241–250 of 332 posts
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I fail to understand how your particular case works. Not having a horse in the race but just a piece of paper you don't care about doesn't help you to make a point, which is what exactly?
I was replying to a comment that said: "The EU is its citizens. So in a sense the EU did create its citizens." I tried to show that I was a counter-example.
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I totally agree with you all your points. Just to be clear: I never said we missed the bus because of regulation. But the fact that we react like that now shows we don’t have other ideas or means to respond.
Having your communication run by foreign entities is dangerous. it’s no longer even direct communication, it’s curated. It can be used to create political problems, social unrest or movements, it can be used as commercial advantage on other areas. China happened to actually have a true competitor, TikTok and the first instinct of the USA was to try to ban it or force acquisition.
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Interesting. It is possible that German-style proportional representation would yield more faith in US government institutions than FPTP. You can rapidly substitute one corp for another in America which is probably preferable to being permanently ruled by 51% of the people.
Trust me, the problem is not being ruled by 51% of the people, but being ruled by < 1%, which is the case with American oligarchy (or at least their final goal).
And trust me, being ruled by the 1% would give you way better chances than you got with the 51%. The 1% took money and gave us sci-fi technologies, the 51% took absurdly more money and gave us many problems.
Who's your coronavirus counter-strike leader - Gates or Trump?
The rich don't want to eat you. They don't care about you. They want profit, just like you. They will spend a lot of it on pleasure, just like you. Nobody makes profit in the world you're talking about, it grinds to halt, without pleasure (and freedom is connected with that) there is no point in working.
You can also avoid the 1%. They don't care, and if you're saying there are no other options then you didn't look. Actually I recommend to try - you'll find out that small and middle businesses exist, and they need your support now.
- no preventing businesses from using other intermediaries (i.e. payment processors for app stores)
- ensuring businesses can contract with users outside the platform, and then fulfil the contract via the platform (i.e. selling an app directly, but delivering via a store/platform)
- not use data gained as a platform operator to compete with the businesses on the platform giving that data
And the big one:
- "allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores [...] to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper"
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You could say the same thing about your local coffee shop. What's the problem?
No problem - the local coffee shop is also subject to regulations and needs to pay tax, need to respect hard fought worker laws (at least in most countries) and needs to respect the law. Now there are some new regulations for bigger entities. What's the problem?
"Size" of business is an arbitrary and meritless distinction.
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This is weird to me, the argument is not just that company X is a private platform so they should be able to do what they want it is that they're a private US platform and in the US they can do what they want because that's generally the law and social understanding of companies in the US. At least for me it was never that company X can do what they want globally. That's silly they're subject to the laws of the juris…
Corporations cannot do "what they want" in the US, they're subject to regulations and to anti-trust laws. The problem is that the government (both parties) has been very lax about anti-trust enforcement. So now we have companies that are virtual monopolies and oligopolies trying to remove whatever regulations still remain in the books.
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This is weird to me, the argument is not just that company X is a private platform so they should be able to do what they want it is that they're a private US platform and in the US they can do what they want because that's generally the law and social understanding of companies in the US. At least for me it was never that company X can do what they want globally. That's silly they're subject to the laws of the juris…
The argument against/for what? Do you think people who call for new legislation think it is already illegal? This would make no sense.
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These are the usual arguments in defence of the EU's democratic credentials. The fundamental problem I have with them is that they don't actually meet the simple, transparent standards I set out for meaningful democratic representation. National governments pick the members of the European Commision, so if you're not happy with your European Commission representative, take it up with your national government. How, sp…
> How, specifically, should someone do that in practice? Does someone cast an anonymous vote to indicate their preference? Will some robust system then make an objective determination of the outcome based on the popular vote? This is how the people customarily determine their representatives in a representative democracy. Well it up to each national government to decide this process. If you're not happy with the way…
I'll address a couple of your other specific points directly.
You have a strange concept of what personal accountability means, why does the electorate need a direct method of removing an individual? How would that even work? Not to mention the issue that it turns the entire political system into little more than a popularity contest.
The argument is that representatives who have no credible accountability for their actions are free to misrepresent the people they supposedly act for. It creates a principal-agent problem.
As for how it would work, elections where individual candidates are personally supported by votes is one major factor. Powers of recall for representatives who fall far short of the expectations of their electorate are also not unusual, though obviously not universal.
And democracy is inevitably a popularity contest at first anyway. Only after someone has held office for a while can you judge them on their actions rather than their words. For example, when Johnson was elected in December 2019, I doubt many people voting for his party realised that the next year was going to be dominated by something very different to Brexit. At this point, if enough people felt that the Johnson government's response to the coronavirus situation was inadequate, a situation that was barely conceivable at the time the people last voted, is it not reasonable in a democracy that the people should be able to choose new leadership instead of enduring policies the current government had given no substantial indication about before the last election and any consequences they may have for public health?
I notice that in your previous comment, you talk about how terrible FPTP is, now your saying the PR is also bad. What exactly do you want?
I didn't say PR was bad in general. I said party list systems fail my criteria for individual accountability of representatives, which they do. I consider this a significant democratic deficit, and one which could have been avoided by using a better voting system at the relevant elections. Nevertheless, it still results in a more-or-less proportional representation, and in that respect it is clearly superior to FPTP.
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I think what they're trying to do is force Apple (and other OS makers) to provide the ability to uninstall built-in apps. So, your iPhone will come with Apple's default messaging app, but you would potentially have the ability to uninstall it.
It also says their own app can't be placed more favorably on the screen, and a default app certainly sounds more favorable than one not on the screen.
So, maybe a powerful enough government may say, "no, Apple, you're not even allowed to make apps that compete with 3rd party makers - you can only provide a platform"
By today's standards, that would be quite revolutionary.
Such a government would have to do the same to Costco, Microsoft, Amazon, and any number of platforms on which smaller vendors earn their bread.
Ok, I will probably get downvoted for this. But I will still speak my mind: I am an EU citizen and I don’t think that’s the right approach because it’s distracting from what really happened: We missed the big Internet bus because we were so much focused on keeping things the way they were. Now we try to regulate us out. It makes me unbelievably sad. And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australi…
Europe didn’t miss the internet bus because of regulations, there were no regulations until the dust settled. The thing is, there’s no US style capital in EU. The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it. I remember when YouTube was burning billions per year, Facebook being labeled as “would never be profitable”. Is there the kind of money in Europe that would…