[HN Gopher] EU Signs EUR145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Pro...
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EU Signs EUR145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm
Technology
Author : simonpd
Score : 720 points
Date : 2021-01-01 12:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eetimes.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eetimes.eu)
| jamesblonde wrote:
| Sweden missing from here is a surprise. We have Ericsson who
| still design their own chips for telecom devices - one of the few
| companies left in Europe to do so. And Volvo and Scania might be
| interested for self-driving cars.
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Volvo cars is now Chinese owned. Swedish Volvo only do HGVs.
| allie1 wrote:
| Intel must be thrilled
| imtringued wrote:
| I'd like to see more government investment into domestic
| industries, however I believe that the semiconductor
| manufacturing market is already heavily saturated. R&D is welcome
| but beyond ensuring independence from foreign manufacturing there
| are not that many benefits that you would expect from this
| example of government stimulus. This industry primarily hires
| high skilled workers but unless they also directly fund the
| education of those high skilled workers it's not going to result
| in less underemployment.
|
| I mean come on, the existing semiconductor industry in the EU has
| found it's niche. It's already well developed. If there really
| was a shortage of domestic semiconductor products then these
| companies would have been able to make a killing with their local
| fabs because corona related shipping restrictions resulted in a
| lack of supply from foreign nations. They wouldn't need the
| government stimulus and stand on their own.
|
| It would make more sense to use this government stimulus on
| reducing CO2 emissions because most nations do not have economic
| incentives for reducing CO2 emissions. With our current economic
| models environmentalism amounts to charity and charity is one
| thing the government is very good at. The reason why I bring up
| CO2 reductions is because they are inherently domestic. You
| cannot put CO2 or electricity on a container ship and move the
| problem to a different country. A lot of the work also involves
| simple manual labor which helps with the underemployment problem
| for low skilled workers.
| ginko wrote:
| >however I believe that the semiconductor manufacturing market
| is already heavily saturated
|
| Is it? It seems to be headed for a TSMC monopoly as far as I
| can see.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Not to mention the current supply issues for gaming console
| chips and GPUs - unless it's a very temporary blip it looks
| like insufficient production of the most cutting edge chips &
| all that on top of the TSMC monopoly.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Indeed. More on that here if your interested
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466561
| naruvimama wrote:
| China is bound to win in the long run, given the resources,
| captive market and most importantly competitive/cost of talent.
|
| Japan, US, India and possibly some EU countries are partnering
| today to build an alternative to Huawei in 5G. This is coming 10
| years late.
|
| We might be repeating the same mistake but now in semiconductors.
| Roritharr wrote:
| So, we're getting an Airbus for Chips?
|
| Or will it more be like our Ariane missiles?
| rapsey wrote:
| I am sure most of the money will somehow get into the hands of
| Airbus, Siemens and so on
| m4rtink wrote:
| >Or will it more be like our Ariane missiles? It's rude to call
| it a missile just because they launched one on the wrong
| azimuth recently. ;-)
|
| Also given the success rate of the related Vega rocket, it
| would not be a very dependable missile anyway.
| andi999 wrote:
| Yes, isnt it normally called a launcher?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Ariane has / had a similar reputation to Airbus, the only
| problem with it is that SpaceX lapped everyone. There were some
| really bad European projects in IT though, like that big search
| engine project, Quaero, that didn't deliver any end-user
| product in eight years and was then cancelled.
| nikivi wrote:
| Are there any companies in EU who are developing chips now? I
| only know ASML but that only makes the wafers.
|
| I ask as I can't imagine the government doing this. So there must
| be some company behind this deal.
| Kosirich wrote:
| Zeiss does a lot of work for microchip industry.(lithography)
| xiphias2 wrote:
| They could get into chip dev for that amount of investment
| money. But of course EU will just waste the money as always.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > But of course EU will just waste the money as always.
|
| As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this
| subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and
| processor push is very real now.
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| As someone who worked in HPC Projects in the EU, I'd say
| the vast majority of the grants is wasted. E.g. on
|
| - obscure software and programming paradigms/libraries
|
| - one-off's
|
| - projects that create only reports, papers and
| recommendations
|
| - endless recreations of the same software over the years
| and decades
|
| - plain dumb projects
|
| - attempts at recreating other people's software (e.g.
| U.S.)
|
| There is also a large amount of overlap in work/content
| between projects, and lots of time is appropriated for
| unrelated work e.g. employees working on their PhDs.
|
| On the other hand the industry takes a lot more money and
| plays similar games.
|
| Project partners do not take the right path, because it's
| not conducive to fulfilling a grant, getting the next grant
| or increasing your citation count. The incentives are
| wrong.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| EU's decreasing GDP share in the world shows that EU is
| wasting lots of money by trying to pick winners. Just
| having low tax for small tech companies like in Shanghai
| would incentivize people to work on new great ideas, but I
| don't see it happening.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| The EU spends less time picking winners than countries
| did back in the pre-EU days. If you take that evidence at
| face value, it suggests that the EU isn't trying to pick
| enough winners.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Technology is always pushed by states, not small
| companies. Small companies can figure out how to market
| and reduce costs, but have never successfully created
| new, advanced technology.
| nickpp wrote:
| Saying this while waiting for the new savior vaccine with
| a brand new mRNA technology pushed by two startups:
| Moderna & BioNTech is just... funny.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, that's a great example of what I'm saying. The
| vaccine is payed for by states - they had a 100%
| guaranteed worldwide market. Whether they invested their
| own money (like BioNTech) or were explicitly financed by
| a state (like Moderna and Pfizer), the money for that
| research will ultimately be payed almost entirely by the
| state.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| States are making monopolies with their militaries. I
| don't need a state to buy the vaccine, actually I signed
| up for a private vaccination, and I would pay
| significantly more than the states, but states are given
| priority because of their power.
| creato wrote:
| I think there are more differences than militaries
| between states and what is essentially kickstarter.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's irrelevant, because whoever you are, you have much
| less money than the US and the EU and the UK and [...].
|
| Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine
| without specialized medical care, so even if people could
| buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which
| most people in most of the world get from the state
| anyway.
| nickpp wrote:
| No. States are simply clients, buyers of the end-product.
| Investors included VCs and states. But the Tech was built
| by the startups.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Guaranteed wealthy clients are equivalent to investors.
| They're actually better, because you don't have to pay
| them back.
|
| One of the main ways that states fund technological
| advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This
| was one of the most important things in early IT - the
| fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the
| companies in that space would have had to live by selling
| their tech on the free market, no one would have been
| crazy enough to invest in it.
| nickpp wrote:
| Guaranteed wealthy clients and investors exist in free
| markets too. That doesn't make them Tech creators, that
| merit is still reserved to the startup itself.
|
| Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the
| mRNA technology before governments came with large orders
| for the vaccines.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you have guaranteed clients, you're not selling on a
| free market. This is one of the reasons why you can't
| have have (healthy) free markets in medicine in general.
|
| And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in
| mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA
| research for many years. BioNTech itself has received
| significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| Infineon, X-Fab (formerly ZMD) are coming to my mind.
|
| Not sure you would include foreign companies with plants in the
| EU. Nexperia, TI, GloFo.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
|
| Aside from that I'd expected chip designers like ARM
| (+licensees), Bull Atos (would you call that an OEM?) and
| related software companies to take part in this.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is the tipping of old European Processor Initiative as far
| as I can see. They can either leverage ARM or OpenPOWER I
| guess.
|
| I don't think they'll start a new ISA from scratch.
| Pietertje wrote:
| ASML does lithography, they do not make wafers. NXP develops
| chips, especially for automotive industry.
|
| There are also some small companies focusing on photonics in
| NL, Smart Photonics is one of them for example.
| farseer wrote:
| ASML makes the equipment to etch on wafers. The best in the
| world I believe. ASML has thousands of suppliers in the EU.
| mkl wrote:
| ASML makes photolithography machines, including the EUV
| machines TSMC will be using for 3nm chips.
| yvdriess wrote:
| Most precompetitive research in the semi industry also happens
| at Imec in Belgium.
|
| The ASML litho machines are a single step in even just the
| wafer production process, there are several companies involved
| in making and processing masks, doing the etching, cleaning
| solutions, etc. As many industries, it's a highly globalized
| supply chain, with many companies distributed around the world
| specializing and leading different aspects. And yes, several of
| them are in the EU.
|
| As to why the governments would do this, well it's geopolitics.
| The EU has some big players in the industry, but other parts of
| the supply chain are elsewhere. When all big geopolitical
| powers are interdependent, then no player will move to block
| another off at risk of hurting themselves. Now, both China and
| the US are shoveling billions into developing a higher
| independence (even before the trade war). Likely, the EU feels
| it is now forced to follow suit, or risk having e.g. the access
| to high-volume fabs to be a bargaining chip in future trade
| negotiations.
| archi42 wrote:
| Yes, there are. One of our project partners (in a different EU
| project) has a fab for large structures. I don't know what I
| can legally share beyond that, and also don't want to put wrong
| info here since I don't know the hardware details well enough
| (did software work higher up the stack and only have to care
| for the ISA) ;)
| iagovar wrote:
| NXP, Infineon and STM are the three major in Europe, although
| STM is Swiss/Italian.
| _ph_ wrote:
| STM is also very strongly French.
|
| And these three are only the largest pure-semiconductor
| companies. There are many dozens of smaller companies and
| quite some fabs. A lot of automotive electronics is done by
| European companies. Also, many international semiconductor
| companies have development sites in Europe.
| gpderetta wrote:
| STM was originally Italo-French; it is a public company
| these days, whose headquartier is in Switzerland (as a
| neutral territory I guess), but the major shareholder
| (which is incorporated in Nederland) is still jointly owned
| directly by the Italian and French governments, and major
| production and reasearch sites are still in these
| countries. So, it is complicated
| bshanks wrote:
| If 50% of this is loans and 50% are grants, and if all of the
| grants are over 3 years, then that's 145/(2*3) = 24.17 billion
| Euros in grants per year, or $29.33 billion dollars per year. By
| contrast, in the US, US National Science Foundation (NSF) is the
| grant-giving agency for most basic science/math research in the
| US, except biology which is under a different agency (NIH) (also
| I think DOE funds some energy-related research)) total budget is
| $8.3 billion per year. So if these assumptions are correct, then
| this initiative alone is over 3.5x the total US NSF budget.
|
| This is not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because
| this is obviously applied rather than basic research.
| jononor wrote:
| Article says this is for 2-3 years? Seems crazy. Semi-conductor
| R&D is something where I would expect commitments to be 10 years
| or more, not just a couple of years...
| corty wrote:
| Just pork. Commitment is irrelevant because no real results are
| expected. Also, election terms make any real commitment
| unlikely, because results will only come for your successor in
| office.
| simias wrote:
| It's not like we're starting from scratch though, we already
| have companies and people with ample experience in this field.
| Not to say that it's not a huge bar to clear or that I don't
| expect massive delays but I think it's a good thing overall.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I mean until recently ARM was based in an EU country.
| danieldk wrote:
| And there are still a lot of relevant European companies.
| ASML, STMicroelectronics (which is Swiss, but is spread
| across many EU countries as well), NXP, Infineon, Bosch
| (sensors & semiconductors), etc.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| The funding is only for two years, and it looks like this is an
| extension to an initiative that started in 2018.
|
| I don't think they expect to build a 2nm fab by 2023.
| eric_khun wrote:
| The world starts realising all the processors that everyone
| depends on is mainly from Taiwan. I just wrote an article[1]
| about the importance of processors and talking about key players
| such that help the semis industry such ASML, and why it's not
| that simple to get into the game. . It's not as easy as pouring
| money into some companies. Sourcing trusted partners + years
| (decades?) of R&D might be needed to achieve what TSMC did in
| Taiwan
|
| [1] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-
| semicondu...
| tasogare wrote:
| I hope governments, including EU, will realize that and help
| (commercially, diplomatically and of course militarily) Taiwan
| not being invaded by its greedy neighbor.
| rapsey wrote:
| Just a giveaway to the best politically connected companies. Like
| all such EU initiatives.
| simias wrote:
| Such a tiresome and self-defeating mindset. If the EU does
| nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just
| corruption.
|
| Of course politics and lobbying will play a role when we're
| talking about hundreds of billions of euros, but that doesn't
| mean that it can't end up being a net positive for the union.
|
| Ask for transparency and keep tabs, don't assume that it's
| already lost.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something
| it's just corruption.
|
| Well, surely there are other ways to try to improve things
| besides doing nothing and bureaucratic grant schemes.
| xondono wrote:
| Because what the EU countries need to do is to get out of the
| way.
| flembat wrote:
| We can do more than one thing at a time, so the EU can be
| both useless and corrupt.
| rapsey wrote:
| This mindset is born out of seeing how the game is played and
| where the money goes from past initiatives. Why would this
| one be in any way different?
|
| To quote a very rich and slimey asshole I've interacted with
| who's income is largely from such initiatives. It's just
| money for papers.
| yulaow wrote:
| Almost any "federal government" branch in any national or
| transnational entity works that way. They still get results
| good enough to push technology forward by encouraging
| parallel private investments.
|
| I mean the whole USA tech sector was basically bootstrapped
| by federal money/grants/investments given in no different
| way of what EU is doing right now.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > USA tech sector was basically bootstrapped by federal
| money/grants/investments given in no different way of
| what EU is doing right now
|
| There are MANY different ways to channel money into
| business or non-profit R&D. I doubt you can ignore all
| the differences and declare that what the US and the EU
| do or did is the same.
|
| I am not saying it doesn't exist, but I am personally not
| aware of any similar multibillion declaration made by the
| US.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And even earlier, in chemical and advanced manufacturing
| space - just how many of the well-known US companies
| started as small shops that got their hands on government
| grants during WWII?
| cinquemb wrote:
| > ... government grants during WWII
|
| Seems like we're missing some "proper"
| motivation/focus/constraints now like war on this scale
| can provide... not just the EU, but this kind of diktat-
| innovation is increasingly more present everywhere...
|
| Probably goes hand in hand with the ever present bailout
| olympics for those deemed TBTF...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I used to believe the "proper motivation" - like winning
| the war - mattered. Then I read "War Is a Racket", a 1935
| short book by US general Smedley Darlington Butler, which
| in many places argues that even during an active war,
| companies will happily steal and squander the war
| funding. So now I'm not sure how much you can expect from
| such motivation.
|
| Probably it's best to assume that some amount of graft
| will always happen, just dump the money, and hope
| something good comes out of it...
| cinquemb wrote:
| Well i'm not sure gunboat diplomacy and banana/global
| policing wars provide sufficient motivation compared to
| total wars... can only steal and squander so much before
| your factories get bombed and supply chains crippled.
|
| I would agree if only the money dumps stopped ending up
| going mostly in the same places... lol
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Why don't you instead quote a source that proves that it's
| a pointless giveaway? Without it, your post seems like mud
| slinging.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Ask for transparency and report slimey assholes. If you
| want the change, be the change.
| rapsey wrote:
| Yeah sure lemme go against a guy with half the government
| in his pocket. Life is not a movie.
| makomk wrote:
| Reporting corruption only works if there's someone to
| report it to who has both the power and the political
| will to actually do something about it. That simply does
| not exist within the EU as an institution. I don't think
| it's possible to easily explain exactly what's wrong with
| the EU's accountability and anti-corruption structures;
| endless column inches have been spent on the problems,
| mostly in somewhat niche publications and read mainly by
| people deeply interested in EU politics. (Which may also
| be part of the problem. Even before Brexit, few cared,
| and the political polarization around Brexit has pushed
| the idea that the EU has structural problems outside the
| realm of mainstream discourse. Take a look at the
| comments in this HN discussion for example!)
| baxtr wrote:
| Can you name examples of EU initiatives on that level that
| delivered the desired results?
|
| EDIT: I am asking because I seriously want to know. I haven't
| made up my mind yet what to think about the whole thing. I am
| not familiar with successful EU initiatives. I'm open in
| believing this can work if there were successful examples in
| the past.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I thought Airbus was one.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| You mean that resource wasting shop, that is sending huge
| airplane parts all across Europe for political reasons? I
| don't even want to start about the subsidies considered
| illegal by the wto...
| m4rtink wrote:
| Well, it seems to be competitive with Boeing & no one
| else really stepped up doing it the "proper" way so far.
| ju-st wrote:
| Well, Boeing is doing the same things. Transporting 737
| fuselages through the US and illegal subsidies. And I'm
| not even mentioning the 737 debacle.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Maybe those are just table stakes in this sort of market
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Isn't that the kind of outcome you would expect from such
| a monopoly (/duopoly)? Even if a company could be more
| efficient it would not make sense for them to try to
| compete
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I am not familiar with successful EU initiative.
|
| The EU Cohesion Fund is one. Since 2007, ~133 billion EUR
| got invested in the poorer countries of the EU to improve
| trans-european traffic infrastructure (TEN, aka road, rail,
| waterways) and environmental projects (e.g. villages hooked
| up to proper sewage pipes with treatment plants at the end,
| instead of dumping sewage to the groundwater / into rivers
| and seas).
