Europe eyes strict rules for artificial intelligence

> Consider that total installed capacity of renewables is by far China, electric cars are being driven by the USA, and the country in Europe that has done best at reducing carbon emissions and coal burning (taking coal to zero) is the UK. Germany's energiewende meanwhile has been a failure. The EU has no notable wins to its name in the environmental space.

If you ignore the countries that didn't rely on coal in the first place, like France, Belgium or Austria just to name a few, all of which fare better in consumption of CO2 producing energy like oil, coal and gas.

Cars are are much more of a thing in the USA than in the EU, so slower electrical vehicle rollout is completely normal. And even then, sales are exploding.

> 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

Yes, that is indeed a problem many are trying to tackle ( via reform, encouraging hiring, startups, etc.). I don't think scraping all employee protections to make it easier for young people to get a shitty job is worth it.

Sure, because Pullman strike, Pinkerton's and strike busting were never a thing. Corporate owned stores with gouged prices, and so on. Oh, and whole towns being sold out in bankruptcies, people forced to move. (Latest example being slow dismantling of Scotia.) All sorts of paternalistic policies.

Nowadays the corporations do not have this kind of control because they don't want real estate on this level. The towns were extremely vulnerable to downturn in business, and still are. (Even whole industry sector cities have problems, such as Detroit.)

Capitalism itself is based on profit, which is not shared to workers. By definition exploitative, unlike taxes, which are supposed to be redistributed back to populace as services almost in whole, if the government works correctly. (Excluding public sector salaries. Monarchies and dictatorships excluded to a point.)

Moving to Europe is culturally very different though. Despite the language barrier, I feel a lot more at home in France and Germany than the US (I'm British). If the US feels so foreign to me I'm sure most European countries would feel equally weird to North Americans. I'm not saying weird is necessarily bad, but some people like familiar reference points, shared values etc.

The Pullman Strike started with violence from the strikers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

>>On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful meeting to rally support for the strike from railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward, groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive.[8] Elsewhere in the western states, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks, or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention and the demand for federal action.

This was destruction of the private company's property and trespassing to violate the shareholders' right to freedom of movement across the US. This is only justifiable if you accept the victimhood ideology, which sanctifies any worker, and grants them an unlimited right to commit any action in support of their demands. It completely rejects the principle of free association, and the free market, in favor of assigning moral superiority to individuals based on their level of wealth.

And what's wrong with strike busting? Strike busting means hiring replacement workers to cross the picket line. They hired the Pinkertons to PROTECT the workers from the violent picketers, who would regularly assault, and sometimes murder, strikebreakers.

>>Capitalism itself is based on profit, which is not shared to workers. By definition exploitative

Profit is the investor's compensation for their investment. The investors owes the worker what they commit to paying them in their employment contract - nothing more. It's not exploitation when a worker freely agrees to work for a person, and that person profits from the enterprise that they hired them to work in.

You're claiming that you can take a job based on employment terms that were disclosed to you, and then because the employer didn't share any profit that they never promised to share in the employment agreement, cry victim, and demand their private property. This is just a narrative used by cheats to rob people of property that they are in no way entitled to.

The workers get paid wages, as promised. A worker is able to save their wages after expenses, and then start their own company, and earn profit on their capital. The incentive to invest capital, into new machinery, leads to productivity growth, which leads to wage growth. That is the process that made the US the most productive country in the world by 1890, with people from Europe migrating en masse to try to enjoy the much higher hourly wages it offers.

The USA doesn't differ in material ways in how it produces meat. They raise lots of animals and then kill them in various nasty yet efficient ways, which is no different to how European farms raise meat, not much different to how farms have ever raised meat. There has never been a time when animal farming was ethical and clean. The small differences that do exist in this area are hyped hugely (e.g. chlorine-washed chicken), but when you go looking for concrete harm to people from those practices you can't find them.

The biggest way Americans are harmed by their meat is the fact that it's so cheap that they eat a lot of it, but "we need meat to be expensive so you don't pig out" is not a justification the EU is willing to deploy. At any rate, it's a messy unpleasant business no matter how they're sliced up, and I'll feel a lot better when I'm reading hand-wringing articles about how plant-based meats are destroying the traditional landscape by getting rid of all the cows. It feels like we're on the verge of a breakthrough there: Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat are both very, very convincing. And both firms are American, of course.

BTW recycling rates are a bit of a sham. Most of the material marked as 'recycled' ends up in China and whether it really gets recycled in the way people mean then is very questionable. A lot of it doesn't.

"we should be modelling ourselves on northern Europe rather than Singapore"

I disagree. The UK absolutely should look to America and Singapore. Europe looks increasingly like a reactionary backwater. Look at the mess over vaccines. That dysfunction is everywhere but was hard to spot before because there wasn't a good counter-example to compare to, except very small places like Switzerland which at any rate are forced to be half-in even when they vote against it.

Where's the exciting stuff happening? Where's the progress coming from? I've spent virtually all of my career working for and with Americans, even though I'm a Brit living in central Europe, because that's where the action is. It wasn't even a conscious choice: they came to me, they found me and where were the European companies doing that kind of search? Nowhere. And it showed: the times when my colleagues were mostly European were times when we all reported to bosses in the USA. The EU makes a huge deal all the time about how only it can push back against global forces and defend European "ways of life", which is a purely reactionary take on things and anyway, there is no such "European way of life". The reason they are terrified of being fragmented is because they know they don't have it in them to define the future, only club together to try and stare it down and hope the people who actually are making the future roll over in exasperation. It's a dead end strategy and no path for the next generation.