If the works are so great then you've got nothing to worry about. Kids will read them on their own. Of course we both know that's not true, because the works are not that great.
The usefulness of reading books is not about what factual information you can glean from them. They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously. In that sense traditionally published works aren't going to offer all that much more than fanfiction.
> They're about engaging the imagination and making you take hypothetical situations seriously.
- that nudges readers in interesting (to society) or new (to the reader) directions. Or at least in not in actively harmful ways. Otherwise, OF, livestreaming, or whatever latest social media BS, etc. are king: purposefully designed to create parasocial relationships that trick you thinking you have chance to be noticed.
My main beef with most fan fiction is that in my experience, it unconsciously locks readers into an extremely rigid way of thinking. Of course, this varies from fandom to fandom but woe upon the budding writer who ships the wrong pair or violates the canon.
It mirrors religious dogma, but somehow even worse when compared to all the disputes in Christianity throughout the centuries. (Plus, there's at least a connection between Christianity to modern democracy.)
Required reading in school killed my interest in reading. When I graduated I was very happy that I wouldn't have to read books ever again.
It took me about 5 years or so until anime and manga got me to try another fiction book. That eventually led to reading more books. But when school was done I really did think that I wasn't going to touch a (fiction) book again.
---
It makes me wonder if kids in the future will have "required reading" where they have to play certain old video games. Will that make them hate video games?
In our local highschool (near Copenhagen, Denmark) they have scheduled reading time for all pupils while in school - weekly as part of their normal schoolday. That is, instead of normal class everyone needs to bring a book of their own choosing and read in it. No phones allowed during this time, so they can either read or stare out the window. The local library helps them find books of their own interest.
The idea is to get them find genres and books they like and find joy reading it, while not taking time out of their free time.
Ironically this wouldn't work for me because I do almost all of my reading on my phone these days. It has become the main use of my phone at this point.
It is a good idea though, as long as they can find things they want to read. I've been sucked into the "bleeding edge" of reading (web novels), so it can be a bit more challenging to find things I really want to read. They are still out there though. Eg The Martian and Project Hail Mary (the former actually started as a web novel) .
What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid.
I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.
Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers.
"Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.
It's not clear what "full access to everyone's data" actually means, isn't it limited to things that are already publicly available? So for example, I don't think researchers would get access to someone's Likes because that feature is now considered private, but they could access things like Posts and Retweets. My expectation is that researchers would be allowed to run queries against publicly available data as part of their research, but they wouldn't be allowed to do a huge download with a copy of everything posted during the last 5 years.
Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws, and the way that they handle researcher access is by providing carefully controlled remote environments with sandboxed access to user data, which forms the basis for my understanding of how researchers are typically provided access to social media data.
It means what it says. A lot of these academics want to access people's IP addresses because they're trying to map out social networks and bot accounts, by which they mean any account they don't like the views of. So it means stripping people's anonymity under the guise of "research" and of course those academics can be trusted to immediately report everyone posting conservative views to the police, who will then arrest them and prosecute them.
But please understand that the EU is not a part of the world that has the rule of law. It has rule by law. Law in the EU is a vague thing, discovered as often as written, in which people who advance the EU's social plan are legal and people who oppose it are illegal. It's a system in which the EU Commission is judge, jury and executioner, and the courts are merely rubber stamps to which you can appeal if you feel like wasting money arguing in front of judges chosen for loyalty to the project over loyalty to high minded judicial principle.
Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data?
I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.
I guess one point of confusion is exactly what data is shared, because I understood it to be general access to things that are already publicly available.
Furthermore, X offers paid access to the same data through their enterprise API program, so you're already giving access to unrelated third parties. Is there a significant distinction between the data that researchers could access and what's available through enterprise API?
There is a big difference between auditors and "researchers". Researchers are just academics whose incentives are to publish things and makes a name for themselves - possibly the worst group to give data access to.
Maybe it’s stupid in your perspective. nevertheless; nations have the right to put laws in place and enterprises willing to provide goods and services ought to follow those rules.
And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate. These nations can do whatever they want but let's be honest about what's going on here. The law is stupid because it's forcing US tech companies to subsidize research boondoggles. They're providing bullshit jobs to useless academics who are incapable of doing any real work, and the final output will be some long reports that no one ever reads.