| rapsey wrote:
| EU funds for improving infrastructure is the only money
| that actually is not mostly money down the drain.
| Unfortunately programmes that don't have such concrete
| outcomes (like this one) are entirely different.
| Lionga wrote:
| Yet after spending 133 billion EUR the vast majority of
| Romanian, Bulgarian and many more countries villages do
| not have sewage pipes for example
| mschuster91 wrote:
| In Croatia, they did, just saw a big sign in the hood
| when I went there for a funeral in the summer (which is
| what actually inspired me to write this comment).
| rapsey wrote:
| I don't know how much the EU spent, but over here EU
| money payed for a frankly crazy amount of fiber optic
| cable. Completely common for a house far from any urban
| centre to have fiber internet.
| csunbird wrote:
| Which I found that very amusing, because Germany is
| suffering from really bad and expensive cable/copper
| internet all over the place.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That is the intentional result of Helmut Kohl's
| government many decades ago. Kohl wanted cable TV instead
| of fibre... because cable TV could be used to broadcast
| programs that were not "left mainstream". Wish I was
| joking, private TV stations in Germany are a thing only
| because the state TV was too left (in reality: not right-
| wing enough) for the freshly appointed Conservative
| chancellor.
|
| See https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-
| kabelfernsehe...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Is this actually true?
|
| I've visited several small towns in Romania, and all
| plumbing was in good order. It's not like a country stuck
| in 15th century. Are you talking about 'villages' of like
| 5 people?
| Someone wrote:
| Even if that's true (which I wouldn't know), I don't see
| how that can be sufficient to declare a project that aims
| to improve things a failure.
|
| Let's assume that project was for the poorest 10% of the
| EU. That would be 44 million people. EUR133 billion
| divided by 44 million is about EUR3000 per inhabitant.
|
| I don't think one can expect such an amount to bring
| roads, rails, bridges, and sewage treatment systems up to
| standards of the richest parts of the EU.
| lvice wrote:
| I think the Erasmus initiative is an outstanding EU
| programme, which helped collaboration between EU
| universities and to build a EU identity for young educated
| students. It's not an economic initiative per se, and it's
| hard to measure its effective results objectively, but I
| believe it's been an absolute net positive for the EU.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Airbus is the obvious one; successfully broke a foreign
| near-monopoly. TSMC would be playing the role of Boeing,
| here.
|
| I'm not sure if this will work, but I do think that
| something needs to be done by _someone_, even if not
| Europe. TSMC having a global near-monopoly on high-end fab
| is obviously not long-term viable. That's a bad situation
| for _everyone_.
| Neputys wrote:
| aaand here's a typical representative of said companies
| "positive for the union", "ask for transparency"...
| wwwwwwwww wrote:
| > If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something
| it's just corruption.
|
| Wrong.
|
| Its not about "doing something", its about doing the right
| thing. And they don't.
| smhg wrote:
| Even if done inefficient (to which standard?) the current
| state of doing things can be a net positive.
| FpUser wrote:
| To me it looks more like they're trying to get more
| technological independence. Right now they're at the mercy of
| the US and China in many areas and as the result are target to
| political pressure. Reducing one's dependency does not hurt.
| imtringued wrote:
| It doesn't hurt but it's not an economic miracle either, it's
| a luxury if it isn't self sustaining.
| FpUser wrote:
| How do you know it will not sustain itself further down the
| road.
| Guthur wrote:
| Are you a citizen of the EU to even care?
| wwwwwwwww wrote:
| Do you do nationaly checks before allowing people to have an
| opinion?
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| 2nm tech, and not only just the tech, but the whole fab for it in
| two-three years?
|
| that how eu is spending 145 _billions_ while allocating 1bn to
| fighting covid?
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't mind that at all.
|
| Covid requres just one vaccine and a bit of time and disrupts
| mostly businesses that produce just human powered entertainment
| (and health services which is the worst thing about it).
|
| While making the whole new generation of most important
| machines and landing beyond current cutting edge seem like both
| pricey and worthwhile endeavor.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| bold to assume any new generation machine will come out of
| this, meanwhile real business that produced real wealth are
| closing down.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > real business that produced real wealth are closing down.
|
| Could you please share some examples? I'm genuinely
| curious.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Why? Europe already produces EUV lithography machines, and
| while I'm not that familiar with the field, I'm pretty sure
| ASML and TSMC are already working on 2nm lithography.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| TSMC is aiming at 2024 for 2nm, they're the market leader
| and they reportedly started research back in 2019
|
| https://wccftech.com/tsmc-2nm-research-taiwan/
|
| https://wccftech.com/ssmc-mass-produce-2nm-2024/
|
| now a consortium of runner ups not only hopes to catch
| up, but plans a parallel release of a new node size,
| while starting later, while starting with less know how.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| TSMC purchases their lithography machines from ASML.
|
| https://semiengineering.com/euv-challenges-and-unknowns-
| at-3...
| visarga wrote:
| > allocating 1bn to fighting covid
|
| No sure what you mean here. Seems like the EU recovery package
| is EUR1,824B. Also, in Sept and Oct they allocated EUR87.9B in
| financial support.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| the SURE are bonds, not grants, idk why are you putting these
| on the table, from the tax payer pov bonds are just temporary
| transfers, it's the grants that will 'disappear'
| nickpp wrote:
| USA entrepreneur: I need to start a company that will attract VC
| money. Damn, that means a company with huge potential. I better
| start working.
|
| EU entrepreneur: I need to start a company that can access these
| juicy governmental funds. Let's see, what exactly do these
| bureaucrats want? Hmm, sounds complicated, who do I know in the
| approval committee? I better start calling.
|
| Incentives matter.
| zpeti wrote:
| It's almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide
| which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate
| buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your
| way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the
| next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
| bzb6 wrote:
| "bureaucratic arrogance" is a great name to define the EU. I'll
| borrow it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most
| important technological inventions of the past century was
| funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how
| to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important
| things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the
| business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as
| distributed by beaurocrats.
|
| It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven,
| you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of
| developing new tech.
| zpeti wrote:
| Even if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting
| edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things
| in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed
| for.
|
| We aren't talking about a military research project like
| packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
| krona wrote:
| Then by your own definition, and the statement issued by the
| EU commission, this is a bad investment.
|
| I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once
| put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in
| to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of
| documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of
| something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Yes. It's bad investment for the one who pays. Possibly
| great for everybody else and humanity in general.
|
| If efficiency is your thing go into business. The smaller
| the better. But if you want to have a chance at literal
| moonshot stay in your job and swallow inefficiencies that
| come from size, ample capital, and no expectation of
| monetary profit.
| andi999 wrote:
| Why 32 languages? I thought there is only one language in
| the country that put a man on the moon (apart from the one
| other language)
| thu2111 wrote:
| _Research of most important technological inventions of the
| past century was funded by beaurocrats_
|
| Important defined how?
|
| The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their
| post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if
| not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some
| very early work on packet switching networks and their work
| became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But
| the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was
| taken over by the private sector.
|
| Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for
| almost any broad category of thing, you can find _something_
| they funded. But that 's no evidence that stuff would never
| have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term
| R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities.
| Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly
| lagging behind.
|
| _It sucks a bit that it 's this way but if you are profit
| driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in
| hopes of developing new tech._
|
| Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per
| year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140
| billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic
| research.
|
| Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of
| both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the
| best papers are always those with corporate funding - some
| academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these
| tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the
| most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often
| gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody
| cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional
| incentives to maximise ROI.
| oblio wrote:
| Companies rarely do basic research. Yes, there are
| exceptions.
| nickpp wrote:
| Companies do plenty of research, just not basic, since
| they don't need to: the government funds it instead. With
| money taxed from said companies, so...
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, us peons don't pay any taxes and corporations don't
| evade them...
|
| All those taxes are collected from companies, look at the
| nice graph that proves it:
|
| https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-
| tax-ra...
|
| I'm being ironic, the average corporate tax rate went
| from 40% in 1960 to 10% today.
| yvdriess wrote:
| Yep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is
| how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a
| private company bringing that innovation to market.
|
| To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at
| following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to
| escape the well and find new minimas.
| dahele wrote:
| Very well put. Take AI as an example - foundational
| research in deep learning and reinforcement learning was
| first done in academia. Everyone knows the story of how
| long neural networks languished in the shadows, before its
| time. Even commercial research labs only really took note
| after the potential of these methods was discovered.
|
| Government funding is a good thing, but it'd be even better
| would be if we could harness the free market. One solution
| could be to equip research institutions with the means to
| capture value from IP that follows on from basic research.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I was thinking in a similar direction. What about an
| adaptive patent law? Where the duration of the protection
| in a particular area of interest can be set by e.g. a
| committee (with a strict ruleset and a big time constant
| of course). So when there is not much progress in a
| certain area (e.g. cancer or nuclear fusion) the patent
| protection is increased to incentivise investments. A
| problem with this approach are obviously the unknown
| unknowns, which might prevent this system from
| incentivising inventions like the transistor. So this
| approach can probably only help with problem driven areas
| and not in cases where the tech innovation gives rise to
| new problems/solutions
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen,
| but it 's not as visible as a private company bringing that
| innovation to market._
|
| A recent example of 'basic' research coming to fruition in
| a practical fashion (eventually):
|
| > _" S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader
| sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent
| polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of
| the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear
| anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2_
|
| > _The level of control and understanding we now have over
| our biology came from literally millions of person-years
| spent working on things that at the time were obscure and
| "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95%
| efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2_
|
| * https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934
| 978
|
| We have no way of knowing ahead of time what knowledge will
| be needed or "useful" in the future, so in some ways it is
| prudent to try to acquire as much knowledge of the natural
| world as possible and sort it out later.
| rapsey wrote:
| Government funding is extremely wasteful and will generally
| go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is
| this game has been played for a long time and it has
| diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get
| the exploitation down.
|
| Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But
| that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and
| corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for
| your government grant buck now.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Remind me how is that WeWork and Theranos investment
| going?
| nickpp wrote:
| Plenty of startups crash and burn. It comes with the
| territory. What is your point?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| No-no, this is not examples of ordinary wastefullness and
| 'crash', these were outright fraud.
|
| The exact same thing the OP accuses government grants of
| perpetuating.
|
| Your post is a perfect example that with startups that's
| just accepted and glossed over.
| nickpp wrote:
| Well maybe because in government grants waste and fraud
| are the rule, while in private startups they are the
| exception.
|
| And it is the investors problem when a startup fails, and
| they are aware of it. But with governments, it is OUR
| money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Well maybe because in government grants waste and fraud
| are the rule, while in private startups they are the
| exception.
|
| Are they really? What are the failure rates for both?
|
| > But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away
| by politicians and their friends.
|
| https://qz.com/1719019/wework-and-ubers-losses-may-be-
| subsid...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-investors-
| include-pe...
| andybak wrote:
| > The world has changed and corruption is more severe
|
| Are you sure? This rather smacks of the "good old days"
| fallacy.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| I love this analogy!
| dagaci wrote:
| Just like those EU CERN bureaucrats funding Tim Berners-Lee,
| what were they thinking
| nickpp wrote:
| No, just like the EU search engine, remember that one?
| dagaci wrote:
| No, what was it called?
| bosswipe wrote:
| China beurocrats have been quite successful with this strategy.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The US recently spent their way into a cutting edge private
| space launch provider industry, and that seems like a roaring
| success. What makes you think it doesn't work?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| How much of that was really private? My guess is the NASA
| launch facilities, former employees, and potential for future
| contracts were a big part of the picture.
| jryle70 wrote:
| While that's probably correct that without NASA support
| SpaceX may not survive 10 years ago, on the way to becoming
| the innovator it is today. Financially speaking however NASA
| has spent less to buy launch capability from SpaceX than it
| would have to otherwise.
|
| From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in
| how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting
| edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or
| milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's
| initiative.
|
| In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the
| private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-
| how, credibility and potential contracts.
| cinquemb wrote:
| Seem's like though we're still stuck in the Goddard age and
| most of the resources go towards pursuing such techniques
| (with a few private orgs that have the lions share of support
| with public funds that even go towards such ends) of getting
| into LEO as if there couldn't possibly be any other way worth
| pursing... how long will we be stuck optimizing Goddard
| paperclips above all else?
|
| It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to
| do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the
| lack of support from the American government, military and
| academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket
| to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military
| applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors
| that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic
| research that provided more strategic benefits?)
| wwwwwwwww wrote:
| Not true.
|
| SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private
| risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA
| awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA,
| compared to what they would pay otherwise.
|
| Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the
| SpaceX achievements.
| _ph_ wrote:
| This isn't trash talking the SpaceX achievements but
| stating the fact that government money played a huge role
| in developing a space industry which was the base for
| SpaceX becoming reality.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| It's so strange to read a comment like this one. They have
| the facts but completely miss how the facts connect with
| each other.
|
| Yes, Space X is a private company but they wouldn't exist
| without the innovations that came out of NASA, a publicly
| funded organization.
| _ph_ wrote:
| And of course the market. The supply contract for the ISS
| gave SpaceX the necessary money to grow, without public
| money no ISS, and as a consequence, no supply contract.
| wwwwwwwww wrote:
| It's always been normal in the EU. There is little innovation
| here based on private risk taking, almost no venture capital,
| and huge barrieres for banks to lend money to innovators.
| djbebs wrote:
| The fact that its practically impossible to legally invest
| and create a business in the EU makes that almost inevitable
| nirv wrote:
| EU haters much, eh? It takes 30 mins to 3 hours to
| establish[1] an LLC in EU (Estonia).
|
| [1] https://investinestonia.com/business-in-
| estonia/establishing...
| usr1106 wrote:
| EU has very limited to no impact how businesses are
| created. Some member states are more flexible (Estonia)
| than others (probably a long list).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I have 2 legal entities in 2 EU countries, you are free to
| invest any time.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Just like the NASA bureaucrats thought they could make a dent
| in rocketry - how foolish of them.
|
| Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and
| risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private
| partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there
| doesn't appear to be an alternative.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I might have looked positively at this if the bureaucrats would
| have actual skin in the game and would be judged by the outcome
| in 5-10 years. But in the likely case that this will fail and
| most of the money will be drained through lobbyism etc., nobody
| will talk about it and they will come up with the next thing they
| can throw money at to come across as being super innovative.
|
| Disclaimer: I used to work at a company that was particularly
| good in draining these kind of funds without delivering useful
| outputs.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Government spending isn't the problem, it's who gets the money.
|
| In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is
| fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total
| disaster for promoting innovation.
|
| I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing
| of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20
| years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards.
| But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle,
| it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the
| Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches
| (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).
|
| It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of
| dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors
| that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what
| we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most
| part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly
| skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.
|
| So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount
| of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed
| with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker
| is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no
| viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics
| simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the
| impression that progress is being made on these endeavors
| today, but things look a little different to me, watching them
| play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4
| decades. I mourn what might have been.
| mafribe wrote:
| I do NOT believe that you can deliver _" orders of magnitude
| better performance"_ general purpose multicore processors for
| low millions of dollars!
|
| The salary for the verification engineers would already
| probably exceed low millions of dollars after 3 years. Not to
| mention licensing cost for EDA tools you need to tame
| billions of transistors.
|
| I will give you low millions of dollars if you have a viable
| path to orders of magnitude better performance general
| purpose processors.
| alokrai wrote:
| If the money required "to design real (general purpose)
| multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better
| performance than what we have today" is in low millions of
| dollars and technical challenge isn't too daunting, why
| haven't VCs invested in such ventures?
| baryphonic wrote:
| > It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions
| of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore
| processors that deliver orders of magnitude better
| performance than what we have today. But unfortunately
| lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate,
| and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of
| programming outside the mainstream. > > So my dream of a
| sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per
| core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with
| existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is
| just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable
| road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics
| simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have
| the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors
| today, but things look a little different to me, watching
| them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense,
| over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
|
| I'm really curious what specifically you mean by this. I see
| similar issues on the software side (my degree is in CS).
| Software is incredibly bloated and horrible at
| interoperability. Unix had pipes back in the early 70s, and
| somehow with GUIs and then mobile "apps," we've regressed.
| Identity-based security has failed time and again. And only
| rarely has software design progressed meaningfully beyond
| structured programming from the late 70s (not to mention the
| languages). Moore's law has given software developers around
| over 100M x improvement over the past 40 years, yet ordinary
| people would scarcely notice.
|
| TL;DR: I see a lot of the same flaws in software, dominated
| by fads and popularity only of what is mainstream.
|
| I'd really like to hear a dissident point of view from the
| hardware side.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya I hear you, I started with C++ and dabbled in 68000
| assembly back in the early 90s. The biggest problems back
| then was the main loop and that a program could only get to
| a million lines before it was too unstable and crashed.
| Even just the protected memory of Java, or protected memory
| in general, felt like a distant dream.
