the Parliament does the vetting, the countries Parliaments propose the candidates. It's all done by elected officials, what more do you want? the commission is a place for technicians, it's not a political entity.
it would be like electing the people in the HR department because the board of directors cast votes.
> the result is a bunch of dodgy appointments in exchange for political favours. The whole process reeks of corruption
how elections can fix that?
suppose politicians are chosen directly by the people, a corruptor could simply pay the people who decides the single candidates for each electoral college or could buy the votes directly. it has happened before and it's also way cheaper and easier than getting an appointment in some room godfather style.
> For example, the EU Commission is responsible for coming up with all new EU Directives, setting budgets and representing the EU internationally
that's the norm everywhere. technicians make the rules, the Parliament job is to discuss and ratify them.
In Italy laws are not written by the Parliament, but there are so called "commissions" that work on budget, directives, proposals etc
it's always been like that since we invented modern democracies.
it simply means that you are free to do it, but not overdo it because there are rules.
it's the basis of every modern society.
many things allowed by the law are not really "free". police forces are allowed to use weapons, that doesn't mean they can shoot randomly whenever they feel like it.
> And no one elected this persons with so much power by the way.
this is a very tired meme, they have been nominated and scrutinized by the people elected in what you called probably the best thing that we have in Europe i.e. the EU Parliament
edit: elections solve none of the problems people think they solve. proof is governments are corrupt even though they are elected by the people. if the objections is "we can't let them chose because they will meet in a room and exchange money for the position" well, how is it different from "they will meet in the same room exchanging the same money to decide who you can vote or not"?
elections are a consensus strategy, they do not solve social and political issues.
the best part of this thread is people that do not know how a democracy works and how the EU works giving advice to improve democracy in EU, that sound like bullet points to pitch some startup idea before having checked if their idea can work in practice, what the flaws in the reasoning are and if something similar has been already tried and rejected .
> I know people who already watch whole movies, etc, in VRChat. This usecase already exists.
mmmmm
this line of reasoning is a bit worrying to me.
I'll use an hyperbole here, apologizes in advance, it's not specifically a counter argument, just a thought, but to me it's like saying "some people are alone, don't have friends, so they use heroin, I can totally see a usecase for manufacturing heroin"
Maybe we should try to fix the underlying problem, before trying to exploit it?
> It's not much different from watching a movie with a friend at your own place
not to sound rude, but that's a bit of a stretch.
It is much different.
Maybe not better overall for some people, but very much different it is.
> VR gives the activity sense of presence which is hard to describe
Not really hard, it's similar to proprioception
Difference is proprioception enables you to feel limbs that are actually there, which is not as good as tricking your brain to feel something that it's not there.
> just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs
is a curated list of fellow "leaders" pontificating on almost everything to blind "followers" helped by an opaque "algorithm" with the ability to block the "heretics" and direct their followers' hate against them, better?
notice the cultist terminology: leader, follower, heretic etc
> Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints
I am not advocating for blogs per se, but a reddit thread where "some rando calls out the original post" could have easily have been a thread of comments somewhere else that did not made money for reddit, but for the randos creating the actual content you are interested in
you are criticizing the presentation, but the actual meat (the value) is in the content.
> Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking
sounds more like a your problem than a blogs problem honestly.
if you are assign authority to someone writing on the internet under fake credentials, it's not that it's written in a blog the issue IMO.
twitter and reddit (which are vastly different anyway both as kind of platform and as audience) made the problem worse, if anything.
> Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly
again, good for you. but there's no inner quality of reddit that makes it especially good at that. I changed my mind a lot of times by reading books and when reddit was born I was already almost 30, so...
> Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine
replace the word Twitter with "internet" or "school" or "traveling or "hip-hop battles" and you'll find billions of people who had the same realization.
anyway, nothing that a good old BBS couldn't already do 40 years ago. It's where I discovered and then downloaded the Wolfenstein 3D demo.
To wrap it up: the question was "where could I follow X and Y if Twitter dies"?
The answer is: don't worry, Twitter eventually dying won't be an issue, they'll tell you where to follow them cause their status depends on it. You might as well ask them some money to follow them, they'll probably give it to you.
I believe it depends on the demography, I, for one, am tired of seeing things I grew up with being ruined by poor writing and/or low interest in keeping the source material as a pivotal element of the narration.
Few examples
- Foundation wasn't bad per se, if it was marketed as fan fiction. As an adaptation of Asimov's works it's really bad and also chose a timeline that's totally unsatisfying for everybody, both newcomers and book fans. Starting from "Prelude to Foundation" was a much better idea to set up the stage for future story development and as an introduction to the characters.
- Rings of Power, same sin: it isn't Tolkien, it is a fan fiction with some actors cosplaying Tolkien characters that, at its center, portrays a very silly, very boring, romantic story between the female protagonist and the male villain. Teenage good, if the villain was no other than Sauron, AKA "The Lord of the Rings".
- Andor, that I too consider good, is, from an objective POV, just decent. Decent enough in this time and space to stand out compared to the endless list of monstrosities that Disney recently produced especially the Star Wars themed ones, but certainly not a masterpiece, as many have called it.
- Willow: lets' not talk about it. A mediocre movie from the late 80s that has gained a cult status only because, IMO, the video game was reaaaalllyyy good, that had only one reason to be re-adapted to modern times: scrape the bottom of the barrel. It is so bad that you can actually feel sorry for he people who worked at making it.
Neuromancer? I have no hope that they'll make something good, the era of cyber punk hype is long gone, it would already be a miracle to get it back, let alone have an honest adaptation of Gibson's ideas.
During the camberian explosion of the cyber punk movie trope they already tried with Johnny Mnemonic and had to basically rewrite the script from scratch because the book, that was only 10 years ago, had a lot of things that would poorly adapt to 1995, the movie was just ok, with lots of hits and misses, it worked, but it's not memorable.
Neuromancer is 100x harder to adapt and this time it won't be a movie, on real theatrical big screens, but a TV show, on a streaming platform.
There are too many things that could go wrong, to be optimists.
But, there's a big but: William Gibson himself is on board, so I will probably watch it nonetheless.