Paradoxically, while Trump has accomplished very little but make speeches, the damage his presidency has done to our image, and perception of how welcoming America is, will be felt for years.
It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
Those gains were most likely based on the anticipation of tax cuts (increasing consumer spending and the supply of investable capital), deregulation (allowing higher profits, most notably by banks), and repatriation (allowing share buy backs).
So far, none of those has happened and it remains to be seen if they will. If they don't, I don't expect a market decline, but just a smaller total cumulative growth since November that has nothing to do with Trump's election or the general agenda I outlined above.
Tax cuts to the rich increase investable capital, as I said. Trump also proposed tax cuts for everyone else, too, which would increase consumer spending.
Those of us even in Australia are wary now of travelling to the US because of (a) fear they maybe mistakenly detained, (b) having to turn over social media information and (c) visa problems at the arrival gate.
Places like Berlin, Amsterdam etc are looking far more interesting for startups because of the access to the European market and the sensible policies that seem to be enacted e.g. roaming.
Exactly. Countries definitely lose out because of these policies.
I intended to visit China in the near future -- but I've booked a trip to Taiwan instead, almost entirely because Taiwan doesn't require me to get a visa.
Likewise, I can't see myself ever living in the US as long as I have access to free movement in Europe.
>"I intended to visit China in the near future -- but I've booked a trip to Taiwan instead, almost entirely because Taiwan doesn't require me to get a visa."
You still get a visa to enter Taiwan. It's just a "visa on arrival" as opposed to needing to obtain a visa prior to travel. Visa policies are reciprocal between countries. China and the US both charge citizens from each other's countries to visit for tourist purposes and that must be paid prior to travel. Tourist visa policies and immigrations polices have very little if anything to do with each other.
I think you might be short changing yourself if your only reason for not visiting mainland China is solely because they require a visa. It's less than a hundred bucks, it's basically a tourist tax. You likely won't regret it.
>You still get a visa to enter Taiwan. It's just a "visa on arrival" as opposed to needing to obtain a visa prior to travel.
Sure -- 'doesn't require me to get a visa' as in I don't have to make a trip to an embassy or pay a fee.
I'm sure I'll visit China eventually, but for the sort of low-budget travelling I'm doing, an entry visa represents a not-insignificant amount of the total cost. It also makes things less flexible: as I understand, authorities must be notified of exact travel plans before you depart.
It appears to be worth it to pay the entry visa to (PRC) China; Taipei is certainly an amazing city, but the mainland has much more history and tourist opportunities. I hope to visit it one day.
>" It also makes things less flexible: as I understand, authorities must be notified of exact travel plans before you depart."
This isn't true. You are free to travel wherever and whenever you want in China provided you have a visa. Tibet might require a special approval but nowhere else. The visa is also good for 10 years. Also if you are a Westerner, hotels and taxis are a really good value in China. Lastly there are much better flight options into Beijing than there are into Taipei and so would more than offset the cost of the visa.
> (a) fear they maybe mistakenly detained, (b) having to turn over social media information and (c) visa problems at the arrival gate.
ok wait what? are you planning to move into the United States without applying for citizenship or are you just coming for travel? Because if it's just for travel then what are you worried about? Likewise why would you have visa problems unless you have known affiliations with terrorism or places that have terrorism?
I'm from Australia and agree with this. A colleague and I with travel plans to the US this year have discussed your three concerns at length over recent months. I'm a reasonably regular traveller to the US, and the colleague is exactly the sort of tech talent that any country should be trying to attract.
You cite the dismal perception from 2006-2008, but what changed? In 2008 Obama was elected and everything is new again and he won the Nobel. Did the country completely change in 2 years? Has it changed that much in 8?
Not really, that's why getting so riled up over singular negative events isn't worth your time. Things change fast, and countries have long histories. Germany and Japan were ruled by jingoist elites for centuries and just 80 years ago they were culling populations. Today they are examples of doing it right. Do we really believe 4 years of a bad leader is gonna flip centuries of progress?
It's an issue, yeah, but let's not overstate it because that' s not being honest with ourselves.
Assuming Trump stays for the full term (all signs point that way right now, no matter what impeachment hopes and dreams people have), four years of damage is pretty long.
And you're right, in the grand scheme of things, it may not matter. But four years is a pretty long time in tech-timelines for other countries to start catching up to Silicon Valley's vibrancy.
> Assuming Trump stays for the full term (all signs point that way right now, no matter what impeachment hopes and dreams people have), four years of damage is pretty long
Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover. For entrepreneurs and talents, Canada, Germany or France just can't compete, especially France with a bureaucracy that will crush one's bones.
>"Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover"
George W. Bush was in office for 8 years, Trump has been in office for 6 months. How can you realistically compare the two? I also don't understand the past tense. Trump is still a sitting President.
Has it? I'm pretty sure most of the country's (and let's be real, many other nations) currents problems are directly related to actions undertaken by Dubya and his despicable administration.