|
| Now we have event-based apps but we're also stuck in the
| purgatory of async hell. Hundreds of classes got replaced
| with hundreds of factories and having to endlessly learn
| DSLs. Compilers mutated into handwritten unit tests. I feel
| a heaviness in my chest just writing this, because one
| thought leads to another and it's hard to articulate the
| root of the discontent. I still believe that the web way is
| better than bare metal, but I'm saddened to see it
| reinventing the bad habits that we abandoned 25 years ago.
|
| For me, what's really going on is that computers have not
| gotten appreciably faster since about the time that PowerPC
| iMacs were running OS X, roughly the year 2000. Before
| that, computers were getting 100 times faster every decade,
| and then it just kinda.. stopped. Only video games kept
| going, the only tradeoff being that we have to use someone
| else's 3D library rather than just writing ray tracers in a
| few pages of code (if only we had general-purpose multicore
| chips).
|
| And that made programmers desperate, because they were
| still focusing on performance instead of stepping back and
| seeing the high-level abstractions that were largely
| understood by the 1980s. Everyone is so used to being
| compute-bound that we can't even think about solutions
| outside of that reality.
|
| My "idea" to fix all this, bluntly, is to forget about
| improving single-threaded performance and start giving
| people the raw computing power they need to get back to
| work again. To keep up with Moore's Law, that's a computer
| with 10,000 parallel threads running at least 1 GHz, for
| $1000. Or 100 times the cores every decade. My initial
| mention of 1000 cores was perhaps conservative.
|
| Pretty much all of the problems we deal with today are
| embarrassingly parallel. A synchronous blocking PHP page
| is, when served to thousands of users. DSP is. Neural nets,
| genetic algorithms, stocks, Bitcoin..
|
| So our desktop machines should really be thousands of
| Docker containers with a total capacity of like 1000000%.
| No program would ever block another program, or get out of
| its sandbox. Programs would sometimes run across the
| internet. I picture it kind of like this big Minecraft
| Disneyland where you're in VR but processing stuff in the
| background and forgetting it's there. Maybe you'd devote
| 50% to an AI agent like J.A.R.V.I.S. that sits around all
| day backing up its best self and evolving its subprocesses
| to be even better. Not being compute-bound is like being
| able to throw processing power at problems declaratively
| and never having to solve anything menial again. I've been
| daydreaming about all this since like 1999 hahaha.
|
| The math is all there, I've written about it at length in
| previous comments. You basically take an old processor like
| MIPS that was about as optimized for single-threaded
| performance as one can get, without getting mired in the
| evolutionary dead end of long pipelines and huge caches.
| That or the PowerPC 601 or DEC Alpha had on the order of
| 1-3 million transistors. Looks like the Apple M1 has 16
| billion. So the raw numbers do suggest 10,000 of last-
| century's best cores. Then spend another 10 billion
| transistors for about 1-10 GB of RAM, or 1 MB of ram in-
| core.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
|
| Yes, memory routing is a pain, but you just use content-
| addressable memory and treat the interconnect just like any
| other network on the internet. The cores use caching,
| compression and copy-on-write to combine the best aspects
| of Erlang, Lisp, and Clojure. We'd write code in a
| Javascript-like language that's identical to the ideas from
| Immer and Immutable.js, but natively. Since everything is
| read-only, it statically compiles ahead to the best of its
| ability, running through a monad only when processing
| mutable state, and then going back to static. When you're
| not compute-bound, the static stuff processes instantly. It
| basically inverts the logic, so the only slow part of your
| code is the IO. My terminology isn't exact here, but it
| would basically transpile a subset of Javascript to Lisp
| and then run the embarrassingly parallel stuff 10,000 times
| faster than we're used to, rivaling the speed of video
| cards.
|
| To do this as a hobby project, it might be fun to see how
| many early ARM cores and small RAMs could fit on a chip
| with a billion transistors. Then see how hard it is to add
| the content-addressable networking to the OS. Then finally
| get 1000 Docker containers running with, say, Debian. I
| used to daydream about doing it on an FPGA, but haven't
| kept up as closely as I'd like. Also I feel like there is
| industry pressure to keep FPGAs down, because they haven't
| kept up with Moore's law either, and never went fully open
| source like they should have.
|
| I feel kind of weary about all this because I've been
| thinking about it for so long, and have a lot of regrets
| about not using my degree more. I'm still just writing CRUD
| apps like everyone else. It's so tedious, and takes so much
| code to do so little visible work, that I've lost seasons.
| singhrac wrote:
| Maybe you could use your experience to propose a system
| (whether funding vehicle restrictions or proper incentives) for
| that not to happen in this case? I think we'd all be excited by
| that.
|
| How can we avoid spending money on lobbyists? Maybe the
| structure should be more VC-like?
| rusk wrote:
| No point arguing with ideology.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| It is arguably quite ideological to insist that a large
| monopolistic bureaucracy, or a conglomeration of them -
| e.g. the EU - will be efficient in allocating vast amounts
| of resources when basic game and microeconomic theory
| suggests otherwise.
|
| Still, an argument for state subsidies, despite some
| inevitable degree of inefficiency, can be made.
| rusk wrote:
| Point was that despite repeated successes with this style
| of investment the libhurdurians still insist it's a bad
| idea, totally blind to the fact that lassaiz affaire is
| just as prone to degeneration. It's ideology as much as
| any other approach and when you find people _insisting_
| on it without any concrete examples it's just plain
| ideology you're dealing with and there's just no point
| wasting your time.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| I'm a libhurdurian and I don't think it's necessarily a
| bad thing. A public goods argument can be made for
| strategic investments.
|
| I also don't think it's been conclusively shown that
| there have been "repeated successes with this style of
| investment". Demonstrating that would require knowing
| what the opportunity cost of the spending for these
| projects was, which is impossible. Claiming it's an open-
| and-shut case that these kinds of investments will yield
| positive results is just as ideological as you accuse
| dissenters of being.
| rusk wrote:
| I'm not claiming it's open and shut. Every time something
| like this comes around you have all these guys giving
| out. I don't say free market doesn't work in all cases
| but just that it doesn't work in all cases.
| Libertarianism is a dead end. Also BSD Unix.
| jabl wrote:
| "More VC like" has been proposed by Mariana Mazzucato. If the
| state invests in a startup/spinoff, the state should get
| equity in return rather than just some lofty words about
| future jobs or such.
|
| Not for the purpose of creating long time state owned
| companies, but for cashing out when/if the investment is
| successful, just like VC's. This would both provide the state
| with money, removing the need to raise that same money via
| taxes, and hopefully also better align the incentives of the
| funding organisation by providing measurable goals.
| lostmsu wrote:
| An option to try is making a mixed merit+vote system instead
| of just voting.
| hndudette2 wrote:
| Putting structure aside for now (although I agree we want an
| answer to that), I don't see why we even want governments
| allocating capital to projects like this in the first place
| when the space is already very competitive with loads of
| private money. It seems like a classic case of big government
| doing big government things to justify their own existence.
| yostrovs wrote:
| If it does succeed, it will be a perpetual, repeatedly brought
| up, example of how the EU can get things done. The other
| projects will remain forever forgotten.
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| ITT bashing on EU without understanding it
|
| I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into
| their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unrealistic.
|
| EDIT The 2-3 years is when the funds are allocated. Not when the
| results are expected.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There is a missing bit of perapective: many EU startups rely on
| grants for bootstrapping because investors here are a lot more
| risk averse here. They commonly let folks get their startup to
| an MVP and become investable.
|
| The other factor is that they come in waves: there could be
| many grants for your startup for a few years, then government
| focus shifts and they dry up, then 5 years later they might
| come again
|
| Aquiring the grants and completing the required paperwork feels
| a lot like doing schoolwork - it's tedious, but certainly
| doable, I have won 2 grants a few years back for my startup,
| its not like you have to be a big corp to stand a chance.
| Roritharr wrote:
| I won a grant for our company, roughly 600k, but it took
| nearly 2 years until the first money hit our bank accounts
| and the ongoing documentation effort is really slowing a lot
| of things down.
|
| But it might be because it's Germany, you have to use your
| regional bank for the process and ours was horrible.
| andi999 wrote:
| Still, I think the 2-3 years is too short. I believe if you put
| in a lot of money into something it needs a bit of time,
| otherwise every participant will just do whatever they normally
| do, just more of it.
| Daho0n wrote:
| The 2-3 years is when funding start, not when results are
| expected.
| andi999 wrote:
| Thanks. So over what time frame are results expected?
| rapsey wrote:
| Because somehow this initiative is different from all the other
| ones?
| varjag wrote:
| Which other ones you mean?
| rapsey wrote:
| Horizon2020 for instance
| elric wrote:
| I contributed to a couple of projects that received money
| from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon
| 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a
| huge waste of money. Software (and hardware) projects
| were completed, and nothing was ever done with them. We
| produced over 20k _pages_ worth of paperwork (which was
| all mandatory if we wanted to get the money), which I 'm
| guessing no one ever read.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it was all developed with good
| intentions, but those have been known to pave the road to
| hell. From a personal point of view, I learnt a lot from
| the experience. But there are probably more efficient
| ways for software engineers to learn than by doing FP7
| projects.
|
| I was just a cog in the machine, perhaps someone further
| down the pipe got some benefit out of what we were doing.
| But given how the projects were managed, I doubt it.
| petra wrote:
| But isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N projects
| gets used for commercial purposes ?
| rualca wrote:
| > But isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N
| projects gets used for commercial purposes ?
|
| The OP forgot to mention that one of the goals in the
| Horizon2020 projects is to provide incentives to create
| pan-european collaborations involving industrial,
| academic, and institutional organizations.
|
| In short, they are aimed to bridge the gap between
| academia and industry, and also create synergies between
| multiple organizations across Europe.
|
| For example, some programs require applicants to partner
| with research institutions and industrial companies of
| significant and arbitrary size to be able to even submit
| a proposal.
|
| Thus, it's disingenuous to evaluate the success of these
| programs in terms of commercial products being developed
| out of these programs. The political goals of developing
| collaborations between member-states is far more
| important than delivering a gadget or a trinket.
|
| Similarly, we have the Erasmus program that enable
| higher-education students to spend a year in a school
| from a member state somewhere in Europe. It's
| disingenuous to assume the goal of the Erasmus program is
| solely academic.
| Radim wrote:
| As someone who came from academia, now runs a commercial
| company, and having participated in several large
| consortia projects (including Horizon 2020), I find your
| perspective... charming.
|
| I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is
| made. And where you taxes really go.
| rualca wrote:
| > I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is
| made.
|
| I appreciate your arrogance, but as you might notice by
| reading my comment I already have more than enough
| experience making said sausage. Thus your complete lack
| of arguments, which you tried to hide with snide remarks
| and an unimpressive attempt to appeal to authority, were
| dully noted.
| Radim wrote:
| > you might notice by reading my comment I already have
| more than enough experience making said sausage.
|
| I noticed nothing of the sort. No need to lash out - you
| probably meant to describe your experience but then
| forgot. I'd be curious to hear. I'm not psychic, and your
| account is anonymous.
|
| OK, so you've had good experience with the EU bureaucracy
| and its "innovation funding" schemes. What was you role
| in them?
| touisteur wrote:
| I agree it's very difficult to run large-scale research
| projects with consortia, etc. And even worse at EU scale
| _with public money_. I 'm not sure whether there's a
| better way to balance the admin-load against all the
| scamming, or to avoid 'favoring' one nation's industry or
| other. When you do something on processors, you'll
| probably have to keep the door open to all big & small
| European actors, right? I feel all the administrative
| overload is a way to avoid all kinds of political
| problems.
|
| Yes, Europeans complain about bureaucracy from the EU and
| here about the ERC, but the moment someone comes with
| more 'pragmatic' processes, either you see some 10+MEUR-
| level abuse quite quickly, or you get some blast about
| bad management of the tax payers money, and calls for
| more oversight.
|
| I don't have a solution, and without a united EU
| military/defense budget I don't see anything DARPA-like
| emerging. And it seems only European military budgets
| (still sovereign) and regional budgets (regionalism
| being, to me, the biggest flaw in the modern EU vision)
| seem spent on 'low admin we trust you let's try this just
| convince this panel of scientists and admins' funding.
| While I think it's great for labs/research funding, for
| product derisking and creating competitive edges for the
| local industry, and for SMEs and overall high tech
| employment, you're not going to create a semiconductor
| industry like this.
|
| I've seen the results of several ERC consortia projects
| and am sometimes impressed with what EU-based research
| (academics+smb+large groups) can do with so little money
| (on each subject) and, yes, so much admin overhead.
| lemonspat wrote:
| I read the previous comment as: there wasn't anyone at
| the end trying to help make it actually commercialized
| meh2frdf wrote:
| It's more than that in my experience, often the concept
| was a non starter, or the output is nothing an enterprise
| couldn't do it self if so motivated, and certainly aren't
| going to bother picking through the mess of some academic
| code base.
| touisteur wrote:
| But not every R&D project can or should lead to a
| commercial product right away. I work in a big corp and
| sometimes the tech you invested in, even if the PoC was
| great and all successful, doesn't fit in any final
| product because of thousands of other constraints.
|
| But I also see lots of small 'mindshare' changes thanks
| to those 'it can be done' projects. The important steps
| seem to be to first unlock the first TRLs, then find PoCs
| on real products to inspire (and increase TRLs) tech
| directors and product managers that they need to invest
| the next millions into an big and still uncertain shift,
| and to underinvest in other important parts of their
| products. In the case of tech push you often end up with
| a new shiny tech that can't be used right away. So,
| mostly, it's about climbing the maturity ladder, and be
| ready for the _very small_ openings in the product
| development cycle to shoe your new tech in.
|
| In the case of customer pull or market pull, the lead
| time of such projects makes it too late to ask for
| external help, and no research grant wants to participate
| in 'product development' (not their job). So the tech is
| usually badly implemented and leaves a sour taste.
|
| What I see as positive: if you have a great tech idea and
| available resources, and great academic/labs contacts,
| you _can_ get the money, with little resistance (but yes,
| lots of admin work) with either European or national
| /regional grants.
|
| IIRC the 2014 version of SPARK was designed and developed
| through a French civilian R&D funding project :
| http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/ The project was
| clearly a success there (although I don't know about ROI
| or profitability for AdaCore on this tech). Working with
| innovative SMBs is a great way to get funding in France
| and most of the projects that I've seen tend to conclude
| in new products... for the SMB. But the scale is low
| there (<4MEUR), so it also helps to accept failure
| ('only' 4m 'wasted'...).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 'TRL' ?
| touisteur wrote:
| Sorry, jargon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology
| _readiness_level
|
| Funny thing, the wiki page explicitly cites horizon2020
| (which one of the GPs criticized): "The European
| Commission advised EU-funded research and innovation
| projects to adopt the scale in 2010.[1] TRLs were
| consequently used in 2014 in the EU Horizon 2020 program.
| In 2013, the TRL scale was further canonized by the ISO
| 16290:2013 standard.[1] A comprehensive approach and
| discussion of TRLs has been published by the European
| Association of Research and Technology Organisations
| (EARTO).[3] Extensive criticism of the adoption of TRL
| scale by the European Union was published in The
| Innovation Journal, stating that the "concreteness and
| sophistication of the TRL scale gradually diminished as
| its usage spread outside its original context (space
| programs)"."
| namero999 wrote:
| This maps onto my experience with an Horizon2020 project.
| I don't want to say that it is wasted money, rather just
| point out that it feels like a spray&pray approach. We
| travelled a lot, produced a lot of excel and word
| documents in a very inefficient way, the outcome, despite
| being the project "successful", is completely useless and
| will never see the light as a commercial product, not
| even as a useful blueprint for other organizations. All
| in all it was a depressing experience, knowing that we
| were going on thanks to taxpayer money. R&D is good and I
| don't want to bash on these initiatives... I guess I just
| ended up in a project that didn't go anywhere.
| rualca wrote:
| > I contributed to a couple of projects that received
| money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon
| 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a
| huge waste of money.
|
| I guess your mileage does indeed vary. I contributed to a
| subproject of a major FP7 research program, which counted
| with the collaboration of a major industrial
| manufacturing company, a state research institute, and a
| couple of university research groups. In the end, besides
| a hand full of research papers, the industrial company
| developed a commercial product which is being rolled out
| as we speak. The state research institute didn't gained
| much out of the deal but we did developed institutional
| relationships that have been fruitful since then.
|
| What you take from a research program is proportional to
| the legwork you put in. I'm sure some projects aren't
| immediately fruitful but it's short-sighted to claim that
| the money is wasted, specially if you take into account
| that this expenditure is what makes this sort of
| industrial effort possible.
| touisteur wrote:
| I'm guessing the state research institute got some
| funding and visibility ('dear tax payer or high-level
| admin that cares about public image of state research,
| what you paid for - our research on topic X - for Y years
| is now being used in industry, see?') and that's what
| makes/helps them run so they probably also got some
| things out of this.
