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Italian economy wasn't so bad until they joined the euro.
| The northern part still has decent industry even now.
| usrusr wrote:
| But has it really been only the now-absent lira
| rollercoaster that kept the economy afloat? I'm far from
| convinced that an independent currency would have been a
| decisive advantage in dealing with the economic
| challenges of the recent decades, they might even be in a
| worse position without the euro (not speculating that
| they would, just refusing to take the other outcome as a
| given)
| kwere wrote:
| This is unfortunately a populist trope (here in italy)
| hijacked by no-euro, no-europe, no-nato that need some
| data/debunking:
|
| Italy is economically coasting since the 1980s, basically
| since the termination of QE of Bank Of Italy toward Italy
| Treasure in 1981, and since then politicians struggled to
| finance their banana republic policies resulting also in
| less subsidies that boosted businesses, lowering growth.
| Tangentially Italian business culture is rooted in
| nepotism and old ways of doing things (basket case of low
| trust society), so most of companies stay at a family
| level and new ideas tend to come from family
| members/offsprings. Capitals are mostly obtained through
| lending based on superficial personal connections at
| banks (harder to get financing since 2008) on "clean"
| balancesheets that in some sectors cover less than 50% of
| real revenues (small companies found easier to cheat on
| taxes). R&D expenditures on GDP averaged around 1% since
| 2000.
|
| TLDR: Italy always has been addicted to subsidies and
| stimuluses backed by debt to grow on paper, most
| companies didnt innovate/grow past family businesses in
| semi-informal economy in the last 30-40 years and now the
| overrall economy finds really hard to compete/grow. Plus
| the Pension system is a TITANIC unfunded liability
| similar to social security but already in deficit waiting
| for a gigantic wave of baby boomers to enter pension
| earlier due to whatever populist scheme politicians
| foster (Quota 103, Opzione Donna, etc...). A lot of
| retirees lower also internal consuption, weaking the
| economy further
|
| Regional variance applies, some areas (usually in the
| north) are competitive/dynamic "globally" and others are
| on "life support"
| panick21_ wrote:
| Italy success was largely being a proto-China (or proto-
| Vietnam) before those existed. Basically no respecting
| copy right and producing knock of stuff.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I know, I have been visiting Italy since the 1990s and
| the change is heart-wrenching. It used to be a much more
| dynamic and optimistic country. Now it feels ... drained
| and exhausted.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| There was little demand for non-GPS satnav.
|
| There is plenty of demand for non-Musk satcom.
| sys42590 wrote:
| The whole controversy around Musk is mostly a North American
| topic. I'm pretty sure that most Europeans that were left out
| in the rain regarding useful Internet speeds would love to
| use Starlink (if they can afford it) no matter which crazy
| billionaire owns the satellites.
| ilyt wrote:
| There is demand for good satellite internet.
|
| There is no demand for something more expensive than
| starlink, aside from government stuff and you need consumers
| to support it and not be money pit
| usrusr wrote:
| Exactly: any constellation built with pre-falcon9 rockets
| might be non-Musk, but it won't even be remotely starlink-
| like. They'd inevitably aim for orbits higher than
| "throwaway-LEO" and the much sparser constellations those
| orbits enable (lines of sight less constrained by horizon)
| will cause considerably more latency (far from
| geostationary-bad, but a meaningful quality difference)
| even if the inherent SNR drawbacks were somehow solved. It
| seems quite rational for governments to desire a fallback,
| but it won't ever be more than that and as long as starlink
| is on the market any hope for significant customer
| contribution seems unwarranted.
|
| Without rocket parity to f9, it's just hopeless to get
| meaningful customer contribution as long as starlink
| exists. At least as long as they don't find some miracle
| tech to massively extend VLEO lifetimes (solar powered VLEO
| Bussard jet or something similarly far out), but even with
| that the numbers required would be virtually unachievable
| without an f9 equivalent (it's a somewhat crazy project
| even with the f9!).
|
| They should absolutely go for it, if they consider having a
| starlink fallback worth the investment, but they should
| _really_ not base that decision on illusionary hopes for
| customer contribution.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Amazon basically bought every available heavy lift rocket
| for the next decade in an attempt to compete with
| Starlink.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| For terminally online people, prehaps. But in real life, no,
| people aren't generally obsessed by twitter drama. Real life
| usage is what matters, and if it's good enough for the
| ukrainian army in an active war zone...
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| [flagged]
| dmix wrote:
| They cut off access to military drones... drones which
| will still have access to military satellite data feeds
| from NATO countries. Yet every video posted on Reddit of
| commercial drones used by UA soldiers is still obviously
| using Starlink. Beyond drones it's still a critical
| asset, probably as much or more important than Javelins /
| HIMARs.
|
| This is a PR move, since Starlink is trying to deploy
| globally it doesn't look good when they are supporting a
| military.
|
| Making it _seem_ like you 're ostensibly a civilian org
| is a wise move, while in practice Starlink remains the #1
| technical contribution by a foreign entity supporting the
| war effort.
|
| Of course, what it actually means IRL won't stop the
| people looking for a villain and spreading FUD as if they
| cut off the entire military.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Because Russia might just blow up LEO satellites,
| civilian objects/devices can now be blown up for national
| security reasons, the US recently normalised it with
| their weather/spy balloon saga.
| t43562 wrote:
| It's not good enough for them because Musk seems to be
| limiting its use in line with his political views.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I'm out of the loop on that one, what are you referring
| to?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| He's referring to the fact that SpaceX are trying to
| abide by weapons export restrictions, so they are trying
| to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink from drones etc.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Do we need satcom if we have good enough terrestrial
| communications? EU is reasonably densely populated. So why
| just not go with simpler and maybe even cheaper terrestrial
| solutions?
| adolph wrote:
| _With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but
| the EU didn't have something to offer. Ukraine should not have to
| rely on the whims of Elon Musk to defend their people._
|
| What a weird reason to undertake such a project. Ukraine isn't an
| EU member.
| scotty79 wrote:
| But providing support to Ukraine is EU business. And who knows
| what will be the member and buisnesses of EU in 4 years. Better
| to be ready.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| I guess this is the near term reason, but the main motive for
| the EU to set up their own satellite positioning system
| Gallileo was because GPS is under the whims of US military and
| may not be available to even US allies under emergency
| circumstances. They want critical infrastructure without
| relying on an external entity be it the US military or Elon
| Musk.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why this infatuation with low Earth orbit? Why not put just few
| satelites further out, like every other satellite internet
| provide does except starlink?
|
| EDIT:
|
| To people bringing up latency. Far away satellite has them far
| enough that they cover large area so the signal goes to satellite
| and back and that's it. Distance introduces latency.
|
| But in case of constallation packet must bounce through multiple
| satellites and/or ground stations to arrive at the target so that
| introduces latency too. So it's usually not great either.
| mhandley wrote:
| Starlink originally planned to put their first shell at 1100 km
| altitude. They changed to 550km for several reasons. First,
| because it offered slightly reduced latency. Second, so long as
| you launch enough satellites, the reduced coverage region for
| each satellite is offset by having more satellites and hence
| (other things being equal) more bandwidth per area of land.
| Third, satellites at 550 km will naturally deorbit in a few
| years if something fails. So although they plan to actively
| deorbit the first satellites after 6 or 7 years to replace them
| with newer ones, if they get something wrong and have a lot of
| satellite failures, they really won't cause a long term
| problem. At 1100 km the orbit won't decay for centuries. If you
| have satellites fail, the rest of the constellation will be
| doing avoidance maneouvers for a very long time. Thus if your
| launch costs are low enough and you can mast produce satellites
| cheap enough, you want them as low as possible. Somewhere
| around 500 km is about as low as you want to go, before too
| much of the satellite mass ends up being fuel to maintain
| orbit.
| 58028641 wrote:
| Doesn't that have higher latency (further distance) and lower
| speeds (more users per satellite)?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Latency
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| latency.
| drewg123 wrote:
| According to https://frankrayal.com/2021/07/07/latency-in-leo-
| satellites-..., GEO has about 20x the latency of LEO.
|
| I think this is why starlink is so much more usable than
| traditional satellite internet.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Yeah but in constallation packets need to bounce of few
| satellites and ground station so all these steps introduce
| additional latency.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Good luck, not sure $2B is enough though...
| GeertB wrote:
| The new satellites will orbit the EU.
| karmakaze wrote:
| So it seems that each group of nations needs/wants physical
| networks because it's not enough to use encrypted communication
| on others'. How many is enough, 3, 4, more?
|
| Is this solvable with a single network? e.g. Is there a way of
| anonymizing users of a network preventing discrimination,
| analogous to cryptocurrency?
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'm not sure encryption really solves the root issue that is
| autonomy.
| playingalong wrote:
| Confidentiality is not enough to claim Security. You also need
| Availability.
| kensai wrote:
| There is always bashing if there is something about the EU and
| its national projects, not always deserved. However sometimes I
| wished HN showed more of local projects. For example: has there
| been a post about the European AI?
|
| https://www.aleph-alpha.com/
| js4ever wrote:
| Maybe because it's always in response to, and generally a
| failed copy costing billions to Europeans because of
| bureaucrats?
| wafngar wrote:
| US has no bureaucrats? All the EU member states, no
| bureaucrats? How many projects in member states cost the tax
| payer billions? Btw the EU budget is tiny in comparison.
| permo-w wrote:
| "because of bureaucrats". with such a nuanced justification,
| perhaps you should consider the solidity of your position
| waihtis wrote:
| Bureaucrats -> Horizon and the other incredibly murky EU
| funding programs that a good bunch of these projects come
| from, with the "businesses" ending up only having the
| lifespan of whatever runway they have been able to build
| with EU funding
|
| I presume thats the gripe with a lot of these "EU"
| technologies
| sergiomattei wrote:
| And that's very different from all the startup grants
| every other country does?
| jevgeni wrote:
| Or maybe it's because HN crowd parrot the same groupthink
| like reddit? /s
| eastbound wrote:
| or we need a European chip manufacturer, so we take the most
| pathetic legacy brand around, and give it billions to build
| chips from the old generation. Oh, hi Intel!