I started out this post by attempting to defend G.W. Bush, but considering the Iraq War and his handling of the Afghanistan War, the worldwide consequences have been catastrophic beyond that of the Vietnam War.
If we ignore the majority of what Trump says or Tweets, Trump comes out ahead.
I wish there were a metric for ignoramus, I suspect Trump would be fully one or two orders magnitude a bigger moron than Bush except when it comes to how to handle fellow con artists. He was apparently adept at handling the mob.
In order to be impeached, you have to actually have committed a crime, no?
So far as I know, tweeting dumb shit is not yet a criminal offense.
I've suspected from the outset that four years of Trump would effectively amount to four years of stasis, with perhaps a chance of getting a conservative majority in the supreme court for the foreseeable future.
At least from my perspective so far he is not significantly worse so far than say George W. Bush, he might be if he starts new wars, but that seems unlikely. Pretty much all the previous presidents screwed over the rest of the world in some way or another. Just to give you an example in 2013 in 35% of Germans believed the US government to be trustworthy (Snowden NSA spying revelations) according to infratest dimap, now that value is at 22%, only slightly higher than that of Russia (20%).
People were convinced Trump was going to turn the US into an authoritarian/fascist state well before he even proposed any actual practical policies. They continue to despite the fact he has failed to pass any meaningful legislation beyond congress/courts months after getting into office. With the exception of dropping out of the largely non-binding Paris accord.
Sadly I doubt this will be dependent on what he actually does vs other politicians. It's entirely about perception.
This Russia congressional hearing is getting 10x the amount of coverage than the CIA torture hearing - if that's any indication of perception vs national priorities.
The blatant criminality and anti-American behaviour by the CIA and the executive branch was far more obvious in that case going into the hearing. They openly destroyed 92 videos tapes of interrogations at a black site which would have provided direct evidence of abuse [1] which not a single person got punished for.
Yet Jeff Session refusing to answer a few questions about private conversations with Trump got more scrutiny than the CIA did when they refused to release a 10,000 page report on their torture practices, using the same legal basis as Sessions did citing executive privilege during Obama's administration.
Firing the head of the FBI for investigating his campaign was an authoritarian move. It remains to be seen if he gets away with it. If he does, America has become Authoritarian (i.e. when the law no longer applies to the leader).
The person, not the campaign. Besides, he's under investigation now for firing Comey… although not much to investigate when you admit committing crimes on TV.
No laws have been broken by Trump. Hillary Clinton & co. on the other hand have broken _many_ at an egregious level. Lynch and Mueller should similarly be under investigation for covering up crimes as well.
Let me remind you that you know of this from the same sources which, until Comey's testimony, swore on a stack of bibles that Trump is under investigation.
I agree that critics are far more shrill than they should be. However, there is some basis for their fears of an authoritarian push: significantly high proportions of his campaign speeches used authoritarian imagery and themes. His closest advisors were outspoken for advocating authoritarian viewpoints. In hindsight, he was using that rhetoric aspirationally with no intention of doing the intensely hard work and dedication involved in actually bringing about an authoritarian state.
Indeed, almost nothing authoritarian has emerged; he uses executive orders to implement policies because he doesn't have the votes to legislate it.
As for the lack of zeal for investigating the CIA, the reason should be obvious: very few Americans were the direct victims of it. That scandal would only be zealously pursued if there were no other noteworthy events happening.
It is "whataboutism" for me to point out the lack of Republican interest in the CIA case is similar to the lack of Republican interest in the Russian election interference investigation. I only make that point to underscore the lack of lawmaker interest in pursuing a mostly "suspicious foreigner" set of victims, not to claim some difference of virtue between the two political parties.
I agree with you that the CIA scandal is shocking and unacceptable. It is 1) morally wrong; 2) directly results in terrorist organization recruitment; 3) disrupts trade and political cooperation with other countries.
Even with "authoritarian undertones", it's never been clear to me what sort of Very Bad Things Trump might do to warrant the hysterics. What is a realistic worst-case scenario? Do we really think he's going to make himself dictator or implement some soviet-esque authoritarian government? I don't see a scenario where he does more than temporarily obstruct progress for a few years. I guess it's just odd that everyone is terrified about "authoritarianism" without starting so much as a realistic concrete scenario.
From this point, yes. During the campaign, it appeared that Republican leadership were acquiescing to most of his demands. It's clear now that he has little political support for most of his policies. The Republicans are using him as a vehicle to sign bills into law and little else.
The things he wanted to do during his campaign that may have seemed credible: 1) Muslim ban, 2) Libel law strengthening, 3) Increased law enforcement action, "stop and frisk" policies. None of these lead to an authoritarian state, they just erode the Democratic norms of the Republic.
I hope no one thinks that Trump is emblematic of a country that elected Obama 4 and 8 years prior. I can only imagine Trump is a passing fad; then again, I said that at every stage of his campaign...
