At some point you need to draw a hard line in sand when it comes to people trying to actively supress freedom of expression.
Otherwise they just keep trying and trying. A bully won't stop until he gets punched in the face, and this is what the USA did to the EU bully bureaucrats pushing their will everywhere.
While I don't love over-regulation, and there certainly are some parts of the DSA which are probably over-broad, it is astonishingly rich that the current US administration is targeting the EU for "suppressing freedom of expression".
Also banned: “Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index”
The bullies are anti-disinformation and anti-hate speech activists?
The USA using its diplomatic power to become a defender of hate-speech and disinformation?
I guess when JD Vance deliberately snubbed the democratically elected government of the country when visiting Germany and instead spent his time with a far-right neo-nazi party, it should have been clear which way the wind was blowing.
Land of the free looking like rank shitty low cowards, afraid of every shadow these days. Absolutely no tolerance, demanding subservience. It's totally up-side down, just madcap that any of this is OK with anyone. All Correct turning to All In-Correct, all wrong.
If you wanna operate in a market you have to follow said market's rules and regulations, full stop and period. The only ones actively trying to suppress freedom of expression are the bullies and borderline sociopaths currently in the US executive.
If you've ever read Thierry Breton's personal (and public) threats towards Elon Musk you'd understand who the real "bully and borderline sociopath" was.
Breton once threatened Musk simply for hosting an interview with the democratically-elected President of the US on X:
In the UK we told the EU bully bureaucrats to go f*ck themselves in 2016.
The same thing is possible in all EU nations - never give up hope.
The EU bureaucracy stunts growth on the continent. It's undemocratic (only the executive can originate and repeal law - and they are appointed, not elected), protectionist, bullying, expensive and unnecessary.
Successful nations like Switzerland and Norway (#3 and #4 highest GDP per capita in the European continent) show that you don't need to be an EU member state to prosper, maintain peaceful government and strong human rights protections.
When, in 2029, we have our first decent government in decades, let’s have this conversation again.
Both the Tories and Labour have squandered the opportunities afforded by Brexit. Both parties are weak globalist shills.
Current polling suggests the situation in 2029 will be very different, and we will enjoy an administration that puts the national interest at the forefront of every policy decision. No more narrow-minded focus on the EU27, and much more focus on our service export to the dynamic English speaking economies of the world.
No more growth-killing EU directives lingering on our statute books.
No more deference to foreign human rights lawyers. The UK is perfectly capable of administering its own improved British Bill of Rights.
No more unskilled immigration lowering our national productivity and hammering our limited infrastructure and public services. Targeted legal immigration at the volume we need and no more.
I agree but the issue is that C-suite executives think that AI can replace these things rather than enhance and you end up with lower quality trash. Look at sites like etsy etc., it's been overwhelmed with AI trash that is worth 0 value to anyone
Dunno about games but there was a recent interesting pop video -
Fatboy Slim & The Rolling Stones - Satisfaction Skank - https://youtu.be/_c_V3oPCe-s Not so much as good as human as able to do different things. I could see that kind of thing in games.
That's what I was asking. I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance, which at least implies it. I was questioning that, is all.
If it takes 60 seconds on a GPU I can leave it running over night on a CPU. (And going off previous experience, it won't be even be that slow, I'm just being conservative.)
AirBnB should be banned, and I say that as a very pro-capitalist guy.
In an economy where there is a housing shortage local population needs affordable and long-term (6-months+) rental contracts or they don't have stability.
Capitalism is great in general, but some things, such as healthcare, housing, electricity,... needs to have a stronger regulatory framework then eg TVs since the collapse of basic human necessities creates chaos and eventually becomes the foothold of extreme socialist/communist political parties which then finish the job of destroying the economy.
Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?
Housing and rent are already heavily regulated in Spain. Some regulations and side effects of those regulations:
* Minimum contract length of 5 years.
* Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years).
* It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
* Even if the tenant is not paying, you, the landlord, have to keep paying the utilities, because if you stop paying, you'll be charged with "coacciones".
* If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
* In some cities like Barcelona, regulation goes beyond. Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
* And all that is not going into detail of the "Okupa" problem.
> Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?
New York, as expensive as it is, is still considerably cheaper than cities like SF. Part of this is that they build more, part of it is that they have a usable train system, which allows people to live more spread out across the city, but part of it as well, is that they've banned airbnb. It would be ideal to also see empty unit taxes on units >$10m (inflation adjusted). It would also be good to see high taxes on sales of units >$10m (inflation adjusted).
> Minimum contract length of 5 years.
This is good, assuming it's one sided (the tenant can choose to move out, but the landlord can't break the lease). People need stability in housing more than landlords need to be able to end leases.
> Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years)
Sure, it should be generally tied to inflation, but what other investment exists where you're guaranteed yearly increases? Why are people so adamant that landlords need to be guaranteed minimal increases in their profits?
Housing is a natural monopoly, and allowing businesses to maximize their profits, unchecked, isn't capitalism.
> It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
This is often brought out as a massive negative of regulations, but let's be honest, this is an outlier. Without tenant protections, however, it's common for landlords to evict tenants to increase rents. Even with protections, landlords still take illegal measures to try to evict tenants to increase rents, like doing constant construction at night, or refusing to do maintenance.
This is basically the same complaint about welfare programs. We have to accept some percentage of fraud to serve the greater good.
It's completely normal for most businesses to take a risk based approach to fraud, to maximize profits. Retail businesses, for example, will try to maximize their credit card auth rates, even though that may increase their fraud rate, if the increases in auth rate outweigh the cost of the fraud.
A stable society is worth a small percentage of fraud.
> If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
Good. I don't see how this is a downside.
> Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
Again, this is good. If there's a housing crunch, then residents should be prioritized over tourists.
We do agree. The desired objective of the regulations I mentioned is good. It's a good thing to have some stability as a renter, to not be kicked out and on the streets if you have children and cannot pay the rent, or that yearly rent increases are small enough that renters don't feel asfixiated.
However, we should not only consider the stated objective of the law but the real consequences of them. My point is, housing and rents are quite regulated in Spain. More regulation is being added every year as it serves the political and electoral objectives of our leaders, yet the situation is getting worse. Regulation detached from practical realities will fail to reach the desired objectives.
EU was supposed to be an economic union, but it morphed into a politicaly cancerous union.
Now it's evocing emergency acts to bypass union member states when it sees fit.
On using Russian frozen assets:
>> The vote put forward by von der Leyen reframed the issue of frozen Russian assets as an economic emergency rather than a sanctions policy. This allowed the Commission to invoke Article 122 of the EU treaties, an emergency clause that permits decisions to be adopted by a qualified majority vote instead of unanimity, effectively bypassing veto threats from countries opposed to the move.
This is not what the people asked for, wanted, or were told, though. The issue is the insiduous nature of the "ever closer union" that advances by stealth, deception, manufacturing consent over time, and sometimes by just ignoring what the people have said.
And then, now and then the people suddenly realise, too late, that on an ever growing range of issues their country has become powerless because a change of policy is either no longer within the country's power and is banned under EU law and treaties... and the web is being woven tighter and tigher little by little.
There is no support in member states for leaving the EU or dismantling the EU. "Eurosceptimism" is by and large only wanting to loosen and restrict EU oversight of member states(which again has been the main debate for decades) but even that is anathema and "far right", which should really raise red flags in people's minds even without going full conspirationist.
You are not the people and you do not speak for them. You are one person, just as I am. I want this, and I was told this - clearly, it's in the founding charta!
Right wing populists always pull this parlor trick of framing their views as the views of the people. The people have many different views, you do not speak for us.
There was no EU wide vote, so you cannot claim "the people" want or do not want things.
It hasn't just been communicated in the founding charta, but communicated and confirmed over and over and over again. [0]. If you have a problem with what member states do, then I actually agree - that's why we need to get rid of that layer!
I never claimed your opinion didn't exist, I just called you out for trying to frame your opinion as the one of "the people".
And the EU was always meant to be political, even the EEC was political since I have no clue how you form economic ties without passing legislation.
If anything the EU was built to respect sovereignty of a member state than a union considering they have to evoke emergency power to avoid violating that sovereignty.
>EU was supposed to be an economic union, but it morphed into a politicaly cancerous union.
The EU started with noble goals, but given enough time, the purpose of any large bureaucracy shifts to growing even larger and only existing to justify its own existence, rather than serving its original intended purpose.
Remember the "What would you say...you do here?" Bobs from Office Space where workers in useless jobs couldn't explain why their job is needed but they insisted they were needed.
You see this in the corporate world on a daily basis, but government bureaucracies are no different.