| rapsey wrote:
| Exactly. The rules and bureaucratic burden of getting
| involved defeats the entire point. Even if you go in with
| the most noble of intentions.
| newdude116 wrote:
| Great. Sounds very different from the very corrupt SBIR
| grants.
| snvzz wrote:
| That does describe my own experience with 2x FP7 projects
| well.
| ginko wrote:
| That's a programme providing research grants. Why do you
| think it's a failure?
| sgift wrote:
| Can you show where Horizon2020 squandered money? Or gave
| any other reason to bash the EU?
| rapsey wrote:
| I know of two companies getting money. The first ones
| entire business model is EU funds. They "make" only the
| necessary burocratic documentation. They have zero
| intentions of producing anything. The other is large and
| dirty af with bribes.
|
| If you try to compete with them for EU grants, you are
| going to get an investigation into your business for
| misspending EU funds. Because they know the right people.
| petre wrote:
| That's one reason why the European Public Prossecutor's
| Office was created.
| andi999 wrote:
| I thought it is not possible to have 100% funding through
| EU funds, there needs to be a sustainable business; but
| maybe ppl do not check this.
| Shorel wrote:
| At the very least mention the countries these companies
| are based on.
| welterde wrote:
| Would be good to name them publicly and/or perhaps have
| some investigative journalists of your choice poke them a
| bit.
|
| Doing nothing and just giving up doesn't make corruption
| go away.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Better defined goal, more money?
| varjag wrote:
| This looks a lot like what NSF does in the USA, on a
| similar budget.
| jcelerier wrote:
| What ? there's a shitton of good research done on H2020
| funds
| meh2frdf wrote:
| Any examples?
| jcelerier wrote:
| you can check out this for a meta-analysis: https://bmjop
| en.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/8/6/e021864.full.pdf and then,
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q="funded
| "+"... and add any field you'd like
| rusk wrote:
| You mean like CERN? Yeah what a waste of everybody's time
| that was ...
| Eridrus wrote:
| There are a fair amount of people who think the LHC was not
| a wise use of resources since it did not give any clues to
| a new theory beyond the existing "Standard Model"
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-
| means-f...
|
| It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't
| necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely
| cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that
| had to hand out work to all the funding countries.
|
| I am curious what investments have worked out for the EU,
| but if the LHC is the pinnacle, it doesn't inspire much
| hope.
| rusk wrote:
| You are literally using a tangible benefit right now.
| cnmlqk wrote:
| We would be using another subset of SGML otherwise.
| There's no way that something resembling the WWW wouldn't
| have been invented without CERN.
|
| And Einstein's patent office was cheaper.
| rusk wrote:
| Yeah well it wasn't and in all the years since nothing
| better has been either. And the reasons for that are
| specifically the flaws in the commercial approach.
| [deleted]
| kindly_fo wrote:
| I don't get why you are so upset us has more it companies than
| eu. Us and eu are friends and their good stuff you can use
| without wasting 140 billions. The r&d are very costly and by not
| doing it all this centuries eu saved gazillion of money.
| orbifold wrote:
| Always great to see how the EU squanders money on projects like
| that.
| michalklujszo wrote:
| Wasn't a project like that that was a starting point for
| Airbus?
| newdude116 wrote:
| As if the corrupt SBIR Grants are any better. Do you homework
| dude!
| _ph_ wrote:
| Good news. Yes, as with all government money, there is some pork
| barreling involved, but there is a long history of such
| government initiatives laying the starting seed for high tech
| industry development. It means money is invested in Europe tied
| to a certain purpose. Giving talented engineers a job perspective
| and companies a field in which they can invest into.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Exactly, I suppose the Taiwan government also helped a lot to
| TSMC to get started & get where it is now.
| rapsey wrote:
| Yeah but that was then and this is now. Exploiting these EU
| programmes is a business for many. They produce paperwork and
| they get EU funds.
| thu2111 wrote:
| _there is a long history of such government initiatives laying
| the starting seed for high tech industry development_
|
| However, not in the EU. The EU has been engaging in massive
| subsidisation for decades and has little to show for it. In
| some places it seems to have led to a hollowed out society in
| which companies that are supposedly startups spend all their
| time chasing grant money instead of building real products.
|
| VC investment is hard work. The EU isn't a well run VC firm
| even though it deploys more capital than such firms do, and it
| shows: they don't really care what the money gets spent on as
| long as there's a paper trail they can use to do ass-covering
| if it turns out the money was lost to fraud. So it creates this
| USSR-like culture of zombie firms that can't really survive
| independent of state funding.
| 02020202 wrote:
| let's reinvent the wheel for 145B of tax payer's money...ffs.
| OpticalWindows wrote:
| so thats where the NATO money went
| baybal2 wrote:
| Just by looking at the digit, it's 6 times bigger than the US
| programme on money spent per year.
|
| As unsubstantiated news suggest, the most of American program
| will be spent on attracting few, amazingly expensive, one off
| projects.
| golfer wrote:
| Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company
| influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has
| successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much
| more on a global scale.
| flembat wrote:
| Partly we are all hopelessly impressed by American
| salesmanship. For example our businesses ignored things like
| the Acorn Archimedes and bought PCs from IBM instead.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| First step would be to build better products and services.
| audunw wrote:
| Why do you think EU is behind in tech? As pointed out elsewhere
| in this thread, the lithography machines used by all state of
| the art IC nodes is designed in Europe. It's one of the most
| complex machines on the planet.
|
| Then there's mega projects like LHC and ITER (international
| projects, but it's not pure chance that they're located in
| Europe) and Wendelstein 7-X.
|
| My pet example is Nordic Semiconductor, which has an insanely
| good position in the Bluetooth LE device market. What's also
| interesting is that two of the major competitors also design
| their chips in Norway. Although those companies do illustrate
| one problem in Norway (and perhaps Europe in general): the lack
| of capital at certain stages. In the IC businesses it seems
| most companies are acquired by US companies eventually.
|
| Let's look at EVs. Europe doesn't have Tesla. But seems like
| most European car makers are doing OK with EVs. Arguably better
| than US incumbent car makers. VWs new platform is one of the
| most promising right now, although this project has shown that
| VW has a problem with software engineering. But so does most
| other older car companies in the world. There are also some
| interesting start ups that's more focused on
| designing/supplying components, such as Rimac and Kreisel.
| Rimac seems to go toe-to-toe with Tesla on extreme performance.
|
| I believe a lot of robots used in advanced manufacturing is
| German as well?
|
| In general I have the impression that Europe is very strong in
| designing/making components and manufacturing machines and
| such. Things that the end consumer never hears about. Very few
| have heard about ASML, but everyone has heard about Intel. So
| maybe that contributes to the impression that EU is behind on
| tech.
|
| Europe has also been ahead of the US in adopting tech on the
| consumer side in several areas. The US was in the stone age for
| a long time when it came to banking and payment for instance.
|
| How do you measure being behind/ahead in tech?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Why people have this perception seems pretty clear to me.
| Just comparing Europe to the US:
|
| The US has both the major desktop/laptop CPU designers, as
| well as both desktop/laptop GPU designers. Of the three major
| desktop/laptop OSes, two are American, and the last doesn't
| belong to any particular country, but the primary creator
| moved from Europe to the US permanently.
|
| The two major smartphone OSes are made by American companies.
| Two biggest browsers, again, Americans. Maybe three, if you
| count Mozilla (though Samsung is probably around there as
| well).
|
| Huge internet/software tech companies that consumers interact
| with? Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple are all
| American. Europe has no equivalent to these, all they can
| boast is a few smaller ones like Spotify, or business facing
| giants like SAP (equivalent to that in the US would probably
| be like Oracle or IBM).
|
| While obviously Europe doesn't have a complete dearth of
| local software, in terms of major consumer hits, especially
| the kind that get play outside of the region they originated
| in -- not much of that going on.
|
| Also, I work at Google Munich, and it's pretty telling how
| rare it is for people here to get 'poached' by other local
| tech companies. It happened to a few people I knew...to go to
| Lyft's Munich office. Other than that, I can't think of any.
| When it comes to enticing engineers, there just aren't any
| German tech companies that play in the same league as Google.
| golfer wrote:
| The market defines behind "ahead/behind" by market value.
| None of the top 5 market caps in Europe are in tech. They are
| Nestle, Roche, Total SA, Novartis, and LVMH. They are tiny in
| comparison to the US tech giants.
|
| All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not
| represented in the market.
|
| An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap
| of $3B.
|
| Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The
| first European entry is #14, ASML:
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-
| companies-b...
| biggermike wrote:
| I can't speak for the entirety of the Europe but from my
| experience with certain countries in the EU, there is a
| pervasive culture of avoiding risk at all costs in favor of
| stability. The culture extends from the government to investors
| and even employees.
|
| Government has no appetite for creative destruction and pushes
| policy favoring large incumbents over upstarts. Investors have
| no appetite for risk and only seek conservative investments.
| The best minds (that don't leave the EU) would rather work for
| large companies, schools, government, etc. than at smaller,
| riskier organizations that may not be around in a few years.
|
| My family in Europe thought I was a loser and/or crazy for
| leaving a job as an adjunct professor to work at a 100-person
| startup. It makes no sense to us but it's understandable to
| someone who views landing a lifetime cushy bureaucratic job as
| the gold standard.
| thu2111 wrote:
| That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And
| when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been
| Americans doing the asking.
|
| Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and
| getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who
| lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of
| Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about
| the Power Of Tech Firms. The front cover this particular week
| was one such article and I had found it kind of funny, so I was
| showing it to my friend and we were discussing it.
|
| Next to us in the restaurant was another table with an elderly
| gentlemen dining alone. Suddenly he leaned over and joined our
| conversation. It turned out he was some sort of economics
| academic and one of his 'research interests' was this question
| of why the EU doesn't generate tech firms. He had a lot of
| insight and I've never forgotten that discussion: it has
| influenced my thoughts about how to set up my own software
| firm.
|
| One of the points he made is that outside the USA there's no
| real culture of granting early employees equity, whereas in the
| US tech industry that's standard. ARM is apparently one of the
| few exceptions, in which the co-founders did in fact hand out
| equity early on. The incentivising effect this produces is
| profound. I've felt it myself - when I joined a startup, having
| an ownership stake as well as a salary made the difference
| between doing the work, and genuinely _caring_ about the
| company, being willing to get into arguments and fight for what
| was important, etc. So a culture gap with respect to ownership
| is perhaps one reason.
|
| The man made other points that were more commonly observed,
| like the different approaches to regulation. A few days ago
| people were surprised to discover that the UK/EU Brexit treaty
| mandates SHA-1 for some obscure data interchange format. This
| is typical for the EU. In the US people at least pretend to
| care about the innovation-harming impact of regulation, even on
| the left. There's zero culture of that in the EU. The EU views
| more regulation as inherently good, and anything that isn't
| caked in hundreds of pages of regulations as being merely on
| the TODO list. It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red
| lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to
| undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country
| that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU
| Commission itself, _in its own courts_ , which almost always
| rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law
| actually says. This creates a one-way ratchet of ever more
| convoluted and obsolete rules, which in turn imposes a thicket
| of complexity costs on companies that have other things to
| focus on. Many of these rules are justified on the grounds of
| making trade easier but often have the opposite effect.
|
| Finally there are the very real cultural aspects. The US/Valley
| culture practically celebrates failure. This isn't necessarily
| _good_ - failure is still failure, but family and friends at
| least seem to be pretty supportive of entrepreneurs in general
| and "failure" is very flexibly defined. For instance creating
| a company that never makes money isn't a problem in the US
| thanks to a mix of this culture and bottomless VC money.
| Whereas that would be perceived as failure by family and
| friends in Europe.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I run a tech company in the Netherlands. I can corroborate
| most of this.
|
| Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly
| impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of
| the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is
| because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the
| "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore
| salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equity. In
| the Netherlands, this tax is around 50%.
|
| Worse: depending on the exact legal implementation of the
| equity, you may end up having to pay the tax, based on its
| value on paper, _before_ actually selling the equity, whose
| actual market price may be far lower. One could end up losing
| money just by having equity.
|
| In the Netherlands, having a bankruptcy on your name makes
| you an ecomonic pariah. The process of going through a
| bankruptcy is not pleasant and comes with many
| responsibilities. Starting another company will be difficult.
| You will not be able to get a loan anymore. Oh, and your
| phone bill counts as a loan.
|
| There is also a very weak culture of venture capital
| investment. There are very few such investors, and where they
| exist, the amounts they offer is tiny (like 10x lower)
| compared to US VCs, even though they ask the same amount of
| equity.
|
| I am also not very impressed with the amount of
| advice/expertise VCs can offer over here.
|
| The Dutch government likes to talk about how much they
| stimulate the tech and startup scenes. But when capital is
| concerned, their default answer is that you're supposed to
| get a loan. Lenders, unlike venture capitalists, are risk-
| averse (which they have to by law), meaning that they MUST
| get their loan paid back no matter what, which means that
| your business plan MUST be profitable, guaranteed, and that
| you must provide some sort of personal collateral, such as
| your savings or your house.
|
| The sort of companies the government is thinking of, is for
| example a factory, where you need capital up front in order
| to buy machinery. The demand is known, so you know what
| profit you will roughly make. But this sort of thinking
| doesn't work for areas with high risk or a high degree of
| unknown.
|
| For example let's say that you want to make a Twitter. You
| need money to pay for developers' salaries. But what will
| your profit be in year 3? It could be 1 million, or 0
| (because nobody wants it). When banks hear this, they want a
| collateral equal to the loan amount. Why would I even get a
| loan then?
|
| The best thing I can say about the Netherlands is the WBSO
| subsidy. When you do tech research and development on an area
| with risk (where risk is defined as being risky _to you_ ,
| e.g. because you have no experience with a particular topic
| or technology), then the government provides a subsidy for
| the amount of man-hours spent on this R&D. R&D includes
| software development too. This subsidy is implemented as a
| salary tax break.
|
| Plus, when it turns out that your WBSO-subsidized product
| actually generates profit, then you get a corporate income
| tax break on the profits generated by that product. This is
| called the Innovatiebox.
|
| WBSO and Innovatiebox are really nice once you have initial
| capital and have taken off. They won't help you when you
| start with near EUR0.
| Daho0n wrote:
| >The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason
| you get equity, is because of your relationship as
| employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a
| form of salary
|
| But they are correct in saying this. You wouldn't give
| equity to random people would you? And is it not worth
| money? You might not agree with the tax rate but the two
| reasons you mentioned are irrefutably true.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I am not saying it is false. I am just saying that the
| tax rate makes giving equity very unattractive, which
| doesn't help employee motivation.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Do you really have a problem of obtaining good devs?
| Seems to me you can get good personnel in a bargain price
| in NL. It's also super easy to bring people from outside
| the EU. That's the main reason I think software devs are
| so cheap in the EU.
| thu2111 wrote:
| He's not talking about hiring, but motivating people who
| were already hired.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| By the way I think I read somewhere they wanna fix the
| employee options problems, you're totally right it's
| broken.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| I"ll echo VC scarcity in NL as a main problem. Coming from
| Israel I really notice in NL bootstrapped Dutch companies
| of high quality that are quite happy serving the local
| market and maybe Belgium and that's about it. No expansion
| planned, or if one is planned it could take years and
| years. I read once its due to lack of ambition by Dutch
| entrepreneurs, but that isn't it. Without VC money its
| simply realistic to stay local; how are you gonna compete
| with U.S companies without money? Even the big names in NL
| like WeTransfer, Mollie, Bux, Bunq etc would have raised
| way more in Israel or the US. It's quite enough to raise a
| sizable 1st round in Israel, use connections + acquire
| traffic and customers to show growth, and then raise
| enormous subsequent rounds because you showed growth. I'm
| sure many Dutch entreprenuers could have done the same
| thing but it isn't possible for them without funding. So
| they "dream" small. There are probably a lot of missed
| chances in NL. On the other hand if the tech VC market
| implodes again Dutch companies won't be hurt as bad.
| welterde wrote:
| Not sure if that also exists in the Netherlands, but maybe
| a worker cooperative as company form could be a solution
| for the equity problem?
| avianlyric wrote:
| > It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in
| the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut
| their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that
| attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU
| Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always
| rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law
| actually says.
|
| This is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No
| trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with
| another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes
| it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.
|
| It's the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against
| each other. They don't want the subsidies or differences in
| standards to allow one to undercut the other.
|
| The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its
| just that historically the US has sought to export its
| copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western
| world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy
| paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it's why weed is
| still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It's also how the US
| gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.
|
| Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade
| agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement
| agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-
| state_dispute_settl...
| Krasnol wrote:
| > For instance creating a company that never makes money
| isn't a problem in the US thanks to a mix of this culture and
| bottomless VC money. Whereas that would be perceived as
| failure by family and friends in Europe.
|
| I guess that's related to the US dept culture too. Not having
| money but borrowing it for all kinds of things and with that
| stacking dept upon dept is quite normal in the US while over
| here at the continent you usually want to pay it back asap.
|
| So not having money or working for a company which doesn't
| generate any must feel much better in the US.
|
| I would be terrified. I also wouldn't work for some startup
| which won't pay be but instead preach something about family
| values for example. Earning money and owning stuff that I buy
| feels great. Wouldn't want to miss it.
| amzans wrote:
| Interestingly, in German the word for debt - "schuld" - is
| the same as the word for guilt.
|
| Having lived in Germany for 7+ years, I noticed there's a
| strong sentiment against owing money in general. Odd,
| considering the crazy high real-state prices these days.
|
| People also seem to save a lot, and consume much less than
| in other western nations I've lived at, or visited.
|
| This may be causing broad economic issues as the money is
| there, it's just not moving around as much [1].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50213411
| Krasnol wrote:
| True but there is a difference between "jemandem etwas
| schulden" and a actual credit for a house or something:
|
| Owing someone you know money is probably the worst. You
| want to get rid of that "Schuld" asap. Even if it's an
| Euro you borrowed for an Einkaufswagen.
|
| Than there is the "credit" for things you should actually
| pay from money you have or otherwise not buy at all. Like
| a fridge or a TV or something like that. You usually
| don't go around and tell other people that you did that.
| You pretend that you actually paid for it and that it's
| yours. This is also where US debt-culture comes into
| Europe though. You can see for years now that shops
| encourage going into debt for those kind of products.
| They try to normalize it because it's easy to hide and
| pretend.
|
| Third are really big investments like a house or a
| business. Taking a credit there and discussing those with
| your friends and relatives is nothing that is frowned
| upon. Nobody expects you to have that kind of money (and
| if you had, you'd probably not admit to it).