What does "political relevance" have to do with political longevity? We're not a fundamentally different country now than we were last year, and policies created with a pen stroker can be struck down just as easily. Anyone who thinks that Trump's policies are a good predictor of future US policy need to explain their rationale because it doesn't follow reason.
The rationale: we aren't a fundamentally different country now, and won't be fundamentally different after Trump's term is over.
Thus, no matter how progressive or good-neighborly future administration policies are, allies now have to build in the risk that every 4 years there will be a 50:50 chance that those policies will be reversed and any agreements voided.
How do you suppose one Trump election drives those odds up so high? And what percentage of international agreements has Trump actually voided? As bad as things may be, the sky isn't actually falling, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise.
Well, it's more like with each president over the past two decades, everyone became more aware that the US is not the benevolent/welcoming/whatever democracy it said it was.
And with Trump's open imbecilic statements, it's like a switch went off in people's heads - "hey, they US is really not the benevolent/welcoming/whatever democracy it said it was!"
It will reduce it's importance a bit for the next decade. Leave it to Trump's successors to strike the final blows.
I don't know why the fuck you guys are talking about the US and Trump in this thread, btw.
The endowment of that venture fund (Viva Technology) will be around 10 billion euros. It has just been announced so the news hasn't come out in English media yet.
I can see those cuts in corporate tax being good to increase startup competition. Some of the other big remaining issues to see highly successful startups are salaries and lack of tech talent.
We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay tax on it until the options are actually sold[1][2], so that's a good thing for employee, no need to scratch your head with 83b elections and whatnot.
Regarding the lack of tech talent, there's still a lot to be done. France has incredible engineers, but those engineering schools are not focused enough on Computer Science, instead they excel in "old-school" engineering like Aerospace, Civil, Nuclear, ... . On the other hand, Free universities have Computer Science degrees, but they don't prepare the future graduates as much as the Engineering "Grandes Écoles" would in regard to core engineering knowledge. There are some attempts at schools focused more on Software Engineering, but I feel that they're more similar to longer bootcamps with a focus on projects, I think those who graduate such schools are trained to be good "monkey coders" (pardon the expression) but lack a growth-mindset.
However I come from a private "engineering" school focused on computer sciences (named Supinfo) and there's some others (Epitech / Epita ) that though they don't deliver a engineer diploma (as per the law-regulated definition of engineer) but rather a master diploma (but that you can name "engineer in computer science" or somekind of trick like that and the schools play on that to attract student), actually have to my opinion, provide a decent education.
I learned assembly, C, logical gates and how to build a 1 bits processor.
I then learned HTML, and SQL, and then PHP, and some basic of algorithm (though no data structure courses, I learned only years after being graduated what was a quick-sort/merge-sort)
But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL
And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
However I have to admit 10 years ago, I wanted to be a monkey-coder and thought the management and finance lessons were bullshit for people who were not good enough to code and still needed a job.
So I have to say the school totally prepared me for the "startup world" (and with 30 campuses in France and ~5000 graduated student a year, quite some others were prepared, though they were maybe with the same mindset as me).
> But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL
> And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
Oh interesting, I thought this was specific to the "Grandes Écoles". For entrepreneurship, this is good. Accounting basics also comes in handy.
But yeah, I make a difference between learning C, SQL, PHP and let's say taking a compiler class, OS class , programming language design, distributed systems, and a database class where you learn the intrinsic of a database.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when such school 'teach you SQL', they teach you about how to operate a SQL database, and do efficient indexing/joins. That itself is very important, but the school makes no effort to demystify a database. Similar to how you demystified processor by building it from scratch (Electrical Engineering is another "old-school" discipline one I think French engineers are good at), I feel learning to demystify many key computer science concepts makes you a better software engineer. And while learning a new language is something you can do on your own time easily, going deep into a compiler creation isn't something easy to do on your own, especially after being out of school.
Some people would argue that lot of this is useless, but to me: Like a civil engineer, where doing matrices operations and second order derivatives by hand at school is never going to be useful later on the job, having the core skills gives you a better intuition on the job.
Imho , schools like those don't do enough "hard" science, like math, to prepare you for the future.
Have you done enough linear algebra to work on image processing, or with neural networks , and understand the various parameters to tweak the libraries ?
Done enough logic (the math branch) to understand the deep nature , or at least feel the taste of the type systems to come ( scala, haskell and now more and more swift kotlin and rust), or use formal program proofs toolings ?
Enough statistics, physics and algebra to get a hint of what's under the hood of Quantum computers, should they come one day ?
There are CS Engineering schools in France that have a large part of their teaching in "hard" science.
For example, in my school (ENSIIE). I've studied Operational Research, Graph Theory, Logic, Probability, Statistic, Formal Program Proof, and other subjects I don't remember (oups...).
No Quantum Computing in my school however.
But it might be present in better schools like ENSIMAG or Supelec.