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Any examples you'd care to elaborate about?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Galileo might be a good example to discuss in this context.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Are you talking about the satellite navigation system
| that's been usable and widely used for about a decade?
| The one that gives location data ten times more precise
| than GPS (1m vs 10m)? That's a "failed copy costing
| billions to Europeans"? Really?
| betaby wrote:
| Galileo was down for 5 days in a row in 2019. I won't go
| in to the details of other issues of, for that Bert
| Hubert's blog is a good start.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Now that's an indictment! One major outage in nearly a
| decade. Better write off the whole programme as a waste
| of money.
|
| Meanwhile the whole US government gets shut down
| seemingly every other year.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Are you sure you're writing from an informed perspective?
| Galileo holds a LOT of expensive, time-consuming lessons
| that this project will do well to absorb. Outages are
| only scratching the surface.
|
| You'll note that I didn't say "Galileo sucks," or "those
| guys are morons," or that there was no reason to build
| it. But the fact that it took longer to commission than
| the original NAVSTAR GPS system doesn't augur well for a
| Starlink clone. Which, in any event, will probably be so
| highly regulated and censored that it will be more like
| an orbital Minitel than a conventional ISP.
| betaby wrote:
| Are we still on the satellite communications subject?
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Yes, we are. Why?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Because GPS has never been shut down, to my knowledge.
| uoaei wrote:
| Can you be more specific on how exactly this one-
| dimensional evaluation of a resolved issue contributes to
| your argument?
| bryik wrote:
| Has GPS ever experienced a major outage in its ~30 years
| of operation?
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Not that I know of. What's your point?
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| kypro wrote:
| This article and your link reek of, "but Europe can do it too".
|
| I don't know why the EU / Europe can't just do interesting
| things without coming across as so desperate to prove something
| - can we not just start a cool AI company without branding it a
| "European AI company", as if that's something so unlikely we
| should be proud of it?
|
| An AI company started by kids would be something worth noting,
| an AI company started by the world's most prosperous and well
| educated continent is kinda cringy. I can't think of a single
| American company which does this.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| It's honestly got to the point where I barely open comments
| related to EU projects any more. While most of the time there's
| somewhat nuanced discussions in comments, once the EU gets
| mentioned for some reason most of the comments basically boil
| down to "EU bad, US better", and "Big government bad",
| completely ignoring the actual contents of what the post it
| about.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Not all too different from Europeans smugly commenting about
| how crazy Americans are for having different priorities in
| threads that happen to relate to American issues.
| uoaei wrote:
| In my experience, criticism of the US is of the "this is
| clearly harming more people than it helps" variety, while
| criticism of the EU is of the "look at what these silly
| people are trying to provide as a service to their
| citizens" variety.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Nah criticism from Europeans generally comes down, "look
| at dumb Americans doing things differently than us, don't
| they know we're objectively right about political and
| economic institutions?"
| returningfory2 wrote:
| So glad to see someone pointing out this phenomenon!
| peterashford wrote:
| As a third party (New Zealander), I don't think that's
| correct. I think the US criticism of EU is much more often
| baseless compared to the reverse situation (as evidenced by
| the number of issues which are picked up by the residents
| of non aligned countries).
| eethawkey wrote:
| Also as a New Zealander - I think the opposite - EU
| criticism of the US really misses many points about the
| competitiveness of their society and burden they bear
| protecting the rest of the world's democracies. I think
| it is really about people's personal politics - Kiwis
| generally are much more aligned (left) with EU
| socialism/interventionism and hence relate more and see
| US criticism as baseless. It's all a matter of
| perspective & personal politics vs one side being more
| baseless than the other.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| As a USian, I think it is super important to question a
| super power that takes it upon themselves to protect the
| rest of the world's democracies--even if they have to
| force them into democracy first.
|
| The same way I think it is super important to challenge
| Russia's current defense against Ukrainian aggression.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| "burden they bear protecting the rest of the world's
| democracies"
|
| As an Australian, that's a pretty glowing interpretation
| of the US intervening where they aren't wanted or needed
|
| Was the US protecting 'democracy' when they annexed
| Hawaii, or how they've treated Cuba? Or Vietnam or South
| America or Iraq or any litany of other countries
|
| Hell. They helped depose Gough Whitlam because he dared
| threaten to nationalize our mines ala Norway, not to
| mention that worthless spying ring that is Pine Gap
| edgyquant wrote:
| You're completely disregarding that they're talking about
| the US being the armed forces of all western democracies
| and strawmanning about 19th-early 20th century
| imperialism (which Western Europe took part in far more
| than the US did.)
