That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership.
On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers.
Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation.
If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding.
Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
It's unfair that in your country you decide nobody should have to work more than a certain amount, and then you make other people work more than that amount in a different country instead, yes.
So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?
Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.
Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.
It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.
What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.
Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.
I remember during communism, how The Party was loudly condemning anything coming from the “decadent capitalism”. Meanwhile, the youth was busy wearing bluejeans and listening to rock and roll.
People are always able to recognize those providing value versus the ideologues…
Except here we’re talking about data connections beamed from outer space to our phones anywhere on Earth by a private enterprise, not some gigantic bureaucracy starving its citizens to build a bigger monument to its ideology in a dick-measuring contest with another State.
Saved money are also injected back into the economy. They aren’t stored under the mattress. They are in banks, where they are lent out, spent and invested, creating jobs, buying goods and services.
You're only 1/3 right. Saved money isn't lent, nor spent (lending is just creating money). It's invested, 95% in the secondary market (probably more in the US). If the secondary market isn't correlated to actual production (and nowadays, it actually isn't, even in mining, prospecting and future are the main beneficiaries, which to me is crazy. One of the only exceptions is the energy sector), that money won't create real jobs.
Re-invest in crypto or other, already-existing stocks.
The secondary market is so huge nowadays, and uncorrelated from dividends, mainly because growth (followed by regular buybacks), not dividends, is now the main way to pay investors, but not only. In fact, what Jacques Richard call "futuristic accounting" (his research is available in english [0]) is basically helping big companies to decorrelate real profits from dividends.
> Re-invest in crypto or other, already-existing stocks.
Again, for a stock to be on the market, somebody has to do the economic activity to create & bring it there. Buying from that "someone" pumps the money back in the economy. Buying from another, previous, stocks owner just moves the situation to him.
Kind of like when you pay your retailer for the product on the shelf: there are certain delays but eventually the money has to reach the product builder, with each participant in the production & logistics chain keeping his share on the way.
This is simple, trivial logic and no amount of biased, ideological "research" can change it.
You're right, eventually an investor exit his position to buy newly issued shares or obligations, which in theory should be used to increase production.
What I'm saying is twofold: most of the money is invested in purely financial products, not production. Two examples: I'm not against futures, I think it's a good idea to stabilise farmers income. But when you have twice as much money in futures, twice as much investments in agritech, and the same agricultural output, can I say that money had no impact in production? Also,just look at the state of mining companies, or rather, where new money is invested. A lot is in new prospecting companies with 'AI' or 'blockchain' in their website. In the same time, new mines open less frequently, despite a huge increase in investment. Am I allowed to say that investment in this sector is decorrelated from actual production?
That's my first point. My second was that the new accounting 'technique' (futuristic accounting) used by some companies (PE, but probably others) is used to issue dividends uncorrelated from profit (thus uncorrelated from production).
Also I don't want to enter a boxing match, just confronting point of views, and I don't care that you didn't read about the specific of futuristic accounting, it's about accounting, I understand. But don't call ideological something you did not read next time.
The only point I am addressing here is the claim that invested money is not injected back in the economy.
Where exactly do you think invested money goes, if not in economy? Please be specific. Give concrete examples.
No boxing match, just trying to understand your point. I know nothing about mining sector and I have no clue what the connection with your “futuristic accounting” is.
The exact same argument, that Trump voters were “influenced” by algos, can be made that anti-Trump voters were influenced by mainstream media or whatever.
So you either believe that people have agency and actually decide for themselves, or that they are puppets and democracy is a sham.
> So you either believe that people have agency and actually decide for themselves, or that they are puppets and democracy is a sham.
Do you always think in such binary terms? Life is nuanced, there very few absolute binaries, but as I originally pointed out, those that hold on to that "either or" absolute type of thinking were my easiest, most profitable sales.
I have triple-pane windows since 2014. No leaks, no fog. Superb comfort. Same with countless friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Almost nobody has been installing single-pane windows around here since early 00s. Double pane is the default. Location is Eastern Europe, if that matters.
The "X" that shuts down speech its owner doesn't like, and that openly said they were going to "change the algorithm to promote positivity" now that the president he helped elect stepped up? Jesus
Cool. Still, X is far less censored than any other social media platform of comparable size. And at least there are rules now, as opposed to the unaccountable chaos of the prior Twitter censorship regime.
The billionaires are all kneeling to kiss the Trump/Musk rings, yes.
All the companies announcing they're ditching diversity programs, WaPo and LA Times refusing to endorse candidates, Tim Cook donating to inauguration. It'll keep coming.
Which are that the government can't censor speech. Forcing a private entity to support any form of speech is actually against the first amendment, it is compelled speech.
Who's forcing what? They are just inspired by it, at least that's what the comment you are replying to is saying. If a private corporation wants to support or enable free speech, they are allowed to, just like you said. This is literally from Facebook itself so I'm not sure who is compelling who.
Meta, as a large and powerful entity with the ability to censor as much or more than many governments, is opting to allow free speech on its platforms. So is X. That spirit is inspired by the Bill of Rights, not Elon Musk.
If you’re going to attempt to be pedantic, can you at least work on basic reading comprehension?
The concept of a large and powerful entity allowing free speech is in the spirit of the Bill of Rights, whether the large and powerful entity is government or not.
The parent poster was taking the position that allowing speech is somehow a Musk-derived idea, which is absurd.
To be less ambiguous in word choice, they jammed a satellite from the ground. Russians used a ground based dish to spoof a TV station signal to a repeater satellite, causing TV stations near Ukraine to go down and show an interference error. I'm just clarifying because "sabotage" could mean any number of more costly and damaging things, like a spy loosening a bolt before launch or something. https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2544558-verantwoording-en-b...
For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.