pembrook

Since the topic of 'Europe' has become a culture war issue (like everything), I can see that most comments here are showing a bias. You're defending OP who openly says he 'will always cheer for Mistral' regardless of objective reality. Is that not bias?

Among Americans, it appears that, if you're a college-educated white collar worker (champagne socialist), hippie degrowther, big tech alarmist, or just a left-leaning urbanism enthusiast (the current reddit/hn audience) you want the entire world to become the fantasy version of Europe you have in your head...so anything Europe does is the best thing thats ever happened, regardless of objective reality.

Or if you're the opposite, you think the EU is essentially playing out the collapse of USSR-lite in slow motion. I'd say I'm closer to this camp just looking at the financial situation, as someone actually living in the EU.

Is either position entirely rational? No.

I personally want Mistral to succeed. But this cannot happen unless we accurately assess the situation and objectively discuss the quality of their offerings compared to the alternatives, as well as the way that Europe is doing everything in its power to kill any intra-country cooperation or private sector innovation.

Use Opus 5.5 and then use this back to back and tell me I'm wrong.

Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.

If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.

Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.

I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.

The law is not some immutable thing, in fact its something that we humans evolve over time on a case by case basis to improve and adjust.

Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.

I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.

But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you probably didn't see Dhurandhar or Ne Zha 2 last year (the highest grossing films in India and China respectively)?

Yea the pandemic is overfit as a reason for most things. Production had already left over the preceding decades.

Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, the incestuous hollywood-to-traditional media marketing pipeline died (much of old print/tv media existed to market Hollywood stars and products), etc. etc.

It's not just about cost though.

Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.

Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.

I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.

It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.

The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.

China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.

Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.

In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).

We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.

Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.

This is a bunch of regurgitated horseshit that business school grads repeat to each other like a game of telephone based off some PR puff pieces written about McKinsey in Fortune magazine back in the 1980s.

Pure strategy advice represents less than 20% of McKinsey billings (as publicly revealed last year).

Both firms are full of low level talentless grunts, essentially just fresh grads from different tier schools.

The only measurable difference between the two is that Accenture makes heavy use of geographic talent arbitrage by hiring heavily in India so they can do higher volume/lower-rate implementation gigs. The companies that spend the most with consulting firms are usually legacy dying companies and governments, not exactly a picture of competence (you think OpenAI or Anthropic are asking strategy advice from McKinsey?)

All professional services firms are commodity human time resellers, there is no special sauce or reality behind the 'brand narrative' behind any particular firm.

Yes that's what you think you're paying for.

But in reality, you're paying for AI-written powerpoint slides slapped together by a 23 yr old kid fresh out of college (for another client, with your logo slapped on it), that the senior partner looked at 2 times in a meeting and gave a few nitpicks about.

And the senior partner hasn't ever done anything real either, since again, their whole career has been selling powerpoints and never facing any consequences (upsides or downsides) for the outcomes of their recommendations where they could learn anything.

But of course, the buyer of consulting services, usually an in-house executive at a giant company who had nothing to do with building the company (since that happened 100 years ago), usually also knows nothing.

So what you have is an arrangement where glorified children sell google/chatgpt sourced generic powerpoint 'Expertise' to faceless managerial class members who either:

a) have been promoted beyond their level of expertise and are afraid of taking responsibility for anything for fear of getting fired

or

b) are cynical and experienced and want to launder their actions through an external 3rd party as a reputation-covering mechanism

or

c) the largest cohort: the lazy, do-nothing managerial class who don't want to do work their own teams actually should be taking on so they outsource it

Source: I have worked in consulting for 10 years.

Their valuation comes from the Saas side of the business.

In fact, the bear case on Palantir is always that it's actually a consulting firm masquerading as a Saas firm.

No they're not.

McKinsey would like you to think otherwise of course. They paint a brand image of only doing high-end C-suite strategy work, but ultimately thats a vanishingly small part of the business. Their bread is buttered (just like Accenture) on labor heavy implementation gigs.

Fundamentally, the business of billing out human hours is the same, as are the the incentives. Doesn't matter if its a strategy consulting firm in NYC or an advertising agency in Nepal.

They will all inflate scope, inflate titles/rates, hire mostly cheap new grads, and slowroll-and-expand any engagement.

And they will all take ANY work you give them, regardless of in-house expertise (which they rarely have, given the goal is to pay employees as little as possible to capture margin).

The advertising agency in Nepal will claim to offer strategy consulting to your C-suite, just as McKinsey NYC will happily churn out a powerpoint deck about advertising in Nepal if you're willing to pay them.

Hence why professional services firms all trade at low multiples. It's an undifferentiated commodity business of re-selling human labor in project-based chunks.

It sounds like you're agreeing with my point; good people do good work, the brand name on the invoice billing you for their time is irrelevant.

That said, I would be highly skeptical of any 'very experienced systems engineer' who took a job at a glorified post-collegiate body shop like McKinsey. At least in the US, given all the opportunities available, it means something has gone horribly wrong (EU/ex-US might be different given it's a dead zone for tech).

This is a tell you haven't interfaced with consulting firms much before.

When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:

"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."

There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.

It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.

Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.

What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.