The side effect is that these schools tend to be old school in their purely technical teachings. No learning of <fancy JS framework released a weak ago> or how to configure <enterprise stuff> or <fancy cloud provider>, only basic programming skills in C, Java or CPP, SQL, a little assembly, OCaml and some Unix administration skills. By themselves, these schools will not produce code monkeys.
Generally I think you're right, but tbh you don't need to be a MIT class A mathematician physician master to become a great systems engineer. Scala, Rust, Kotlin etc has (to me) the same learning curve as Java and I think most system devs will be able to adopt the languages if they wish to do so.
I had some course about linear algebra, though I agree only the very basics (matrix multiplication etc. but nothing fancy about convolution etc. so I would need to follow a course to be able to implement a raytracer for example)
About neural network, also we didn't learned it, but we learned prolog and lips. And prolog itself was a "mind blowing" moment that I would not have exchanged against quantum physics or more maths.
I'm learning rust right now, so I think it's more about the mindset, the school being here mostly to open up your mind about subjects.
Sounds like an HBO (higher professional education) in The Netherlands.
Having done a bachelor at an HBO and a masters at a research university (and now doing a PhD at a university in Japan) I can say Computer Science at an HBO is excellent preparation to work as a programmer at a consultancy firm or at a firm doing grunt development work (business app developers, web development, etc.). Like another commenter mentioned, you probably won't easily be able to write code for startups which are doing stuff like robotics and deep learning. However in due time libraries will make it easier for you to work in that area.
Even at the PhD level I sometimes suffer because of not having a very strong background in the mathematics needed to build/use cutting edge technologies. I think most students coming from an HBO would have some problems working at a startup working on some novel tech.
That said, I have met many excellent HBO students who either joined a company and did very novel technical work or went on to be successful in academia. In the end, I guess it depends on your mindset.
CS classes B.S. seems to be everywhere. I would say that we in france produce a lot of good engineers but we are going abroad and not all staying in our native country :-)
I disagree about the comment on French computer science education; I am continually blown away by the technical depth and effectiveness of my French colleagues (here at Google). Though maybe the problem is that a lot of the best ones moved here :)
Our comments are not incompatible, I'd say, given Google's and other companies recruiting standards, the difficulty of the immigration process, there must be a huge foreign engineers survivorship bias.
Despite a not-as-good-as-the-best-US-schools CS education, they managed to make it to Google.
Similarly, assuming each country has the same distribution of talent, and that the US is able to brain-drain from the top of the stack, the foreigners coming from smaller countries will look even more competent. I know very few Danish and Finnish programmers in the US, apart from Bjarne Stroustrup, Linus Torvalds, so I'm under the impression from that sample that Danish and Finnish are amazing programmers :)
A law passed in 2015 in France [0] that makes it mandatory, starting 1/1/2018, for any business (including "auto entrepreneur", what you have to register as to be a freelancer or such in France) to used "certified" software for accounting.
Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
If you get audited and are not in conformity, you get a 7500 euro fine and 60 days to correct your situation.
But what if you are serving foreign clients, and use foreign software to produce invoices that fulfill local regulation? Or if you developed in house software to meet your very particular needs? Heh, sucks to be you, go give money to Ciel.
That being said, the law says that if you do your accounting without software, you don't fall under the regulation. So can you just do your accounting in Excel, copy it by hand, and show that when you get inspected? Who knows.
There are many, many cases like this of useless bureaucracy and regulation in France that make it a nightmare for anyone to start and run their own business. My friends who have been "auto entrepreneur" in the past have hated every minute of it, and most of them have moved to other countries. I'm French, likely to start a company in the next 5 years, and would never go back to France to do it.
The government doesn't really want to create an environment where small businesses can flourish - no one has the proper background to really get what factors contribute to that. What they want is to get the big bucks from venture capital flowing into the country so that they can boast about having a French Google or Airbnb or whatever, which is purely a vanity metric and not particularly constructive for the economy.
Absolutely outrageous, and there is no free open source alternative? how is this even possible.
> Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
Fucking "socialists". Macron need to struct down this law, this is straight out corruption, there is no other way to say it.
>A law passed in 2015 in France [0] that makes it mandatory, starting 1/1/2018, for any business (including "auto entrepreneur", what you have to register as to be a freelancer or such in France) to used "certified" software for accounting.
Macron has been elected in 2017. Given this article is about how he is sparking a tech boom in the country, I hardly see how that's his fault, or even related.
Lawmaking in France is not confined to the president.
If there is to be a tech boom in France, it will be the result of years and years of judicious, thoughtful, policy that makes life easy for small businesses (tech or not); not one time acts of symbolic VC cash investment.
The purpose of my message is to show that French lawmakers are still very far from understanding this. I don't know where in my post you find me blaming Macron for this.
They can make you buy a computer? And dictate what operating system you use? Seems like a freedom of association problem, but I don't know anything about French constitutional law, or if there's any EU office that can address this.
