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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (239237)	6/30/2005 5:01:51 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571992

Re: Some suggest its because they have an inferiority complex. I'm afraid it's rather the opposite: French nurse a superiority complex... They don't see why French culture and worldview should surrender precedence to the Anglo-American civilization. Otherwise, France --like Europe as a whole, for that matter-- is an old, seasoned polity... Hence her dismissive "been there, done that" attitude towards up-and-coming Yanks. That's particularly true for the current Iraq crisis: starry-eyed, trigger-happy yanks were gung-ho about "liberating" Iraq from bugbear Saddam and expected the whole crusade to be over after 3 or 4 years... Yet the French knew better, they saw that the Yanks were merely re-inventing the wheel --the same wheel that ground and destroyed France's colonial hubris in Algeria 50 years ago... Another big cultural difference between France/Europe and the US is the preeminence of the macro-political over micro-interests. For the French, it doesn't matter whether they can do it or not, more important to them is the way the social fabric is changed by innovation --the less change, the better. France/Europe's conservative mindset dates back to the guilds system of the Middle Ages... What Europe as a whole has not understood yet is that you can't have technological innovation without social innovation. Technological innovation in the XXIst century is not like that of the XIXth century --it's no longer the cozy preserve of wealthy bourgeois with ample time to spare on scientific/technological experiments. Europe doesn't conceive of high-tech as a way for (lower-)middle-class wannabes to get rich quick... Europe still dreams of the Ernest Solvays, Michelins and Roland Morenos of yore: idle rich splurging time and money on their private labs to provide the world with their solitary, genial inventions.... Europe still expects that the Tim Berner-Lee philanthropic business model will save her from (technological) decadence: Tim Berners-Lee Fascinating facts about Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web in 1991. ideafinder.com Contrariwise, Americans have understood that social innovation is intimately linked to technological innovation, the latter literally spawning the former. Hence the German gibe: Roland Berger had told me a regulatory joke: "Do you know why so few German companies start in garages like Hewlett-Packard did? Because it's illegal. There's a law that says every office must have a window—and another law that says garages are not allowed to have windows." I've also heard businessmen say that if Bill Gates had been born German, he'd be middle-management at Siemens. "That's not true! That's not true!" said Frank, a self-employed management consultant. "You have to have a university degree to be middle-management at Siemens. Gates is a college dropout. They wouldn't allow him to be middle-management at Siemens." slate.msn.com Gus