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite a
| entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max, which
| was never explored under this focus. Why does European airbus
| thrive, while us aircraft industry declined? Both are heavily
| state subsidized, so it is not that. There is something
| dysfunctional in us business culture, that extracts value
| first, and then runs without creating something for the value
| extracted.
|
| It sometimes is almost reminiscent of the eastern European
| oligarchs that emerged at the end of the coldwar.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I can't comment on the broader US/EU perception question,
| but I would partly attribute Airbus' success to its
| harnessing of smaller scale engineering excellence always
| present in Western European aviation. Airbus merely solved
| the problem of risk of high scale production which has
| historically been a challenge for European manufacturers
| relative to Americans operating in their large, uniform
| market.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> There is something dysfunctional in us business culture,
| that extracts value first,
|
| You just said it. When we prioritize the money over the
| activity that makes the money... We deprioritize the
| activity - it's at least second place if not worse.
| flangola7 wrote:
| If there was a machine that increased a company's stock
| value by crushing orphans invented today, tomorrow there
| would be lobbyists in Congress pushing to allow
| corporations to directly apply for adoptions.
| eethawkey wrote:
| Way to cherrypick - A380 wasn't exactly a masterpiece in
| economics. Should we discuss Airbus/Araine?
| kazen44 wrote:
| not being a masterpiece in economics is not on the same
| scale as building an aircraft which is technically simply
| unfit to fly.
|
| Sure, you can make bad bussiness decisions but this
| doesn't mean you cannot build proper airplanes.
| jasmer wrote:
| And Volskwagen cheating on it's emissions?
|
| This is bit of a glib view of Boeing.
|
| Boeng and Airbus will trade spaces for a while, until China
| starts stelling it's gear at 1/2 the price and then we will
| see some material changes.
| belltaco wrote:
| >A crowd that is ideological resistant to reality in quite
| a entertaining fashion. Just remember the Boing 737 Max,
| which was never explored under this focus.
|
| Boeing was heavily criticized by HN in every thread I saw
| about it. You picked a wrong example.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think pointing out Airbus is a bit questionable. Yes
| Airbus does well now, but Europe tried to do these kinds of
| things in many different places and most of them didn't end
| up so well.
|
| And at the same time, if we stay within Aerospace, why is
| SpaceX utterly dominating anything from Europe. Is US
| business culture to blame?
| emilburzo wrote:
| > Why does European airbus thrive, while us aircraft
| industry declined?
|
| The documentary "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing"[1] goes
| into this topic, and I believe the wiki page[2] summary
| captures it nicely:
|
| > "There were many decades when Boeing did extraordinary
| things by focusing on excellence and safety and ingenuity.
| Those three virtues were seen as the key to profit. It
| could work, and beautifully. And then they were taken over
| by a group that decided Wall Street was the end-all, be-
| all. [...]"
|
| Of course, I have no idea if this is just cherry-picking
| information, but it does seem plausible why things
| "suddenly" changed.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Agains
| t_Boe...
| ginko wrote:
| I've heard one theory that the merger with McDonnell
| Douglas swept the bean-counters from there into executive
| positions ruining the engineering focus at Boeing.
| karmakaze wrote:
| That's what I read and understood to be the cause. Prior
| to that Boeing had an engineering culture all the way up.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| The Microsoft spreadsheet happy-hippos are relying on
| India to buy enormous sums of Boeing passenger planes is
| one headline the media is running with, and another line
| of propaganda is to not bet against India. They say.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| the comments basically boil down to "EU bad, US better"
|
| Nothing stops the EU from landing a probe on the surface of
| Mars, successfully.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Outside of the whole issue of Russia invading Ukraine
| instead of launching the damn thing like they were supposed
| to:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)
|
| Oh well, one way to avoid it crashing I guess. ;-)
|
| Still, Europe being responsible for Mars having _two_
| Shapirelli craters is cool as well. ;-)
| atoav wrote:
| I can't shake the feeling you have been baited
| successfully.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| The odd part is that these bad takes seem to typically come
| from people that don't even live the EU, and don't understand
| how it works.
|
| They just don't like that it exists.
| lokar wrote:
| Extreme individualism and libertarianism is an extremely
| seductive ideology. Its simplicity and self-justification
| is very appealing to many HN posters. Most of them will
| grow out of it eventually.
| generalizations wrote:
| > Most of them will grow out of it eventually.
|
| On the other hand, condescension is harder to grow out
| of.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| You're right, they will never grow out of it.
| briantakita wrote:
| Pot, meet kettle...seriously though, I don't think many
| people are inclined to "grow out of" advocating for their
| own self interests by giving up their freedoms to the
| state/bureaucracy. As long as there are power dynamics,
| those on the lower rungs will dare to annoy those on the
| higher rungs by sticking up for themselves...and vice
| versa
|
| Perhaps you meant "they will eventually sell their soul"
| instead?
| alright_scowl wrote:
| Are you implying I gave up freedoms to state/bureaucracy?
|
| Which freedoms did I give up, exactly?
| briantakita wrote:
| [flagged]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Banderite Nazis"
|
| For the record, this is a standard Russian talking point.
| Stepan Bandera was a nationalist Ukrainian leader and his
| remembrance is one of the reasons why Russian propaganda
| now paints Ukraine as Nazified.
|
| "War is terrible."
|
| Indeed, and being absorbed into the Russian World is even
| more terrible. I get it, the Kremlin isn't exactly
| winning on the battlefield right now, so it tries to
| undermine the will to fight among its opponents. Nazis,
| Peace Now etc., the standard Russian word salad.
|
| No, you are not getting Ukraine, forget it. That invasion
| was a bridge too far and Russia will lose badly. Good. I
| will never forget nor forgive the Soviet rape of
| Czechoslovakia in 1968, but Russian defeat in the
| Ukrainian war will at least somewhat soothe the
| bitterness.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| > There are many concerns about giving a centralized
| authority more power
|
| > Also, since the EU is a vassal of Pax Americana
|
| So the problem is giving a centralized authority (EU)
| more power. At the same time the EU is a vassal of the US
| (Pax America, which is a fairly ridiculous notion in and
| of itself).
