As an Italian national who grew up in Italy and left as soon as I could to work abroad, I feel I'm in a pretty good position to make the following statements: 1. I've never seen the Italian government move so quickly on anything 2. Now that they have, they've done so for something extremely stupid 3. They haven't exactly halted AI development. They've just widened the productivity gap between Italy and the rest of th…
I hear this VPN suggestion a lot. Here and on Twitter. Wonder, can't people do protests on the streets for this?
i've seen a lot of buzz around such tools in the italian Linkedin space, it was either praised as the ultimate tool to automate jobs or feared it would leave unemployed a lot of office workers. i understand both sides and can confidently say that this ban was made for the latter concern; the italian job space revolves so much around bullshit employment practices (unpaid internships, long term employment for useless t…
> since my mother couldn't keep her mouth shut, somehow this information got leaked to the family tax consultant, resulting in a police search of my office, and a mandatory visit to a police station almost an hour away. this kind of stuff happens regularly. Why ? is it illegal to do taxes online in italy?
it comes back to the "keeping others down" mentality, since our tax consultant heard i was getting his services cheaper elsewhere, he most likely tipped the authorities for something bogus either as scare tactics or to actually do harm to my business.
i know it's him because he ranted about this service, said should be illegal to charge so little to handle taxes, and warned my mother that tax returns will be less or something because our situation isn't fully handled by him (completely false).
we pay him around 800€ per year, plus a fixed per tax return form (around 150€), and opening my business with him would have been around 700€ yearly plus 300€ once to handle some documents (it's free if you do it yourself).
i pay around 300€ every year for a service that so far was perfect, with online guides, a billing/management software, multiple tax consultants handling tickets and responses to any questions i might have.
you can see the convenience from a mile away, and he would be forced to innovate in a fair market; however the easiest (and most italian) way of handling competition is to be vicious about it, bring others down and leverage authorities
I am also writing from Italy. In the last few months I have received so many spam calls from UK numbers that I have been forced to ban the whole of Britain from my phone. Good job Data Protection authority.
Report from the UK. I'm a British prince. I have a business proposition for you. It could be financially very lucrative. Having left the EU, we are finding it hard to make ends meet. If you send me £50k,I will be able to release £100m frozen in evil EU banks. I will give you 50%.
I am also writing from Italy. In the last few months I have received so many spam calls from UK numbers that I have been forced to ban the whole of Britain from my phone. Good job Data Protection authority.
Report from Germany: Haven't received a spam call in years.
You never got a call from a mobile network provider? Incredible.
I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. I'm in the Netherlands as you can tell and 'even' we are not that much more progressive. There is currently a massive farmer uprising and everybody is complaining literally non-stop about just about everything. Meanwhile nobody has even…
"Nobody has even tried GPT" is as meaningless as possible. Not sure if this is satire, but exactly this is a kind of cargo-culting. 99% of persons are better off not "trying ChatGPT". Your country is very lucky to have its own high-quality farmland and the culture around it. The food there is of such a quality that "countries with like 5000% more arable land" will never have a chance at of having. See the US, for all…
The food we produce: exported.
The food we eat: imported.
Nope, it's enforcing an EU directive. Read up GDPR. Italy is actually trying to protect its citizens.
Italy is definitely succeeding at protecting its citizens from entering the 21st century. Let’s be real here. Italy is a dinosaur and scared shitless of change. ChatGPT, lab grown meat, immigration, the list will only get longer.
Not that the US has a positive record on immigration. There's no wall in Sicily, at least.
Keep on gifting your data to the megacorps, I am sure they care about you.
Europe on top of innovation once again. Watch out US and China! /s (I say this as a French citizen)
About once a week I consider dropping out of the tech industry and becoming a politician just so I don't have to sit and watch by the sidelines as incompetent, ignorant people, who studied humanities with not a drop a technical aptitude, bullshit their way through funding and regulating technology. They are never well informed enough to come up with any sort or coherent solution, because they're barely capable in act…
UK politics, IMHO, is blighted by a cabal of Oxbridge unqualified humanities graduates that cycle between journalism and some role in politics (MP, Private Sectary, think tank, "policy advisor").
As consequence both journalism and politics in the UK seem less about the truth or doing what's best and more about selling convincing short term rhetoric.
We need a revolution where we hang the last Cambridge classics graduate with the entrails of the last Oxford PPE graduate[1].