EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

I use the Web to talk to people, learn things, and explore cool stuff other people made. If those other people aren't using the niche crypto/stegano services, then what am I going to use them for?

Yes, there will always be some way to have privacy online, if you're beardy enough and avoid using most popular consumer technology in favor of homegrown hackerly solutions. But a Web without the network effect is a Web that's no good at all for almost all the reasons I care. It'll be good for dissension, semi-legal activity, dubious porn, safety ... there's plenty of times that people need true privacy and security. But when your network's only good for that, then it'll still be dead in all the other ways that made the Internet so amazing.

The problem is most of the poor don't actually get that bump. None of the people who lose their jobs do, nor anyone who was already unemployed, nor the people whose wages were already just above the new minimum wage. But they all have to pay the higher prices.

> Also, at least in Germany, there has been no statistically significant change to general employment when the minimum wage was introduced.

This is quite unsurprising. The vast majority of people make more than minimum wage so instituting a minimum wage would have little to no effect on their employment. The loss of employment is to the people who had been making less than the new minimum wage.

People are often surprised how few people actually make minimum wage. It's a low single digit percentage of people.

> There have however been some marginal price increases as well as reduced employment (This is purporting to show the effects of a minimum wage that only existed for little more than a year when the studies were done. It takes longer than that for some companies to realign their operations with the new costs, e.g. to replace your checkout clerks with machines you have to negotiate with suppliers, evaluate the machines, deploy them, etc. In the meantime you keep the employees and eat the higher cost, but only temporarily.

This is why evaluating this kind of thing is extremely difficult. It can take a decade or more to fully shake out, but the number of confounders that can appear in that time frame make it difficult to distinguish the effects of the minimum wage from everything else that happens in the economy. That's why the issue remains contentious.

More annoyingly, studies in different economies are not comparable. To see why, imagine the effects of a $5000/hour minimum wage. Obviously an unemployment disaster. Meanwhile a $0.05/hour minimum wage would cause approximately no unemployment, but also yield no other benefits.

The amount of unemployment caused by a given minimum wage is determined by dynamic characteristics of the economy. The same minimum wage will cause different amounts of unemployment in Pennsylvania than California etc., or different amounts in 2005 than 2015.

It's all too easy to screw it up and end up on the wrong side of the equation. And even when it's "working" you're still severely screwing over a small percentage of the working poor in exchange for a very modest wage increase for the remainder.

The 'definition' is exactly as vague as I feared it to be:

Consider a blog, one could easily argue that it is a (samizdat) press publication, the blog has a name or title, is regularly updated, provides information to news or other topics and is published as a medium (everything on the web is published in the medium of HTML, PDF, ...) under the initiative, editorial responsibility and control of the "service provider" of whomever maintains the blog.

The same can be argued for any website, forum, government webpage (so we can't even safely link to government pages without exposing oneself to the risk of a fine!)

If the goal was not to expose normal daily citizen activity to the risk of fines, then they should simply require "press publications" to self-declare themselves to be such by means of a tag, or perhaps even better, by having those providers who WISH to be freely linked to provide a tag containing a cryptographic signature endorsing free circulation, such that upload filters can verify without users having to rely on decentralized lists of educated guesses of who would or would not sue for linking freely...