|
| I can only conclude from the horrible word salad you gave
| me that individual member states without the EU would
| also be vassals of the US, which is itself a centralized
| power. So the EU existence, following your logic, is
| inconsequential.
|
| Your thoughts were mildly entertaining to parse through.
| Sorry for not giving credence to your thoughts beyond
| mere entertainment however.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > So the problem is giving a centralized authority (EU)
| more power. At the same time the EU is a vassal of the US
|
| Yeah, cognitive dissonance is strong with this one
| briantakita wrote:
| > EU is a vassal of the US (Pax America, which is a
| fairly ridiculous notion in and of itself).
|
| You don't believe me? Perhaps Pax Americana needs to blow
| up another one of Europe's oil pipelines to remind you...
|
| I wonder how long the sycophantic politicians can keep up
| the act before the freezing & unemployed citizens notice.
|
| Here's a word of advice though, don't give the Nazis too
| many weapons. It may end up in a bad situation. They may
| hate Putin today, but tomorrow their prerogatives may
| change...
| nerdbert wrote:
| > Perhaps Pax Americana needs to blow up another one of
| Europe's oil pipelines
|
| Does "pax" in Freedom Latin mean the same thing that it
| does in traditional Latin?
| zzzeek wrote:
| > Extreme individualism and libertarianism is an
| extremely seductive ideology. Its simplicity and self-
| justification is very appealing to many HN posters.
|
| yes!
|
| > Most of them will grow out of it eventually.
|
| not if PG has his way
| permo-w wrote:
| is that odd? it doesn't seem surprising to me that
| Americans would think USA good EU bad
| alright_scowl wrote:
| Forgive me for not taking their opinion about an economic
| block that they don't seem to understand and that their
| country doesn't belong to very seriously.
| permo-w wrote:
| if I was suggesting that they're right to criticise the
| EU, I would have said that. what I was suggesting was
| that "America number 1, everyone else turds" is an
| extremely normal and expected attitude for a lot of
| Americans, and not something that I would describe as
| "odd". you seem to have read it differently
| peterashford wrote:
| I guess the question is, is that level of response what
| one would expect or hope for in a forum like HN? Maybe we
| could aspire to a better level of discourse?
| drstewart wrote:
| Funny cause Europeans always think their opinions of the
| US should be taken very seriously, and they have a lot of
| them
| alright_scowl wrote:
| Funny, do they? I don't participate in threads about the
| US and its policies, so I wouldn't be able to tell.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Well, as someone who has lived in various parts of the
| U.S (mainly Utah, Oregon and Northern California), as
| well as Germany, Denmark, and is married to an Italian:
| Germans, Danes, and Italians often have a lot of
| cursorily formed opinions of the U.S, while in the U.S if
| people have strong opinions about the EU (and not actual
| familiarity) they are often not just wrong or stupid but
| also just as often completely unhinged from reality.
|
| I'm guessing this is due to stupidity manifesting in
| different ways in their respective regions.
| Oxidation wrote:
| > completely unhinged from reality
|
| Like apparently the UK bring a knife-ridden crime
| epicentre, when the knife-crime rate is, while
| unacceptably high, actually rather _lower_ than the US,
| and that 's before you consider guns which are about 10
| times more on top of that.
|
| (And let's please at least pretend that the UK is still
| in the EU for argument's sake :)
| uoaei wrote:
| It is odd that you believe citizenship demands some kind
| of absolutist factionalism that is not just felt but
| continually reinforced using all available media
| channels.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The EU is a major world power, like the US and China, which
| means everyone in the world will have opinions about them,
| of every level of informedness :)
|
| The US is used to this. The EU still have to adjust.
| 988747 wrote:
| I live in the EU, understand how it works, and that's why I
| hate it, and I want my country out of it ASAP :)
| alright_scowl wrote:
| I think the benefits far outweigh the downsides. To be
| frank, I think a big chunk of its problems is that it is
| not integrated enough.
|
| Then again, my perspective is from someone not originally
| from Europe, that chose to migrate here and declined job
| offers from the US even though I would receive
| considerably more money had I accepted. I have zero
| regrets, by the way.
|
| So take my opinion as one without the social nuance from
| someone born here.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think many of the benefits could be achieved with
| better methods, other then putting a French style barley
| democratic bureaucracy on top of all existing
| democracies.
|
| The reality is also that almost non of the people in the
| countries were actually asked if they wanted to join.
|
| There is a difference between being pro European
| integration and pro existing EU structure.
| kazen44 wrote:
| how where people not asked if they wanted to join?
|
| mind you, European integration is a major political
| pillar in national politics of basically all countries
| inside of europe and its periphery.
|
| People vote on parties based on there political program,
| and most people seem to want to vast economic benefits
| being a member states brings. (heck, ukraine is basically
| fighting a war at the moment about an issue which
| basically boils down to European integration).
|
| People definetly had a say if they wanted EU membership
| through the political process of there country.
|
| The only case where this is a bit of a grey area is of
| the founding countries of the precursor of the EU.
| (european community of coal and steel). Most of those
| measures got passed as policy without a lot of democratic
| process by the populance.
|
| But we cannot change the past, and considering the state
| of most of europe during the 1950's i wouldn't judge them
| so harshly for it.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| How exactly is it just "barely" democratic?
| peyton wrote:
| I think most Americans have literally no opinions about
| the EU. I've always assumed anybody talking about it
| lives there. It's virtually absent from our lives here.