> And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate.
Can you help me understand how the EU is stagnant? Granted, they have lower economic growth than the US, but they're (mostly) not running large fiscal deficits.
And unable to innovate is quite simply, untrue. Deepmind (you know the people that invented LLMs) were a UK based company and were purchased by Google. Spotify & Skype were also both relatively innovative.
If by innovative, you mean are highly valued in the stock market above what a rational person would pay, then yeah Europe doesn't have as much "innovation". Now, if there was a single EU capital market (which honestly should be in London, despite the political complexities) then that might not be true.
Also worth noting that a lot of the US market is propped up by EU/EEA investors. Like, the Norwegian oil fund owns an appreciable amount of the US stock market. What would happen if all the European money was withdrawn from the US market? Nothing good for US "innovation".
And on the core point here, social media is now the public sphere, and as such is definitely worthy of investigation by academics. Like, if FB can do this (with much more personal data) then Twitter/X can do it. In fact, it would be super easy as they used to do it before Elon decided to attempt to monetise it badly.
Like, most studies of social media were performed on Twitter data, precisely because of this.
It's because X is denying researchers access to public data. Data which can be used to detect scams and illegal advertising. It's really a consumer protection fine, but this article explains it better.
A lot of people seem to be forgetting that the Cambridge Analytica scandal started off with data that was supposed to be used for research projects at the University of Cambridge being exfiltrated for commercial political use [0].
That said, this is most likely a tit-for-tat by the EU against the Trump administration, because we live in a world where all countries (even the US) have now weaponized regulations for negotiating leverage.
Our red line in both the Biden admin as well as the current admin was the DSA. The EU's red line is not being included in any negotiation over the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. The US fights against the DSA by arguing about infringement on free speech. The EU then tries to fight back over market competition. And it goes on and on and on.
This is why a lot of businesses get antsy about trade wars.
They could implement a similar system to what Facebook currently provides when doing research with platform data. I think they only allow access to carefully controlled data through a remote sandboxed environment.
I think Twitter is already providing access to this data through paid APIs too, so this is effectively subsidizing researcher access.
Probably, but as I mentioned before, the EU has been using the DSA as a negotiating tool against the US - just like we are using Free Speech absolutism and "censorship" as a tool against the EU in negotiations.
Unlike other major tech companies like Meta or Alphabet that fall under the DSA, X doesn't have a similar presence in the EU to give it a firewall. Alphabet has Poland on it's side [0], Meta has Ireland on it's side [1], Amazon has Luxembourg on it's side [2], and Microsoft has Czechia on it's side [7][8][9], and because of Musk's ties to the GOP, it becomes a useful political lever while not directly hurting individual EU states. If X somehow complies, some other issue will crop up against (eg.) Tesla despite the Gigafactory because Brandenburg is a lost cause if you aren't affilated with the AfD or BSW. It's the same reason why X doesn't push back when India passes a diktat because Indian law holds corporate leaders criminally liable and X has a significant India presence [10]
It's the same way how if you want to hold Germany by the balls you pressure Volkswagen [3] and if you want to pressure France [4] you target LVMH's cognac, scotch, and wine business [5].
This is a major reason why companies try to build GCCs abroad as well - being in the same room gives some leverage when negotiating regulations. Hence why Czechia, Finland, Luxembourg, and Greece pushed back against French attempts at cloud sovereignty [6] because OVHCloud only has a presence in France and Poland, but Amazon and Microsoft have large capital presences in the other 4.
alephnerd, I have to flat out disagree with your grievances [0][1][2][3][4][5]. The more I read, the worse it gets. The fact that some people in a foreign country feel personally persecuted by the DSA and are willing to bully us around is not a good argument against it [1]. In fact, I think the American attitude of having "red lines" about this is quite frankly irrelevant to the bigger picture [2]. I think there are plenty of ego-syntonic justifications for why it's okay to take a different stance than us on our policies, but while there are plenty of sources, I don't think there is a lot of reasoned analysis [3]. I'm sure much of it is shaped by personal circumstances. But I admit, sweeping historical references can be interesting too [4]. As a Swede, I can tell you that not a single person I know cares about random companies in Czechia, Luxembourg, Germany or France getting pressured [5]. I'm not very familiar with it, but I'm sure Finland already regrets their previous stance on cloud-infra. Perceptions have fundamentally changed about the United States as an ally. As for GCAP and FCAS, they have different requirements and serve different purposes. What's your take on the next Gripen?
