Any source for those allegations or is it only your imagination?
2,601 karma · joined March 2, 2009
All companies? Every single company with a website even if without any trackers or ads?! All companies are evil and the single law that triggered their evil behaviour is good. Sure. Ever heard of Occam's razor?
Are you a lawyer? Are you willing to assume the liability I may incur if I follow your advice?
Actually every single lawyer we asked about implementing GDPR advised us to have one of those obnoxious banners. Because the law is so ambiguous and the penalties so high that is better to play it safe. And we have no ads nor tracking at all on our product website.
You can ignore your lawyer's advice if you want, but it's a bit like a lawyer office ignoring my data security and backup advice: assuming a huge amount of risk.
Correlation is not causation. It would be illogical to remove options and have less exploitation. When luck and free markets compensate for the removed options - great. A strong labor market with lots of employers is the best tool against exploitation. But here we are talking about a corrupted, monopolistic government-controlled market where there weren't many choices to begin with. New entrants should be encouraged and celebrated, not shunned and punished.
Minimum wage laws are incredibly damaging as well. For example, the unpaid part-time "job" that launched me in the IT field would be illegal now. And I would be much poorer for it. But, hey, I wouldn't have been "exploited".
I am a dev in EU. What you are calling "malicious compliance cookie popup" is what every single lawyer is advising every single company with a regular website to implement. Even if they have no ads and do no tracking. Just to be safe from from a badly written law. To avoid being "fined into the ground".
Even official EU websites have that "malicious compliance cookie popup". Try using the web from inside the EU. EVERY site has that, ads or not, tracking or not.
And, BTW, ads are still there. Tracking still there. Just with cookie popups on top now. The very definition of a bad law: it solved none of the problems it was supposed to fix while adding new ones.
Are we really? Then why all these Boeing fails? They are quite regulated and that's supposed to prevent them but regulatory failures abound.
I'd much rather have a strong free market where competition is keeping companies honest and on their toes. But one of the effects of regulation is reducing competition (through raising the barrier of entry).
Thus regulation becomes even more necessary to replace the lost competition... A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.
But GDPR didn't get rid of the ads. It just added another unbeatable popup I have to understand and agree to - on top of them.
> Apple made a shittier mobile experience
Shittier than what?! Apple made the mobile experience. Not the EU. The marked fixed it just fine: there are alternative platform with different policies. Apple users were quite happy with how things worked. The EU is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist - for political gain.
> Uh, good?
Ugh bad - other countries don't kneecap their AI developers and if China wins the AI race... ugh really bad.
Besides we are facing a civilization-level threat: climate change. We need AI to solve it. And we need it yesterday since another boneheaded governmental regulation (nuclear) kept us burning fossil fuels way longer than we should've.
It's how the founder's mind works, sorry. This is (one of the reasons) why Europe gets fewer startups than freer places like the US.
Copyrights and trademarks are important though to prevent fraud and deception. The government has the role of upholding the rule of law and gentlemanly competition - I am not advocating for anarchy.
When those dreams are illegal, startups don't get created and the founders simply choose to get a cushy job at some FAANG.
Just compare how few talented people in EU choose to build startups instead of working for the bureaucracy. The more regulation we have, the more founders-to-be say "why bother?!"
Common example (dug from over 100 years ago), quite flawed one too. By the time of the anti-trust regulation the free market was already pushing Standard Oil out - healthy competition evolved. Read up on it.
I haven't heard of an ISP startup in ages. Only multinational Telecom providers, well protected by regulation.
And I don't know of a single example where regulation created more competition. The more barrier of entry you add to a market (of course for good intentions, to protect customers etc) the less competition you'll have and the fewer startups.
Only incumbents love regulation. Paradoxically, Apple will gain more from DMA on the long term, even if everybody is cheering they got slapped.
The competition was free. Now startups have regulation to contend with. This logically results fewer startups. You can plainly see that too, comparing the EU startup scene with the US one. Just take a look at all the European platforms the DMA is regulating: ...?
Do you have analytics/telemetry for your products/websites? Do you include 3rd party fonts, libraries or use a CDN or a anti-DDOS service like CloudFlare?
Do you have data scrubbing capabilities in all your user-interaction software with a default maximum retention period? Do you answer data removal requests?
These are some the requirements for organizations of any size, big or small.
So the great majority do. That actually confirms my world view. Of course my bubble is not representative, but it turns out that it formed the most probably correct opinion. Good enough for me.
> where the husband and wife earn about the same amount of money
So hard-working women (and they need to be hard-working in order to make as much as men who still have an advantage in the workplace) are also hard working at home. The article says that is only 29% of cases though.
