I'll go ahead and be 'that guy' and say it: I don't want my country to become a startup nation. I don't want management methods and labor laws to be reformed, or modernized, or to mimic those in the US. I don't want corporation-friendly tax rates to be enacted. I don't want regulations to be lifted.
There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of Americans who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world.) Not everyone among these 65 million is fit to 'move fast and break things'. Not everyone wants to be flexible, adaptable or able to sell themselves in a world of fast hires and firings. Not everyone is a young and dynamic entrepreneur full of 'innovative' ideas (whatever that means). In short, not everyone is a twenty-to-thirty- something with a moderately high level of education and relative affinity with the tech world.
On the other hand, everyone needs a steady job to make a living. Everyone needs the healthcare, retirement plans and other benefits our current labor laws entail with that steady job. In short, everyone is a human being with basic human needs.
Startups have one thing in common - they tend to fail. Maybe your average HN reader will be able to endure the typical working conditions with no guarantee of a stable income in the future, but they are the exception, not the rule. It is preposterous to imagine that an entire country's labor laws and regulation should align with the needs of such a narrow demographic so that foreign investors will maybe deign to notice it and shower said demographic with money.
Yes, there are many things wrong with our current labor laws. Yes, maybe some regulations are needlessly tight and stifle the growth of blooming startups full of bright people. No, that does not mean the US as a 'startup nation' is an example to follow. And if that means the next Facebook or Instagram won't come from here, so be it. Many of these startups tend to produce services that are superficially useful at best or actively harmful at worst. We don't need them.
As a french I'm accustomed with this point of view, but I think it is too often based on a false vision of what is France and what does french people truly want.
France has not always been the country you describe. Even if France never leaded the french revolution and always been more attracted to the philosophical or political side of things, France hosted a lot of technical revolutions and even be part of a "startup culture" in some domains, like automobiles. I invite you to read the bio of Louis Renault or André Citroën. They were true pionners and they share some life events and a mindset very similar to those of a web entrepreneur.
Today, we tend to despise all those huge industrial automobile, food, or aviation companies that didn't really innovate anymore, and it's normal because they're symptomatic of the collusions between state and business, but we forget too often that they started like startups, at a time it was possible to make of a small company in a disruptive domain a true unicorn. And many of these companies are the root of the social rights we beneficiate today. If we can't build new big companies anymore, our social system (which I'm fond of by the way) is doomed.
I believe France was at this time much more confident with technological progress. Maybe because time was more hopeful, company management more patriarcal, inequalities where less important, and examples of bad conduct from great companies less visible. Anyway. But the roots of innovation are still here, and on the contrary, all the social regulations are not necessarily a true part of what a complex country like France means to be. We must find the balance.
(By the way, I have a familial anecdote (really not significant, it's just pretty fun) on was I said about confidence in technological progress : my great grandfather was a blacksmith, as his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and so on. And what did he do when automobile replaced horses ? He became a car mechanic.)
I think so too. Not being French but reducing France to just being France if it keeps it's inefficiencies is what made it take the role of "Europe's sick man" from Germany.
As if having a permanent base of 20% unemployed youth (and 10% in general) is a price worth the cost of being a "well-meaning" nation.
PS: And no, youth unemployment is not a new thing in France as it stood around 27% in 1997. Pre-Euro and Pre-German-Labor-Reforms.
France is a combination between Philippe le Bel, Zinedine Zidane, Louis Renault, Serge Gainsbourg, Marcel Dassault, Jean Jaurès, Auguste Renoir, Blaise Pascal, Napoléon, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles de Gaulle, and so on. Current social rights are not more a part of french culture than anything else and I think most of the current conflicts come from the thinking than progress is acquired and a marxist point of view (which is very valid and important, but not the source of all answers). We tend to forget than France existed before 1945.
> There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of Americans who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world.)
> 65 Millions is a bit exaggerated but not too far from the truth.
The only objective number mentioned in wikipedia's article is 43 million, but apparently that figure appears to be made up, as it is based on a single citation of an obscure and unavailable document published by an organization that calls itself Talk Poverty.
