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The original research came from FTM: https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/vws-taaleis-duits-lab-testcapac...

https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/coronatesten-belangen-arts-micr...

However, this stuff is paywalled by now.

https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2346643-testlabs-kunnen-wel...

Or, an easy video summary by Arjen Lubach (has english subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUx-kdbKQys

The lobbyist, part of the Outbreak Management Team, is Ann Vossen. And she argued from her experise that there should be specific requirements that effectively kept larger laboratories from being able to be suppliers. Ironically, the trick used was the Tower of Babel (pretending language differences could be a risk)

>Do you have any examples of large scale corruption inside EU?

It doesn't happen with the one large corruption scheme taking all of the money. Its hundreds of small corruptions like a locust.

Here is a fair and neutral attempt to catalog all the schemes in play: https://www.oecd.org/gov/ethics/prevention-fraud-corruption-...

In return: Do you have an example of where the EU paid anywhere below 200% of industry standard price for anything?

I'm not arguing its more corrupt than say the US Congress. Its on par, with some weird extremes. For example: Berlusconi, a prime minister, spending public money on under age prostitutes, serving today freely as a member of the EP. That kind also owned most media companies in his country and implemented favourable regulation and tax exemptions for himself.

Here in the Netherlands, there is something referred to as the 'job carousel'. Where favourable regulation by politicians is rewarded in the future (after a political carreer) by very highly paid gigs in the industries and companies they favoured. Technically legal, and very hard to legislate against. Its a refined form of corruption, but it has all the same downsides. During Corona for example, the Netherlands had trouble getting its testing in order. Turned out we had excluded big commercial labs from consideration because we had represenatites of the 'small artisinal labs' in our taskforce lobbying. A small scale corruption, with heavy economic distortion as a result!

I'm also not perse blaming corruption on the politicians themselves. We are all together responsible for the corporate and governance culture we breed. Yet we shouldn't pretend we currently have the ability to spend/invest money effectively and fairly as a collective.

Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML

The US companies do what they do best: innovate business models and find ways to vendor lock in and own the market.

But who's been doing all the research keeping moore's law alive? Lithography?

For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing all the world's chips (answer: no, it would force other place to invest highly in competition out of strategic interest).

Hence the strategy of being long term profitable and to just sell the machines to everyone at the same price.

It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.

As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?

It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management".

So don't expect anything from this. The future most sold chip will still be Apple Silicon or Samsung Exynos in TSC's foundry or Samsung foundry on a machine by ASML using IP from ARM and NVidia

They have a reasonable historic reason to be extra sensitive with xenophobia.

I'm not saying its the correct ideological position, but it sure is understandable.

If you consider the structural and institutional racism in the US, and how many innocent people die because of it, one could wonder what the lesser evil is.

IF it would work. But it doesn't. It actually increases polarisation and radicalization. The more you treat the population like idiots the more they will become that.

The best strategy is always for the state to lead in humanism, by example. By showing mercy, patience, tolerance and respect.

I don't have to believe any of that. I just have to find it slightly more likely Bannon isn't that smart, that well connected, that technically skilled nor planning that far ahead.

They can't be idiots and evil geniuses at the same time, you know. And maybe it the luxury of some distance (I'm not american not do I live there). So it's quite easy to see: they are mostly idiots taking advantage of economic inequality that is the result of decades of democrats doing nothing but lip service to the middle class.

If they hadn't screwed that up, these same people wouldn't be Trump or Biden fans. They wouldn't be into politics at all. They would be into sport, their job, dating, etc.

>probably spurred on by Chinese propaganda and their fake reporting.

What the hell are you talking about? What propaganda or fake reporting?

China initially denied there even was a virus or that it was dangerous. Just like Europe. Just like the US.

What kind of weird conspiracy websites are you getting this information from and how did you end on this site? Don't those places have comment sections too where you can discuss with like minded people that are also shopping for confirmation basis data points for their xenophobia.

China has a very scary government but that's no reason to for us here to just make shit up. It actually dilutes from the real risks and criticisms.

It does tell you when though.

>It has no understanding of the world

What does this mean? The world with countries, borders, celebrities, hypes, newsletters and ideologies?

Because that world is as virtual and not grounded in reality as the world of data points fed into this model. Culture is made up. Language is made up. It may express itself in reality but so do the algorithms of social network sites.

If something can only live in a reality of data points on the internet this thing would live mostly in the same reality as we do.

The reality is that GDPR is not strongly enforced at the moment. This is not uncommon for Europe and may be a cultural differences with other places.

Those who have the intent to comply and are at least complying in spirit are not at any legal risk. Attitude matters.