I'd say you should be able to use pen and paper with a traditional ledger. I would sooner do this (having already done it before) than be required to buy certain software, just out of principle.
Anyway, at least in the U.S. I've never heard of this. Manhattan has ludicrous layers of taxes that a huge PITA for a small business to learn about let alone comply with if you do it yourself. But there's no software mandate. You just have to be able to show your work if asked.
The law specifies that you don't have to use "certified" software if you do your accounting outside of a software system. So they don't "make you" buy a computer; but it is still ridiculous because of how hazy it is. For instance, as I mentioned in my message, if I use Excel for part of my accounting but do the final ledgers by hand, will I get fined if I get inspected?
Additionally, the law says that any software has to be certified again for any new major version. But in the world of web software and continuous deployment, how does that work? It's kind of a software equivalent of the ship of Theseus - if my software ends up being completely refactored and rewritten over the years but doesn't change major version, do I need to get it re-certified or not?
It's just nonsensical lawmaking done by people who don't understand tech at a fundamental level.
French governments like to create all these grants and loopholes, but it doesn't mask the complexity and the hostility of french bureaucracy toward entrepreneurs. Don't be fooled by these PR stunts. If Macron really wants to change things he needs to start telling the tax office to stop treating every business owner as a de-facto fraudster and criminal.
Both of you are right, it's about all western governments.
Still, we have in france a strong anti market thinking that is well reflected in how our government keeps piling laws and regulations. This news is indeed a PR stunt nothing more
French business owners have earned that reputation of fraudsters. To the point that salary-men, who cannot cheat much, used to have a tax reduction to compensate for that inability to cheat compared to business owners who were "expected" to cheat.
All small business owners around me, or whom I ever knew, are fraudsters. At the moment, the one right left of my house is a fraudster (he's been caught several times but doesn't care). The one 50 meters forward is a fraudster (he's not been caught yet). The friends of mine who own bars and restaurants are fraudsters, they generally don't get caught, or they only get caught for minor stuff, unrelated to their main fraud. The guy the wedding of whom I last attended got a several millions euros fine (so, same for not so small business!), he didn't blink. The bosses I worked for broke many work rules and that's just considered standard behaviour.
As a French, I hope this will also bring large "big5-like" compagnies to open engineering offices in my country as well. I'm always a bit disappointed to see them have offices in London or Dublin but not here where we have a lot of engineering talent as well.
As an American living and working in France, this sounds like a scenario where France would love to have the results and benefits of a startup boom, but they don't want to take the necessary steps to enable it. Having a bunch of free money or easy visas are actually not what will cause a boom. France is notorious for never-ending paperwork and administration, and it's true. It's like trying to swim in molasses. You can do it. No one is "stopping" you. But eventually you just get too tired and give up, and go to the cafe and enjoy life. But hey, yeah let's make France attractive to startups and catch some of those taxes and world attention. But we don't want to change anything about our culture or regulations, so we can give give out a bunch of money, right? That will get people to flock here, make billion euro companies, and we'll reap the benefits. That's what it seems like to me.
French companies won't take risks. Banks fund only very classical projects. And it's very hard to get money or when you do get it, it's a small amount. Everybody ask for rock star programmers and put them on boring tasks and don't pay them well. Eventually they quit or never come so they can work for non french companies.
And it's not a problem of skills. The french society produce plenty of skilled managers, devs or innovators.
We just make just those skills will always be underused. We had barriers everywhere to protect the old, avoid uncertainty and fit.
French companies won't take risks. Banks fund only very classical projects. And it's very hard to get money or when you do get it, it's a small amount. Everybody ask for rock star programmers and put them on boring tasks and don't pay them well. Eventually they quit or never come so they can work for non french companies.
And it's not a problem of skills. The french society produce plenty of skilled managers, devs or innovators.
We just make just those skills will always be underused. We had barriers everywhere to protect the old, avoid uncertainty and fit.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadIt's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
So far, none of those has happened and it remains to be seen if they will. If they don't, I don't expect a market decline, but just a smaller total cumulative growth since November that has nothing to do with Trump's election or the general agenda I outlined above.
Although this is a popular theory, mostly promoted by the people who don't want to pay taxes.
Those of us even in Australia are wary now of travelling to the US because of (a) fear they maybe mistakenly detained, (b) having to turn over social media information and (c) visa problems at the arrival gate.
Places like Berlin, Amsterdam etc are looking far more interesting for startups because of the access to the European market and the sensible policies that seem to be enacted e.g. roaming.
I intended to visit China in the near future -- but I've booked a trip to Taiwan instead, almost entirely because Taiwan doesn't require me to get a visa.
Likewise, I can't see myself ever living in the US as long as I have access to free movement in Europe.
You still get a visa to enter Taiwan. It's just a "visa on arrival" as opposed to needing to obtain a visa prior to travel. Visa policies are reciprocal between countries. China and the US both charge citizens from each other's countries to visit for tourist purposes and that must be paid prior to travel. Tourist visa policies and immigrations polices have very little if anything to do with each other.
