Here's the real issue. Economic innovation only really happens when the government is spending big on some issue. That's at least half the reason war advances technology so fast. It's not like Ukrainians weren't able to figure out drones 5 years ago.
Stopping spending kills the economy. Which kills tax income. Which puts far more stringent limits on spending. Which reinforces the need to stop even more spending.
AND, much less visibly, has been bleeding top engineers that choose to leave like someone cut it's heart open. There's even an internal joke about it (a specific way to refer to one's salary)
Yes but the point was that supply is very elastic since what happens to old fields is that they get priced out. When an oilfield gets older it's production cost creeps up, slowly. Since most of the oilfields that can produce at $current_price + 5$ aren't even properly shutdown yet, they can be rapidly brought online if prices rise, and there's a large supply of such fields. A very large supply of them.
Nobody's going without oil, it's just pushing up inflation. Not saying that's not a problem, but the problem isn't that people are being forced to go without.
Of course EU countries are complaining to high heaven since increased inflation will push their borrowing cost up further, and given the state of their public finances this means more sacrifices. If I lived in Paris, I'd park my car indoors for a month or two. Or 100km outside of Paris.
Only if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves.
And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.
Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.
To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.
That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.
blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals.
If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...
Yes, but it won't matter. The state energy firms of EU countries are going heavily into debt to survive this crisis, and it'll just turn from "paying high electricity prices because oil is expensive" to "paying high energy prices to repay state debt".
I mean it'll help in the sense that energy supply will switch to renewable sources, sure. Great for the climate, hopefully, But it won't help in lowering energy cost.
And before you say "but solar panels". A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
Which state energy firms? Most countries have mostly privatized generation with just the grid in public ownership. EDF is something of an exception, but they have very different economics (and the nuclear fleet).
> "paying high energy prices to repay state debt"
The whole range of general taxation is available for that.
> A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
The problem with this, historically is that the way Europe's geography works, a number of countries are just not going to fairly share in the burden of defending Europe, while other countries have the ability to tax foreign trade. Ireland is famous for this, and looking at a map, you can see why. Spain, Turkey and Denmark have historically taxed foreign trade.
Additionally a number of countries have "unfair" advantages over others. There are 2 straits that control access to the oceans. Which means Denmark and Norway control free trade routes (land routes are not "free" as in they are taxed) into Germany, Sweden, Finland, the Baltics, and of course Russia. This can't be fixed, and the UK effectively occupies Gibraltar to prevent it.
Spain (I'd say Spain and Morocco, but really ... Spain) controls sea access for all Mediterranean countries, from Italy to Georgia, Algeria to Greece. France (and Morocco) being the major exceptions to this. This can't be fixed, and is currently blocked by what is effectively an international force. Spain is not happy with this.
Turkey controls (and intends to tax) trade routes into all the black sea countries, which is most of Eastern Europe.
Oh and UK and the Netherlands, for reasons that are slightly less obvious, control free trade into Belgium.
In addition to this, most countries do not have the resources they need. Not even to survive. And even most countries that could be self-sufficient, aren't (cough Germany, really, WHY????). Really only France is somewhat close to self-sufficient. Specialization, on a country level, is a necessity in Europe, most countries do not have access to free trade routes and are utterly dependent on trade, in other words: they have to pay to survive.
Essentially the situation is simple: all European countries, except France. Spain, UK and Portugal (and, yes, Ireland) COULD get themselves into a secure position, but haven't (and so if it came to it, it would be very hard to do in a short time). All other countries probably can't do it at all. So all these countries have good reason to attack each other.
So the question with getting Europe's armies weapons is: the natural situation is that they'll try to destabilize Europe rather than stabilize it, because that is in most countries' direct economic interest. Historically, they ... you can say Europe was more peaceful than places like the areas of the ottoman empire, for example. But that should not be confused with peaceful in an absolute sense. In fact, the last 80 years or so have been remarkably peaceful, with America guaranteeing access to international trade. Well, I'm sure Russia would counter "guarantee access? You mean control access", and yes, that's been done.