Nevertheless, even if we take that 43 million number at face value, that means that OP's exaggerated number would have an absurd margin of error of around 50%.
Funny how Americans get so shocked about it, while it is quite clear to the rest of the world. Honestly when I was visiting the US the first time, I was shocked how Second World everything was. Most people live in poor areas (of course most well off Americans don't travel to these part of towns so they don't see it). Many non-chain shops are struggling. Food prices are ridiculously high in comparison to the not that much higher pay Americans receive for the same job. Even the electricity system looks somewhat like Vietnam or India.
I'm neither American, nor shocked at the idea that America has poverty. I am, however, a bit of a stickler actual information. Pointing to general issues does absolutely nothing to help source this claim.
The claim was that ~65M people were in "who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world."
The actual figure for a poverty measure is 43M. However, that's not what the claim was - it's not simply that people are in poverty but those that are are in "the most abject poverty seen in the developed world".
Either we can find actual information and have a real discussion, or we can throw around vague unsourced claims and get nowhere.
That's false. France has a higher cost of living and higher food prices [1], with a considerably lower overall median and full-time median income level, versus the US. US GDP per capita is also currently 50% higher than France. France has an unemployment rate ~120% higher than in the US. US wage growth has been roughly 8x to 10x that of France over the last 20 years (France only averaged 0.5% annual wage growth over that time).
So let's recap. France has: far lower median wages, far lower wage growth, a higher poverty rate, a higher homelessness rate, dramatically lower GDP per capita, and an economy that hasn't net expanded in over a decade.
In 1980 France had a higher GDP per capita than the US. In 1990 France was just barely behind the US on GDP per capita. Today it's about $40,000 vs $60,000; that gap is persistently widening, with France falling down the global economic ladder by the year. It also explains why wage growth has been so extremely low in France over that time.
Please mind the difference exchange rates make, otherwise comparisons over time are meaningless. France it's GDP per capita was not higher in 1980, the relative gap was similar to today.
Furthermore, median wage growth has done much better there than in the US over that period. Also poverty rates are set by national standards not international, they're hard to compare unless when it's between EU members for example.
If you wonder why your comment got downvoted, let me come with a quick answer.
"The level of discourse you're pursuing isn't tolerated on HN. It should come as no surprise to you that no one is engaging with you- that is, of course unless you're being serious...in which case I feel dreadfully sorry for you."
:D :D :D
But don't worry. This weekend I will start a HN-Exiles invite only alternative and there would be only creators and no "priests". It is obvious that coexistence is no longer an option.
The level of discourse you're pursuing isn't tolerated on HN. It should come as no surprise to you that no one is engaging with you- that is, of course unless you're being serious...in which case I feel dreadfully sorry for you.
TLDR: Depending on the criteria, 12.7%/43.1 million or 14%/47.5 million Americans are living in poverty. About half of which in abject poverty (under 50% of the poverty level).
And this attitude is precisely why I just moved from France to Silicon Valley. I want to be around people interested in creating the future rather than recycling the past.
What kind of future, though? Don't take this the wrong way, but to me Silicon Valley seems like the most hypocritical and cynical place in the developed world today. Just take a look at the social issues and inequalities in the area, but I think you're already aware of that.
The false dilemma of Silicon Valley being the only possible model to "create the future" sounds like a classic pompous Valley view, maybe the US can afford part of a state to be like that, I don't know if I want that for France. And this is coming from someone who made a startup in France, and is currently working in the industry.
> There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of Americans who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world.)
Your claim about American poverty is beligerently false. The US poverty rate is below both the French [1] and Canadian [2] poverty rates. It's also below the rates of poverty in Spain and Italy.
France also has a higher rate of homelessness than the US. There are 550,000 homeless in the US, that's a rate of 1.7 per 1,000. France has 140,000 homeless persons, a rate of 2 per 1,000. The French homelessness problem has been increasing dramatically (a 1/2 increase since 2001), while the US rate of homelessness has been persistently declining for decades.
The French poverty rate is ~14%.[1] The US rate in 2016 was 12.7%, and will probably hit near or below 12% in 2018 at the rate it has been falling [3].