And the spirit is obvious: get consent if you enable a third party to unique identify a user in reality. I.e. if it's private data or if you enable correlation across websites.

It's correlating and sharing you need consent for. Don't worry about a server log.

It is not about what you make possible. It's about what you do. Technically any sysadmin can access some information they should not. It's unavoidable.

But that's quite a far way from commercially exploiting databases of people without their consent.

Honestly they should just ban the sale of personal information. Most internet marketing vendors are not actually in the business of selling personal data.

Now the good ones suffer because of the bad ones. And the bad ones either pretend they have consent or find a way to get it.

>Ergo, it is also very expensive to run

Wether thats too expensive depends on what you are doing, and how much what you are doing creates value.More disturbingly is that the whole approach seems to scale linearly in quality based on the amount of training. This implies that the NLP market at least, will not be conquored by start-ups from somebody's garage, but will be owned by whoever already had a shit load of money. Whoever gets more funding will have the best model. Not arguing that people involved don't have a lot of skill, but within this space, its funding (not skill) that will determine who wins the market.

So, unless you can get more funding than the other guys, don't even try the NLP space.

>If this is true, those calling for OpenAI to not monetize intermittent progress are essentially preventing next generation discovery, unless they have alternative monetization ideas to generate 8 figures for research

I suspect they will share the models directly with select customers (with too much money), because the negotation position of these counterparties will be different. The results are easy to replicate with a lot of money. So if you have enough money to do so, your price negotation with them would be more like 'ill pay you 1/3 of that price to liscense your model and save me the time'.

If you dont have enough money to pay the electricity bill to train this much data, however, you can be forced to comply with this bussiness model. Obviously, there will be competitors. Obviously the big boys will likely try to replicate these results (and be succesfull at it). The hope is one of them just open-sources a 'good-enough' model.

Its a bit like Colombus 'discovering America'. Once you know its there the risk/reward of trying to go there drastically changes.

Apple catered to that niche crowd when it was the runner up.

The addressable market of the media arts is a peanut next to the mountain of consumers they are now successfully targeting.

It's like asking why Apple is making the value proposition of the Mac Pro so bad. It's so they can cancel that bring the userbase down enough so they can cancel it all together without it creating too much fuzz.

>That's what Apple is now desperately trying to avoid happening to iOS as well.

It took a court order to not cut off Epic's developer liscence, which affects many other game vendors too.

That doesn't sound desparate. That sounds balsy and arrogant, and considering the attitude of Epic somewhat called for. It's almost like the gaming market on iOS is a only small percentage of all the money Apple makes. We are talking about a lot of money that Epic looses to them, but the same is not true in reverse.

Apple will stick to its guns even if the whole gaming industry would boycot them. They don't seem to care, and i can understand why they don't. Mobile games is a very profitable market, but one that makes money irregardless of quality. Angry Birds will do for Apple. The assumption that exclusive titles are platform drivers for mobile phones is false.

In the Netherlands we have a saying 'high trees catch a lot of wind'

It's the best known country in the world. It's the most famous one. As a result chances are for a lot of people on this planet the people they admire the most and the people they despise the most will contain a lot of Americans.

I'm from the Netherlands. When we elect an idiot he falls of a skateboard and says something stupid. When Americans elect an idiot a country gets bombed or the world economy almost collapses.

It's too easy for the rest of the west to put all blame on the US. On the other hand: to be the leader of the free world was the ambition of the US for a long time. That does come with more responsibility.

If they dont want to carry all that responsibility by themselves one of the things that has got to go too is the American Exceptionalism. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The position came with both responsibilities and privileges.

And maybe it would be nice to a formal letter of resignation in that case.

>You don't pay a fix dollar tax per citizen, but a percentage of your income

Yeah, the government has a monopoly on that.

> I can see private companies doing the same.

You must be American then. This is where all this friction comes from. Corporations aren't people, nor should they be government.

This is not because the people who work there are bad people or something, but because they are legally binded to do whatever maximizes profits. They are by definition not operating in the common good (they are not supposed to!). There is no democratic oversight.

You can imagine companies doing the same. As a European, i can't. It's a problem. And its fake innovation anyway. Where is the America that did real research and real innovation? That put people on the moon? These days all you guys are good for is 'bussiness model innovations'. Ways to cheat, extort or externalize the costs. Quality of life is just going downhill the more of these type of products one uses. Technology is regressing.

No, in-app purchases are forced to BE proccessed by Apple.

Epic would like to proccess these themselves. They dont want apple to turn on their economic output. When you charge money for the work others do -- that's like communism.

Because its the sort of above most transaction fees of most payment providers in the world.

But Apple can ask whatever they want. They can't block side-loading though. That's the uncompetitive part.