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm American and my opinion is EU good. Also euro
| expanding east bad; single currency for radically
| different economies doesn't work out well in theory and
| practice, ends up saddling everyone with a lot of debt
| since inflation in just Greece isn't an option for
| France.
| wafngar wrote:
| What concrete advantage would it have for you?
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| hkt wrote:
| As a British person, I'd suggest you reconsider. Things
| over here are not so rosy. Drugs shortages, crazy
| inflation, no discernible benefits at all except to a
| government that hates judicial oversight of any kind.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Drugs shortages, crazy inflation"
|
| Sounds precisely like Czechia right now.
| jonititan wrote:
| The fact is not everything was the EU's fault. There was
| a lot Westminster could have done to make things better.
| They choose not to and indeed actually gold plated many
| EU directives due to virtue signaling which made them
| much more difficult to follow.
|
| That said not all the good stuff actually was caused by
| the EU either. I'd recommend watching Yes Minister but
| apparently that will get you put on a watchlist these
| days... https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1153
| smh/yes_min...
|
| The fact is politicians at all levels including EU take
| credit for things they didn't do and try to ignore the
| fallout from things they did. All the while blaming the
| voters. Mainly because changing public perception of
| policy choices takes time and effort and they have
| limited of both and tend to want to focus on things they
| actually care about.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The UK has been doing a bad job at a lot of things and
| they ended up blamed the EU. Now all the problems are
| blamed by the opposition on leaving the EU.
|
| The reality is that most of the UKs problems were not
| because of the EU before and are not because they left
| the UK now.
| dageshi wrote:
| I think inflation in the EU is roughly at the same level
| as the UK right now.
|
| edit: apparently this is a controversial statement
| weberer wrote:
| Its actually higher than in the UK.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-
| rate?con...
| TheNotToo wrote:
| I see Sweden the "utopia" that some claim has even higher
| inflation than UK, I guess that must be because of Brexit
| too right? And Italy, the land of the great food?
| wafngar wrote:
| The UK would do much better had they not chosen Brexit.
| Basically everyone here admits that (bank of England etc)
| apart from some zealot politicians. And the health system
| has collapsed. The problems are not solely caused by
| Brexit but it exacerbates nearly all of them.
| TheNotToo wrote:
| Can you share more about this 'drug shortage'? Is it like
| the empty shop shelves and empty fuel pumps that is
| claimed to still exist for years now despite being
| resolved within days/weeks at the time?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IDK about the UK, but in Czechia, we had a shortage of,
| among others, antibiotics, only very recently alleviated.
|
| At the worst times, you could phone to thirty pharmacies
| with a relatively standard recipe (Augmentin etc.) and be
| turned away everywhere.
|
| Been there, done that.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Also Stable Diffusion is made by a German organization:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion
| hef19898 wrote:
| TIL!
| [deleted]
| mardifoufs wrote:
| This is a bit crazy to me since it seems like there is a
| constant, almost never ending praise for everything related to
| Europe here. But I totally get that it's probably a difference
| in what topic we browse and what comments we read, so your
| experience is just as valid. I guess it's just surprising to
| me!
| permo-w wrote:
| that's strange. every EU-related thread I've ever seen has
| had highly ranked comments poo-pooing whatever it is they're
| planning to do.
|
| what's your position on the EU? perhaps I notice the negative
| comments more because I'm very pro-EU, and vv for you?
| Pungsnigel wrote:
| Well EU != Europe for one. I'm positive to Europe, (mostly)
| negative on EU. Could be you are both right.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think the EU is ultimately the best option for
| europeans.Though I also think that it will always be prone
| to making super weird or counterproductive decisions by
| design (steering a ship with 27 different rudders will
| always be hard).
|
| I guess I have a generally slightly negative opinion of
| Europe (or more accurately, of the portrayal of Europe I
| generally see online), having lived there for a little
| while. I guess it's that I honestly see a lot, lot more of
| harsh america bashing than criticism of europe. But
| ultimately, I'm a bit of an outsider to both the US and
| Europe and it might be that the constant, louder "america
| bad" makes eu bashing less apparent to me.
| dmix wrote:
| You're surprised a headline like "The EU's Response to Musk's
| Starlink" from "reneweuropegroup.eu" [1] stirs up nationalistic
| mud flinging?
|
| It's silly to blame HN for this. This sort of headline is just
| asking for the conversation to be derailed. Which is exactly
| why your comment is #1 and the comments below it are quickly
| derailing into it's own version of EU vs US.