If you want to pressure Volkswagen, go ahead. Nobody cares. The fundamental flaw in your position is your implicit assumption about what we value or what motivates us. We're not Americans. I don't think America's "non-tariff barriers" are a valid concern. They are disingenuous rhetoric for domestic consumption. Heads would roll if there was ever an agreement with the US to lower our standards and open up local industries to competition from lower quality foreign importers due to geopolitical pressure. Pressure is not going to undo the DSA or the GDPR because they have broad support. As others have said, it is decades overdue. If Elon Musk is mad about having to follow the law, I'm sure he can find sympathy elsewhere. His sour grapes are not principled, they are about protecting his ego and finding others who do so for him.
Sorry for the bluntness, but I feel it is very much warranted.
Of course no one cares about random companies in Czechia or France getting pressured; it's not meant to sway public opinion in Sweden, otherwise it would have been a waste of influence (money). I think alephnerd operates on a higher level of abstraction in his commentary, and you mistake this as him making specific validity claims about the policies. I think your grievances stem from this gap in abstraction.
For example, he might personally support DSA/GDPR, but he says that the US generally views these as “non-tariff barriers” to US service companies[0] and doesn’t bother evaluating the policies themselves. essentially saying for the purposes of predicting how the US will react, it's sufficient to analyze how the US views them and the actual policy details lose relevance in that context. He also shared a detail[0] about how the US placed their lobbyists as commissioners on GDPR, which is an interesting operational detail that argues against the broad support argument you’re making. Another question is whether there would still be broad support for some policy after it has been enacted and its adverse effects have been felt.
> For example, he might personally support DSA/GDPR, but he says that the US generally views these as “non-tariff barriers” to US service companies[0] and doesn’t bother evaluating the policies themselves. essentially saying for the purposes of predicting how the US will react, it's sufficient to analyze how the US views them and the actual policy details lose relevance in that context. He also shared a detail[0] about how the US placed their lobbyists as commissioners on GDPR, which is an interesting operational detail that argues against the broad support argument you’re making. Another question is whether there would still be broad support for some policy after it has been enacted and its adverse effects have been felt.
This.
> I think alephnerd operates on a higher level of abstraction in his commentary, and you mistake this as him making specific validity claims about the policies. I think your grievances stem from this gap in abstraction.
This (but does make me sound kind of pretentious). I started my career in Tech Policy (and considered a career in academia for a hot second) before pivoting to being a technical IC and climbing the ladder. I am responding as I would when I was a TF.
--------
I am a supporter of multilateralism and do think the EU was a net benefit, but the EU's approach to unanimity should have been reformed during the 2004-07 expansion, and the Eurozone should have been decoupled from the political goals of the EU then unified. I'd probably say I lean closer to reformist academics like Draghi and Garicano.
> Sorry for the bluntness, but I feel it is very much warranted
No worries. I think you misunderstood my post.
I used to work in the tech policy space, and I'm just bluntly explaining how we in the policymaking space view these discussions - especially with regards to negotiating with the EU.
> As a Swede, I can tell you that not a single person I know cares about random companies in Czechia, Luxembourg, Germany or France getting pressured
Well duh. You aren't the target for such an influence op. Leadership in (eg.) Czechia, Luxembourg, Germany or France are.
Much of the EU runs on unanimity, so all you need to do is pressure a single country and you have a veto.
This is what China has been doing with Sweden to a certain extent via Geely-owned Volvo Car Group and Polestar [0] and what we in the US have been doing with Ericcson [1][2][3]. Even the EU tries to use similar levers against the US [6].
To be brutally honest, this is how the game is played.
Most nations have now adopted the "elite-centric approach" to transnational negotiations [4], which makes it difficult for the EU, because the line between national soverignity and the EU with regards to foreign and economic affairs is not well defined. If you are not a veto player [5] your opinion does not matter.
Once you understand Political Science basics, a lot of stuff starts making sense. And I went to a college where heads of states would visit on a biweekly basis, and a large subset of European (and other regions) leaders attended or recruit from.
> What's your take on the next Gripen?
DoA if it depends on a GE power plant - the Volvo engine is a licensed version of the GE F404, so the US has final say on any Saab Gripen exports.
The DSA is decades overdue. It's absurd that there hasn't been one. There's also a dozen non-EU countries that have one, and that number has been growing rapidly.
To call it a "negotiation tool" is like calling literally any import tax or tariff - of which hundreds of thousands existed and were entirely accepted as squarely in the Overton Window long before Trump took office - purely a "negotiation tool". Just because it's new doesn't make it one any more so than such import taxes which have been around for ages.
> There's also a dozen non-EU countries that have one, and that number has been growing rapidly
Not really. Most of them offer significant carve-outs for American BigTech companies, or their implementation has been stayed, or significant capex subsidizes are provided to help reduce their impact for American BigTechs considering FDI in those countries.
It has been a DNC supported policy [0] as well to put pressure on countries that are even considering a digital services act. Heck the Biden admin began the process of making a legal example out of Canada [1] as a warning shot to other countries considering such options.
> To call it a "negotiation tool" is like calling literally any import tax or tariff ... purely a "negotiation tool".
That is what import taxes and tariffs are when not clubbed with subsidizes and formal sector specific industrial policy, because the act of giving MFN status to certain nations is itself a negotiating tactic. Canada's backing down on a digital service tax is a good example of that [2]
The whole point of (eg.) giving the UK preferential market access to the US over the EU, and giving Japan and South Korea preferential market access to the US over China is because it is a lever we can use when negotiating. Heck, France and Germany have both constantly tried leveraging tariffs and import taxes as a negotiating tactic against the US under the Biden admin [3][4] (and of course earlier).
As I mentioned above, this has been a slow-rolling negotiation between the US and EU since 2019. We in the US have bipartisan support to oppose the DSA and DSA-equivalents abroad. It was prominent stance in the Biden administration [0], and even Harris would have put a similar degree of pressure on the EU.
We have no obligation to give Europeans a red carpet, and you guys are not in a position to push back anyhow. The Chinese [5] and Russians have given similar ultimatums to the EU as well. What are you going to do? Sign an FTA with India and then face the same problem in 10 years with them?
You guys have fallen into the same trap that the Mughal and Qing Empires fell into in the 18th-19th century. Anyhow, we've unofficially signalled we are leaving the responsibility of Europe's defenses to Europe by 2027 [6] - meaning member states have no choice but to end up buying American gear or completely vacillate to Russia on Ukraine.
You're still not explaining how the DSA is supposedly a negotiating tactic from the EU any more than you could say that about GDPR. It's a new legal framewo tackling a relatively new set of problems. If any of them get watered down because of deals with the US, then you could make that sort of claim.
> Anyhow, we've unofficially signalled we are leaving the responsibility of Europe's defenses to Europe by 2027 [6] - meaning member states have no choice but to end up buying American gear or completely vacillate to Russia on Ukraine.
Or just buying from the existing European providers? Most American gear has a (sometimes better, cf. all the stuff even the US buys from European companies) European based equivalent. The only major exception is the F-35, but at least one 6th gen European jet is in the works, and unless fighting with the US, an 5th gen stealth fighter isn't really that needed. European manufacturers need to increase output, and they have been working on it and have done so quite a lot already.
> Or just buying from the existing European providers? Most American gear has a (sometimes better, cf. all the stuff even the US buys from European companies) European based equivalent.
That might happen over the long term (I still have doubts given that whenever a joint EU project is formed between two countries with vendors, they inevitabely end up collapsing due to domestic political considerations such as the European MBT and FCAS - no leader wants to be the leader who shut down a factory with 1200 high paying unionized jobs for the greater good), but cannot happen in the 1 year timeframe given.
The reality is, if we the US make a deal with Russia over the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the next 12 months, the EU will have no choice but to accept it if you do not put boots on the ground and if you do not expropriate Russian government assets in the EU. But your leadership class has rejected [2] both [3].
> European manufacturers need to increase output, and they have been working on it and have done so quite a lot already.
Not enough for the 1 year time frame needed
> how the DSA is supposedly a negotiating tactic from the EU any more than you could say that about GDPR
We view the DSA as a non-tariff barrier to American services companies. This is both a Trump admin view [0] as well as a Biden-era admin view [1].
We held similarly negative views about the GDPR until Ireland, Czechia, Poland, and Luxembourg accommodated us by hiring our lobbyists as their commissioners.
And this is why every single pan-EU project fails - every major country like the US (previously listed) and China [4][5] cultivated economic and political ties with members that act as vetos in decisions that have a unanimity requirements.
This is why I gave the comparison to the Qing and Mughal Empire - the English, French, and other European nations broke both empires by leveraging one-sided economic deals with subnational units (eg. the Bengal Subah in the Mughal Empire and the unequal treaties in the Qing Empire), which slowly gnawed away at unity.
We in the US, China, Russia, India, and others are starting to do the same to you - not out of explicit strategy, but due to the return of multipolarity and most European state's failure to recover from the Eurozone crisis.
> whenever a joint EU project is formed between two countries with vendors, they inevitabely end up collapsing due to domestic political considerations such as the European MBT and FCAS - no leader wants to be the leader who shut down a factory with 1200 high paying unionized jobs for the greater good
Eurofighter Typhoon and before that the Panavia Tornado. That lineage's next up is the GCAP 6th gen plane.
Horizon/Orizonte and after that the FREMM (which is so good even the US are buying it). In general Italian/French naval cooperation is very strong.
The whole of MBDA and hell even Airbus were created for inter-country cooperation.
There are plenty of successful examples on which to build on, as well as failures from which to learn. But again, today very few military things cannot be sourced from a European supplier. BAE, Leonardo, Dassault, Thales, Rheinmetall, KNDS, Saab, Fincantieri, Naval Group, Indra, Airbus, MBDA etc. are world leaders in their respective fields.
> The reality is, if we the US make a deal with Russia over the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the next 12 months, the EU will have no choice but to accept it if you do not put boots on the ground and if you do not expropriate Russian government assets in the EU
No? US can sign whatever bootlicking deal it wants with Russia, but it's up to Ukraine what happens actually. The EU will continue backing Ukraine. Boots on the ground are highly unlikely, but exploration of Russian assets is quite probable (opposition isn't massive, and as time goes on, will only whither).
> We view the DSA as a non-tariff barrier to American services companies. This is both a Trump admin view [0] as well as a Biden-era admin view [1].
Cool, nobody cares. The US has put in sufficient actual tariffs that it cannot scream "unfair". EU leaders will try to negotiate whatever they can to lower short term economic damage, but the long term damage is done. The US is not a reliable trade or anything partner, and there's no going back on that.
Regarding your Mughal and Qing comparisons... Damn, where do I even start? EU isn't a country, so the comparison is off from the start.
How? Ukraine uses American intel for targeting, a significant amount of American munitions either bought directly from the US or indirectly by member states, and more critically, we in the US can force Ukraine to the table by preventing access to these systems.
> but exploration of Russian assets is quite probable (opposition isn't massive...
How? Belgium has vetoed expropriating Russian assets [0] because the ECB rejected providing a backstop. And Hungary has vetoed the utilization of Eurobonds [1]
If EU member states cannot expropriate Russian assets nor provide boots on the ground in Ukraine nor provide munitions and intel to replace American offerings in the next 1 year, what else is there that the EU can do?
On top of that, we've given the 2027 deadline for NATO, so now what should the EU prioritize?
> That lineage's next up is the GCAP 6th gen plane
Which isn't really an EU project - it's a Leonardo SA - Mitsubishi project as Leonardo is dual British-Italian. And that's my point. No EU joint defense project succeeds because inevitably individual states in the EU protect their champions
> The US is not a reliable trade or anything partner, and there's no going back on that.
Yep. And who else is there? The Chinese gave the exact same ultimatum as the US to European leadership, and so are the Indians as part of the FTA negotiation.