I think you might be short changing yourself if your only reason for not visiting mainland China is solely because they require a visa. It's less than a hundred bucks, it's basically a tourist tax. You likely won't regret it.
Sure -- 'doesn't require me to get a visa' as in I don't have to make a trip to an embassy or pay a fee.
I'm sure I'll visit China eventually, but for the sort of low-budget travelling I'm doing, an entry visa represents a not-insignificant amount of the total cost. It also makes things less flexible: as I understand, authorities must be notified of exact travel plans before you depart.
This isn't true. You are free to travel wherever and whenever you want in China provided you have a visa. Tibet might require a special approval but nowhere else. The visa is also good for 10 years. Also if you are a Westerner, hotels and taxis are a really good value in China. Lastly there are much better flight options into Beijing than there are into Taipei and so would more than offset the cost of the visa.
ok wait what? are you planning to move into the United States without applying for citizenship or are you just coming for travel? Because if it's just for travel then what are you worried about? Likewise why would you have visa problems unless you have known affiliations with terrorism or places that have terrorism?
You cite the dismal perception from 2006-2008, but what changed? In 2008 Obama was elected and everything is new again and he won the Nobel. Did the country completely change in 2 years? Has it changed that much in 8?
Not really, that's why getting so riled up over singular negative events isn't worth your time. Things change fast, and countries have long histories. Germany and Japan were ruled by jingoist elites for centuries and just 80 years ago they were culling populations. Today they are examples of doing it right. Do we really believe 4 years of a bad leader is gonna flip centuries of progress?
It's an issue, yeah, but let's not overstate it because that' s not being honest with ourselves.
And you're right, in the grand scheme of things, it may not matter. But four years is a pretty long time in tech-timelines for other countries to start catching up to Silicon Valley's vibrancy.
Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover. For entrepreneurs and talents, Canada, Germany or France just can't compete, especially France with a bureaucracy that will crush one's bones.
George W. Bush was in office for 8 years, Trump has been in office for 6 months. How can you realistically compare the two? I also don't understand the past tense. Trump is still a sitting President.
Has it? I'm pretty sure most of the country's (and let's be real, many other nations) currents problems are directly related to actions undertaken by Dubya and his despicable administration.
If we ignore illegal wars, Bush comes out ahead.
If we ignore the majority of what Trump says or Tweets, Trump comes out ahead.
I wish there were a metric for ignoramus, I suspect Trump would be fully one or two orders magnitude a bigger moron than Bush except when it comes to how to handle fellow con artists. He was apparently adept at handling the mob.
So far as I know, tweeting dumb shit is not yet a criminal offense.
I've suspected from the outset that four years of Trump would effectively amount to four years of stasis, with perhaps a chance of getting a conservative majority in the supreme court for the foreseeable future.
Sadly I doubt this will be dependent on what he actually does vs other politicians. It's entirely about perception.
This Russia congressional hearing is getting 10x the amount of coverage than the CIA torture hearing - if that's any indication of perception vs national priorities.
The blatant criminality and anti-American behaviour by the CIA and the executive branch was far more obvious in that case going into the hearing. They openly destroyed 92 videos tapes of interrogations at a black site which would have provided direct evidence of abuse [1] which not a single person got punished for.
Yet Jeff Session refusing to answer a few questions about private conversations with Trump got more scrutiny than the CIA did when they refused to release a 10,000 page report on their torture practices, using the same legal basis as Sessions did citing executive privilege during Obama's administration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_d...
No laws have been broken by Trump. Hillary Clinton & co. on the other hand have broken _many_ at an egregious level. Lynch and Mueller should similarly be under investigation for covering up crimes as well.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/87570147199986483...
Indeed, almost nothing authoritarian has emerged; he uses executive orders to implement policies because he doesn't have the votes to legislate it.
As for the lack of zeal for investigating the CIA, the reason should be obvious: very few Americans were the direct victims of it. That scandal would only be zealously pursued if there were no other noteworthy events happening.
It is "whataboutism" for me to point out the lack of Republican interest in the CIA case is similar to the lack of Republican interest in the Russian election interference investigation. I only make that point to underscore the lack of lawmaker interest in pursuing a mostly "suspicious foreigner" set of victims, not to claim some difference of virtue between the two political parties.
I agree with you that the CIA scandal is shocking and unacceptable. It is 1) morally wrong; 2) directly results in terrorist organization recruitment; 3) disrupts trade and political cooperation with other countries.
The things he wanted to do during his campaign that may have seemed credible: 1) Muslim ban, 2) Libel law strengthening, 3) Increased law enforcement action, "stop and frisk" policies. None of these lead to an authoritarian state, they just erode the Democratic norms of the Republic.
Trump just openly bashes everyone, like a complete moron.
