PorciiVorbesc

If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.

Sounds just like Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and any many other EU countries, including the EU itself, where there's "employment for life" guaranteed by the state or by strong unions, which makes them ripe for cronyism, complacency and incompetence to thrive unchecked until people inevitably die, and only then can audits and system reforms actually be done. The way it works, is that things need to get worse, before they are allowed to get better. I think this has been the case in politics since time immemorial.

>Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard. [...] Portugal is currently further along that road

From what I saw interviewing, Portugal has much lower earnings, and earnings aren't something the government can control. What the government CAN DO to stimulate high earnings to happen, is provide incentives and an environment for attracting businesses and investment, but that typically correlates with low taxes and low government welfare spending, policies that Spaniards and other Europeans aren't known for supporting, so there you go. You get what you vote for.

Also, there's no mention of Nemotron in that handy. Is that the same Handy GGP was talking about?

EU doesn't care about hobbyists, it cares about protecting the interests of the monopolies of the major retailers who lobby the politicians, who disliked that people could order the same Chinese shit they sell at 100x markups, directly from China, and cutting them off as middle-men.

But don't worry, in their heads, this way we'll get to on-shore our HW/electronics manufacturing industry back. Any day now. I can already see the factories pumping out ESP32s "Made in the EU", popping up everywhere across the EU, creating jobs and a competitive electronics industry. Alarm clock buzzes

A lot of things have changed since then: EU taxes and duties, AI-induces HW shortages and price hikes. For example RPI prices today are untenable compared to a year ago.

That's why I asked about the prices of today. Whatever people paid in the past, is not necessarily applicable anymore.

Obviously, in the context of hobbyists at home, we were talking about the ESP32 SBCs, and not the bare solderable chips themselves.

>But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me

Yeah but I wanted to know if the 1,50 price is realistic since it's quite a big difference, 200%+, between those two price ranges.

If price differences didn't matter for hobbyists, then Arduino wouldn't have been killed, and ESP32 taken over the world.

Clearly both people and businesses are highly price sensitive, especially in the current economy.

>that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).

Needless whataboutism straying from my point, as with such line of reasoning, you can justify anything that's bad: "Getting punched in the balls isn't so bad, because you could always get cancer which is much worse."

No, it's also objective stuff I gave you arguments and examples on how some things are better now.

> I hate it with passion

yeah and you haven't given any objective arguments and examples about it.

I like talking about concrete examples not about personal feelings since that wastes everyone's time.

How come I can use a keybaord?

Because in the EU whether it's amazon or AliExpress, the cheapest I can get one now would be 4,50 Euros a piece, and that's only if you buy them in bundles of two or more.

Or is it that the UK lacks the lunacy parcel taxes and duties of the EU so things are much cheaper over there?

"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.

Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).