Unfortunately it's very clear that America's power, especially measured relative to other countries, is waning. Meaning America is still far more powerful than, say, Turkey. But it used to be easily 100x more powerful. Now ... it looks more like 10x. Opposing Turkey will be a huge effort for the US, far more than the Iran war will be. US's deal, the Pax Americana, was that America would simply guarantee free trade routes with it's military for everyone, in fact, that's what the Iran war is really about (free trade for everyone behind Hormuz). In exchange, US gets the dollar. Many nations, most obviously Iran, but Turkey, Indonesia, China, Somalia, ... have all taken steps to tax the trade routes they control, which will over time create an untenable trade situation for a very large number of countries.
The situation for Germany in the long term is a simple choice: they can either pay, or attack. We all know what their historical choice has been, as soon as you have a somewhat prolonged economic crisis. Germany is not alone in this, in fact all of Eastern Europe is more or less in the same situation. A decent chunk of those countries are arming themselves (for example, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Finland have all given hints they're building a nuclear force)
The problem with America weakening is that the US wants free trade, because that directly benefits the US greatly, whereas most other factions want to control trade instead. Turkey, Iran, China, Indonesia, even Spain's current government if we're honest and others want to (go back to) taxing other countries. Historically they have succeeded at this, but it resulted in constant wars.
Yes ... countries that can't decide to invest in their own hospitals or education are going to arm themselves to pursue wars to protect little states thousands of kilometers away they barely even trade with. I haven't even mentioned that even as part of NATO they have systematically refused to invest in the defense of the Baltic states. That is not ancient history, that's 6 months ago. Oh and they're financing this with loans. EU government debt is already a pretty heavy burden in ... essentially everywhere except Germany. So they're kicking the can down the road, and this is military investment. It's not going to improve anything about the EU. It'll either do nothing at all (that's the optimal scenario: Russia is deterred and nothing happens. The economic production rots away in some secret basement until it literally decays into dust) or it'll cause destruction. Its value is either zero or MINUS trillions. The loans, however, will need to be repaid.
I'm just thinking ahead to what will happen once these loans turn from a short-term economic boost and start dragging the economies further down.
Yes. You see whats going on in Ukraine. Small countries have either partner countries or the bigger ones use them as proxies like i would assume would happen with lithuania.
Where do you get this from? Is this a remark that comes from antipathy to social democracy? Every speech by Sanchez that I have listened to over the last year has him promoting free trade, even the wiki says so:
Sánchez has been a strong advocate for finalizing the long-negotiated EU–Mercosur Free Trade Agreement,[170] which aims to establish one of the world's largest free trade areas.[171]
He is pushing really hard to renegotiate Gibraltar, and has even booked some success there (the fence is taken down). He's artifically pushing the Spanish economy in the region, and he's also sending in ships on a regular basis (no change from previous Spanish governments there) that UK has to chase away.
Why do you think that is? If you want to know: Spain's official story is they want it back because "it's inconveniently placed" (they imply they mean for the Spanish fishing industry).
and has even booked some success there (the fence is taken down).
He negotiated that with the UK so that the whole border control thing could be ameliated that made commerce and travel more difficult than strictly necessary. I would argue that is more in the vein of enabling free trade than installing a tax.
As for the UK chasing spanish ships, do you have a link?
I mean, he is arguing for the UK to return to the EU every chance he gets and that was part of the negotiations for Gibraltar, is that what you object to?
Yep. Really. As I said, not because Europe was very peaceful (although most of these conflicts were extremely underwhelming if compared to what ended the era: WW1)
Everything everywhere ever (except perhaps some of the larger wars in China) was underwhelming compared to WW1. That's why it's so famous.
But you were specifically claiming that Europe was "more peaceful than places like the areas of the ottoman empire", which is frankly absurd. I mean, we're talking about a region that had a Thirty Years' War, an Eighty Years' War, and a Hundred Years' War!
Unless... if you're talking about WW1 "ending the era" - were you talking only about a shorter timeframe prior to WW1? If we look only at the 40 or so years before 1914, then indeed Europe had a fairly peaceful period (Belle Époque, Gründerzeit) while the Ottoman Empire was basically starting its death throes.
Stopping spending kills the economy. Which kills tax income. Which puts far more stringent limits on spending. Which reinforces the need to stop even more spending.
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