And that top 20% is the one pushing for all of these insane COVID restrictions - with the closure of schools being the most idiotic. COVID is less harmful than influenza for children, and they transmit the virus at very low levels, particularly to other adults. Schools need to be reopened immediately.
You improve the standard of living for these people by making it culturally and technically acceptable and possible for them to have zero or one child, instead of six or seven. The few children that are born will receive much greater investment in their education and upbringing, and the gradually falling population in those regions will improve quality of life for everyone and reduce pressure on the environment.
Because the 30% 'Standard' commission is fundamentally uneconomic. Independent publishers cannot thrive, when they could simply be acquired by a platform owner (ie. Microsoft) and pay 0%.
The illegal immigrants going to Europe are not legitimate refugees - they are overwhelmingly male, of working age, and pool funds from their home villages to pay people smugglers thousands of Euros to get them to Western Europe.
There, they absorb as many taxpayer resources as possible, and work menial cash jobs - sending the proceeds back to their homelands to repay the initial 'investment'.
Its basically a huge scam, an unholy alliance between European elites who want cheap labour and European leftists who want to virtue signal. The average European citizen loses out hugely from the undermining of the labour market, the increase in crime, the destruction of national culture and identity, and the lack of investment into European automation and robotics (since illegal labour is so cheap instead).
It would be simpler to assume direct control over parts of Africa and farm produce there, as well as providing Universal access for local women to education, contraception and abortion. This would encourage actual long-term development of the region and tackle overpopulation (the root cause of these migration outflows).
Its not a 1 in 100 year event, its a once a decade event exaggerated by a hysterical media and exacerbated by an aged and unhealthy population, and weak regular flu seasons for the past two years leaving a lot of 'dry tinder'.
Europe generates a lot of content, but owns none of the platforms. Lower commissions on those stores would translate directly to higher profits and investment by those content creators, which would be taxed directly and indirectly.
COVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria.
If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.
Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.
Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.
I think the inevitable move here is for the EU to enact a maximum % commission for platforms above $1b revenue, at something like 20%. Maybe for sales from that region or for developers in that region.
Unfortunately the EU is going the opposite way - increasing VAT and digital taxes, which are passed straight onto developers.
IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.
In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.
I struggle to see anything Fascist about Donald Trump. I'm significantly more concerned about the role of BLM, woke politics, and the rise of Leftist racism, which is basically part and parcel of modern Democrats.
The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.
The economic migrants that have travelled to Europe illegally are mostly illiterate and with few skills. They are consistently borne out to be at the bottom of society and over-represented on welfare rolls and jails. Essentially they will form a permanent underclass in Europe and a forever burden.
They come into Europe to work on huge farms owned by wealthy Europeans. Here is an example - essentially all of the manual labour in these towns is illegal:
Without these workers the production would be automated and picked by robots (providing jobs for European engineers, technicians, developers). When you can pay someone $2/hour, with their lives subsidies by the taxpayer, there is no justification for robots.
The most dastardly action performed by the ruling class of Europe is to bring in millions of exploitable workers and claim they are doing it on the basis of human rights.
The EU is not a great place for innovation, period. Here are the major problems:
1. No common language
2. Incredibly high taxes, particularly sales taxes
3. Unfinished transition out of Communism in many Eastern Countries
4. Preference for cheap illegal labor instead of automation
This could be solved by:
1. Formalising an 'EU English' language so that schools teaching it can open up around the continent and families can move from one country to another without having to pay for extortionate international schools
2. Eliminate payroll taxes, limit sales taxes to a maximum of 10%. Deport all illegal immigrants (who are huge burdens on the State and society) and raise pension ages to 70 in order to save money. Limit bachelor degrees to the top 20% of the population and Master's degrees to the top 10%, to encourage people into the workforce earlier in life. Raise taxes on land and pollution.
3. Limit EU funding for countries like Bulgaria that have not transitioned to modern Democracy or Bureaucracy.
4. Withdraw from the UN convention on refugees, deport all illegal immigrants, pay and help North African countries to guard their own coastlines, and replace migrants with robots and automation.
This will immensely boost the living standards of the average European, but hurt bureaucrats and old-money.
The simplest explanation for Madrid is that it locked down too early, and herd immunity (which seems to occur at about 20-25%, based on Antibody testing of New York and Sweden) was never reached.
Lockdown also seems to increase the threshold for herd immunity and increase deaths, by dramatically changing the demographics of who is infected. Without lockdown, the youngest and most mobile people are likely to be infected - with minimal/zero deaths since COVID mortality is incredibly age dependent.
Under lockdown, those people are at home and intermingling with family. The only 'social' activity is shopping for food, leading to an unnatural mingling of old and young.
I live in Ukraine which has masks and little else against COVID. In shopping centers particularly in the evenings there are essentially zero old people - they fear for their lives, as they should.
The most effective policy we could have adopted was 6AM-10AM public transport and shopping for the aged only, and everyone else from then on. Segregate the elderly population into the mornings and let the masses in in the afternoon. This might have required shifting school and work to later hours in the day for three months, which seems a minor inconvenience.
You are paying for your Dad's pension, and for the Government services consumed by millions of migrants.
Those same migrants increase labor supply (thus lowering the equilibrium price) and increase demand for land and real estate.
The end result is high taxes and high real estate cost. Of immense benefit to your dad (and other Baby Boomers) who receive risk-free pensions, and supercharged capital gains for their own assets.
The missing component is the need to integrate Electric Vehicles into the grid on a fundamental basis including selling electricity.
We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters, by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the network.
If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.
The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy.
Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.
With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.
We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West.
At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
America is under-investing in technology and investment because the US is increasingly filled with people who aren’t American, and don’t ever aspire to be American – they just want what Americans have. The social and cultural values that allowed America to become the light on the hill, to generate the sort of excessive social capital that allowed the Apollo program, now needs to be diverted to support those who just want the lifestyle that living in the US economic zone enables, without the responsibility or cultural ownership of the values that made it possible.
America was a success before the Immigration Act of 1965, what diversity has delivered to America is division and destruction, as imported people and cultures predictably demand their values and needs be attended to in primacy to all others. Instead of investing in STEM to build the next epoch changing era of technology, we are investing in social sciences that specialise in division and enjoy pulling apart cohesive societies like a psychopathic doctor pulling apart wounds with tweezers.