And we can always put the squeeze on Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and LVMH and make both Germany and France squeal [2] and blunt any regulations coming out of the EU as a result - just like the China [3] and India [4].
> are world leaders in their respective fields
They absolutely are in R&D and IP, but their production will not scale out until 2029-35, at which point it would be too late.
They have been cut off already. But if you think that Ukraine was flying blind until now if not for US targeting, I don't know what to tell you.
> Which isn't really an EU project - it's a Leonardo SA - Mitsubishi project as Leonardo is dual British-Italian
No, Leonardo is Italian with significant presence in the UK. But in any case the British component is provided by BAE Systems (which also heavily participate in F-35). And yes, it's not an EU project, it's a project in which European countries and companies are taking part. Does that change anything?
> Which isn't really an EU project - it's a Leonardo SA - Mitsubishi project as Leonardo is dual British-Italian. And that's my point
> No EU joint defense project succeeds because inevitably individual states in the EU protect their champions
Do I need to list the big successes again? This is categorically not true.
> How? Belgium has vetoed expropriating Russian assets [0] because the ECB rejected providing a backstop. And Hungary has vetoed the utilization of Eurobonds [1]
Belgium can be convinced potentially, and with any luck Orban would be heading to prison next year, so Hungary wouldn't be vetoing Eurobonds.
> The Chinese gave the exact same ultimatum as the US to European leadership, and so are the Indians as part of the FTA negotiation.
What ultimatum? To drop DSA? Source?
> They absolutely are in R&D and IP, but their production will not scale out until 2029-35, at which point it would be too late.
Production of what? This is so industry and company specific that I struggle taking you seriously just throwing random years like that for everything. And in any case one the major weapon of the war is drones, for which manufacturing is mostly local in Ukraine. There are a million other things that go into a war machine, but pretending that the second US cuts supplies Ukraine has to surrender is disingenuous.
They cannot. The Belgian government has categorically rejected expropriation 3 days ago because the ECB rejected providing any funding, and Euroclear has announced it will fight the EU in Belgian court if any steps are taken to do so [2] with Belgian govenenent backing [4], so those funds would anyhow be frozen for years.
You aren't even reading any of my citations.
> Orban would be heading to prison next year, so Hungary wouldn't be vetoing Eurobonds
We still have Slovakia [3].
> What ultimatum? To drop DSA? Source
Over other regulations like CBAM [0]. The same way the US is playing hard ball over the DSA, China+India are playing hard ball over CBAM.
> Leonardo is Italian with significant presence in the UK
Yep, and as a result needs to continue to follow UK specific regulations and export controls [1], but being a single overarching conglomerate makes it significantly easier to manage the GCAP project, versus FCAS which became a Renault-Airbus spat which turned into a France-Germany spat.
> but pretending that the second US cuts supplies Ukraine has to surrender is disingenuous.
EU leadership has admitted this fact [5] and even best case projections [6] show it is a Herculean task in the next 1 year.
> Yep, and as a result needs to continue to follow UK specific regulations and export controls [1], but being a single overarching conglomerate makes it significantly easier to manage the GCAP project, versus FCAS which became a Renault-Airbus spat which turned into a France-Germany spat.
I have a hard time with you, you sound extremely confident in your opinions, provide sources and everything, and then make massive errors like saying no European common military projects work (after having been given a list of the big hits), confuse what Leonardo is and who is working on GCAP, and now you're confusing Renault (a car manufacturer that used to make planes a century ago, and that has recently said they'll look into making drones from underused factories) and Dassault Aviation.
To top it off, you cite sources that don't support your claims.
> Yep, and as a result needs to continue to follow UK specific regulations and export controls [1],
And cite a source that merely says "Requirement to rate each part number being exported from the UK in accordance with the UK Military Classification List;
" (emphasis mine).
> Over other regulations like CBAM [0]. The same way the US is playing hard ball over the DSA, China+India are playing hard ball over CBAM.
"Playing hardball" is not ultimatum. And your source doesn't even support your "hard ball" claim, it says India tried pushing back which was refused by the EU.
How what? How the EU will support Ukraine? The same way it currently has, and if things get dire, there will be more pressure to get alternative revenue streams (like convincing Belgium).
Or how there have been no ultimatums, and how EU legislations aren't negotiating tactics?
It's not "any company", it's exceptionally large platforms who can give insight into large societal questions and have enough influence to sway people's opinions. The data is technically public already, researchers could scrape it, but investigations has to be able to be done to ensure the platforms aren't used to intentionally steer people's opinion in a specific direction, since they're unable to self regulate that it seems.
> Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?
In the US that's called an FOIA. It could include their personal devices if they use them for work communication. It's not limited to research purposes.
I'm wondering this as well. Buying 40% of global production just sounds too much. What kind of user counts would they require for that much compute to pay off? Billions of people? What's the chance they could actually get that many users and charge them money? Zero?
I found it useful for learning to write prose. There's nothing quite like instantaneous feedback when learning. The downside was that I hit the limit of the LLM's capabilities really quickly. They're just not that good at writing prose (overly flowery and often nonsensical).
LLMs were great for getting started though. If you've never tried writing before, then learning a few patterns goes a long way. ("He verbed, verbing a noun.")
And in some areas it's even worse than that - construction quality for housing can be very poor. You basically need an independent building inspection to not get scammed by poor quality construction.
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
This was actually law for 8 years until the Court of Justice of the EU found it to be violating fundamental rights and was declared invalid.
It's still a law in Denmark, despite being rendered illegal in the EU, and likewise in national courts.
It was last used to convict a murderer of the murder of Emilie Meng (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Emilie_Meng). At the time, he had kidnapped a 13 year old girl (IIRC), that he had sexually assaulted for 24+ hours, and various dashcam recordings were used to piece together what had happened. He was also convicted of attempted kidnapping of a 15 year old girl from a school.
They found the 13 year old in his home, so not much doubt about that, but the other two cases were partially proven with phone metadata logging, proving he had been in the area at the time.
In the light of that, it's hard to disagree 100% that it's a "bad idea". It's a question of balance I guess, and the mass surveillance proposed in ChatControl is way out of balance. Not only does it scan in the background, it also scans for things that are unknown to you, and alerts authorities without alerting you. That's the perfect tool for facist regimes to get rid of political dissents.
It's always a tradeoff. Nothing is ever going to have zero benefit, the problem is that these laws use the marginal benefit as an excuse to institute something that actually has massive downsides.
> It's always a tradeoff. Nothing is ever going to have zero benefit
Realizing that is the first step to having any kind of productive discourse, much less a chance of influencing the outcome. It's also the step I see most commenters in discussions on this and related topics here, are unable to take.
But then, the follow-up step is:
> the problem is that these laws use the marginal benefit as an excuse to institute something that actually has massive downsides
Are they marginal though, and are the downsides that big? Or does it only seem that way from our armchairs, as we debate computer philosophy and look at the world as a diagram of interacting systems, instead of, you know, the real world?
I'm not saying these particular regulatory ideas are good - I just have a problem with this assumption (not even implicit, it's often outright spelled out here), that it's some evil elites that try to strip us off our privacy and freedom, and keep trying to push the same laws hoping to catch our vigilant protectors off-guard.
Truth is, there's plenty of people who push for these things because they actually think of the children and honestly think these are good trade-offs, and they may be even more right than we are. They definitely sit closer to the real world and real people, real problems and real policing, than we do. They may be fatally misguided, too, but we won't achieve anything unless we try and see their perspective and honestly address the issues they're concerned with.
The removal of out-dated privacy offers great benefits. Why not begin to invest and develop technology to scan people's brains and leverage the supreme protection advantages for the nation state by its complete elimination ?
Mandate that every resident of the EU wear a certified, union-approved, scanning head-band that monitors the resident's brain for violent, racist, subversive or even "offensive" thoughts using state-of-the-art AI and supporting algorithms.
Authorities are notified immediately and are granted auto-approved warrants. Judges get notifications on auto-sentences that include mandatory re-education to heal such delinquents. Obviously, the system will include the vital and necessary exemptions - politicians and friends of the party, top campaign-donors, favored minorities and cartels, etc.
