>Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.
>As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it
Then the companies in that country need to learn how to be more competitive and governments need to learn how not to overregulate, overtax and raise barriers.
They justified it by religion but they really wanted to rob and mug. And this happened many times across history and will continue to happen: people claiming they are fighting for an ideal but really just wanting to gain power and money.
Yes and no. Downplaying “honest” convictions and other motivations unrelated to greed is flawed. Plenty of people in history did what they did because they truly believed in it (of course there were usually several motivations)
For instance the first Crusade was organized as a military relief expedition by the Byzantine emperor and the pope to save the empire from Turkish invasion and liberate the recently conquered Anatolia. Jerusalem was mostly an aspirational and symbolic goal.
Most people who joined did it because of sense of duty and various degrees of religion fanaticism. There was little prospect of profit and while the expedition was enormously more successful than anyone could have anticipated the overwhelming majority of initial participants were dead by the time they reached Jerusalem. Even those that survived to the end didn’t necessarily profit that much.
Europe started going backwards from some time. Energy is becoming more expensive, raw materials are becoming more expensive, industry is thickening, jobs are closed, education is not ok, most important tech developments are happening elsewhere, we don't have a thriving startup environment, most large tech companies are established elsewhere.
Maybe we will wake up at some point and do something.
Discourses won't put foot on the table and won't help with economic competition.
Poland is doing fine. Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast. Switzerland is still one the richest and successful countries in the world. Denmark is amazing.
Germany and the UK are the sick men of Europe. France is going brankrupt. Careful with confusing the 19th century superpowers with the whole of Europe. Yes cost of living has increased by which i mean real wages have stalled in many places, but this is worldwide and mostly due to external causes such as rocketing gas and oil prices. If we succeed in making lasting peace with Russia and getting access again to their natural resources, a new golden age may well commence.
I mean, yes - if your biggest external source of energy declares war, and your hitherto trusted defence partner goes rogue - it's going to have a chilling effect and the measures needed to address that will hit both the economy and the populous
Because it will cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere.
If you have 300 froblets per month being shipped to you, and suddenly you have only 200 froblets arriving and you have to spend £5 billion building a froblet factory, then you're both going to be short on froblets and high on expenses at least until the factory is built.
And yes, in the long run you'll have built the factory, will be getting a safer supply of froblets, and everything will be sunshine and roses, but while you're building it all that's an extra expense that you have to find the money for.
RoI isn't instant. If it takes you 20 years to build as much supply as you need then you're spending money over that time to try and get back to where you were.
And spending money on one thing means you don't have it for something else. Even if you're borrowing, you can borrow less for other things, unless you want to break your credit score, which would also hurt.
>All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk.
The purpose of an index is to provide a benchmark of the market, not to build funds that follow the index.
> The purpose of an index is to provide a benchmark of the market
Usually a subset of the market based on specific criteria. Total market indexes and funds exist, maybe there is a reason S&P 500 despite its "strict" inclusion criteria is more popular than them?
Unless we invest heavily in research and find new way to do chips. But I think there's not enough motivation and money to do that.
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