Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

When Ciro was a teenager, he was extremely cheap e.g. for clothes, food and video games even tough his family didn't have bad financial conditions.

This was mostly to save the world by not wasting resources that other people in need could use, and to save money so he could have more money to do more of whatever he wanted without the obligation to work.

But Ciro admits that shocking people with the incredible level of low quality goods was also fun.

Ciro changed after he came to Europe, especially in regards to food, perhaps corrupted by the fact that now the best chocolates, cheeses and breads in the world were not much more expensive than the cheapest brand you could buy. He still hates clothes that are just to look good like costumes though.

Living close to a small favela, São Remo, the favela next to USP, helped Ciro get frighteningly cheap goods on the shop frequented by the favela neighbours.

One legendary story is that of when his flatmate dropped some past on the kitchen floor, and the bowl broke, but Ciro prevented the flatmate from throwing it away and ate some of it nevertheless. What spooked them out the most was Ciro's statement that the pasta now had a crunchy glass shard texture to it.

What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!

As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization^[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.

Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.

ASML, and perhaps more maeaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.

The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!

Talent mobility is another issue:

So why can't Europe unify its laws?

Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

There isn't true mobility of people between countries.

You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.

Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.

Europe can't even unify basic things like:

Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead).

Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.

Evidence such as those makes it clear that the European Union is a failure.

One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.

Things that are not nice such as: