What do you expect from an aging population that still secretly hopes the internet will just go away? Here in Germany, we basically have a Gerontocracy. Until all of the old farts in high places finally move off this planet, the fax machine will be one of the most important technologies in this country.

We outcompete the world in [...] work-life balance.

Not because of good reasons. The younger population is extremely underpaid and a lot of them have shifted their priorities to work less, because of their original dreams becoming too difficult or even outright impossible to follow.

It has been doing it for 20 years.

That's what you get when you stop producing in Europe

It’s the same story for quantum computing

Unless I've missed some developments, quantum computing's applications are somewhat-niche. Yeah, it's a new field, but I am not sure that it's something that I'd be incredibly worried about (at least from an economic standpoint; from a military communications standpoint, maybe it matters, as there are some important applications there).

googles

Yeah:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

Quantum algorithms provide speedup over conventional algorithms only for some tasks, and matching these tasks with practical applications proved challenging. Some promising tasks and applications require resources far beyond those available today.[121][122] In particular, processing large amounts of non-quantum data is a challenge for quantum computers.[85]

I mean, it's cool in that in involves interesting physics and engineering stuff maybe, but I'm not sure that it's that interesting economically.

Like...I think that blockchain stuff is technically interesting too. But...there are only so many realistic applications, and people have tried to use it in a lot of cases where I don't think that it's all that useful.

Some of the highest tech most proprietary equipment to make semiconductors among others things are only produced in Europe...