The rate of US poverty has seen a large improvement over the last 30 or so years (as one example, childhood poverty has been nearly cut in half since the early 1970s). It routinely goes unheralded, however government / welfare programs targeted at reducing poverty have been tremendously successful.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. Poverty line is defined as < 60% of median income. Median income in France is heavily influenced by the minimum wage income. As a consequence, anyone working part time will be considered under the poverty line.
And in France, making less than 60% of median wage certainly doesn't make you rich, but you still get access to basic need (healthcare, even housing in some cases).
> Poverty line is defined as < 60% of median income.
Therefore that indicator doesn't reflect poverty, it only reflects income inequality. Income inequality has absolutely no impact on your ability to meet your basic needs or even having disposable income.
Just because your neighbor can afford to buy a boat it doesn't mean you're suddenly on food stamps.
In French media (newspaper, TV), it is usual to state there is no medicaid, nor medicare in US ("pas de sécurité sociale, pas de retraite").
I guess it is a way to make people to not complain, because...
* The widely praised "sécurité sociale" does not reimburse much and nearly nothing for common health problems and not everybody has acces to it. The CMU was voted in France only in 1999 when Medicare exists since 1965.
* Every employee pay for a "mutuelle" (it is mandatory by law!) even if employees pay already high taxes for the "sécurité sociale".
* As for the "retraite" (medicare) most young people will get only half of what people like me receives, because of a convergent string of laws that were initiated 25 years ago.
Especially now we are seeing what that really means: fake blood labs and the brakes on cars disabled. Do we want a world where nothing can be trusted because it was all just a fantasy to defraud gullible investors to start with? I think most people don’t want that.
I don't think it's reasonable to reject some vague concept of American style capitalism based on Theranos and Uber any more than it would be to reject "German-style" capitalism based on Dieselgate.
Thanks for the tip! In return, for people who are into this sort of thing but don't know about these (listener-supported radio stations/streams and free music archives):
>After thinking long and hard about the GDPR the part that bothers me the most is the expectation from the EU that foreign entities enforce their regulations because the EU cannot bare the political consequences of doing it themselves.
That sort of thing happens all the time - except the US is usually the one coercing foreign entities. Remember the DMCA? ThePirateBay's raid in 2006? Or the Megaupload debacle? Or how Japan was pressured by the US to adopt stricter child pornography laws?
Note, I'm not saying the people behind these were supporting moral and noble causes that the US was wrong to clamp down on. I'm certainly not saying people should comply to China's expectations on free speech and flow of information. Simply, if you feel infuriated that a foreign power is enforcing its worldview and related regulations onto you, an American citizen, know that that's what literally everyone else has been experiencing for the last decades from the people you've put in power.
But then, what the EU is trying to enforce here - more power to Internet users, essentially - is fairly benign when compared to what other foreign powers would like to enforce. If there were matters of infuriation to be had on that account, I'd start with the Mariott debacle [1].
The DMCA does not magically apply extra territorially.
It’s applied through an established legal framework either through bilateral trade agreements or through WTO rules.
The majority of copyright enforcement outside of the US has nothing to do with the DMCA but rather copyright holders using local legal frameworks.
The problem with the GDPR is that it’s extraterritorial application as expected by the EU is also extrajudiciary.
I would have no problem with the EU seeking ways to expand GDPR through new legal frameworks which the people that would be impacted by these changes can actually control through their own political system.
What I have a problem with is the EU essentially forcing compliance through extortion and sooner rather than later it will employ the companies that the GDPR was in spirit intended to protect us from to enforce it.
I don’t see the EU being able to enforce the GDPR even internally without essentially deputizing the likes of Google, Amazon and PayPal to enforce it across all of their customers in order for them themselves to be compliant.
Even with the fines possible under the GDPR the EU can not enforce compliance by targeting 100,000’s of small companies without going essentially bankrupt.
It can however effectively target the big ones and worse make it impossible to operate within the EU without using their “GDPR complaint” platforms.
The GDPR might be a great thing on paper and even in spirit but the uncertainty and the inability to enforce complex regulation on a mass of small entities would likely cause it’s real world repercussions to be quite different than from what was imagined or intended.