You can run your store and pick whatever terms you like. You can't use your marketshare in hardware sales to bundle a forced store.

Imagine Tesla charging you 30% of any grocery shopping (i.e. would refuse to open the doors if the store didn't share 30% of its gross revenue).

I mean, its literally, textbook anti-competitive. The App Store as a store isn't competing fairly, on its own merits.

Also keep in mind, that this whole getting raped with transaction fees is a 'america-only' thing. This is much better regulated in the rest of the world.

Specifically the costs are fixed, so anything that is a percentage is just fucking nonsense. It doesn't cost more to charge 5 euro's than it does to charge 1 euro. It uses the same electricity, the same personel costs. There is a point where its get more expensive because of risk management, but thats above 100 euro per transaction.

Percentages on transactions are generally only allowed when its a loan. Which is why Americans are always buying things with credit cards ("loaning the money"). Most people pay for things with their own money, not with a loan. (i.e. direct bank transfer). And those transactions have a fixed transaction costs. Worst case 1 euro (low-volume, your personal webshop) all the way down to 5 euro cent (high-volume, i.e. the supermarket).

So explain to me where the hell you get your 3% from? You just sound like an already boiled frog saying 'are you sure we can survive in cold water?'

> Is that because the Dutch are white and the past is the VOC and slavery? Or because the Dutch are white?

As a Dutch person I will answer: the first.

The great grandfather's of the black kids getting name called 'Zwarte Piet' because of this tradition were literally slaves. Their grandparents were free but did not have remotely the same chances in life. Often couldn't read/write. Any original culture or family ties they had were completely erased. It wasn't like we allowed them to 'raise their kids' when they were slaves. Their parents had it much better. Went to the same schools, etc. Still had to deal with racism when going out or trying to get a nice job, but not at all with persecution. They still did not having a lot of good role models within their own community yet. And don't think about trying to go to a club or join a fraternity.

The current generation is the first one performing on par with native people within society. With more good role models and succesfull entrepeneurs.

Honestly. Decent folks in the Netherlands already changed the tradition to the chimney style. Small subtle change. Doesn't harm anyone.

The people at this moment who still strongly hold on to Zwarte Piet .. are racist. But the tradition wasn't intended to be. And before the discussions started it wasn't. It is now. Because it's impossible to claim that minor changes to traditions are this important to someone unless the intend is racist. Traditions that were always changing. That have changed over and over again. And the only change that is a discussion is this one.

You might like the language Crystal, it works this way.

https://crystal-lang.org/

No the exploit was by the Dutch supporting the French because the actual physical servers were located in France, under their jurisdiction. Just like the previous time they did this we aren't getting a lot of information of how. But it seems physical access is part of the exploit.

There are things like mortgage rates and spending priorities that are healthy political democratic differences that should have no impact on your professional life.

There are also things that are not political. They are war. They are 'over my or your dead body' type of things like slavery, holocasts and treason. We don't vote on those and accept whatever the outcome is. We go to war. That's why that sort of stuff is in a constitution. Because it's not negotiable. Not up for popular vote.

Now. I do admit that I don't think that applies to Facebook. I don't think they are intentionally trying to end the US democracy and break the US society.

But never say never. There is definitely a point. One does not sell hamburgers to the KKK for example. Or help build their website.

That's also why you see so many apolitical brands speaking out and picking a side here. They do understand this is different. This is a war for human rights. Nobody deserves the privilege to stay neutral on this.

>when neither have faced this before

>The fact that mistakes have been made doesn't mean there's nothing to their field and anyone can do it

I was not making that claim. The premise is: should every non epidemiologist keep their mouth shout and trust the domain experts blindly? Don't they have the right in a democracy to question the science and therefor the legitimicy of the suggested policies?

That's a hard sell, when the field of experts themselves have little consensus.

I might be seeing this from a different bubble, over here in the Netherlands. We have had our equivalent of the CDC show and explain their models and policy choices in detail. We got powerpoints and everything.

Now before you make assumptions: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes... .. the Netherlands ranked 3rd in preparedness.

Yet, it turned into a shitshow. It was already going wrong in Italy, when they claimed their models suggested we have it fully under control if only we wash our hands, and they then let one of the biggest social events happen (think mardi gras). Even though we already had our first cases.

Italy's expert initially said they had it under control. They suggested cultural differences in health and healthcare made it such a bigger problem for China than for them. Then it went to shit in Italy. Then the dutch experts said, after a few cases, they had it completely under control and the reason it went wrong in Italy was cultural differences in health and healthcare. Yeah, racist ignorance.

