Seems weird to pit socialism against free markets.
There's nothing about disallowing private ownership of the Earth's common resources, natural monopolies, etc. that stops having free markets everywhere else.
If anything, allowing that is what corrupts free markets - as even with privatisation, you never have a real free market on the railways, highways, or electricity grid because we can only build a limited number of them and can't support multiple disjoint networks. But those corporations can then use that captive market for an unfair advantage entering other markets / verticals.
I think the best solution would be free markets and liberalisation, except in natural monopolies, and a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income) to provide a level playing field and economic mobility.
American engineers are lucky to earn enough to be able to save up and do stuff like this, like on $200k you can save enough to really try a start-up for a year or two.
Whereas in Europe we're lucky to get $80k in the same jobs, and then the state steals half of that :/
Yeah, feminism has gone completely insane. At the moment of marriage all assets are divided equally in most countries, regardless of when they were obtained. And in many countries a man can even be liable for child support if his wife cheats on him.
That said a lot of countries actually have lower taxes for married couples like Germany, or separate it entirely like in Sweden.
Yeah, but if you speak to Cubans they really think it become Miami overnight if they get rid of the Communist Party.
Whereas the reality is probably much closer to Haiti.
It'd be best if there were a steady transition of ending the blockade, allowing markets in non-natural monopoly industries and services (in practice this largely exists already), multi-party democracy without persecution. Cuba has pretty great education in comparison to similar nations and a relatively large population, so I think there's a lot of opportunities.
I can understand why they're so defensive though, the USA has openly admitted to dozens of assassination attempts on the Castro family, etc. - literally no different from Russia poisoning Yushchenko.
The main thing is that having them elected directly would mean holding an election across all EU countries - and I think that would be great for European unity. Like have French, Spanish, Greek, Swedes, Germans, etc. all debating and voting - and people would actually know the background of who the President of the EU commission is!
Right now VdL has just failed upwards, being a terrible politician in Germany who was moved to the EU to get her out of domestic politics, and it seems she'll be NATO leader soon (again unelected).
The ePrivacy Directive is different from the GDPR btw. The GDPR is actually not so bad tbh - although a bit too over-reaching, but at least it's a step towards making some things like I mentioned in the previous comment a bit more uniform.
The book is from Britain and written by a socialist - this section is about how they try to twist it to their benefit, making the government take over their failing business and then blame the later failure on "socialism".
It reminds me of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists where the capitalists conspire to make the local government purchase their failing electric company (written in 1910):
'Something will 'ave to be done, and that very soon,' Grinder was saying. 'We can't go on much longer as we're doing at present. For my part, I think the best thing to do is to chuck up the sponge at once; the company is practically bankrupt now, and the longer we waits the worser it will be.' [...]
'Sell out!' replied Grinder with a contemptuous laugh in which the others joined. 'Who's going to buy the shares of a concern that's practically bankrupt and never paid a dividend?'
'Who's to buy?' repeated Sweater, replying to Grinder. 'The municipality of course! The ratepayers. Why shouldn't Mugsborough go in for Socialism as well as other towns?' [...]
'Afterwards,' resumed Sweater, 'I'll arrange for a good report of the meeting to appear in the Weekly Ananias. I'll instruct the Editor to write it himself, and I'll tell him just what to say. I'll also get him to write a leading article about it, saying that electricity is sure to supersede gas for lighting purposes in the very near future. Then the article will go on to refer to the huge profits made by the Gas Coy and to say how much better it would have been if the town had bought the gasworks years ago, so that those profits might have been used to reduce the rates, the same as has been done in other towns. Finally, the article will declare that it's a great pity that the Electric Light Supply should be in the hands of a private company, and to suggest that an effort be made to acquire it for the town. [...]
'Come to think of it,' observed Rushton arrogantly, 'why should we trouble ourselves about the opinion of the ratepayers at all? Why should we trouble to fake the books, or declare a dividend or 'ave the harticles in the papers or anything else? We've got the game in our own 'ands; we've got a majority in the Council, and, as Mr Sweater ses, very few people even take the trouble to read the reports of the meetings.' [...]
'Well, 'ere's success to Socialism,' cried Grinder, raising his glass, and taking a big drink.
Stuff like this will lead to the rise of socialism again tbh.
It's like Tucker Carlson said - it's no wonder that the young people support socialism, when they can't afford a house and face massive economic uncertainty even in professional fields, etc.
Everyone knows that the super-rich executives will benefit massively from this (or have already taken huge bonuses and dividends in prior years), and they basically run the government and will face no consequences.
They get rewarded for failure, meanwhile normal working people face mass lay-offs, high interest rates and high inflation.
More useless bureaucracy that will harm start-ups (and side-projects becoming proto-startups).
I don't understand why people want more bureaucracy, it never works out well. Now the established companies like SAP will just pay expensive lawyers to check boxes for the certification, and European startups will face another massive obstacle (just like the GDPR, Cookie law, etc.)
A better law would be pushing for repairability - ban locked down bootloaders and closed firmware, force published schematics, component lists and replacements, open bootloaders, etc. - this would help solve a lot of electronic waste and also drive a new sector for startups.
Wayland has a massive loss in functionality (in the name of "security" and off-loading implementation details to compositors/window managers) compared to X11 though.
Stuff like xdotool, screen sharing, clipboard sharing, etc. is much harder.
Real Late Stage Capitalism to push up the cost of learning to drive to absurd amounts (along with a massive shortage in driving test places) - easily 3k+ GBP nowadays, and then just offshore driving jobs remotely.
It's a full commune - more like a cult than normal society. So it's quite a strawman in that respect.