Thus, no matter how progressive or good-neighborly future administration policies are, allies now have to build in the risk that every 4 years there will be a 50:50 chance that those policies will be reversed and any agreements voided.
And with Trump's open imbecilic statements, it's like a switch went off in people's heads - "hey, they US is really not the benevolent/welcoming/whatever democracy it said it was!"
It will reduce it's importance a bit for the next decade. Leave it to Trump's successors to strike the final blows.
I don't know why the fuck you guys are talking about the US and Trump in this thread, btw.
Here is a reputable source in French: https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/030386245787-en...
We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay tax on it until the options are actually sold[1][2], so that's a good thing for employee, no need to scratch your head with 83b elections and whatnot.
Regarding the lack of tech talent, there's still a lot to be done. France has incredible engineers, but those engineering schools are not focused enough on Computer Science, instead they excel in "old-school" engineering like Aerospace, Civil, Nuclear, ... . On the other hand, Free universities have Computer Science degrees, but they don't prepare the future graduates as much as the Engineering "Grandes Écoles" would in regard to core engineering knowledge. There are some attempts at schools focused more on Software Engineering, but I feel that they're more similar to longer bootcamps with a focus on projects, I think those who graduate such schools are trained to be good "monkey coders" (pardon the expression) but lack a growth-mindset.
[1] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/questions/jai...
[2] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/lactionnariat...
The mindset comes from opportunity and belief that you can own what you build. Schooling is almost irrelevant, especially today.
However I come from a private "engineering" school focused on computer sciences (named Supinfo) and there's some others (Epitech / Epita ) that though they don't deliver a engineer diploma (as per the law-regulated definition of engineer) but rather a master diploma (but that you can name "engineer in computer science" or somekind of trick like that and the schools play on that to attract student), actually have to my opinion, provide a decent education.
I learned assembly, C, logical gates and how to build a 1 bits processor.
I then learned HTML, and SQL, and then PHP, and some basic of algorithm (though no data structure courses, I learned only years after being graduated what was a quick-sort/merge-sort)
But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL
And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
However I have to admit 10 years ago, I wanted to be a monkey-coder and thought the management and finance lessons were bullshit for people who were not good enough to code and still needed a job.
So I have to say the school totally prepared me for the "startup world" (and with 30 campuses in France and ~5000 graduated student a year, quite some others were prepared, though they were maybe with the same mindset as me).
> And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
Oh interesting, I thought this was specific to the "Grandes Écoles". For entrepreneurship, this is good. Accounting basics also comes in handy.
But yeah, I make a difference between learning C, SQL, PHP and let's say taking a compiler class, OS class , programming language design, distributed systems, and a database class where you learn the intrinsic of a database.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when such school 'teach you SQL', they teach you about how to operate a SQL database, and do efficient indexing/joins. That itself is very important, but the school makes no effort to demystify a database. Similar to how you demystified processor by building it from scratch (Electrical Engineering is another "old-school" discipline one I think French engineers are good at), I feel learning to demystify many key computer science concepts makes you a better software engineer. And while learning a new language is something you can do on your own time easily, going deep into a compiler creation isn't something easy to do on your own, especially after being out of school.
Some people would argue that lot of this is useless, but to me: Like a civil engineer, where doing matrices operations and second order derivatives by hand at school is never going to be useful later on the job, having the core skills gives you a better intuition on the job.
Have you done enough linear algebra to work on image processing, or with neural networks , and understand the various parameters to tweak the libraries ?
Done enough logic (the math branch) to understand the deep nature , or at least feel the taste of the type systems to come ( scala, haskell and now more and more swift kotlin and rust), or use formal program proofs toolings ?
Enough statistics, physics and algebra to get a hint of what's under the hood of Quantum computers, should they come one day ?
For example, in my school (ENSIIE). I've studied Operational Research, Graph Theory, Logic, Probability, Statistic, Formal Program Proof, and other subjects I don't remember (oups...).
No Quantum Computing in my school however.
But it might be present in better schools like ENSIMAG or Supelec.
The side effect is that these schools tend to be old school in their purely technical teachings. No learning of <fancy JS framework released a weak ago> or how to configure <enterprise stuff> or <fancy cloud provider>, only basic programming skills in C, Java or CPP, SQL, a little assembly, OCaml and some Unix administration skills. By themselves, these schools will not produce code monkeys.
About neural network, also we didn't learned it, but we learned prolog and lips. And prolog itself was a "mind blowing" moment that I would not have exchanged against quantum physics or more maths.
I'm learning rust right now, so I think it's more about the mindset, the school being here mostly to open up your mind about subjects.
Having done a bachelor at an HBO and a masters at a research university (and now doing a PhD at a university in Japan) I can say Computer Science at an HBO is excellent preparation to work as a programmer at a consultancy firm or at a firm doing grunt development work (business app developers, web development, etc.). Like another commenter mentioned, you probably won't easily be able to write code for startups which are doing stuff like robotics and deep learning. However in due time libraries will make it easier for you to work in that area.
