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Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

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Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#251

Post by rusk »

Drakim wrote: post #243
rusk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everyone in Europe that operates in any kind of a pan-European business space speaks English. Kind of ironic these days really ...

Is it? The same could be said for Americans speaking an European language.

I just mean with Brexit and all ... if the English leave, English will be deprecated as an official language, yet it will still be the lingua franca of European Business. It's just a kind of a funny, and slightly ironic situation I think.

EDIT: I think actually it speaks very much to how european unity is about so much more than just the EU. By extension how culture and national identity is about so much more than what the Westphalian paradigm provides.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#252

Post by jochung »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #232
kodablah wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "destroying our democracy and societies" Imagine how you have to talk to a doomsayer like that knowing no matter what you say, there will be no chance to get through to him.

Depends, he's not wrong if facebook is used as a propaganda device

Facebook was used as a political propaganda device years before this kerfuffle, with FB's approval, but they and the press didn't mind until it had an outcome they didn't like.

Really, there is a supreme irony in whipping the upper echelons into a frenzy about a propaganda crisis itself manufactured into social consensus.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#253

Post by nikanj »

icebraining wrote: post #3

There's some irony in getting the Oath panel forcing me to consent to their tracking (in apparent violation of the GDPR) before showing me an article about Facebook's data handling problems. By the way, if you want to read the article without agreeing to their stuff, stop the page load after the article shows up. https://guce.oath.com/collectConsent?brandType=nonEu&.done=h...

Next level of irony: You just distributed advice for circumventing a technical content protection mechanism, which is illegal in many countries today.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#254

Post by rndgermandude »

phicoh wrote: post #238
rndgermandude wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Draconian? Just because we got laws in Germany saying you need permission to store personal data and you need to make available that data upon request and/or remove it upon request?

One thing I always found rather bizar is where ISPs break internet connections after 24 hours to force the customer to get a new IP address. And then the next step was where the home routers would disconnect after less then 24 hours to make sure that the disruption happens in the middle of the night. Or something to that effect. I wonder if in Germany people get new telephone numbers every 24 hours as well.

Ye, that's true... They started doing it so that you didn't just keep your IP for ages as a quasi static IP and then host things from there... because the "dedicated" lines with a static IP were/are different offers with a lot bigger price tag.

Yes, it's ridiculous, but has nothing to do with privacy laws.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#255

Post by evgen »

wierd0 wrote: post #183
sparkling wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not FUD, its not a myth, its not cheap propaganda, its real: Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 of 15 June 1988 laying down quality standards for cucumbers [1] Yes i know this regulation is no longer in place, thats not the point. The point is that the EU is a overblown bureaucracy that should not be in charge of regulating every silly little aspect of life across the various member states. And yes, they are…

> Do you honestly believe that the average citizen wants highly paid bureaucrats in Brussels debating on how much power a vacuum cleaner should draw? I certainly do. Wait, there is no equivalent discussion of power draw of vacuum cleaners in the US? Well, then the EU might be at the forefront of consumer electronics regulations and in the end, that's very good for me.

Yes, there is similar regulation in the US that mandates every appliance have a standardized sticker indicating energy efficiency and where each particular model falls within defined classes.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#256

Post by pluma »

sparkling wrote: post #205
kuschku wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And do you know why that happened? Ever considered the reason? Just like cameras had a megapixel war, vacuums had a power war. In reading electricity consumption without increasing actual air throughput. At its height there were 3500W vacuums with less than 10% effectivity. Billions of euros every year were wasted on electricity for this. Just like the laws encouraging LEDs, the vacuum laws had a major effect, manufa…

Its funny that you mention the light bulbs. Actually, the EU did NOT encourage LED light bulbs for the longest time. You may recall that they banned some conventional wolfram based light bulbs and instead tried to force compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) to the consumer, not LEDs. This has actually lead to a huge recycling problem. The CFLs contain mercury, the plastic parts are hard to recycle and the glass can not be…

Do you even remember what LED bulbs were like when the traditional bulbs went the way of the dodo? The reason CFLs were popular wasn't that the EU mandated them, it was that LED bulbs at the time were utter rubbish. If anything the ban increased a demand for proper LED lighting. If everyone was still happily using tungsten I doubt we'd have anywhere near the range of quality LED lighting we have today.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#257

Post by jorvi »

sparkling wrote: post #203
ionised wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to see what massive wins you are referring to here. The only 'win' I can think of of the top of my head was the UK referendum, which was 52/48 in favour of leaving. Polls taken now suggest that people are now mostly against leaving but the referendum result still stands.

Are you just going to ignore all the countries i listed? Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic all have goverments in place that reject giving more power to the EU and refuse to take in refugees. In France, Marie Le Pen did not win a majority but had big gains. And Macron, well, he seems to like the EU as long as someone else (Germany) picks up the bill. Italy: same as France.

In The Netherlands Geert Wilders' PVV became the second party by size, but the rest of the mainstream parties refuse to form a coalition with them so they are pretty much always in the opposition. I don't like that type of party (we had the LPF, then PVV and in the future maybe FvD) but I have to admit that as long as they don't actually govern they have a very useful function in that they often point out painful truths or situations that the other parties won't touch for fear of seeming politically incorrect.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#258

Post by mbroncano »

sheepmullet wrote: post #245
gambiting wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Im pretty sure the fall of the EU has little to do with Facebook Wait, what? EU is doing better than ever and it looks like after Brexit we will enjoy greater integration, and hopefully a full financial and political union in the future. If this is what a "fall" looks like to you, then I don't really know what to say to you - but from the rest of your sentence it seems like you don't like EU as an institution, so I…

> If this is what a "fall" looks like to you The EU has massive structural problems - sure most of them are not a direct fault of the EU but it certainly weakens the union. Just look at youth unemployment in Spain for example. There is an entire generation growing up out of work and not building any skills. They can't compete in a global market. What happens when Spain falls on actual hard times? Or for example a sma…

Spain, or actually any other European nation for the sake of this argument, has been through rougher times by any measure. Successfully if I may say, time and time again.

If only most people out of Europe, and most certainly Spain, would take a glimpse of the standards of living people take for granted in Western Europe, in particular Americans, they’d be demanding their governments at least the same.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#259

Post by adventured »

stfwn wrote: post #58
Y_Y wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the format and the fact that a lot of the time was taken up asking long-winded questions was the fault of the European Parliament and not Zuck personally. Of course the idea that you can just drag the CEO up to account for whatever grievances you have against the company and hope to get anything out of it seems a bit misguided to me. Looks like more of a PR exercise.

And a bad one at that. The first question I heard when I put on the livestream was something along the lines of: "answer yes or no to the following questions! (...) Will Facebook delete all fake accounts before $date and prevent all new ones from being created?", with the MEP putting on a stern look. Zuckerberg is smart enough to show up and pretend to get a verbal beating, but I wish he would just point out to the g…

One idiot in the bunch asked Zuckerberg about having founded Facebook as a hot or not site. They had no idea what they were talking about.

Another politician just used the Q&A platform as an excuse to threaten Facebook with being broken up, while adding very little substance to the discussion.

Another was seemingly out of control emotionally, waving his hands angrily and belting hysterics, while pretending Facebook was going to bring on the end of Democracy and that Zuckerberg might be an evil villain.

Another tried to pretend that somehow Facebook needed regulation to stop bullying: as though bullying doesn't occur every day in every school in the world. It's like saying: we must regulate human behavior to end all crime! Good luck with that. They all seemed to not understand that Facebook = everything that you see everywhere else in life, from the public square to school to home. You can't actually regulate an end to bullying, no matter how sad that is.

After how much I've seen others talk up the wise politicians of Europe, I expected a lot more. They were no better than the US Congress. Which makes sense, given the condition of most of the EU and its politics.

Re: Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today

#260

Post by pluma »

sparkling wrote: post #207
sgift wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the dreams of some people where all of these were not massive problems before. Sure, more people may make some very small dent on these issues, but nothing remotely relevant. Despite all the fear-mongering there has not been a "massive" refugee influx, but a very, very small one. This is an age-old strategy of "make sure those who have less fight each other for scraps instead of asking the rich to pay their f…

First: I appreciate you actually making a point, instead of just down voting other opinions. They were massive problems before, i agree, but adding more than 1 million refugees over the course of 2 years (in the case of Germany) adds a very real problem to the housing market and we should be honest about that. You can not blame so called right wing populists for hoping on this issue if other parties fail to even talk…

I'm German and I have no idea why you think the refugee crisis would pose a "very real problem to the housing market". The housing market hasn't changed much.

There's plenty of vacant housing in Germany. It's just not in the places people want to live anymore (i.e. mostly rural East Germany). Housing is scarce in the urban areas but that didn't really change.

The 1 million number sounds scary in isolation but it's really just a drop in the bucket. The real problem is our attitude to refugees and our immigration laws: a lot of people are stuck in a legal limbo where they are forced to live off welfare because they're not allowed to seek employment or attend craft schools or universities, many who are technically allowed to do those things only have temporary visas that get extended quarter-to-quarter but could be discontinued at any point. This creates a lot of unnecessary uncertainty while also isolating them socially, hindering "integration", which in turn increases frustration and all kinds of social ills.

Additionally, our welfare system is based on the assumption of a growing population but our birth rates are too low, so immigration is actually necessary. There's a lot of untapped potential in the refugee crisis, our attitudes just need to change to see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.

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