>The DMCA does not magically apply extra territorially.
>It’s applied through an established legal framework either through bilateral trade agreements or through WTO rules.
>The majority of copyright enforcement outside of the US has nothing to do with the DMCA but rather copyright holders using local legal frameworks.
That means essentially the same, in effect. Very few countries have copyright laws that do not align with interests of US lobbies. If any country with significant partnerships with the US decided to tell "screw the MPAA, you can now download anything from the Internet" to its citizens, the said lobbies would pressure the US government to pressure that country through the trade agreements you mentioned, until it relented. This is something that actually happened, during e.g. the TPB raid. We can argue about the moral legitimacy of such things but the reality of the matter is, it's all power plays.
>What I have a problem with is the EU essentially forcing compliance through extortion and sooner rather than later it will employ the companies that the GDPR was in spirit intended to protect us from to enforce it.
>I don’t see the EU being able to enforce the GDPR even internally without essentially deputizing the likes of Google, Amazon and PayPal to enforce it across all of their customers in order for them themselves to be compliant.
>Even with the fines possible under the GDPR the EU can not enforce compliance by targeting 100,000’s of small companies without going essentially bankrupt. It can however effectively target the big ones and worse make it impossible to operate within the EU without using their “GDPR complaint” platforms.
Three objections:
-The use of 'extortion' is rather harsh - the EU isn't out there to suck money out of the poor American startups, they simply want them to treat user data in a sensible manner. Now you may object to what is considered 'sensible' just like someone in Sweden (e.g. anakata) may object to what is considered a 'copyright breach' but the point here is that they are not looking to make money from fines. If you are found to be noncompliant you wouldn't get sued by troll lawyers, you'd get a couple warnings along with guidance on how to be compliant again. Fines are simply there to say they mean business so people stop ignoring the regulations like they've done with existing country-specific ones for the last decades. Again, power play.
-I really doubt Google, Amazon and Paypal would cut off the entire EU market just to avoid going through the hassle of setting up an updated privacy policy. The EU population is 500 million, way more than the US. More likely, they'll do a cost-benefit analysis that will tell them it's worth paying their lawyers to do the compliance work. It's not actually a big deal. Also, these tech giants do have offices in the EU, usually in Ireland, so it hardly counts as extraterritorial extortion.
-As for the poor hundreds of thousands of companies - well, see the above. They don't want your money, they want compliance. A fine is the absolute worst case if you are repeatedly and outrageously negligent on a very large scale. The most likely case, however, is that the GDPR isn't going to care about these startups because the European public doesn't care about them either. I don't mean to be harsh or condescending, but while lurking HNs and reading headlines about such and such service shutting its doors to European user, I couldn't recognize any of the names. No one is going to sue your ten-man startup that develops a niche/superficial app whose use cases only fit twice that many people to a EU court. It is far more likely that it will fail by itself, because that's what startups do. Should it grow, however, and be in a position to deal with enough customers data that negligence or nefarious intent when handling it would cause significant harm - that's where actual GDPR enforcement would step in.
You may say: 'but there is no guarantee', 'it's all very vague', 'this much vagueness only opens the way to corruption and preferential treatment', but that's mostly how most of the law is written here in the EU - clarity of intent and concision over clarity of wording and exhaustiveness. Against all odds I'd say it's working out pretty well for us and the vast majority of people here do not feel any defiance toward their institutions (at least when compared to other countries), so I feel confident in the GDPR's enforcement, jurisprudence cases and their future effects on the handling of my data. You may feel slighted that a foreign entity, its views and its legal culture are being imposed on you, though, and I understand. Again, power play.
The point wasn’t if the laws are compatible with DMCA or not but that we had the ability to influence them.
If you as a Swedish person are blaming the US for Pirate Bay then you are wrong you have had full control over your copyright laws and enforcement and some of it is actually stricter than in the US.
I’ve also that the EU will deputize the giants not that they’ll block services to the EU resulting in even more consolidation and less freedom for EU residents.
In fact that is the expectation of many MEPs.
Combined with a government run one stop shop for data accesss like those that already exist in some EU countries the actual prospects of GDPR can be quite dystopian.
