A lot of people either forget, or never learned, that Poland was once one of the largest and most influential states in Europe.Yes it was long time ago, but the potential was always there. The real challenge was surviving the consequences of being caught between neighbors whose ideologies gave rise to two of the deadliest systems of the 20th century.

Also I am of not very popular anymore opinions that not distorted trade help both sides of the trade and immigrants really help economy of country that they immigrate into. Including workers.

Founder visas are generally suffering from a chicken-and-egg problem, where only a successful company can sponsor anyone

Sorry, but this is wrong. Cheaper labor is pretty much the only reason for nearshoring from more expensive European countries to places like Spain or Eastern Europe.

having had my run around with London VCs - poor terms, slow moving (btw this is at seed stage) - it's better to bootstrap unless you're in deep tech (which London VCs can help out)

bootstrap and either deal with US VCs once you have numbers to back you up - if you wanna redo & do the VC route.

PS. Ever since the full scale war started I finally learned Cyrillic, and I must say - there is something nice about this alphabet (if you speak a Slavic language, of course). Sadly we don't have an official Cyrillic version of Polish, though, my compatriots would have their brains explode if someone promoted one.

You have no clue what you are talking about. I wonder why this sort of obnoxious reasoning always comes from Poles and never from Czech people for example.

And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)

Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

This is a pretty simple and obvious observation. Have you ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test to help establish the "average IQ" of your own country? Presumably not. So why do people keep getting took by this silly idea that "average IQ per country" is a thing?

The mind virus actually makes you love the host.

I wouldn’t describe PiS and its supporters as a dynamic cultural movement in the way MAGA is.

But the result is inarguably positive. Those countries had only recently become democracies after decades of military dictatorships or otherwise unstable third-world style governments. Today they're the most dynamic economies in the EU in many respects, and their democracies are well established and functioning.

The EU doesn't get nearly enough credit for how it transformed the continent. People have forgotten how nearly all European countries were in a very bad shape after WWII. Fascists had remained in power in Spain and Portugal. Soviets were orchestrating communist takeovers in countries like Italy. It's a small miracle that the liberal democratic economic order won so quickly and decisively.

https://georank.org/assets/img/charts/economy/poland/slovaki...

Ireland were in a similar position for instance (received €40bn in EU subsidies in the first 45 years of membership; now a net contributor).

Another argument: Poland's GDP had already been growing at a similar pace before it joined the EU (but after it got rid of communism).