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Well I can certainly say one thing, thanks to EU regulation I
| don't have to eat chlorinated chicken, the air is clean and I
| have reasonable working hours and holiday protected by law.
| You seem to suggest that regulation is always bad, I think a
| lot of people would disagree.
| blibble wrote:
| > Well I can certainly say one thing, thanks to EU
| regulation I don't have to eat chlorinated chicken, the air
| is clean
|
| well, if you completely ignore that the EU pushed diesel
| over petrol, to protect its domestic industries
|
| exactly the same as the chicken thing
|
| neither are to protect your health, that's just a secondary
| effect that the EU uses for PR
| Daho0n wrote:
| Comparing chlorinated chicken to diesel is just insane.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| You're right -- diesel is at least a million times more
| harmful
| Rexxar wrote:
| No. Diesel, compared to petrol, is worst for short-term
| air pollution and better for CO2 emissions. And,
| ultimately, climate change is the biggest danger.
| blibble wrote:
| you're possibly right
|
| diesel particulate emissions as a direct result of the EU
| legislation protecting EU industry cause about tens of
| thousands of deaths a year, mostly in Europe
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diese
| l-e...
|
| meanwhile chlorinated chicken has killed no-one
| TinkersW wrote:
| I visited the UK and the first thing I noticed when I was
| walking around the cities and towns as how much they
| stunk of diesel. Air quality made even the worst of US
| cities look good..
| Daho0n wrote:
| That is from old diesel cars. They are getting banned
| from cities.
| ascari wrote:
| Not sure, if anywhere other than London is moving away
| really. Especially considering bad public transport
| outside London, many people has to stick driving to city
| centres with cheap diesels. My manager was paying PS30
| road tax for his old diesel whereas my ULEZ compliant car
| costs above PS330.
| thu2111 wrote:
| The latter two are perhaps good for employees but are
| definitely a problem for startup founders who need everyone
| to give 110% of the company is to survive at all.
|
| As for chlorinated chicken, the EU likes to come up with
| bogus safety issues to protect French farmers, this is no
| news. It also has banned GM food, although the health
| problems Americans have aren't related to chlorinated
| chicken nor GM foods. The air one has been tackled by
| others already.
| petre wrote:
| > The EU views more regulation as inherently good, and
| anything that isn't caked in hundreds of pages of regulations
| as being merely on the TODO list
|
| One of the best examples of this are the digital tachograph
| design documents, which are hundreds of pages of legal
| gibberish mixed with a convoluted tech spec. 100% design by
| comitee. No wonder the top digital tachograph supplier is VDO
| and one if the lesser players, Stoneridge, has a much better
| designed and executed product.
|
| In contrast with this, the US ELD is an 125 page document
| standardising functionality and the data output of the
| device.
| e-_pusher wrote:
| This is really interesting - do you have any links to the
| documents you mention?
| petre wrote:
| Yes. Here you can find all the associated documents but
| I'm talking about Regulation EU 2016/799 and Electronic
| Logging Device Final Rule specifically.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social-
| provisions/...
|
| https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/hours-service/elds/electronic-
| logg...
| e-_pusher wrote:
| Thank you!
| oblio wrote:
| Well, the current European culture is deeply shaped by a
| immense counter reaction to those times when daring and
| enterprising men blew up the world twice.
|
| That's why consensus building and failure avoidance are
| common in Europe. People want good enough without moonshots.
| DrBazza wrote:
| The USA is also one country, one culture, one language, 300
| million people as an initial market and a continent. Each of
| these lower the barrier to entry. The last point point about
| being a continent is that I can ship across the USA for far
| less than I can ship from one side of the EU to the other.
| The USA has economies of scale that Europe still does not
| have.
| starik36 wrote:
| > The USA has economies of scale that Europe still does not
| have.
|
| If anything Europe has larger economies of scale. EU
| population alone is 446 million and that's not including
| countries that chose not to be part of it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Translating your product into 30 different languages is
| pretty expensive, as is finding local representatives who
| know their markets and can advertise efficiently.
| Americans are much more culturally alike to one another
| than they are willing to admit.
|
| And from the standpoint of e-commerce, shipping charges
| across Europe are expensive compared to the US. We do not
| have any common, reasonably priced service similar to US
| Post. Sending a package to Spain will cost me more than
| twice as much than sending it within borders of my own
| country, and the delivery will take several days.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The last point point about being a continent is that I can
| ship across the USA for far less than I can ship from one
| side of the EU to the other.
|
| I sell on eBay and Amazon. We Americans have no idea how
| good we have it in terms of shipping options.
|
| I can ship via USPS a videogame that is, including the
| padded envelope, 4 oz or less in weight for ~$3 to anywhere
| in the US (even AK, HI, and PR and other territories).
|
| I can ship as much as fits into a USPS-provided free padded
| Priority Mail envelope for $7.75, and reasonably expect
| that it will arrive anywhere in the US in two to three
| days.
|
| After FedEx ended its relationship with Amazon, it gave
| eBay Amazon's previous steep discount. In many cases, FedEx
| 2Day through eBay is _by far_ the cheapest way to get a
| package from one US coast to the other, even cheaper than
| USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Cubic. This is
| _guaranteed_ two days or less, as opposed to Priority Mail;
| think SLA versus lack of same.
|
| Such a discount is available to others, of course. I've
| written before about how I a month ago made $1700 in profit
| in three days by dropshipping a popular video game-related
| accessory from its manufacturer to dozens of customers
| around the country. I leveraged the manufacturer offering
| free FedEx shipping to fulfill my orders.
| welterde wrote:
| Regarding the expensive shipping in the EU point. That
| really depends on the country one is shipping from.
|
| Shipping from Germany is extremely cheap - even
| internationally (even cheaper than the rates you
| mentioned). But shipping the same thing the opposite
| direction can easily cost many multiples more.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is an interesting asymmetry.
|
| I was able to buy from German Amazon with a shipping
| charge around 4 Eur to Czechia. But a package from
| Czechia to Hamburg cost me 12 Eur.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| There's a good analysis video about it by TechAltar:
|
| How Europe lost its tech companies (2017)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
| leke wrote:
| Hmmm... Just after I watched this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF3sp-q3Zmk and thought the
| future was RISC-V
| snvzz wrote:
| I did watch https://youtu.be/_2KgrFm2Fz4 and came to the same
| conclusion.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Even ignoring specific criticism of RISC-V - the ISA means fuck
| all if you can't build the actual uarch that implements it. We
| are probably going to see x86 struggle because of issue-width
| (although Jim Keller seriously hinted something enormous when
| he was still at Intel), but the ISA itself (to 1*) isn't much
| of a CPU
| blargmaster42_8 wrote:
| Government beeing government this will have to opposite effect.
| albertop wrote:
| This is NOT how innovation works. https://www.amazon.com/How-
| Innovation-Works-Flourishes-Freed...
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Historically, Silicon Valley was created from government
| contracts and subsidies.
|
| Gov. intervention can work if done correctly.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| TSMC itself involved huge amounts of government spending and
| support.
| bitL wrote:
| Hint: it's going to end up with the same results as European AI -
| a bunch of inept large companies getting money without any
| results. Top-down approach from basic MBAs down to engineers
| never worked.
| christophilus wrote:
| Well, I hope all of the naysayers are wrong. I'm looking forward
| to what more competition will bring to this space.
| tw04 wrote:
| I can't decide if this is comical or depressing. The EU realizes
| they need to own the ability to manufacture processors. Meanwhile
| here in the US we've got hedge fund managers trying to gut Intel,
| national security be damned:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/activist-hedge-fund-...
| Nokinside wrote:
| EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with
| 5.69% weight.
|
| ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer
| and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography
| machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years
| model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for
| TSMC gigafactory.
|
| TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is
| probably the most expensive machine in the world.
| lumost wrote:
| I've heard this often repeated claim about ASML owning the core
| tech behind TSMC's 5nm process. However if it was just a
| question of buying N 200 million dollar machines to launch a
| 5nm foundry wouldn't we see dozens of 5nm competitors? Why
| hasn't intel , apple, Samsung, or AMD shelled out for 10?
|
| Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is
| a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.
| ksec wrote:
| >it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm
|
| Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do
| with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was
| that without ASML there are currently _zero_ chance you could
| get leading edge node working. But even with it you have
| barely started.
|
| Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.
| dmix wrote:
| It also adds the question what ASML has to gain from handing
| over their technical advantage to some local gov effort.
|
| I mean they can get paid but there's a ton of other companies
| not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of
| so I don't see why some geographic thing is some huge
| advantage for EU.
|
| They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with
| companies who don't need to figure anything out.
|
| If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to
| build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.
|
| But hey what do I know. I don't have multiple countries with
| lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
| iagovar wrote:
| The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the
| whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of
| something useful coming out of it.
|
| The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton
| of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major
| players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches.
| This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money.
|
| And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-
| user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a
| cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by
| Samsumg or TSMC.
| stevespang wrote:
| Agreed. EU has no track record of producing leading edge nm
| chips, any EU designs will more likely be fabbed at TSMC or
| maybe Samsung.
| rualca wrote:
| > The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a
| ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the
| major players.
|
| They don't need to become major players for this program to
| be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a
| native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a
| huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge
| processor.
|
| Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop
| a product line that dominates all competitors in all
| categories, from performance to power efficiency and also
| price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.
| DSingularity wrote:
| What? You are basically discount AMD design. The
| manufacturing and process tech are critical but not enough
| alone. You need good design.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| When you can use the twice the number of transistors and
| they use 1/3 less power that is a pretty big advantage to
| work with.
|
| You might have the best car design in world, but if all
| could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy
| design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might
| work better.
|
| Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right
| now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| "Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of
| American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country
| relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic
| communications.
|
| Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely
| entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an
| important role for small countries, but large groups like
| EU can afford to go big.
| sneak wrote:
| > _No self-respecting country relies on foreign
| cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications._
|
| I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a
| Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the
| majority of its diplomatic communications.
|
| I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| There is a lot more to a communication system than the
| primitives it uses. Even holding primitives constant,
| there is a lot of room for variation (and bugs and side
| channels). Recall that one of the early identifiers of
| equation group was subtracting 0x61C88647 rather than
| adding 0x9E3779B9 during RC6 key setup [1 p. 28]. So I
| guess what I'm saying is nations don't just download AES
| bitstreams off the internet.
|
| [1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sit...
| lumost wrote:
| Sovereignty matters when you can't trust there won't be
| supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade
| intervention.
|
| Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of
| the above in the western world, following the collapse of
| the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the
| belief that "we'd reached the end of history".
|
| As of 2020 I don't think any major power considers the
| risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The
| us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of
| the seas unilaterally.
| [deleted]
| rmrfstar wrote:
| An alternative explanation is that US policy makers like
| Larry Summers and Bob Rubin are just incompetent,
| delusional, and greedy.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"Both India's and China's push for a native self-
| sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success
| in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor."
|
| Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two
| countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a
| SPARC-based chip.
| misja111 wrote:
| > .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I
| hold no hope of something useful coming out of it.
|
| The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious
| government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years.
| Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of
| subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell
| their goods below global market prices. I would say that this
| 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what
| EU money has been spent on so far.
| vladimirralev wrote:
| Central banks and governments pretty much already committed
| to drive a planned economy. EU subsidises farmers (among
| others) to sell goods at cheap prices, which causes
| consumer prices to drop and in the end the ECB says
| inflation is too low, so let's print money to buy more gov
| bonds. Governments then use the money to subsidise
| something else distorting the markets and it loops back to
| disinflation and the central bank printing even more money.
|
| It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or
| not, the future of the economy is with the politically
| preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans.
| Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation,
| insurance and so on is for the peasants.
| skrebbel wrote:
| ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean
| you can make good chips.
|
| As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write
| good novels because you got your hands on a printer.
|
| I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design
| knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet
| see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next
| Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).
| CalChris wrote:
| The company has offices and design centres in Copenhagen in
| Denmark; Oulu in Finland; Sophia Antipolis in France;
| Grasbrunn in Germany; Budapest in Hungary; Galway in Ireland;
| Trondheim in Norway; Katowice in Poland; Sentjernej in
| Slovenia; Lund in Sweden.
| nirv wrote:
| RISC-V Foundation just moved[1] from the USA to Switzerland
| in late 2019 due to geopolitical concerns.
|
| Also, the European Union is heavily betting on the RISC-V for
| its future hyperscale HPC systems[2][3][4].
|
| I would believe that next-gen European CPU budget declaration
| is part of this dynamic. And I really hope it will work out.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-
| semiconductors-...
|
| [2] https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/project/epi/
|
| [3] https://www.mdpi.com/2297-8747/25/3/46/pdf (PDF)
|
| [4] https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/10/europes-
| homegrown-hp...
| GregarianChild wrote:
| The RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland primarily to
| help the big Chinese processor companies to work on RISC-V.
|
| Regarding the _EU heavily betting on RISC-V_ , what gives
| you confidence that this will work? The history of EU
| funded projects to catch up with the US in AI, in cloud
| computing (like GAIA-X), in quantum computing, in the space
| race? HPC is not a mass-market, how should this niche be
| economically viable to amortise the huge cost of processor
| development? HPC in the US (and other countries) is often
| connected to military spending (although this is not always
| openly expressed). Processor development is extremely
| expensive, to the extent that Intel is now struggling to
| finance catching up with TSMC's fab process. Where is the
| EU's micro-architecture design capacity? ARM is about to be
| swallowed by Nvidia, and a lot of Arm's micro-architecture
| development is done in the US already. Now compare the
| micro-architecture design capacity with that in China (the
| world's biggest processor market). I
| really hope it will work out.
|
| I do too.
|
| Given 40 years of failure to catch up with the US, and now
| China, I am sceptical! I expect this to end up like
| previous EU attempts at catching up: the monies available
| will be _much_ smaller than originally announced (by at
| least an order of magnitude), spent over much longer a
| time-frame, but more importantly, mostly flow to existing
| EU-based companies that are good ad lobbying, e.g. Siemens,
| and French conglomerates.
|
| Another prediction: China will soon dominate RISC-V, since
| they are now forced, by US sanctions, to move away from
| Arm. I cannot see big Chinese processor companies moving to
| local ISAs such as Loongson. Alibaba announced a RISC-V
| processor at ICSA this year [2]. The big US players (Intel,
| AMD, Nvidia) have much less of a need to move to RISC-V.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
|
| [2] https://conferences.computer.org/isca/pdfs/ISCA2020-4Ql
| DegUf...
| nirv wrote:
| > _The RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland primarily
| to help the big Chinese processor companies to work on
| RISC-V._
|
| Of course. It also removes unnecessary anxiety for the EU
| that the next ruling power in the US (or elsewhere) may
| eventually attempt to impose sanctions on the export of
| the IP. Switzerland, as part of Schengen and Union's
| single market, fits nearly perfectly into the narrative
| of European consolidation.
|
| > _what gives you confidence that this will work?_ [...]
| _Where is the EU 's micro-architecture design capacity?_
|
| I can't see the future, hence I have no confidence. But I
| express cautious optimism for the following reason: the
| issue of EU's dependence on some crucial technologies
| from the third parties is obvious, but there's no direct
| and quick solution to solve it. The EU can't just turn
| into venture capital Mecca overnight, the same holds for
| becoming a low tax heaven. However, the
| problems/challenges are there, and they must be addressed
| in the best way under the given circumstances.
