As an EU citizen, the US response to COVID-19 really is laughable. It's just that a lot of people die due to this ideological "but muh freedom" mentality.
Edit: would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately been doing that repeatedly, and we eventually ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
With literal criminal prosecution for moving in a safe way 20 kilometers from your house in a car, or even being outside at all for longer than the prescribed short walk, 100 meters away from anyone, government-led propaganda discrediting legitimate medical research in Marseilles, largely state-affiliated media with ownership stakes in Gilead fuelling criticism at the same research (while family members of politicians receive the exact same treatment that's being vilified), PPE stocks shipped away to China in the early stages of the pandemic...
Lockdown orders delayed in the face of all evidence in order to complete local elections, with the chief of police attributing the resulting spike in deaths afterwards to people violating the quarantine that was not yet in place, a police force that only shortly before the epidemic was beating up and tear-gassing nurses that were protesting their working conditions, a government that, as in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, takes the opportunity to pass laws protecting them against persecution even if it turns out they were objectively responsible for bad things that happened...
The federal response in the US has been absolutely laughable, and there's plenty of stuff to criticise on a state level as well, but there's blood on the hands of the authorities in parts of Europe as well.
So the fact that the EU creates policies on other topics isn't relevant to the COVID-19 situation.
Now I realize that cookies and IP-addresses gathered by Facebook are truly important things, unlike this tiny "flu-like" virus, but still...
That the EU has the power to dictate policies in other areas is not relevant.
Anyway, this is irrelevant. EU was explicitly not meant to rule on healthcare-related matters for its member nations, so it's not ruling. That's a fact of the matter. Perhaps after all of this, people will vote to include healthcare into the EU's purview - and only then we'll be able to criticize its response to the next crisis.
I don't know what you think they are doing shady, but it never bothered me. Until some EU-asshole decided to protect me from myself, I guess.
When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage of you, by requiring them to disclose when they want to do so, and to ask you to explicitly agree to be taken advantage of. Clarity in business relationships is good, isn't it?
> When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
Not necessarily, not when it's broken for profit and to the detriment of the parties that doesn't partake in that profit. Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned (after all, "everyone" in plantations/factories would be found breaking that law), and environmental protections should've never existed either ("what do you say I can no longer dump toxic waste into the river?").
You still haven’t explained how exactly I was taken advantage of. Because I never had anything to complain about. On the contrary, I was quite happy until EU started "helping" me.
> Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned
Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
Every possible kind of data you radiate during your visit to such a site is collected and passed on to third parties that aggregate it to build a detailed profile of you, based on the information from sites you visit, services you use, games you play, places you shop, etc. That profile is nowadays primarily used to target you with advertising and direct marketing efforts - or, in other words, to suck money out of you, a little bit at a time. You're losing money because of this data collection - that's the primary reason for that collection in the first place - but it happens slowly and naturally, so you don't notice.
And then there's a good chance that such profile of you will eventually find its way to your insurance provider, healthcare provider, or that your government decides to take a step towards totalitarianism, and then they'll have everyone's digital twins available for the secret police for free. I agree that the last one is hypothetical, but not that hypothetical, all things considering.
> Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
No, I'm just showing the logical consequences of your "When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?" through examples that are a little bit more clear-cut.
Also, it's not "logging visitor IP" that causes the popup, it's "logging visitor IP, associating it with a bunch of UUIDs, and sending those UUIDs, along with whatever information the visitor's browser could gather and the server could give, to a bunch of third parties who also receive similar packets of information from other sites you visit". Also2, it's not "everybody", it's just businessmen. Normal people don't go around, record data about others without their knowledge or consent, and sell it to data brokers.
The countries within the EU all have responded to COVID-19 in some way or another.
There's a bunch more stuff.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6157380317001/
CDC #'s (yes, yes 2 weeks old yawn) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm