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European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump's trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies.
The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades.
[...] The EU would use a so-called draft "Enforcement Regulation" if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to grind the World Trade Organization (WTO) to a halt.
[...] The EU is hoping to emulate past successes, such as its development of the GSM mobile global standard, which fueled the rise of companies such as Nokia.
[...] The document seeks more stringent measures to block Chinese companies from taking part in tenders in Europe to penalize them for the level of subsidies that they receive from the government in Beijing.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/europe-plan-trump-tech-companies-1472326
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:15PM (4 children)
I would fucking LOVE to see him do this. It'd be painful but it might actually force us to get our shit together. Trump is so completely, utterly, cluelessly wrong about everything, with his default algorithm being "do the opposite of what everyone tells me," that occasionally he may accidentally do something that turns out to be good for us, long-term. It's a hell of a gamble, but it may turn out to work.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Better hope it doesn't happen. The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. In fact, China filed more patents than received at the European Patent Org., Japan, Korea, and the US combined.
China has been working towards being the #1 power in robotics by 2025, and they started buying up competitors in the EU and US years ago. There's no reason to believe they won't succeed, since they're not guided by "next-quarter profits" thinking.
If you want the USA to be like what China was before it ended its' policy of isolation from the world, fine ... but it's a sure bet you won't like it.
To get back into the race, the US needs free university education and free health care. For-profit education and health care are draining the economy of money that could be invested elsewhere, as well as the lost opportunity costs that making universities accessable to all would bring.
It's the same thing with reparations to blacks for a couple of centuries of injustice. If it lets the country move on instead of replaying the hatreds of the civil war over and over and over, a trillion would be cheap, and the estimated cost of $200 billion would be easy to justify just on decreasing the economic burden of racism to the economy.
Most who were promised 40 acres and a mule never got either - what does that work out to after all those years of inflation? Pay your debts.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:08AM
That short term thinking you mentioned is a BIG fault of US companies: long term planning is needed to go up against China, but the American reward is "Gimme! NOW! I don't care about tomorrow."
Meanwhile, China is thinking decades ahead.
Belt and road...South China seas... robotics... making friends with neighbours and Europe...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:48AM
"The US is far behind China in number of patents filed each year. "
Yet Trump keeps complaining that China is stealing all of our intellectual property and he keeps insisting that their theft costs the U.S. billions of dollars.
It looks to me like the exact opposite is true now. We're the ones that keep stealing their intellectual property. So by Trump's own logic we should just start handing them over boat loads of money because we owe them all that money from all the intellectual property we keep stealing. Or maybe we should just start filing for more patents because, you know, more patents = more innovation, am I right? Then we can better do cross patent negotiations with China and not have to owe them so much.
I thought we voted for Trump because he wasn't going to parrot corporate nonsense that bought and paid for politicians do. We figure he had more money than the bought and paid for politicians and corporations couldn't buy him. Yet now he is here parroting the same garbage about intellectual property and how it keeps getting stolen. Sounds just like another corporate bought shill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:31AM
The correct phrasing is "it's a million to one shot, but it just might work". You have to actually say it out loud at a dramatic moment, and then nine times out of ten it will work.
(thanks pterry)