|
| The EU has a well-established practice of funding R&D in
| large areas with non-specific goals or metrics, however
| this approach is not unique to the EU, it's crucial to
| the bloc to nourish the interbloc integration and
| establish logistics between the disparate parts of the
| market and institutions. It doesn't always lead to
| unexpected discoveries or breakthrough ventures, but in
| general it manages the integration task quite well.
| Which, in turn, contributes to the development of a rich
| ecosystem. As a tech entrepreneur in the EU, I'm not
| exactly happy with current affairs, but satisfied with
| the recognition of my industry's difficulties and
| proposed attempts to solve them. A failed venture with
| some new sprouts at worst case, a tangible breakthrough
| at best.
|
| So far, the EU holds leading position in the lithography
| systems (ASML). The EU is competitive in radio (Ericsson,
| Nokia) and embedded (NXP, Infineon, STM) semi
| manufacturing. There're many blank spaces on the European
| vertical technology stack, but it's far from a blank
| slate. This whole commitment is about EU pushing
| homegrown processor sovereignty across the entire stack.
| AFAIU, the project puts the focus on HPC as the only
| specific target platform that needs to be manufactured,
| but the developments around this project should lay the
| ecosystem for the boost of the industry as a whole.
|
| Companies such as Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Amazon[3],
| Google[3], and especially fresh start-ups like Nuvia[4]
| and Ampere[5] -- are working on new ARM-based CPU
| designs, while SiFive[6] and some others on RISC-V. Also,
| I'd speculate that AMD and Intel will have to consider
| switching from the X86 in the foreseeable future. _Now is
| the best possible time for venture into the semiconductor
| industry_ in the past few decades. I don 't underestimate
| the complexity of the task. But perhaps a fraction of
| EUR145bn would be enough to plant a seed of a viable EU-
| based CPU semi enterprise; or is it definitely a doomed
| undertaking, eh? Maybe that French SiPearl[7] or some
| other company will take chances, we shall see.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple
| _Silico...
|
| [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
|
| [3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/google-wants-
| to-dump...
|
| [4] https://nuviainc.com/
|
| [5] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-
| altra-80-core-n...
|
| [6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sifive-tech-
| idUSKCN2571UL
|
| [7] https://sipearl.com
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| The foundation just coordinates the standards process and
| sets rules for using the trademark. It has a tiny budget
| and few staff. All substantive R&D is done by its members,
| which are companies of various size with headquarters in
| various countries: https://riscv.org/members/
|
| Changing where the foundation is incorporated doesn't
| change where this R&D happens.
|
| Also Switzerland isn't in the EU.
| m4rtink wrote:
| On the other hand, without the printing press your reach as a
| novel autor was severely limited - to the point there were no
| novel authors basically.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Nice! Great point and it might just apply here as well!
| ginko wrote:
| >I think much of the relevant chip design knowledge we had
| (ARM) left the EU this morning.
|
| The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large
| degree in Southern France.
| iagovar wrote:
| Yeah but that's ARM IP though. There's a window of
| opportunity with RISC V, but something tells me that the
| fact it's open source rubs against some people.
| ginko wrote:
| >Yeah but that's ARM IP though.
|
| How does this matter? Do you think ARM won't license
| their IP to European chip makers?
| thu2111 wrote:
| ARM will be owned by NVIDIA soon anyway so it's all
| swings and roundabouts.
| rusk wrote:
| Are ARM still Japanese? I think there's a pretty solid
| trade agreement between the EU and Japan ...
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-
| for...
| rusk wrote:
| Has the UK even got a trade deal with the US yet?
| jlokier wrote:
| No it hasn't, and the type of deal it is going to get
| looks likely to be different under Biden than under
| Trump. I think your point is relevant regarding ARM-
| Nvidia, as semiconductor technology has tended to be the
| subject of trade barriers, and is seen as a strategic
| national asset.
| rusk wrote:
| Yeah that's what I was kind of getting at ... great
| British success story, bought by SoftBank Japan
| coincidentally straight after Brexit. Would have been a
| good asset to have in trade negotiations. The sale to US
| based Nvidia 3 months ago is an interesting twist that
| would have gone against the EU had Trump won again.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Both AMD and Apple Are fabless, so maybe The EU can partner
| with them like how Apple has partnered with TSMC.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Your analogy works if ASML makes the only printer that can
| print the letter 'S'. Without it, you can't print and sell
| the books, regardless of who the author is.
| gchadwick wrote:
| > I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design
| knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning
|
| Worth noting the Sophia Antipolis arm design centre in France
| continues to exist. It works on some of the big A-class cores
| (The A75 for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A75).
|
| Though whether arm would get involved in this endeavour is
| another question. They have a significant physical IP
| portfolio: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical
| and associated skillsets (I think at least some of this is UK
| based, not entirely sure how much) so would be a good partner
| to have and I suspect arm would like to see arm cores coming
| out as test designs rather than RISC-V cores. Of course in
| the wake of brexit potentially not a partnership the EU wants
| politically! UK government would spin it as UK company plays
| key part in major EU initiative with significant funding
| awarded. EU would spin it as EU brings in major global
| semiconductor company to new semiconductor initiative.
| Nokinside wrote:
| ARM IP, even full architectural license, is relatively small
| percentage of the cost of a semiconductor. Know-how for
| fables microarchitecture designs is widely distributed. Most
| fabless work goes to specialized asics.
|
| It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography
| equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML
| that prevents China from getting into high-end
| semiconductors, not the domestic microarchitecture know-how.
| mafribe wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| Here is an interesting question: how long will it take
| China to catch up? _I predict 10 years!_ The Chinese
| government sees a leading position in semi manufacture as
| being of extreme strategic importance. There are several
| reasons why I think China will succeed other than
| government strategy: the size of the Chinese market
| (already the biggest processor market in the world), the
| ease with which Taiwanese semi expertise can be brought to
| China (legally, salaries are just higher in Shanghai than
| in Taipei).
| stevespang wrote:
| Good, keep the sub 7 nm process out of China's military
| hands, they have proven to be an arrogant and expansionist
| mindset and enslaving millions of Uighurs, organ
| harvesting, other crimes.
| geogra4 wrote:
| Does that change with the China eu trade deal?
| himlion wrote:
| I don't think the US will allow that. They probably have
| enough leverage.
| DSingularity wrote:
| I think they squandered that recently. We will see with
| Biden but the Trump administration basically encouraged
| Brexit and repeatedly adopted anti- EU positions in key
| geopolitical issues (Syria, NATO, Iran, Israel, and
| Ukraine). These things come with a cost and the EU will
| try to rectify this. Enhancing Chinas CPU tech by a few
| generations might be worth it if it can advance EU
| interests and ensure future good-faith from a supposed
| ally.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| It's not their decision. The ASML scanners rely on many
| critical US-origin technologies and the US can block
| shipment unilaterally.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| And in every case the US was right and the EU was wrong.
|
| Only a fool would tie themselves to China as things stand
| right now.
| CountSessine wrote:
| Enhancing China's CPU tech even a single generation is in
| the EU's interest in exactly 0 alternate universes, along
| with this one.
|
| As long as the US has the world's only reserve currency
| and as long as the EU economy - especially the productive
| bit in the North - is built on exporting to the all-
| powerful US consumer, the EU has very little leverage in
| its affairs with the US.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| This thinking is how you end an empire
| usr1106 wrote:
| > the EU has very little leverage in its affairs with the
| US.
|
| The final word has not been spoken. Construction of Nord
| Stream 2 has recently been restarted despite the US
| threatening with sanctions.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design
| knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning.
|
| Does that even marginally matter?
|
| Even after Brexit, both EU, and UK will remain open
| economies, unless you believe a conspiracy theory that Boris
| is a closet communist.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Look at it and ponder how amazing it is that we've built this
| with our monkey brains:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc
|
| So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!
| kasperni wrote:
| The previous top model NXE:3400B, "weighs 180 tons and needs 20
| trucks or three fully loaded Boeing 747s for shipment. The
| price tag is $120 million." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-
| d....
| tape_measure wrote:
| That's ~$.66/g. A car at that price would be around $1M.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Most of that is packaging, seriously. The purity requirements
| and vibrational limits for those parts are very high.
|
| ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is
| already in the pipeline.
|
| The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme
| Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing
| process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole
| metrology is moved into vacuum.
|
| The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration.
| The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large
| Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed
| (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more
| machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's
| law finally dies due to the cost.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I was wondering how much farther down they could
| theoretically go : Typical Si-Si bond length is actually
| only 0.24 nm !
| jlokier wrote:
| > The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding [..]
| gravitational-wave astronomy
|
| A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in
| gravitational-wave astronomy.
|
| ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately _one
| billion_ times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton 's
| width displacements measured by LIGO.
|
| From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts:
|
| > At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect
| a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the
| width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the
| distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to
| an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.
| mafuy wrote:
| That's insane! Thanks for sharing
| baybal2 wrote:
| > ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight.
|
| And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations
| around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the
| Atlantic this year.
|
| So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we
| know.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > for TSMC gigafactory
|
| I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?
| ksec wrote:
| Yes. The correct term for TSMC should be Giga _Fab_ , which
| was used long before Elon coined GigaFactory.
|
| It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of
| those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was
| also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Should have said Gigafab GIGAFAB(r) is TSMC's trade mark.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not
| commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration.
|
| The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can
| make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the
| decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the
| greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet.
| [0]
|
| The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC
| to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they
| want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement
| that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value
| roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills
| and keep China from locking it up.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028
| aeyes wrote:
| We have been trying to help Infineon get onto its own feet
| for years and years, it just isn't happening. The investment
| it would take for competing with TSMC would require massive
| government support with very few benefits. Specialized chips
| with higher margins but older tech make more sense than mass
| production with the most advanced process.
|
| Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the
| people but economically it isn't feasible to have production
| in the EU.
| coolgod wrote:
| > No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and
| catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not
| feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and
| technology on the planet. [0]
|
| Those are some huge claims, which could have previously been
| said for many currently outdated technologies.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| No one else is even trying
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| This truism is known to ASML as well, and they are ramping
| R&D spending to maintain or expand their lead. [0]
|
| Just as an example, the dimension of the features their
| tool prints are smaller than the wavelength of light that
| is actually doing the printing.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100162/randd-
| costs-of-a...
| sigstoat wrote:
| > The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with
| TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node
| they want to intercept (2 nm?).
|
| that's hardly in Taiwan's geopolitical interest. perhaps if
| the EU made some serious political concessions to Taiwan.
| ku-man wrote:
| When it comes to geopolitics the EU has the impetuous of
| Vanuatu.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Underrated comment! If eu has a viable alternative to tsmc,
| incentive to protect Taiwan diminishes greatly. Then again,
| Why would the eu care to fight China? EU does not seem
| interested in using its power to further democracy
| elsewhere (or even within Europe.... )
| dmix wrote:
| Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive
| multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something
| off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don't.
|
| From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it's
| going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid
| 'executives' with 'industry experience' and tons of (also
| overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same
| thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to
| run it.
|
| I mean I _hope_ it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who
| doesn't want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and
| not the ones who know how to play the political game the best
| but I'm highly highly skeptical.
|
| We'll see in a few years I guess.
|
| And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they
| currently provide. But let's hope who ever doles this out
| understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this
| thread.
|
| But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds
| the critical question why should ASML care to give special
| treatment to this one project? They are already killing it
| globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers
| shit loads of money to potentially fleece?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run
| it.
|
| I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to
| work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip
| process and design... In America!
|
| What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be
| directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they
| won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the
| non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
| minxomat wrote:
| > What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to
| be directly paid as engineering salaries.
|
| I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with
| good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop
| new features or tech that they would otherwise not
| develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct
| contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant
| application.
|
| I've written and defended these grants for multiple
| companies and I have been on the receiving end of them,
| too.
|
| This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just
| something you can always do, along with literally
| hundreds of EU and state level support programs.
| csunbird wrote:
| > I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going
| to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip
| process and design... In America!
|
| Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Tech salaries in the US are not sustainable. We don't
| have enough planets to run economies and waste natural
| resources at that velocity.
|
| Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful"
| salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Yet tech salaries in Vancouver combined with real estate
| values make it so that most tech jobs are barely living
| wage, at least when my partner and I tried hard to make
| it work some years ago. Even with universal health care
| (which wasn't _quite_ what they have) it couldn 't
| possibly make up the difference for someone with college
| debt.
|
| I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American
| college you're probably just forced to work in the US
| simply because the other prospective employees can accept
| a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best
| of the best can find a way to earn American salaries
| overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the
| HN crowd might assume.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The situation in Vancouver is caused by out of control
| immigration quotas. Real estate there is a way to park
| assets in a safe jurisdiction.
|
| Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and
| real estate and is only three hours away.
|
| Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs
| get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians
| pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's
| pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that
| goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to
| see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Global purchase power is a very limited and 100% american
| way to assess work compensation. In europe we don't care
| only about the number but about many other factors.
| ATsch wrote:
| That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the
| raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture.
| They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for
| housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the
| things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage
| increase, the increase in living standard is very minor
| (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you
| lose daily to the car centric infrastructure).
|
| The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region
| was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that
| moved from the EU.
| Nursie wrote:
| They still are pretty pitiful across Europe even after
| that, compared to Canada and Australia as well as the US.
|
| In the UK the problem seems to be the company
| owner/manager class see software people roughly the same
| as any other office worker, rather than as skilled
| producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and
| then are surprised when they get less than stellar
| results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but
| across the rest of the continent the pay seems even
| worse.
| kwere wrote:
| italy is the same and maybe worse (outside of Milan
| bubble)
| TMWNN wrote:
| >That's an understandable reaction if you just look at
| the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full
| picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the
| costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the
| rest of the things that you need to live.
|
| At $45,284 the US has the highest household net
| disposable income per capita in the OECD
| (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-
| states/), where "disposable income"
| (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46)
| accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
| kortilla wrote:
| And that's not even specific to tech salaries. A typical
| Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also
| include great healthcare so there is basically no
| competition in any European location.
|
| You have to specifically want to live in a European city
| for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no
| reason to take tech jobs there.
| nixass wrote:
| > Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer
|
| You know not all IT people are senior engineers nor they
| share vision of the world exported by the Hollywood
| lumost wrote:
| You can get the walkability side in any of northeastern
| cities such as NYC, Boston, and to a lesser extent D.C.
| Pay is comparable to the Bay given the cost of living
| difference.
| Bahamut wrote:
| Comparable is generally not true - the difference is
| maybe ~$30k at best in DC vs. the Bay Area for example,
| but DC compensation is nowhere near what you can get in
| the Bay Area. The only thing in the US that beats it it
| seems is NYC area finance (i.e. hedge funds).
| zorpner wrote:
| > A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior
| engineer will also include great healthcare
|
| Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same
| blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network
| complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's
| healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you
| navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.
| stiray wrote:
| You have actually addressed the actual issue here but
| from wrong perspective.
|
| Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to
| earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then
| yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the
| people that I know that went working outside of their
| country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA
| companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left
| for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for
| Europe and bought a small property in France where he
| lives with whole family.
|
| This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr,
| protection of workers, actually having friends, nature,
| having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only
| lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the
| mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water
| in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week
| max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free
| education, maternity leave measured in years not months
| (yes under a year too but not month or two),...
|
| So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some
| people just love the money and things they can buy with
| it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of
| such people are also in EU. The difference is in the
| percentage of population although Hollywood did great job
| at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.
|
| ---
|
| Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying
| processors from the States, it was also happy with using
| Windows, Android, Apple _thing_. The problem is, as in
| every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that
| wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic
| addiction to blood (endless growth).
|
| It has become imperative to produce our own processors as
| you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside
| some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it
| is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU
| has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own
| chips our own phones and operating system (linux,
| sailfish or something else...).
|
| EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of
| muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...
|
| I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China
| products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we
| know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of
| previous development with me), not having a need for
| GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from
| pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and
| resources will have to go that way. But we will
| eventually fix it.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Of all the people that I know that went working outside
| of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies
| (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None
| left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left
| USA for Europe and bought a small property in France
| where he lives with whole family.
|
| Now let me give you actual statistics.
|
| In a survey of scientists from 16 countries
| (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-
| global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of
| the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.
|
| By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to
| another country, of which 32% go to Canada.
| stiray wrote:
| Sure, I have never argued with that.
|
| Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's,
| police brutality, corona handling fiasco,
| Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public
| depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of
| USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring,
| student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants
| want to have children someday), no one believes in "war
| on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on
| privacy,...
|
| This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to
| date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in
| 2012 survey stayed and where.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-
| debt-of-th...
|
| [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-
| image-plumm...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Aren't Europeans interested in ending this brain drain?
