> no matter how "ethically sourced" a colonizer-based entity like Europe made it
The attempt is laughable, buy every country should at least try to keep up with frontier technology, even if they fail massively or are massively underfunded.
On the other hand, it's arguably wasteful for an incompetent govt to do something like this, since the money will almost certainly not be well spent. It will just go to people good with MS Word. That's the likely failure mode for such NL innovation projects. The actual solution is a culture shift, but that is much harder if not impossible to pull off and requires decades. But we (NL people and govt) should work towards that. Most likely all these govt led innovation attempts are a sad waste of tax money.
The culture shift that has generated this is the same one that causes the other story on HN this morning about xAIs gas generators being a national security issue. Ie one towards corruption graft and the public ill.
I don’t want Europe to model itself on the US, whatever the economic gain. Hopefully we are large enough to find a third way between China and the US.