> you’d rather just continue to hold on your persecution complex
You gave me a paywalled article. I gave you a whole free book which you dismissed summarily. Who'd rather hold onto their preconceived ideas then?
I do thank you for the other links, I learned some facts I did not know.
Maybe that used to be the case when divorce laws were written, but today I know very few marriages with the wife in a traditional role like that. The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced. Cleaning services, laundry services and food delivery are accessible and affordable while costing much less than the salary of a full time person doing those tasks and in no way worth paying for with half your assets.
So in a divorce it comes down to earning potential vs spending habits. Earning potential for women is generally less than for men due to their preference for lower paying, humanist fields and their spending habits are generally higher.
That is why divorce proceedings are generally more profitable for women than the accrued assets of the single life.
> Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody.
That is just not true. Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo but no judge will remove the mom from the kid's life unless there are very good reasons (drugs etc) but they routinely consider monthly payments from men enough. Unproven allegations of abuse from the wife are often enough to remove the dad from the equation.
So far the only ones waging war are old imperialist forces falling behind the West: Russia and its ilk.
> Socialism, on the other hand, means rational and planned distribution of resources.
Planned economy never worked, everywhere it was tried. It simply led to hunger.
> reinforced concrete
Except communist workers stole the cement and replaced it with sand. The concrete cracked and water got in the non-waterproofed foundations, rusting the rebars. A disaster waiting to happen.
> Zagreb earthquake
That was a 5.5 - baby earthquake. We'll see when there is a 7+.
> many heavy industries had to be closed because Western bosses
They closed down because they couldn't compete on the global free markets. Mostly they made stuff "planned" for the Warsaw treaty countries. Crap, of course.
> people in Eastern Europe can relax
We still have to pay taxes and utilities. The government makes sure there is no such thing as free ride.
> Owning a home is as real a wealth as it comes.
Personally I'd rather rent a nice place than own a crap-hole. I appreciate the freedom and lack of headaches when renting. For investment I prefer the stock market. Much better returns.
> The economic growth rate of socialist block of countries was double that of the West
Then why were the shelves empty and we starved?! The growth after WW2 came from looting nationalized private property. That lasted a few years and then they simply started fudging the numbers.
> Maybe they also miss their generous anual leave, work rights, and 36 hour work week
Till the 80s the work week around here had 56 hours, not 36.
But some of them do miss being a part of nomenklatura and kissing the ring of the Russian masters, that's for sure.
If you were anti-war you'd be anti-Russia. They are the ones waging war right now. The war would end tomorrow if Putin would get out of Ukraine. Ukraine would end tomorrow if Ukrainians would stop fighting.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. Any economic system can do that. But with free markets a fair price is reached and healthy competition encouraged. Of course most governments will create monopolies instead.
> generally well known economic principle
Do you have actual examples where this happened recently or are you just talking general ideas here?
> housing
Do you mean the gray long apartment blighting the cities across Eastern Europe? Ugly, unventilated and insulated and ready to fall at the first earthquake they would be simply illegal to build today. The only reason they still keep "their value" is that we managed to overregulated the housing market into an obvious supply-constrained corner.
> USSR was outperforming the US economically
USSR was starving. USA had to send grains to avoid starvation - Kansas became Russia's bread basket.
When the Berlin wall fell the stores in the East had empty shelves while the ones in the West presented the usual bonanza of products and options.
> A great majority of people certainly cannot afford things you list
Of course not everybody has everything. But the per-capita GDP is inching closer to the West while Purchasing Power will soon be at parity. Eastern Europe's growth rate after the fall of communism beat the West's.
> plenty of people that are still quite nostalgic
They are nostalgic for their youth. Plus they are retirees and their work created little economic value during communism so their pensions are appropriately limited.
I also want to do tons of drugs every night. The reason I don't? A pros vs cops debate happening automatically in my brain. Even if you don't rationalize it, it still happens. And since it's there you may as well use it, even if sometimes ignoring it in the end.
How exactly is capitalism seeking a monopoly on resources?
> TOO MUCH LOOOL
Absolutely. Eastern Europeans are now in the EU and we have freedom of movement, expression and to work anywhere we wish. During communism machine guns and barbed wire kept us locked down so we wouldn’t escape its wonders.
Financially we’ve never been better: our PIB is at an all time high and people enjoy Teslas and city breaks, ski vacations and shopping trips. Compare it to the 80's when we were cold, starving in lines for half a bread and a bottle of milk.
It’s night and day, you can’t even imagine it unless you’ve lived it . Of course all Eastern Europe (including Ukraine) vigorously rejects any closeness to Russia and its ilk. Of course an authoritarian like Putin was furious and did the only thing he could think of: war, murder and genocide.