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > At $45,284 the US has the highest household net
| disposable income per capita in the OECD
| (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-
| states/), where "disposable income"
| (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46)
| accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
|
| There's a catch, though: You have to live in the
| borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the
| drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary
| increase, imo.
| [deleted]
| ATsch wrote:
| "Disposable income per capita" is certainly a number, but
| it's not actually meaningful in this context for a few
| reasons:
|
| 1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal
| people, as it does not account for how equally that
| wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their
| income and the rest halves it, that's still a net
| increase in "disposable income".
|
| 2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the
| varying amount of cost required to sustain a given
| standard of living in different regions, even within a
| country.
|
| 3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As
| such, it does not measure a large amount things that
| impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job
| satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic
| measures will show those high economic measures don't
| come for free.
| logicchains wrote:
| >What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to
| be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they
| won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the
| non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
|
| This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to
| Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away,
| because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low
| by global standards (even lower than China's).
| mafribe wrote:
| As far as I understand, ASML is _not_ the creation of
| government funding, but instead a spinout of Philip and
| ASMI, two successful Dutch electronics companies. ASML was
| successful in a competitive market, dominated by Japanese
| companies pretty quickly.
|
| In other words, very different model from what the EU is
| currently trying.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| You are correct. The discussion about ASML is relevant in
| that state of the art chips cannot be produced without
| one of their TwinScan lithography tools. ASML is the only
| company that can build tools with 7nm and below
| capability.
|
| In the context of the EU developing the ability to
| fabricate state-of-the-art chips, ASML would sell them
| the TwinScan tools they needed, which are just one
| species of about 40 that are used for chip fabrication.
| mafribe wrote:
| ASML would also sell those tools without prodding by the
| EU. ASML would dearly love to sell them to SMIC and other
| Chinese foundry too, if the US would let them.
|
| Lithography machines are a functioning market that is
| interfered with for geo-strategic reasons.
| jjeaff wrote:
| If ASML is the only company that can do what they do and
| anyone else would need decades to catch up, how are they
| not the most profitable company in the world?
|
| All of the world's most profitable companies depend
| dearly on chips. If they are literally the only company
| that can provide this critical part of the chip
| production, why aren't they taking a larger portion of
| the profit?
| roenxi wrote:
| At some point their customers will stop worrying about
| using 7nm and go back to double-digit nanometres. CPU
| tech from the 2000s is adequate for most workloads, let
| alone stuff from 2010.
|
| I'm sure there is a lot of stuff where 7nm is necessary
| to get certain outcomes, but it is a small market
| compared to what could be reasonably done with older
| process technologies.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| However TSMC is a direct creation of the Taiwanese
| government. In 1985 Morris Chang was
| recruited by the Taiwanese government to help
| develop the emerging semiconductor industry. In
| 1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non profit
| research institute ITRI as Chairman and
| President and launched what would be TSMC's
| first semiconductor wafer fabrication plant on
| the ITRI campus. Taiwan Semiconductor
| Manufacturing Company Ltd. was officially formed
| in 1987 as a joint venture between the Taiwan
| government (21%), Dutch multinational
| electronics giant Philips (28%), and other
| private investors.
|
| https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-
| manufacturers/tsmc/1539-a...
| kazen44 wrote:
| ASML is not directly funded by a govermental grant yes,
| but phillips had massive govermental support (mainly from
| the dutch goverment and the EEC aswell).
| bojan wrote:
| Considering what it has to do and support, the EU has
| surprisingly little bureaucracy, although obviously it's
| huge in absolute terms.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| A relative is a middle manager in one of the biggest tech
| organizations in EU; only 60% of their huge organization
| is doing actual work and that 60% includes the management
| of the actual experts; the rest are "support functions"
| with very well paid positions for people appointed by the
| member states with strong political connections and no
| relevant skills vs. hired with interviews for the 60%.
| But even in the 60% there are a lot that are not meeting
| the skills required, but they are protected from any
| action by labor laws and unions, including forced salary
| raised based on how long they worked there, with no
| performance indicators.
|
| In practical terms, over 50% of that large (many
| thousands) organization should not exist. Another 50% of
| what is left is only needed because EU bureaucracy
| requires them to cover work that can be avoided. That
| qualifies for "too much bureaucracy".
| egman_ekki wrote:
| > This book contains three basic ideas. The first is an
| output-oriented approach to management. That is to say,
| we apply some of the principles and the discipline of the
| most output-oriented of endeavors--manufacturing--to
| other forms of business enterprise, including most
| emphatically the work of managers. Consider Intel, which
| is a true manufacturing and production company, making
| highly complex silicon chips as well as computer-like
| products built from them. Our company now has over thirty
| thousand employees. Of these, about 25 percent actually
| work to make the products. Another 25 percent help them
| as they supervise the personnel, maintain the machines,
| and engineer and improve the manufacturing process.
| Another 25 percent work in administration, where they
| schedule production, keep personnel records, send bills
| to our customers, and pay our suppliers. Finally, the
| remaining 25 percent design new products, take them to
| the marketplace, sell them, and service them after the
| sale.
|
| Andy Grove, High Output Management, about Intel (at the
| time when they were successful)
|
| I think there are many, many (not directly) productive
| functions that successful business needs to have and
| engineers often underestimate those (I certainly know I
| often do).
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| What is described above is a close to 100% productive
| personnel, direct or indirect. Imagine on top of that you
| have 10% that "work" on wellness programs (on paper, no
| tangible output ever, maybe a link to a Youtube yoga
| channel), 25% doing marketing for an institution that is
| unique with no competitors and no need for publicity
| (imagine publishing adds for Europol, the European police
| force; what are they selling?), another 10% doing
| diversity programs (when skilled engineers are already
| scarce, you force quotas on various categories) and
| another 10% are hired just on paper and never appear to
| work.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| >From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment
| it's going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid
| 'executives' with 'industry experience' and tons of (also
| overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same
| thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to
| run it.
|
| Are we talking about VC and large corporate investment or
| government investment here.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I think I share your concern -- it's a question of "is a
| top down order to develop some technology (with required
| investment to 'force' it to happen) the best way to achieve
| that?"
|
| What often ends up happening is that because it's so
| "strategically important" and so much money has been
| directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive
| ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation --
| which may not be applicable to new technology, roadmaps get
| laid out which everyone has to say they're meeting
| successfully, and then at the end you find out somehow that
| it didn't produce what you wanted.
|
| Versus, a more bottoms-up approach where you hopefully
| create the conditions that incentivize or make possible
| some technologies and technologists to succeed -- without
| knowing fully who exactly or what exactly.
|
| I'm sure that both have some inefficiencies, but the 1st
| method is sure to pay the people who have already been
| successful. But then again, maybe for a relatively
| incremental advance in some technology, there are fewer
| unknowns and method #1 works ok.
| emn13 wrote:
| Conversely, for the really novel stuff government
| investment in research has a pretty good track record,
| really - I mean, they don't always turn it into a
| product, but who cares? Hoping for a corporation to fund
| medium or long-horizon research seems unwise. Even if
| they do, they're not going to do it in a way that's very
| efficient (i.e. they'll inefficiently invest in stuff
| with a high moat, rather than broad applicability).
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I don't think this requires anything special from ASML.
| They'd sell systems to the TSMC/EU partnership. The key is
| that the process engineers in the fab would learn how to
| develop processes for the leading edge geometries. To some
| extent, ASML engineers would know this, too. However, the
| secret recipes (literally) of chip production are so
| closely guarded that even the equipment companies for the
| tools they run on are not permitted to see them.
|
| I completely agree that consortium-based organizations are
| less able to respond and react to changes or issues. That's
| why it needs to be treated as a strategic (defense) matter
| rather than a government/industry partnership, a-la
| Sematech in the US.
| usr1106 wrote:
| > Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other
| massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull
| something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don't.
|
| I can understand your concerns. But if you look at mid-
| range airplanes the European monster Airbus did respectably
| catch up with incumbent Boeing.
|
| In with the Jumbos they clearly surpassed it engineering-
| wise but failed in their commercial predictions that such
| planes would be needed.
|
| So EU is neither a guarantee for failure nor for success.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Plus side, the amount of money seems realistic. TSMC's
| latest node at 5nm/3nm was like $16B and so 10x doesn't
| sound outrageous if playing catchup.
|
| I do wonder how many people will be involved; it could be
| like ITER where everyone builds one fab that's truly the
| best in the world. Or it could be that they want to
| spread it out amongst the existing incumbents they can
| find who I am sure will do nothing with it.
|
| Concentrate the funding and I imagine it could do pretty
| well. Distribute to (more than one) commercial entity
| (preferably zero to retain public access) and I doubt it
| will go anywhere.
| wott wrote:
| Airbus was not related to EU (or EEC). It was basically a
| France-Germany bipartite cooperation, with tiny bits of
| Spain and Netherlands, and UK being in/out. UK didn't
| belong to EEC when they were supposed to take part in the
| beginning of the project. Spain didn't join EEC until 20
| years later. Netherlands were in by accident, in a way.
| jxramos wrote:
| > Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run
| it.
|
| I'm still so fascinated by our minds' ability to
| interpolate and extrapolate to the platonic ideal of any
| ungrounded and unconstrained idea so readily. Yes big
| bureaucratic mass of brain trust experts going at it
| nonstop, how can you not yield great returns? I'm starting
| to awaken more and more to how messy and data dependent
| this world is. Ideals and declaration and promises just
| don't go far enough. But it's all so complicated and
| situational to figure out in advance why they don't go as
| far as we'd expect.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain
| domestic strategically important industries (aerospace,
| energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with
| government subsidies.
|
| The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the
| major players in the industry. Being the leader is not
| necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in
| manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
| f6v wrote:
| Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet
| countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the
| pretense of "transitioning to market economy".
| akrymski wrote:
| Assets were sold to friends and family, with massive
| kickbacks and for a fraction of their market value.
|
| This can't happen in EU today.
| stelonix wrote:
| Most of the time with countries not directly aligned to
| the west, the preaching is for us to sell our strategic
| industries in name of liberalism and "economic openness",
| usually spreading lies and misinformation about the
| company's efficiency. When it's the other way around,
| it's protectionism and good old Keynesian economics:
| China can't buy that company, their 5g is evil etc.
|
| I know this first-hand because it has happened to my
| country each and every time an US backed president was
| elect. It's happening right now, they're attempting to
| sell our only semiconductor company.
|
| The Soviet Union was destroyed from within much the same
| way the 2010s arab springs/ukraine and more recently also
| tried with HK.
| samat wrote:
| There is a popular myth that 'there was a mighty USSR and
| some enemies ruined it'.
|
| The Soviet Union collapsed because of massively broken
| economy. That's just basic science. They exported oil and
| imported grain. Russia imported GRAIN for gods sake. Then
| oil prices collapsed. Next? They did nothing and just ate
| through the resources until they were no more.
|
| And then 'evil liberals/evil west destroying the great
| country' happened, when finally USSR had no money to pay
| for the social obligations and for massive military.
|
| This are the undisputed facts, supported by a vast trove
| of internal documents from the late USSR and first years
| of the Russian Federations.
|
| A monograph by Egor Gaidar [1] is an excellent source
| referencing tons of the original documents.
|
| Sorry for Russian, not sure this is available in English
| anywhere.
|
| I get that it's easier to think that source of our
| problems is some evil mastermind and conspiracy. But
| think of the Occam's razor -- this is explained much
| easier by sheer incompetency and stupidity and no checks
| and balances to mitigate them.
|
| 1. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibel'_imperii_(monograf
| iia)
| iguy wrote:
| > Egor Gaidar [1] is an excellent source
|
| This is published in English as [1] Yegor Gaidar,
| "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia".
|
| TLDR is maybe this [2] write-up of a talk, 8 pages, very
| interesting.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-
| Modern-Russia...
|
| [1] https://www.aei.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaid...
| f6v wrote:
| Keep in mind that Gaidar is one of the most controversial
| figures in Russian history.
| iguy wrote:
| Would be interested in links discussing this, if you know
| good ones (in English!). Who's the anti-Gaidar one should
| read to see his opponents point of view?
| f6v wrote:
| The truth is in between. Was USSR full of internal
| problems? Yes. Did USA and allies want USSR destroyed and
| actively work on? Also yes. Saying that Cold War and the
| arms race had absolutely no role in USSR collapse is
| either a blatant lie or incompetence.
| stelonix wrote:
| Exactly. Had the west not interfered, the USSR would
| recover from the 80s crisis. Instead, they took advantage
| of its shortcomings and managed to break up the union:
| Gorbachev is considered by many Russians a traitor, but
| he was not the only western investment in toppling the
| Soviet Union.
|
| Let's remind that full-on opening of the market was not
| what the west promised, but it's what they pushed for
| once the reforms passed a point of no return and they
| wouldn't take "no" for an answer. Propaganda is what won
| the cold war.
| d3ckard wrote:
| I think you miss a crucial fact here - large part of
| Soviet block was incorporated by force and wanted to get
| rid of their influence as fast as possible. Nobody misses
| USRR here in Poland.
| f6v wrote:
| Poland is a weird example since it doesn't seem like they
| fit in the EU either, almost like an outcast.
|
| But let's look at other ex-Soviet countries. Territorial
| quarrels and dumb nationalism were unthinkable back then.
| Look at Azerbaijani and Armenians, ethnic Ukrainians and
| Russians in Ukraine, Georgia...
| caskstrength wrote:
| If only we ("other ex-Soviet countries") could stop our
| "dumb nationalism" and go back to being nice "little-
| brother nations", speaking Russian, fighting Western
| imperialism together somewhere in Afghanistan after being
| drafted to glorious Red army... Those where the times,
| comrade!
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Also yes. Saying that Cold War and the arms race had
| absolutely no role in USSR collapse is either a blatant
| lie or incompetence.
|
| USSR could've easily continued its existence if it went
| full "North Korean." Union's army had no problem to force
| populace to eat grass in case of a complete economic
| collapse.
|
| I attribute the single most important contribution to
| Union's collapse to US funding exchange visits for
| hundreds of USSR's senior officials, and completely
| nullifying their will to struggle:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728237
|
| The very same thing has happened to China, and Xi is
| trying hard to undo it.
|
| His message of absolute committment to, and
| inreversability of "opening up" don't mean anything to
| 99% of ordinary citizens.
|
| Whom he addresses these messages to are not ordinary
| Chines, but elites whom he tries to convince to the best
| of his abilities to not to drop the ball on him, and the
| system.
| baybal2 wrote:
| _> The Soviet Union collapsed because of massively broken
| economy._
|
| Which was a direct consequence of surreal levels of
| corruption, incompetence, and double digit percentages of
| country's GDP coming, and going out of existence annually
| as a result.
|
| If anybody are to call names, those would've been the
| most hardcore brezhneviks themselves.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > They did nothing and just ate through the resources
| until they were no more.
|
| Those resources they ate through -- when were they
| accumulated? I find it hard to believe that they became a
| superpower by just coasting on the wealth that existed in
| 1917.
| worik wrote:
| In 1917 they were in ruins.
|
| in 1940 they went toe to toe with the worlds greatest
| industrial super power (or second greatest - depending
| how you count) in war and won.
|
| The economic development achieved by the Soviet Union in
| the first half of its reign was incredible.
|
| They made the best rockets, fighter planes, super
| computers.... But they never made a TV with a remote
| control.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _in 1940 they went toe to toe with the worlds greatest
| industrial super power (or second greatest - depending
| how you count) in war and won._
|
| Yes, by throwing ten million of their own citizens at the
| problem.
|
| They won because Hitler ran out of bullets before Stalin
| ran out of targets.
| f6v wrote:
| And what was the alternative? The German's objective was
| to literally clear the land out for German settlers. By
| killing everyone inhabiting those lands. For soviets it
| was a matter of giving at least some chance of survival
| to women and children they were trying to protect.
| Imagine all those soldiers who knew they had to sacrifice
| their lives. And you try to reduce their bravery to being
| "Stalin's targets".
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| We're not talking about what should have been done, but
| at how efficient the USSR was.
|
| It. was. not at all.
| f6v wrote:
| I mean, how do you quantify that? I'd love to see the
| study measuring USSR efficiency.
| worik wrote:
| They were incredibly efficient at big industry
|
| But never could make consumer goods. When the economy had
| to pivot to a consumer lead one, they found that all the
| economists with different ideas had been shot....
