41–50 of 59 posts
Europe is going to need to cut itself off from the rest of the world if it really wants a market with much stricter rules than its global competitors. It already has totally asymmetric relationships with its trading partners, where Europe sells mostly luxury goods which can easily be boycotted. Germany, of all countries, is unwilling to acknowledge a genocide to protect their auto industry. It wont be a total segrega…
Sounds good. Respect for employment standards and the environment with fewer billionaires’ vanity projects. Sign me up.
As for employment standards, that's a double edged sword; making it harder to hire people also locks young people out of the job market. Where do ambitious smart young people with no familial ties go to seek their fortune? Not Italy.
Europe has long demonstrated that it's uninterested in competing in the economy of the 21st century. This is exactly in keeping with everything else they've done.
Cheap satellites and drones means a camera or antenna following you every second, whenever you want it or not. Cheap cameras and AI means you are tracked in the subway, and on the street, like in London, Beijing or Shanghai.
Your physical movements, your pace and your stance will be recorded so they could identify you by your movement alone.
Movements will be analyzed for atypicals like they do in China.
A city will be recorded from above all the time like the US military does so they could go "backwards" after something happens.
In the past living on a city was freedom from being observed all the time by your neighbors like in small villages. In the future it means the opposite because it makes economic sense to put technology in the cities when lots of people will be controlled.
This should be regulated and will be regulated because the potential for abuse is tremendous or we will live in dystopia, with freedom and autonomy eradicated.
I think it's going to be hard to create regulations for an industry that largely doesn't exist yet, without strangling it at birth. The rules don't really make much sense either: > Social scoring systems, such as those launched in China that track the trustworthiness of people and businesses, are classified as "contravening the Union values" and are going to be banned. Does this mean stuff like Yelp reviews will be b…
> Europe will struggle to compete in the future
I'd say it already does, but not because it addresses valid issues through regulation or introduces excess regulation for invalid use cases.
One reason it does is regulatory capture, stifling competition to already established companies. It shares this aspect with the US.
Another is a cultural difference with the US, Japan or China in terms of general ambition/entrepreneurship. The European dream for most seems to be "get big enough so I can cash out", not "let's take over the world".
Yet another is that Europe, while being unified in many respects, still is a loose federation of a bunch of different cultures and languages, making it more work to appeal to and serve everyone in the internal single market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Germany, of all countries, is unwilling to acknowledge a genocide genocide to protect their auto industry You mean the Herero? What does that have to do with auto industry? (I'm really asking, this was the first result I found)
Probably he is referring to a situation in China.
Europe has long demonstrated that it's uninterested in competing in the economy of the 21st century. This is exactly in keeping with everything else they've done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less scientific research and collaboration being done is a negative consequence irrespective of any positives GDPR produces. And company towns were generally good: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
We haven't seen the worst about company towns because they were regulated away. Do we have to get there before same thing happens with AI, like it did with so many things like: healthcare, products being toxic, people literally dying? By the way, what about military uses? Counterintelligence? Anything goes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's unrelated to the fact that we are better off having these projects than not. As for being 'parasitic', that goes both ways. Taxes are not a voluntary system, and much of the resources extracted are wasted and/or used to enrich rent-seeking insiders who are close to the government.
Voluntary or not, at least anyone has a degree of control over what governments do... Though that has slipped way too much in places. Almost nobody has any control over billionaires, not even legislature apparently, much less taxpayers.
A once-in-every-four-year election, involving millions of poorly informed and easily manipulated voters, provides far less accountability than individuals making decisions every day on how efficiently their dollars/euros are being spent.
As for wealthy interests, whether it's billionaires, or massive blocs of highly paid unionized civil servants, where do you think the malevolent ones can do more damage: in a rules-based free market, where consumers control their own money, or in a government controlled market where controlling the consumer is only a matter of gaining political clout and dictating to private citizens how their wealth will be spent?
In a rules-based free market, it's irrelevant that Apple is worth $1.5 trillion. It can't force me to buy Apple products. Once the free-market ruleset is undermined, then Apple can, through taxing authorities and regulatory gatekeepers and the armed government agents that enforce their taxes and restrictions, force me to buy its products.
The free market ruleset protects our most basic rights, and is the most important institution for protecting the weak from the strong. That you believe otherwise is a deliberate outcome by those who want to abolish those safeguards.