People would say that it would be better than it’s now and that companies would stop abusing your information but I have no doubt that the existing business models will not differ even in the slightest the only thing that would differ is your ability to compete and operate within a free market.
A lot of people here are basing their view of gender dynamics (such as women being given 'the upper-hand' and so on, whatever that means) on Tinder and related websites/apps. It may be worth mentioning that the vast majority of people on Earth (or even the developed world) do not, in fact, use any dating apps at all. Most people's flirting activities still take place in meatspace, with all the associated awkwardness. In fact, in many parts of the world there is no concept of 'dating' at all, or at least not in its codified form as happens in the US.
I respect your experience and it may be that women do have much more power than men in the online dating world - that doesn't mean it's not an extremely skewed representation of the actual social dynamics that happens between humans. This is due to the many cultural biases of the people who make these apps and the audience they're targeting, both of which being typically college-educated urban American millenials.
Not everyone's approach to relationships is like that of a college-educated urban American millenial.
I do not think that women have "the upper hand" or that they have "more power than men", in general nor in particular when it comes to relationships. In particular, what others say here: in spite of these examples, men also reject and of course appearance is also a preference (sometimes even more so than for women).
And while I also agree that the sample from Tinder is a very restricted view, and in general I also prefer meeting people directly in the real world. What I found interesting about Tinder is, precisely, that I allowed me to directly see how women outside of my social circles and spaces I frequent present themselves. While I still live in a hipster urban area, I found that so many of these examples of very traditional views about courtship---all this "I am a price" logic I mentioned in the parent post is not so much a sign of power, but I see it as more of a conservative view that puts women in a passive role. It can be frustrating for men, but probably it is also damaging for women, and to me showed, somewhat, that the road to better gender equality and fluid roles is a long one.
The Space Merchants, co-written by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Mind you, I was barely a teenager at the time I read it. But:
-It led me down the path to the realization that advertising in almost all of its current forms is unequivocally evil and has no credible moral justification in our current society. I have been running adblocking software on all of my devices (and that of my family's) and feel mildly disgusted every time I see an ad in the street or on the rare occasions I watch television.
-It opened my eyes on the fact that corporations having more power than governments is a huge deal, especially at times where government is often equivocated to 'lazy bureaucrats' and opposed to private companies' supposed 'efficiency' (but for whom?).
-It made me realize that environmentalists are not just some rambling, soft-natured and out-of-touch hippies but simply ringing the bell about how we are going to be royally screwed if we don't radically change our current consumption habits.
But the most shocking thing about that book is that it was written in 1952. There was no targeted advertising and tracking, no concerns about global warming, no oil peak. Critics at the time said it was witty and light-hearted, but far too much of a caricature to be taken seriously. Reading the thing more than 60 years later gives the whole experience a sour pang of irony.
There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of Americans who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world.) Not everyone among these 65 million is fit to 'move fast and break things'. Not everyone wants to be flexible, adaptable or able to sell themselves in a world of fast hires and firings. Not everyone is a young and dynamic entrepreneur full of 'innovative' ideas (whatever that means). In short, not everyone is a twenty-to-thirty- something with a moderately high level of education and relative affinity with the tech world.
On the other hand, everyone needs a steady job to make a living. Everyone needs the healthcare, retirement plans and other benefits our current labor laws entail with that steady job. In short, everyone is a human being with basic human needs.
Startups have one thing in common - they tend to fail. Maybe your average HN reader will be able to endure the typical working conditions with no guarantee of a stable income in the future, but they are the exception, not the rule. It is preposterous to imagine that an entire country's labor laws and regulation should align with the needs of such a narrow demographic so that foreign investors will maybe deign to notice it and shower said demographic with money.
Yes, there are many things wrong with our current labor laws. Yes, maybe some regulations are needlessly tight and stifle the growth of blooming startups full of bright people. No, that does not mean the US as a 'startup nation' is an example to follow. And if that means the next Facebook or Instagram won't come from here, so be it. Many of these startups tend to produce services that are superficially useful at best or actively harmful at worst. We don't need them.