331–340 of 443 posts
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Them "leaving", as in having no legal/corporate presence in, the EU wouldn't remove obligations under GDPR. They would have to block all access from EU citizens to do that.
In practice they will get away with it because good luck enforcing those penalties on a company without any assets you can reach.
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> This, among other things of course, helped sentence millions of people to poor and deprived lives for centuries. Wealth inequality is much worse in the US than Europe, so relatively speaking, "poor" in EU is still much better than "poor" in the US.
Europe is a museum at this point. Tourism is their future. What industrial sectors are left are protected by huge government subsidies and tariffs, but as energy goes up in price and their economic dynamism continues to fall, their future is keeping the capital cities pretty for US and Chinese to visit and take pictures. A friend of mine is a Norwegian in the US. He told me all the ambitious people in Norway scheme t…
German and swedish machining/mechanical engineering industry is essentially powerong the world's manufacturing. The biotech companies that gave us RNA vaccines are based in Europe. Where Europe is lagging is large supernational social media, software companies (although Spotify is Swedish). Hardly a museum. Also in comparison to the US or China the European market is quite open (the whole US defence is essentially a large government subsidy scheme).
I find it interesting that free market maximalists are always pointing to FANG companies as examples how the US unregulated market is so much better. The irony is that these companies are so big that they are largely outside free market pressures and competition and I would argue are a good example how the US dropped the ball on regulating industry to keep competition alive.
I like Facebook targeted ads. They're more interesting than generic untargeted ads. When I was shopping for an electric bike Facebook showed me ebikes of the type I wanted (cargo) for weeks. It's convenient. Yesterday I made a comment on a hat ad (I didn't think any man except Walter White should wear a pork pie hat) and now all my ads are for hats. I didn't realize their were so many kinds of men's hats. I don't fee…
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Except they can't. If a service is only profitable with personalized advertising they aren't allowed to say "if you want to use this service you need to allow us to do personalized advertising". Which means that in the future if there's a service I might want to use which is in this category and if I don't mind having my data used to personalize my advertising, I don't have a choice: the service won't exist.
Yes one of the purposes of the GDPR is to make it so such a service does not exist.
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Really? I think this was extremely predictable. This is implementing the GDPR according to the spirit of the law. That is, to make personal information a liability. The other shoe was always going to drop. Any other interpretation including just slapping an "I agree to have my data collected" dialog on top of your product and proceeding as though the law didn't exist has been naively optimistic wishful thinking from…
I don't understand this "free-rider" depiction of Europe, it sounds to me like a delusional and superficial classification. Can someone please explain the rational observations behind it, if any?
> Pharmaceutical breakthroughs are financed by the high prices paid by American patients (and backed by abundant venture capital); government-run health systems in Europe then bulk-buy the same drugs for much less.
If pharma companies did not have expectations for full price to be paid in America, they wouldn't waste their money developing therapies. This effect also applies to pharma companies in Europe that develop for American markets.
In general, I am not in favor of more military spending - but Europe is perceived as relying on the US for security arrangements as well.
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One should probably account for a margin of error as well as different measurement standards as well as timing differences, but by Europe and the US's own governments, Europe has double the poverty rate of the US: - Europe: 21.7% ( https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... ) - US: 11.6% ( https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-mo... ) So a very very generous adjustment would p…
USA's poverty threshold is significantly lower that Europe's. Comparing against median income, of course. So I would assume poverty rates are roughly similar, indeed.
Post-transfer median income is higher in the US than in Europe.
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Those people will be given a choice (assuming Meta doesn’t throw a tantrum and decide to leave the EU in Brexit fashion - which they are more than welcome to do!). “Do you want us to use [extensive list of all of the kinds of information we have meticulously gathered about you] to show you more relevant ads? Yes/no” I have a personal belief on what most people will answer to that question. You may disagree. But it do…
You don’t have to guess. We know. How many people use Gmail vs paying for a provider not owned by an advertiser company? How many people use Hulu free/lite tier vs paying more for zero ads? How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free! People have choices and their preferences are clear: “give me free shit!”
Ads shown in Gmail are not based on the contents of the emails, rather on other characteristics inferred from the associated Google account [0]. It's a bit of a "splitting hairs" thing, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.
I'm not familiar with Hulu.
> How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free!
Those search engines are not as good as Google. All things being equal, I posit that people would prefer products that respect their privacy.
> You don’t have to guess.
Again, that's beside the point. The point is that people should be given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether a company is allowed to process their personal data for the purpose of showing "more relevant" advertisements, and that is a Good Thing.
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I unironically enjoy non-targeted ads. Every time I see one that has nothing to do with my interests, I know that my meticulously tuned home network and browser settings are working.
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But why do you think legislation should be the one forcing that choice on everyone, rather than the market allowing consumers to choose? The issue isn't what we personally like or prefer for ourselves -- it's more about when we think it's legitimate to take away the right of businesses to experiment with business models, and of consumers to be free to enter into the tradeoffs they prefer. Why shouldn't a consumer be…
> But why do you think legislation should be the one forcing that choice on everyone, rather than the market allowing consumers to choose? You paint a rosy libertarian picture about choice, but choice is not an inherently good. I don't want to live in a society that allows the use of consumer data to be used adversarially against consumers to defraud and manipulate them. It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally im…
> It is good when laws prohibit fundamentally immoral behavior.
Sure, but that's not relevant, because people don't agree on what "fundamentally immoral behavior" is to begin with (for instance - I see nothing wrong with voluntarily trading some of your personal data away for a product, subject to lots of terms and conditions).
However, even if people agreed on what "immoral behavior" was, you couldn't regulate it away, because you don't have the ability to directly affect laws.
Regulation is by definition a very coarse instrument. Regulation is necessary because people are evil. But who puts laws and regulations into place? Also people, who are evil. The very fact that you can have greedy CEOs who destroy the environment for profit means that you also get corrupt regulators who write twisted laws for a bit of extra money. So, regulation is inherently subject to corruption - that's exactly how you get regulatory capture[1].
So, given this fundamental truth about humanity, the only reasonable thing to do is to design a system that acknowledges the truth about corruption and is designed to resist it. In this particular case, that means putting labelling and transparency regulation into place, which is much simpler and harder to corrupt and depends far less heavily on the moral frameworks of individuals.
Your proposal to regulate the market to conform to your personal moral code is highly authoritarian and in denial of a basic truth about human nature.