Even at the PhD level I sometimes suffer because of not having a very strong background in the mathematics needed to build/use cutting edge technologies. I think most students coming from an HBO would have some problems working at a startup working on some novel tech.
That said, I have met many excellent HBO students who either joined a company and did very novel technical work or went on to be successful in academia. In the end, I guess it depends on your mindset.
Despite a not-as-good-as-the-best-US-schools CS education, they managed to make it to Google.
Similarly, assuming each country has the same distribution of talent, and that the US is able to brain-drain from the top of the stack, the foreigners coming from smaller countries will look even more competent. I know very few Danish and Finnish programmers in the US, apart from Bjarne Stroustrup, Linus Torvalds, so I'm under the impression from that sample that Danish and Finnish are amazing programmers :)
Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
If you get audited and are not in conformity, you get a 7500 euro fine and 60 days to correct your situation.
But what if you are serving foreign clients, and use foreign software to produce invoices that fulfill local regulation? Or if you developed in house software to meet your very particular needs? Heh, sucks to be you, go give money to Ciel.
That being said, the law says that if you do your accounting without software, you don't fall under the regulation. So can you just do your accounting in Excel, copy it by hand, and show that when you get inspected? Who knows.
There are many, many cases like this of useless bureaucracy and regulation in France that make it a nightmare for anyone to start and run their own business. My friends who have been "auto entrepreneur" in the past have hated every minute of it, and most of them have moved to other countries. I'm French, likely to start a company in the next 5 years, and would never go back to France to do it.
The government doesn't really want to create an environment where small businesses can flourish - no one has the proper background to really get what factors contribute to that. What they want is to get the big bucks from venture capital flowing into the country so that they can boast about having a French Google or Airbnb or whatever, which is purely a vanity metric and not particularly constructive for the economy.
[0]: http://www.codial.fr/wp-content/uploads/BOI-TVA-DECLA-30-10-...
> Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
Fucking "socialists". Macron need to struct down this law, this is straight out corruption, there is no other way to say it.
Macron has been elected in 2017. Given this article is about how he is sparking a tech boom in the country, I hardly see how that's his fault, or even related.
If there is to be a tech boom in France, it will be the result of years and years of judicious, thoughtful, policy that makes life easy for small businesses (tech or not); not one time acts of symbolic VC cash investment.
The purpose of my message is to show that French lawmakers are still very far from understanding this. I don't know where in my post you find me blaming Macron for this.
I'd say you should be able to use pen and paper with a traditional ledger. I would sooner do this (having already done it before) than be required to buy certain software, just out of principle.
Anyway, at least in the U.S. I've never heard of this. Manhattan has ludicrous layers of taxes that a huge PITA for a small business to learn about let alone comply with if you do it yourself. But there's no software mandate. You just have to be able to show your work if asked.
Additionally, the law says that any software has to be certified again for any new major version. But in the world of web software and continuous deployment, how does that work? It's kind of a software equivalent of the ship of Theseus - if my software ends up being completely refactored and rewritten over the years but doesn't change major version, do I need to get it re-certified or not?
It's just nonsensical lawmaking done by people who don't understand tech at a fundamental level.
Source: http://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/france/bercy-renonce-au-logicie...
Still, we have in france a strong anti market thinking that is well reflected in how our government keeps piling laws and regulations. This news is indeed a PR stunt nothing more
All small business owners around me, or whom I ever knew, are fraudsters. At the moment, the one right left of my house is a fraudster (he's been caught several times but doesn't care). The one 50 meters forward is a fraudster (he's not been caught yet). The friends of mine who own bars and restaurants are fraudsters, they generally don't get caught, or they only get caught for minor stuff, unrelated to their main fraud. The guy the wedding of whom I last attended got a several millions euros fine (so, same for not so small business!), he didn't blink. The bosses I worked for broke many work rules and that's just considered standard behaviour.
Cheating is a religion is this country.
Having visited the Paris startup scene recently, I got the feeling that the bureaucracy is much less taxing these days.
French companies won't take risks. Banks fund only very classical projects. And it's very hard to get money or when you do get it, it's a small amount. Everybody ask for rock star programmers and put them on boring tasks and don't pay them well. Eventually they quit or never come so they can work for non french companies.
And it's not a problem of skills. The french society produce plenty of skilled managers, devs or innovators.
We just make just those skills will always be underused. We had barriers everywhere to protect the old, avoid uncertainty and fit.
French companies won't take risks. Banks fund only very classical projects. And it's very hard to get money or when you do get it, it's a small amount. Everybody ask for rock star programmers and put them on boring tasks and don't pay them well. Eventually they quit or never come so they can work for non french companies.
And it's not a problem of skills. The french society produce plenty of skilled managers, devs or innovators.
We just make just those skills will always be underused. We had barriers everywhere to protect the old, avoid uncertainty and fit.