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| You seem to forget that oil became an increasingly
| important resource. And the USSR had a LOT of oil. Look
| at how Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Norway developed, and
| then look at the USSR.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > The economic development achieved by the Soviet Union
| in the first half of its reign was incredible.
|
| That's a regurgitation of a great lie. Krusev indicated
| in his memoire that economic data of Stalin's years was
| defying kindergarden level arithmetics, was utter
| garbage, and he gave few convincing examples of that, and
| here, I would believe him.
|
| Union's economy saw few ups, and downs during its
| existence, and those under Stalin, and Breznev were not
| ups by any extend of imagination.
| worik wrote:
| The German army at the gates of Moscow,
| Stalingrad/Volgagrad, and Lenningrad/St Petersburg found
| it was no lie.
|
| Do not rely on state propaganda, look at the results
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Up to 40% of the tanks that fought on the Russian side in
| these battles were supplied by the British. UK provided a
| huge amount of war material to the USSR that helped keep
| it in the war.
| worik wrote:
| I do not think that is true. Maybe 40% of the types of
| tank.
|
| Some facts from Wikipedia: At the opening of operation
| Barbarosa the Red Army had four to one advantage over the
| Nazis in tank numbers.
|
| By 1941 lend lease tanks were 6.5% of Soviet tanks, about
| a quarter of medium and heavy tanks.
|
| Where do you get "up to 40%" from?
|
| Even if true my point still stands.
|
| According t Alex Nove in 1900 there was not a metal lathe
| in all of Russia. They could de clinker locomotives, but
| not make a gear box. By 1941 they were out stripping the
| Germans.
|
| That is the greatest economic achievement of the
| twentieth century.
|
| (IMO the Bolsheviks were sadistic psychopaths, but credit
| where credit is due)
| baybal2 wrote:
| German army mostly found that Union had more soldiers
| than they had bullets, and that wehrmacht got to Moscow
| on the fumes.
|
| The "massive industrial advantage" was nothing not to be
| expected from the most resource rich country on the
| planet.
|
| Yet, the country was, by all accounts, from both most
| staunch communist party sources, and contemporary
| anticommunists, completely incapable of running during
| the crisis, and "all in" strategy of manufacturing one
| gun, one tank, one shell, one plane in massive amounts
| was a result of desperation, not industrial might.
| worik wrote:
| Very odd.
|
| How is making more tanks, guns, and aeroplanes done on
| desperation and not industrial might?
|
| I think ideology has gotten in the way of reason!
| [deleted]
| tasubotadas wrote:
| They were non-competitive businesses producing outdated
| junk and in majority of cases there was no other way to
| survive apart of being sold for scrap.
|
| Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods
| survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)
| lumost wrote:
| Price signals following the soviet collapse were non
| functioning ( see the current oligarchs ). It's hard to
| know how many of these factories could have adapted over
| a slightly longer time frame or with some slight
| investment restructuring.
|
| When the price of a corporation falls below their paper
| assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor
| disinterested in long term value. I'd venture a good
| number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry
| up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn't have
| taken more than a few such links in the supply chain
| being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given
| the level of centralization.
| f6v wrote:
| That's exactly the narrative that was used. I guess
| that's why Yeltsin was such a good friend to the west and
| why he's despised by many Russians.
|
| I mean, sure, many factories were not competitive since
| they were highly subsidized and faced no competition on
| internal market. But USSR had an immense R&D potential
| and engineering education was top-notch.
| eecc wrote:
| No. There's significant evidence that sudden overnight
| market manipulation (e.g. setting exchange parity to the
| eastern and western Deutsche Mark destroyed all eastern
| consumer goods industries, which were bought for symbolic
| sums and then deliberately shuttered.) it's obvious that
| any such fundamentalist and radically liberalist policy
| would have tore through any economy, but the point was to
| smother Carthage, and sow salt on its ruins
| chx wrote:
| This is not true, several precision mechanics factories
| (or parts of factories) in Hungary were producing for
| Western export and yet they let them rot apart.
| exebook wrote:
| Same happened in Latvia where the largest soviet chip
| maker ALFA was dismatled under silly (but efficient)
| propaganda premises. It was top notch and had great
| contracts with US and Russia at the moment. Decades later
| the retired goverment officials confirmed they were
| "advised" and said "we did not understand what we were
| doing very much back then". Of course, they were ex-
| soviet middle level officials and anti soviet activists
| who suddenly found themselves in power and needed such
| advices.
|
| The true reason for those who wonder was the fact that
| ALFA was making electronics for MiG, Su, Tu and for
| missiles. I had family and friends working there btw.
| aries1980 wrote:
| Indeed. In my hometown - Gyula, Hungary - there was a
| precision mechanics factory, for phones, faxes,
| communication relays called Integra. It wasn't huge,
| employed a couple of hundreds people. In '89, Olivetti
| bought it for peanuts to close it down.
|
| This was quite a classic move during the "privatisation"
| in '89-90.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Some fertiliser plants (Achema for example) still rely on
| exclusively signed contracts with Russia for buying cheap
| natural gas (its main cost) aka there's some underwater
| influence there.
| GregarianChild wrote:
| aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom,
| drugs/biotech
|
| The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)
| jorvi wrote:
| > aerospace
|
| Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality.
| Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of
| aerospace.
|
| > energy
|
| CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU.
| We are world leaders in wind energy.
|
| > telecom
|
| Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace
| Huawei with Ericsson tech.
|
| > drugs / biotech
|
| BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.
|
| The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the
| sectors you mentioned is not one of them.
| kingosticks wrote:
| > Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace
| Huawei with Ericsson tech.
|
| That's entirely political and nothing to do with the
| tech. Huawei's tech is arguably better, cheaper (and
| available now).
| sorenjan wrote:
| How much of Huawei's research is done in EU? They have at
| least three research facilities in Sweden alone. Ericsson
| does a lot of research in the US. All of these companies
| are global, so to assign their research to only the
| country where they're headquartered gets a bit
| nonsensical.
| rvba wrote:
| It is cheaper since the chinede spy agencies sponsor it.
|
| If you knew that important people would use your phones
| you could as well give them for free - easier to spy on
| them.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Huawei's tech is better per $ because they skipped years
| of R&D that they didn't have to price in. I remember when
| their products included Cisco manuals.
| jryle70 wrote:
| > Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of
| quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space'
| part of aerospace
|
| Such a hyperbole statement.
|
| Airbus has the edge in the narrowbody aircraft market,
| especially A321, while Boeing is plagued by 737 MAX
| problem.
|
| OTOH Airbus is well behind Boeing in the widebody
| segment. Boeing had 1,464 787 orders as of Aug 2019, 882
| of those had been delivered. Airbus had only sold 913
| A350. A380 has been discontinued while Boeing can still
| count on B748 freighter.
|
| Of course 2020 threw a wrench to the airline industry and
| it remains to be seen how well it will recover post
| pandemic. Both Airbus and Boeing are affected deeply.
| Glawen wrote:
| You conveniently forgot the a330 which is Airbus' most
| successful widebody.
|
| You are right that for now, Boeing is better in
| widebodies. But let's see Boeing new aircraft program,
| because currently Airbus is better prepared for the
| future.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| > Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of
| aerospace.
|
| Well, SpaceX caught with the pants down to everyone.
| Before the revolution of the reusable Falcon 9, the
| Ariane 5 was a fine reliable rocket.
|
| Sadly, the Ariane 6 design predates the reusable
| revolution of SpaceX, how ever they are working on
| reusable Arianes that are similar to the Falcon 9 and
| Spaceship (https://www.techforspace.com/european-space-
| sector/european-...).
| andi999 wrote:
| What, apart from using, does CERN have to do with energy?
| adventured wrote:
| > CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU.
|
| Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that
| isn't in the EU, which is revealing. ITER is entirely
| irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in
| much. The biggest breakthroughs in fusion will derive
| from smaller projects, not giant slow-moving projects
| like ITER. The next 20-30 years of energy generation is
| wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear
| (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that).
| Fusion will make zero contribution in that time.
|
| > BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID
| vaccine.
|
| Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech, you're
| more than reaching. Russia and China also have apparently
| successful vaccines being deployed.
|
| > The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the
| sectors you mentioned is not one of them.
|
| That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership
| in most fields to begin with.
| petre wrote:
| Fusion research needs a lot of money and resources. I
| honestly doubt it can be done by a startup. Nuclear
| fission was done by very well funded military research.
| It is true that China has licensed basically every
| nuclear design, but France is still a leader in nuclear
| fission.
| mattashii wrote:
| I believe that if startups can keep losing billions each
| year and go public without ever running a profit, then
| startups may just as well be able to create a fusion
| power plant.
| jorvi wrote:
| > Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that
| isn't in the EU, which is revealing
|
| It is surrounded by EU countries, in a country that is a
| pseudo-EU member. You're reaching.
|
| > ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that
| won't result in much.
|
| Unless you have a seer's eye, these kinds of claims are
| baseless.
|
| > The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind,
| natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and
| primarily only China is brave enough to build that)
|
| Agreed and a sad state of affairs
|
| > Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech
|
| Which makes Moderna a leader too? It doesn't diminish
| BioNtech's work.
|
| > That's true in the sense that the EU never had
| leadership in most fields to begin with.
|
| You literally had to ignore multiple points in my parent
| comment to even be able to make this claim. Revealing..
|
| Edit: not to mention we are commenting under an article
| that partly concerns ASML..
| Nokinside wrote:
| What did I just wrote about leadership and it's
| importance?
| GregarianChild wrote:
| One might wonder if the EU has leadership capacity to be
| able to maintain domestic strategically important
| industries.
|
| Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little
| confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and
| semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in
| the marketplace, in addition to consuming government
| subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been
| the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a
| need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this
| is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the
| structure of EU decision making.
|
| Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as
| domestic industries.
|
| [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
| justicezyx wrote:
| I know nVidia bought Arm, but what is about DeepMind
| being lost as domestic industry?
|
| It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly
| owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other
| comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top
| of Google's tech and capital.
|
| Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were
| blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well
| known are Urs Hozle and Luiz Andre Barroso both are of Eu
| descentdent.
|
| There is no evidence that whatever DeepMind did can be
| done with another EU partner. Or even anyone who is not
| Google, largely thanks to Larry and Sergey's personal
| tastes and experience. I doubt Msft or Amazon have the
| right culture for DeepMind.
|
| The whole alphabet thing was engineered to allow
| independency. So that, among other things, a more pure
| research org can work without the ever encroaching of the
| profit driven hands inside Google. Mind you, DeepMind
| absolutely put itself above Google, or at least firmly
| distance itself from Google, GCP once proposed to use
| DeepMind brand in marketing materials, and was sharply
| rejected citing "conflicting brand images".
| wwtrv wrote:
| I assume, they meant the UK finally fully leaving the EU
| this year rather than the sale to Nvidia
| usr1106 wrote:
| Right. So if the Nvidia deal succeeds ARM will be US
| American.
|
| I have no idea whether any of the relevant antitrust
| official could still stop it.
| lumost wrote:
| The parent is alluding to the notion that govt investment
| made for sluggish state owned industries which aim to be
| second and suck the life out of any domestic competition.
|
| There are a variety of ways to cultivate a domestic
| industry, govt committees directly investing doesn't seem
| like the leading candidate can. Trade barriers and state
| sponsored industrial partnerships.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Leadership or "leadership"? EU is full of "leaders",
| those that self-titled as such.
|
| It lacks motivation, there is no SV in Europe because one
| cannot pay competitively with SV for top talent when you
| tax to death. It is a lot easier to become a billionaire
| from real stuff (not manipulating stock markets or other
| financial trickeries) in US than in EU, so the smart and
| motivated in EU move to US; what is left is ... what is
| left: either less motivated or less smart or less both.
| antisoeu wrote:
| Does ASML belong to "the EU", though, or is it a private
| company?
| baybal2 wrote:
| > TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in
| the world.
|
| Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware
| produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the
| dust.
| dash2 wrote:
| It's not wholly clear that aircraft carriers etc. should
| count as machines. What if we limit the definition to
| "something used to make other things"?
| baybal2 wrote:
| Most gigantic blast furnaces, or hydraulic instruments on
| record if you correct for inflation? Though, most things
| like these made little sense economically even back in the
| days they were built.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Like what?
| [deleted]
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| Do aircraft carriers count in this context? They're
| reasonably expensive to produce.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > reasonably expensive
|
| The USS Ford is said to cost around 13 billions. I
| wouldn't call that "reasonable" :)
|
| https://usadefensenews.com/2020/11/13/meet-the-us-
| navys-13-b...
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| Haha, I know - I should have added a wink emoji after
| that statement.
| mrep wrote:
| Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers are being built at
| 13 billion a piece:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-
| class_aircraft_...
| paulnechifor wrote:
| The next Air Force One supposedly costs 4 billion:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One#VC-25B .
| baybal2 wrote:
| Fighter jets, bombers, few missile systems, air defence
| systems, subs, and surface military ships... the list would
| be long.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| B2 spirit costs more than its weight in gold, clocking in
| at close to a billion
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| That is absolutely incredible.
| paulnechifor wrote:
| 3.17 billion in 2019 dollars, or 1.11 if you exclude the
| sunk costs.
| shi314 wrote:
| There are plenty aircraft models like B-2 Spirit, F-22
| Raptor etc. that cost above $200 million.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Reminds me of when I saw the customs declaration they had to
| make for the Troll oil platform[1]. It was "a thing" made
| here in the country, and it was being transported out of the
| country, so of course they had to customs declare it...
|
| The declaration essentially said "one oil platform,
| unpackaged".
|
| There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it
| was so great the electronic customs declaration system
| couldn't handle all the digits.
|
| Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform
| soygul wrote:
| Bagger 293 probably is the most expensive machine. It costs
| $100M to build one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Fascinating. Had to look it up -- the photos of it are mind
| boggling.
|
| I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are
| only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to
| speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them.
|
| Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?
| tda wrote:
| Floating versions of those machines (dredging vessels) are in
| the 300M range. And the offshore installation vessel
| Pioneering Spirit came in at 2.6B:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship)
| Defenestresque wrote:
| The leaders of the free world sat around a secret table...
|
| https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow
|
| (I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but
| this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone
| mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Planned economy at works.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Exciting development. Not many power blocs has the prerequisites
| to pull this off, though EU coordination capabilities still
| questionable.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I always find these discussion around the business of chip
| production interesting and since there's always many
| knowledgeable people on these I wanted to ask if anyone has a
| good recommendations for books on the business of chip
| production?
| antisoeu wrote:
| It's basically decided that the EU will become a socialist state
| by now.
|
| That's another 145 Billion for corruption.
| random5634 wrote:
| Listening to the EU bang on about state subsidies (they are very
| worried UK might subsidize some industry) always makes me laugh.
|
| The EU farm and many other policies are basically state aid. I'm
| not against it, but stop with the hypocritical denouncements.
| aristophenes wrote:
| Anyone familiar with EU politics care to comment on how likely it
| is that this funding actually goes through, and a probable
| timeline?
| disabled wrote:
| This makes me so excited as an electrical engineering student
| pursuing her masters degree in the European Union, as a dual
| US|EU citizen!
| kats wrote:
| That's awesome, congrats!
| credit_guy wrote:
| So, first thing when it comes to big dollar (or in this case
| Euro) numbers: some of these funds will be loans, not grants. In
| this case the split will be about 50-50.
|
| Second, this is not new money, this is part of recovery funds
| already allocated in July 2020 for combating the economic
| recession created by the Coronavirus [1]. These funds were
| already earmarked for environmental and digital initiatives. This
| declaration is probably a clarification of how much is given
| specifically to the digital initiatives.
|
| This looks quite smart to me. In the US neither the original
| CARES act ($1.4 TN) passed in March, nor the new stimulus bill
| ($0.9 TN) has any funds dedicated to cutting edge industries.
| There were instead funds for airline companies and cruise lines.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_EU#Recovery_fu...
| adventured wrote:
| > In the US neither the original CARES act ($1.4 TN) passed in
| March, nor the new stimulus bill ($0.9 TN) has any funds
| dedicated to cutting edge industries.
|
| That's because the US largely doesn't have to do that. The
| reason the US has a couple hundred major technology companies
| and Europe doesn't is due to its far superior venture capital
| market, which Europe almost entirely lacks by relative scale
| and so it has to try to make up for it with government money
| (which has been a repeated approach in Europe going back
| decades now, it hasn't worked well).
| dmix wrote:
| This is true. Canada has been trying to spend hundreds of
| millions or billions (under a series of different names and
| projects) to develop a domestic SV like tech sector and it
| keeps failing.
|
| Our smartest people keep leaving to the US and taking US
| venture capital. Or selling to US companies. All for very
| good reasons. It's where the rest of the smart people are.
| I'm convinced that's what matters most, the people, not just
| billions of dollars won't replace that.
|
| If anything it's quite obvious the US gov should be investing
| in infrastructure (transit, urban development, etc) like a
| good gov instead of venturing into even more territories
| pretending they can compete with highly advanced industries
| (be that finance or tech).
|
| These governments, not just US, have enough things they are
| already struggling to deliver on. I really wouldn't recommend
| they also pretend they are venture capitalists or worse
| starting the organization themselves.
|
| Even old school NASA success was a lucky collection of semi-
| nationalizing a bunch of already successful private industry,
| academia, and a hardcore Cold War patriotic mission. And I
| should note one of the most famous people who helped get the
| US to the moon was Canadian:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chamberlin
|
| One could argue NASA slowly lost that powerhouse ability as
| it became just another hundred billion dollar gov project.
| They still do great things but nowhere near the scale or
| speed as the past.
| [deleted]
| neop1x wrote:
| 2nm... then what - 1nm? 500pm after that?
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