Same can be said about private corporations. We humans still havent figured out how to structure institutions without constructive destruction in the end. Democracies and free markets both have this correctiv destruction built in and both mechanism are under attack.
Lets hope we still get chances to vote out autocrats peacefully and smash oligopols as the sovereign.
>We humans still havent figured out how to structure institutions without constructive destruction in the end.
And we never will. There's nothing to figure out here, since human greed is constant everywhere. No matter what perfect system you think you create, over time, power hungry greedy sociopaths climb to the top, and steer it to favor them and their cronies until it collapses.
The overwhelming majority of swiss immigrants are either highly skilled individuals that the swiss population cannot produce in numbers or they do jobs locals won't do (cleaning, etc).
Good luck telling Swiss pharma or any other of their specialized industries to live without immigrants, they can close tomorrow. Immigrants are an insane boost to Swiss economy.
Also, I lived and been in Switzerland few times after, there's virtually no problematic immigrants. I've never ever felt the slightest danger, even walking at night with nobody but the kind of immigrants you don't like, you just don't.
Even though foreigners are overrepresented compared to locals (as in any other country in the world with immigrants they are the poorest and thus more inclined) the absolute numbers are very very low.
So no, higher or lower number of immigrants don't have linear correlations. Switzerland has an insane number of expats and immigrants as % of the population, insanely higher than the US or other countries like Poland or Italy, yet their crime numbers are fractional.
It's markedly more difficult and expensive for even highly skilled individuals to obtain Swiss residency, speaking from personal experience. Unlike the rest of Western Europe where you can claim to be a Dr. Engineer on asylum and become a citizen a few years down the line so that you can threaten Christmas markets and take shits in churches without repercussion in future. Maintaining a low target population helps in the vetting process and ensures companies prioritize skill needs over lowering costs. The drawback here being it becomes more appealing for companies to export jobs abroad, at the citizens' expense.
Another country which has a similar strict immigration regime - Singapore. And for a direct opposite, there's the Gulf countries, which let everyone and their dog in, so that they can be part of the slaving class for the locals.
Find the market clearing price for unwanted jobs with domestic labor. Any job will be done at the right compensation. This is what UBI would do. I prefer this versus continuing to require an imported underclass. With my apologies to the conservative mental model, “starve the beast” but of cheap labor.
You know that 30%+ of Swiss population is foreign born?
36% of the workforce is foreign born.
In Zurich, Geneve, Lausanne, 44%+ of the residents are foreigners, and more than half the workforce is foreigners. And that's even ignoring how many people work there but reside in neighbouring countries (France border is close to Geneve and Lausanne is close and even has a boat between the two sides mostly carrying workers).
If you think that a Swiss national (which has several advantages from a hiring perspective) is going to be cleaning your toilet, no matter the money, without having higher paying options you're absolutely out of your mind.
Switzerland is a tiny country, it cannot grow endlessly in population.
Albeit it's density is lower than comparable Belgium, Switzerland is crossed by the alps so the real available land is much smaller, virtually all of the residents live in 30% of the space.
In any case, that's the beauty of Switzerland: Swiss citizens can decide for themselves. I've seen many referendums in Switzerland and I've rarely seen Swiss citizens vote against their interest. Proposals have often an initial support, which fades as people discuss it and investigate it more.
Populism has really low grip there, politicians riding emotions have little legislative power.
i'm okay w importing workers if they're treated the same as domestic workers. its the system we have now that incentivizes importing and abusing workers by somehow pretending that employers have no role at all in illegal immigration and only punishing the immigrants that fails miserably at everything immigration policy says it's supposed to do.
Ahh, but the purpose of the system is what it does. Would employers and countries import immigrants if they had to treat them the same as domestic workers?
Switzerland doesn't really have jobs locals wont do like other countries. e.g. cleaning pays enough that it's as respectable a profession as any other.
I've never ever met a single cleaning staff that wasn't foreigner, and I lived both in Lausanne and Zurich.
Low paying jobs are predominantly staffed by foreigners. Swiss youth has a huge array of opportunities even without education, let alone many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money.
> "many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money."
As someone not very familiar with Switzerland I'm curious what you mean by this, as I assume from your wording you don't simply mean generous benefits available to unemployed and low wage people?
Otherwise they just keep trying and trying. A bully won't stop until he gets punched in the face, and this is what the USA did to the EU bully bureaucrats pushing their will everywhere.
Shame that so few of us Europeans do the same.
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