|
| [1] which is apparently a political group's website
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renew_Europe
| mi_lk wrote:
| I mean... DeepMind has its fair share of AI exposure
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I don't like putting more junk into LEO than we absolutely have
| to because it disrupts our space telescopes (which the EU has
| also invested over 1 billion euro in). I much rather have the
| funding go to improving land based internet infrastructure.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Putting more junk in LEO is a serious problem but SpaceX
| started this and now others will also enter the market. Why
| should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high
| bandwidth SATCOM market?
| RedShift1 wrote:
| > Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high
| bandwidth SATCOM market?
|
| I agree, but those satellites shouldn't have been there to
| begin with in my opinion. But it's too late now.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Why should the not be there? They are in an orbit that has
| essentially 0 practical chance at causing long term harm.
| They provide a service that is clearly very useful.
| baq wrote:
| Genie is out of the bottle. DOD has seen Starlink in a real
| hot war and they _love it_. The constellation has become a
| national security asset. If it disappears, Pentagon will
| pay for another one.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Is there serious talk about launching one? They honestly
| should.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are many. Lots of other large constellations being
| planned. Some from former GEO companies. Amazon. DoD is
| doing its own as well.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Why should Starlink have monopolistic control over the high
| bandwidth SATCOM market?
|
| They don't. There are other satellite internet providers they
| just don't use LEO constallations.
| kstenerud wrote:
| I'd much rather have available-everywhere internet whose use
| isn't subject to one rich man's whims and ideologies.
| deeviant wrote:
| I'm a very big fan of astronomy, but I can't seem to care at
| all about satellites blocking terrestrial telescopes.
| Ubiquitous connectivity is simply a larger concern than land
| based telescopes.
|
| Further, space based telescopes seem to be the future of the
| discipline. While land based radio telescopes are less effected
| by satellites.
|
| A bigger concern is Kepler syndrome, but that threat seems
| minimal in LEO.
| coder543 wrote:
| Kessler syndome, not Kepler, just FYI
| deeviant wrote:
| Yes, thank you. Too late to edit =/
| rtkwe wrote:
| Land based will have an important role to play for a long
| time simply because we can easily service, upgrade and design
| new experiments for them which for a long time isn't going to
| be easy for space telescopes.
| frankreyes wrote:
| The whole point of Starlink is that it's economically
| unfeasible to reach everywhere. Specially in rural areas,
| neither cables, fiber optics or 5G will make it. Keep wasting
| money in Europe.
| doubleg72 wrote:
| [flagged]
| shkkmo wrote:
| There are all kinds of hurdles to running fiber. Even if
| you eliminated them, running power to remote properties is
| also expensive. If we had the ability to beam power from
| orbit to a relatively inexpensive dish, that would be even
| more revolutionary than StarLink.
|
| Your name calling is inappropriate, please keep your
| discourse more productive.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| If there is a point to bring electricity into a village, then
| there is a point to bring there also a fiber.
| frankreyes wrote:
| Infrastructure has to be self financed otherwise it's a
| waste of resources. That's why rural areas do not have
| internet. It fails every time
| doubleg72 wrote:
| This is a rather stupid comment.. so all public utilities
| are failed, wasted resources?
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| By this logic they should not have electricity and water
| pipes as well.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| I don't know where you live, but in most of Europe, rural
| areas have internet too. It doesn't "fail every time".
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| There aren't really any rural areas in Europe, by
| American standards.
| uoaei wrote:
| I think you should review the definition of "rural" then.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Barely any infrastructure is self financed, anywhere.
| jevgeni wrote:
| Land based internet infrastructure doesn't solve the problem
| described in the article.
|
| Specifically:
|
| > It will secure the Union's sovereignty and autonomy by
| guaranteeing fewer dependencies on third-country
| infrastructure, and the provision of secured telecommunications
| services for EU governments in critical scenarios where
| terrestrial networks are absent or disrupted, as observed, for
| instance, in the unfolding war in Ukraine.
| wcoenen wrote:
| In a large enough war, space infrastructure would actually be
| very vulnerable. Imagine a cloud of a few tons of shrapnel,
| spread around in an orbit that intersects all the 550km
| orbits of the Starlink constellation. This shrapnel cloud
| could be deployed with a single launch.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Actually deploying that stuff in a single launch isn't that
| easy. And we have to remember how large orbits are. And how
| sats can change them.
|
| Putting sufficient material into all necessary orbits to
| seriously damage Starlink would be incredibly difficult.
|
| And if its just shrapnel a single hit threw the solar panel
| might not destroy the sat either.
| frankreyes wrote:
| It's not that simple. Because enemy nation states also have
| their own satellites. They will just be damaging their own
| infrastructure, specially Russia with their huge land to
| cover they need their satellites.
| wcoenen wrote:
| I think these things would happen as a result of a
| process of escalations, not as a result of rational
| decisions.
|
| Perhaps one side temporarily blinds a spy satellite with
| a laser[1], to prevent it from observing something
| sensitive. Then the other side reacts by blinding another
| satellite in the same way, but oops, the laser was a bit
| too powerful and it does permanent damage to the sensors.
| Then a single satellite is outright destroyed in
| retaliation. Etcetera.
|
| [1] https://theconversation.com/russians-reportedly-
| building-a-s...
| jevgeni wrote:
| So the solution is to either do nothing, or do something
| that the russians will have even less trouble destroying?
