Europe has a weak tech sector and relatively high taxes and high regulations.
As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
But he, feel free to tax that tech sector into oblivion. If Europe ever gets it's shit together, we would love to take over the crown.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
And yes, because of the tax situation these people are often not resident in the EU. London, Paris and Geneva have small neighborhoods of oil sheik families, for example. Brussels has entire neighborhoods effectively only accessible to EU appointees. Amsterdam ... and so on and so forth.
It's not better, it's just more attractive. The EU isn't the only country with regulations, every single other western country does, every single other first world country does.
The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
Are you finding the EU to be even remotely greed-free?
Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.
> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.
There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.
Regulation works in a theoretical world where the rules of the game are set by an outsider entity, which is powerful enough to enforce said rules and yet completely separate from economic power.
In real life, players affect the rules: lobbying, marketing, media ownership, cronyism…
Context: the speaker Lea Ypi is a professor of political philosophy. She grew up in socialist Albania, and here she's talking about how during her studies of political philosophy in Rome, her Western "socialist" classmates had a fantasy about socialism, and didn't want to hear about her experience growing up in socialism/about the socialist countries that have failed.
I have a feeling you're doing the same, just with a different -ism.
1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, not from any third-party calculations anyone has made, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.
2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3].
3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway.
4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6].
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact... [4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl... [5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama... [6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk...
"What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." "
It's unlikely that this is mostly for payroll. From AI I got:
"median total compensation per employee was approximately $279,802 in 2022, and with 183,323 employees at the end of 2024, total estimated compensation (salary + equity + benefits) likely exceeds $50 billion, or ~14–15% of total revenue"
So maybe it's not 1% as in Varoufakis talk but even if it's 15% of revenue that's also quite low. Also keep in mind in this AI reponse it includes equity (stocks) so that in this way employee is becoming investor/shareholder.
exabrial•2h ago
jcmfernandes•2h ago
TheOtherHobbes•56m ago
Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy.
Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance.
Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation.
So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity.
Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity.
Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy.
If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.
jjice•2h ago
thephyber•1h ago
Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers.
You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
spwa4•1h ago
(which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
secretsatan•1h ago
ares623•51m ago
lokar•1h ago
whatever1•1h ago
So who pays for these? What you are suggesting is government subsidies of companies. This sounds like communism to me.
machinationu•39m ago