And all their preparations didn't include supply chain management or the human factor. For example: the relationship (worldwide) between the lockdowns and the available of PPE -vs- the availability of PPE and the spread of the virus. Because none of those things are part of the known models. So they just exclude it entirely.

So, given all of that, yeah, I would like to see their homework in more detail, and we should all put in the intellectual effort, to sort this stuff out.

>Are there no software bugs?

More than any other engineering discipline. So software engineers do actually have more experience debugging collapsing systems build on the wrong assumptions.

>Can just anyone come in and fix those?

Yes, mostly. Its called a pull request.

It's completely logical that engineers have professional deformation.

Society is in crisis and there are metrics. How can you realistically expect engineers not to start debugging and interpreting the metrics?

Yes. Engineers aren't medical domain experts, but the experts and/or political leadership failed. The models are not being shared. The process isn't transparent, nor optimized for quick interventions based on incomplete information. And claims and policies differ around the world. There is no consensus among the experts.

The truth is, engineers might have more experience in how to operate during a crisis like this. How to quickly asses risks in a world of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.

I wish the real experts were more convincing in their abilities. But in the west this is the first time they deal with this kind of situation while it not being a hypothetical. They is their first real experience with it as well.

The quality of governance in Singapore makes even a spoiled dutch man like me jealous.

Would be even cooler if they found a way to maximize personal liberties too (referring to the freedom of expression, religion and sexuality). It's hard to see why it couldn't just embrace those. I doubt these freedoms are the gateway drug to democracy they fear it is.

Yeah the doubling time confuses me too. All the numbers from China, Italy and the Netherlands (where I am at) show the number of deaths doubling every 2 days upto the limit.

But even our dutch government is claiming it's 4 days standing in front of a chart where it's obviously 2 days.

After you reach the limit it's hard to count because people stop going to the hospital that can't take them in anyway. At that point you should just consider any increase in deaths compared to the normal the result of Corona. Wether it's a cancer treatment that got postponed because of Corona or Corona itself.

So this outrage is in the Netherlands. Security cameras may not be pointed by businesses at public space (which we have a lot of unlike the US). The local government itself may place cameras though but private parties, what kind of nightmare situation is that?

And in public or private space when there are cameras there needs to be signs everywhere to warn and inform you.

So in the Netherlands at least.. Google recording a conversation with someone who doesn't know Google is recording is definitely illegal.

The question is: will they prosecute? Then it becomes a geopolitical question because we are a small country with a disproportionate number of Google datacenters.

So to summarize:

- This is definitely illegal in the Netherlands

- There is no consent of others participating and you really do need that

- Fine print is not consent: consent of terms and conditions requires a majority (determined by polling or common sense of a judge) of users to be aware and knowledgeable what they consented to.

- there won't be prosecution by the Dutch public prosecutor.

- there will be a lobby for the EU to buttrape Google but it may use different reasons or context

It's called Tinder. It's better for everyone to just date outside of the office. And if you can't succeed there any success within the office is a hint that maybe power dyanmics and subtle coercion is at play.

Not to mention that avoiding GRPR, laws that shouldn't need to have been written in the first place, is like walking around with a big sign 'we are evil and not to be trusted'. Because if you are to be trusted, a simple cursory check would simply affirm you are already within the GDPR.

We work in the b2b in the financial sector and part of our contracts in Europe is that all of the data is hosted in infrastructure that complies with the GDPR. That could be Google or Amazon, but not Slack or any SV startup.

Come on people. We don't have a lot of information to judge on. But if we are having a debate about the meaning of rape, then we are all side stepping the incredible high chance this is politically motivated nonsense.

Nobody had ever been extradited for this sort of thing. Sweden is special in that it enabled it based on a testimony, even after the testimony has been revoked and without the victims pressing charges or even agreeing with the interpretation of the police.

This is not an example of the legal system taking too much liberty of the notion of rape. This is much more likely an example of state level conspiracy.

Men are not under threat, sharing potentially incriminating information about the USA just means that nobody is playing by any rules.

Don't embarrass yourself or others to have this debate about rape. As an academic exercise, sure go ahead, but this case does not prove that rape laws in Sweden are used unfairly. It just proves Sweden, like most smaller Western nation's have little choice but do what the big man in Washington whispers in their ears.

This also does not prove Assange is guilt free. But at least if we want to maintain any illusion that we live in a free world: he is a deserved a court case about the actual actions that are fuelling this hunt.

So please just don't use the word rape and Assange in the same sentence. It's a disservice to actual victims, whistle blowers and our cultural identity as such.

>1700 demonstrators showed up this year.

Were they demonstrating against or in favor of the POW's and resistence fighters?

That assumes Europeans or Chinese would have the same issue where nationalism constantly blinds their judgement.