| wcoenen wrote:
| The solution, I think, would be to have redundant
| terrestrial communication links. A spiderweb of links
| between nodes, with routing around damage. And fallbacks
| to slower microwave or radio links when fiber gets cut.
| And developing plans to make due with very low bandwidth
| (i.e. text based protocols) during a crisis.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I agree, but in the capitalistic economy that we unfortunately
| live in, competition is the only thing that will lower prices.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Competition is almost the only thing that has ever lowered
| prices, raised wages, raised quality and invented new things.
| It's weird to demonise competition.
| WithinReason wrote:
| The satellite orbits decay, they don't stay up indefinitely
| defrost wrote:
| There are 10s of thousands planned and other companies eager
| to put up their own constellations.
|
| Those that fall are planned to fall and to be replaced .. the
| issue is that are now thousands (and will be more) sats in
| LEO orbits polluting the night sky with both visible light
| and transmission spectra energy.
|
| Doesn't matter much to those that live in cities and can't
| see the stars in any case .. but it's a blight to those that
| formally had clear skys, and to both visible and radio
| spectrum astronomers.
| WithinReason wrote:
| They are not visible to people when the satellites are in
| the shadow of the Earth (at night)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are not visible to people when the satellites are in
| the shadow of the Earth (at night)_
|
| Night is altitude dependent. Satellites can be in
| sunlight while the ground below is pitch black. (That
| said, I find the complaints about visual pollution
| silly.)
| defrost wrote:
| Out of interest, where do you live on the light polltion
| map [1], Bortle scale [2]?
|
| Do you have any sense of what you're missing out on or
| how bright and distracting tens of thousands of LEO sats
| glinting in the sun are, or to what degree they mess up
| long exposure visible astronomy shots, or the noise they
| make for radio astronomy?
|
| I have no issue believing that you find "complaints about
| visual pollution silly" .. I'm guessing that would be
| because it has zero impact on you.
|
| [1] https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I live in Bortle class 3 and I don't notice more
| satellites now when star gazing then I remember 10 years
| ago.
|
| The hundreds of starlink satellites are totally invisible
| to me, except sometimes right after launch.
|
| A starlink satellite train is amazing to watch and I'd
| love to see it a few more times.
|
| EDIT The light pollution that really bothers me is the
| terrestrial light pollution. There's several cities
| within an hours drive of me, and they make such a large
| glow in the sky.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _where do you live on the light polltion map_
|
| Class 2. I can just appreciate the night sky with
| satellites in it. (They're fun to watch.)
|
| > _to what degree they mess up long exposure visible
| astronomy shots, or the noise they make for radio
| astronomy_
|
| One is a luxury pass-time. For the other, there are
| workarounds.
| j_san wrote:
| I'm european and dont like thousands of satelites swirrling
| around in the sky as well but I'd rather have government-
| founded satelites for the public benefit than from some way-
| too-rich sociopath's private company.
|
| Of course - this project would probably not exist without
| Starlink, so credit where credit is due.
|
| Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the night
| sky in the sense that before these projects people could look
| in the sky and know that all humans before them had more or
| less the same sight. Now there are just so many satellites
| swirling around in your sight. I find that quite sad.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Personally I find it quite sad that we're destroying the
| night sky
|
| That's not actually a thing.
|
| > Now there are just so many satellites swirling around in
| your sight. I find that quite sad.
|
| Except 99.9% of the time you can't see any of them. So for
| 99.9999% of people who don't do advanced space photography
| the night sky looks like it has always looked.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| > some way-too-rich sociopath's private company.
|
| I am certainly you've developed this view in November of
| 2022. Meanwhile any European stuck with DSL - which would be
| most of my family - would be ecstatic to get sensible
| bandwidth today.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Musk has been proving he's a danger to society for the
| better part of the last ten years.
| dminik wrote:
| There's a few comments in this thread from self proclaimed
| Europeans, but this one is the weirdest. The internet
| infrastructure here is great. I haven't seen a sub 10mbps
| offering in years (with 100mbps being fairly common). The
| only spotty places are small villages (which is a rather
| common theme everywhere). Europeans aren't stuck with DSL.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Where is "here"? There are plenty of places in Europe
| with mediocre Internet infrastructure. It is not
| universally "great" by any measure.
| scotty79 wrote:
| So pressure your governments so that they invest in
| infrastructure either directly of by incentivising
| private companies while keeping them in competition with
| each other. Even some poor European countries have
| amazing internet connectivity right now.
| sgc wrote:
| And yet, it does not matter when anybody became aware, but
| when it became a real problem.
|
| Further, one can make use of a service or product today,
| and still be happy that there are better alternatives in
| the pipeline. I am certain that is how many Tesla owners
| view their vehicles, for example.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't like putting out huge amount of objects on any orbit
| because if they collide bits of them might spread to any orbit
| depending on the size of chunks and exact collision geometry.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is vastly overestimated problem. Changing orbits takes a
| lot of energy and most of these crashes don't have enough to
| put significant materials in a significant different orbit.
|
| If something is already on an orbit that decades within a
| decade or so, it still will.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If two things collide heads on there's decent probability
| of some chunks going twice as fast and twice as fast is 4
| times the energy which means way higher orbit.
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