The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

Yeah exactly, right? Europe is the dystopian nightmare, sure.

I wouldn't worry about that. You're ignoring politics, and what this actually is. If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago. They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are, they just want political weapons against the companies. The intention here is not to cure addiction, destroy profits, the intention is to use economic power to achieve political ends. The EU is built on this, it just didn't use to involve that many private companies.

Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.

These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.

In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...

Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.

> Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.

D'oh. But fair.

> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.

Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.

> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.

Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".

> If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago.

Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.

That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties.

They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this:

1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round.

2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner.

In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%.

With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split.

You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues.

They really need to be using something like ranked choice.