Well they can be betting that Republicans will lose in a couple of months and the congress will have the guts to stop him from constantly imposing entirely illegal tariffs on random countries for no reason.

Canada also had a deal they signed with Trump. Then he changed his mind and pretended (or not) he’s to demented to remember it he and not Biden agreed to deal. Then he made other proposals then randomly changed his mind again and again.

There is nothing rational about this, he’s bullying Canada because he has much more leverage over it than he has over China and Europe. Albeit he messed up the global oil supply to fuck with both of them ( and bailed out the Russian economy from collapse while he was at it) or maybe he’s just cluelessly blundered into it, who knows)

> been a fully licensed bank for ~6 months

They had an EU license in Lithuania for years.

Not a bank until 2018

And they clearly figured that was easier than going through the UK where they had previously been licensed

No, they had a standard bank license, no different than any other bank operating in the country. Of course it was only valid in the EU not Britain.

https://www.lb.lt/en/news/banking-licence-granted-to-revolut...

edit: Comment no longer makes much sense after the one above was edited

my understanding is the full licences was only granted in 2021 in the eea and 2026 in the UK

They had an emi license before .

7-8 years surely qualify as "for years"?

French Guiana is in the EU though. While Norway is not.

Of course the cost structure for space companies is very different than for AI and electronics but Chinese companies have proven that they can achieve ~90% of what the bloated US companies are doing on a tiny fraction of their budget. Of course efficiency hasn’t been a priority in the EU for decades so unlikely they can replicate anything China is doing

> What has France been doing since WWII? If they have the know how, shouldn’t they be at the same level as US now

A lot? I mean they were on the same level or above in the early 2000s.

Ariane was sort of the SpaceX of the 80s by commercializing and significantly decreasing the cost of space launches.

> from the Germans on how to build an empire

Yeah.. the German economy is in a remarkably great state these days.

Good thing is that that Trump will never manage to figure out where French Guyana is on a map. Or worst case there is a 50% chance he’ll invade (non French) Guyana.

Western Europe has been mostly stagnant or declining while real incomes for most workers have actually grown in the same period (and for a significant proportion of the population to a very large degree).

The median person and especially those in the top 10th percentile are fairly well off and respectively extremely well off in relative terms compared to people in other developed countries. To bottom deciles are of course not in the best situation but for the most part the rest of the population find it fairly easy to ignore that.

> Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare

They had that 20 years ago? Since then the rich asset owners have been accumulating a bigger share of the pie in the EU as well, it’s just marginally less pronounced because there is less wealth to go about in the EU due to the multi-decade long stagnation (outside Eastern Europe and a handful of other countries). On the whole I find it extremely hard to view this as a positive without a huge amount of wishful thinking.

People in the EU need to start thinking about how to improve things rather than exclusively focusing on holding onto what they already have (which is slowly turning into scraps..). To a large extent the old EU countries just froze in time after the GFC.