Plus the "not" part is the weakest part of historical study and archaeology. From this time we have about 1 page of text for every 10 years for the entire continent.
Well they explicitly hid the fact that there was going to be a vote, AND they had already said they were going to override parliament using more drastic procedures if it didn't pass here.
So once again, it's the "democratic" EU council fixing things when all those pesky "deimos" don't behave and vote incorrectly.
I mean, yeah, I'd love for the EU parliament to put up more of a fight, but they were never going to win this fight, or the Chat Control 2.0 fight for that matter. Or the social media fight. Or ...
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but EU commission politicians often can't even hold their laughter in situations like this. Recently, after laughing, Ursula Von der Leyen declared that social services legislation isn't about denying children access to social media, but about denying social media access to young people.
(in other words, it's about EU politicians controlling the news young people see, not about protecting them. Oh and it's legislation because EU politicians want that control without giving anything in return)
There are various differences, but the price differences are incredibly stark and what the article is really about.
Most optimistic AWS bill: $48 list price (and $300 effective price, because neither storage nor network traffic is included in $48) (and, to add insult to injury, AWS is obviously not giving you the same bandwidth as an actual disk, not even half of it, about one third)
Most optimistic Hetzner bill: 19.49 euro (including storage, yes, without backup, including network traffic), 40 with redundancy.
And even though AWS comes with some redundancy by default, for actual redundancy you need a double deployment (or $600 per month)
First: this is obviously a robocalling application. It's probably illegal in half the world. And being against ads, but helping companies with robocalling ... that's not a very consistent attitude.
Is this REALLY a software developer making robocalling software complaining about intrusive ads?
REALLY?
Yes ... yes it is.
I mean is there any doubt at all what companies will use this software for? (and of course, zero attention given to the fact that robocalling is illegal in most places. For good reason. Using this software is a crime. Which means scummy salespeople and scammers are the only ones going to use it)
First, a big part of subscription is the fault of Google and Apple, and that is not given enough credit. There are plenty of non-subscription software models that obviously work. But Apple and Google don't let them work, because of money. Yes, you need infrastructure and you need to keep paying for it ... because Google and Apple make it so. There is no reason apps can't work standalone, they're just making this hard on purpose.
Second all the arguments against subscription software also apply against essentially every AI service everywhere.
For the insane part of the left, yes. For the majority, let's be honest: no. And for the centrist voters without whom neither the left nor the right can do anything: absolutely not. Immigration was going to solve our economic troubles. Immigrants would bring welfare. That was the idea.
Well, that didn't happen. As to whether that's to blame on immigration ... I would argue it's to blame on the rate and the source of immigration. At a slow rate, selective immigration brings welfare, certainly. At this rate? Of course not. Infinite, mostly fake, refugees? No they don't bring welfare. Of course not.
The promise (for the non-insane majority) was that immigration was going to save our economic bacon. That's the orthodox economist viewpoint after all.
Well, it didn't.
The minimum anyone would have to accept is that the economy went to shit while mass immigration was happening ... (in both EU and Canada). So I guess you don't have to accept causation, but they were happening simultaneously, so this reaction by the population is justified in that sense.
> Yawn. If you look at actual production in industry data we're at the peak or close to.
Indeed. This is the same argument people make about oil: it's at (or near) it's highest level ever! So things must be good! And that's not exactly true.
Even though, for oil, there's barely any people who see how bad things are (I guess the top of the US government sort of demands you don't if you work for the US government). But what matters is the change.
If things even just stay the same, efficiency improvements will lead to massive job losses, and in practice "stay the same" still means some companies suffer and others gain. The suffering companies are the employment giants, the gaining companies are the "lights out" factories, to an approximation. Things must go up, it's "the derivative" that matters, so to speak.
That's why it's such a massive deal that the derivative for Europe's industry (even with the massive military investment) ... very close to zero. In other words: the job losses will continue even under Germany's massive investment plan.
You could say they're not beating inflation, but that isn't exactly accurate. Or it isn't the problem.
Not even that. The government outsources a lot of their functions, so a LOT of organizations have access to extremely private data, where necessary.
For example, Palantir gets access to "large and diverse (government) databases with Dutch citizens’ data for analysis" (including mental health treatment data) under the GPDR to help police in the Netherlands do terror investigations (from 2012 to 2019). I'm sure you can appreciate the wisdom and privacy-enhancement in that just as much as me!
There are large lists of private organizations that get access to government data about citizens ... every country has multiple (public and secret ones).
Oh, they also "failed to mention" this to parliament, and this was only discovered after a journalist got a tipoff and requested financial data about the deal ... for about 5 years. Of course, there was never even the slightest investigation into this.
Why? Simple: visit a restaurant, especially one by the highway with truckers, in southern Germany, with your girlfriend/wife. But one in a town will do, just speak English, or French. It will be entirely clear after that.
Hell, I doubt you'll make it past the restaurant's door before it becomes clear.
But that's the current dollar-based system. Like the gold-based system before it, today countries as a whole have to have long-term balanced trade, as measured in dollars. That's what a great many countries demanded to keep the system fair. If need be, some temporary imbalances can be forgiven by the world bank, but not much.
Outlawing or taxing imports (=tarriffs) of course helps with this.
However, if you look at economic history this always slowly lead to problems that only got resolved by fresh loans (that's what the move to dollar effectively did), hyperinflation or wars.
It's a sad commentary on the modern world that state support (ie. tax avoidance, and ... shall we say "help" in labor relations) matters more than even the best people you can possibly hire working on your manufacturing.
Because that's the difference between China and the US. It's not that the US does nothing, just that China does way more. Some companies are apparently paying negative tax (meaning every products sold the state adds 15% to the price, such deals apparently exist)
But, yeah, less tax means less everything for everyone. Especially less social support and less healthcare. But I guess this is what some of the more constructive people mean when they say taxes are too high. As well as what socialists meant 30 years ago when they said that very high import tariffs are a necessity. They compensate for these huge differences. But at the cost of making any foreign product (ie. "your iPhone") a lot more expensive than it already is.
Why? Because the poor are starving? North Korea has ultra-wealthy ... it works a bit differently but there is massive inequality, and there is extreme wealth.