Every Resident will be made Safe and Happy! This will lead to the establishment of an utopian state - the ultimate paradise on Earth! "Privacy", today, is a nasty detriment that is holding back the Progress of Civilization.
Eh, I don't know, I feel like "is complete population surveillance a net good?" has been answered a million times, I'm not sure we need to go into it from first principles.
"Complete population surveillance" is an ill-defined category; depending on how you slice it, it's something very undesirable, or a status quo we've been living in for the past couple decades.
complete population surveillance is the system we evolved to thrive in: there is no privacy in hunter gatherer societies. and in medieval city societies the average person had no privacy. it was only nobles who had privacy, and they were generally up to no good.
Both have been "status quo" for decades, and subject pretty much everyone in the western world to significant, continuous surveillance. We can discuss whether it's desirable, but it's been like this for a while and people very much like benefits both provide.
Your phone (GSM anyway) continuously reports back to the cell tower it's connected to, the strength of every other cell tower it can "see". The cell network, not the handset, decides which is the better cell tower for your handset to transfer to, which is why this information is being sent in the first place.
That information, the strength of cell towers, along with the knowledge of exactly where a cell tower is placed, can be used to triangulate your position down to a few meters in crowded areas with many cell towers. It's also how your phone establishes its position without GPS.
Besides that, you probably also have a handful or more apps that tracks your location within 100m constantly.
That's not the point of this thread. The original point is whether there's any desirable mass surveillance. I think we've pretty much shown there isn't.
Yet it predates smartphones, and is a fundamental aspect of how cellular networks operate. Surveillance of course got more thorough, detailed and overarching over time, still largely for engineering reasons - the network needs to know precisely where each handset is to aim the radio beam at it.
Your location is already known to your mobile operator, to your phone OS manufacturer, to various social media services, and more, including the government/law enforcement on request (maybe, or they have permanent access, who knows).
Any time you buy stuff with a debit/credit card, the details of that transaction is known to your bank, your card provider, tax authorities, including where you bought stuff, and by request, authorities
Money that goes into your bank account is also known by your bank (obviously), by tax authorities, and by request, authorities.
Your ISP knows who you talk to, and can easily log metadata about which sites you visit, even if you use a secure DNS, and in most countries, authorities can request (metadata) logging from your ISP, which you'll never even notice.
During COVID, health authorities started analyzing sewage to estimate how much the virus had spread in various communities, and some places they were down to street level accuracy. Obviously that gets a lot more diffuse on Manhattan than some rural city with 400 people in it, but you pretty much can't fart without anyone knowing it.
We are already under constant surveillance, whether we like it or not. I don't mind as much as long as it's used retroactively, but the ChatControl proposition would be proactive instead. It would scan your texts and report if it found something "suspicious", with the caveat that you as a user don't know what's suspicious today (or tomorrow). The list isn't public, and you wouldn't get notified that someone had called an adult, not until someone comes knocking on your door.
Their plan is/was to use AI, and we all know that ChatGPT never gets confused about anything, so that sounds like a great and ultra consistent plan. Most things require context. I might be angry because some kids gave me hard time, and write "fuck all children" to someone, but the anger isn't evident in the message, only the literal message, which I agree might be interpreted as something else (deliberately). This would then (probably) result in a notification for human review, a task that would fall to the operator of said service, so now Meta, Google or whomever has a legal justification for reading my messages looking for context, and I can't see any way that could go wrong. The other option was for law enforcement to read the messages, and while they're probably a bit more trustworthy in terms of privacy, I doubt we want to staff up our law enforcement offices by a factor 10 to read peoples messages.
The list could also be updated behind your back, so for totalitarian wannabe regimes, it could be used to pinpoint exactly who is organizing all those darned protests.
- The data was collected in 2016, and was used in 2023 - a retention period of 7 years, way longer than the specified maximum of 2
- I'd argue that the basis of lawmaking is weighing the advantages versus the costs - supplying partial evidence in a case once a decade does not meet the requirements for introducing mass surveillance with infinite retention
The police work was sloppy, the facts as they stand are:
- The guy was on a list of 1400 or so of suspects, and was convicted of abducting a 13yo in 2023, a different crime. It bears mentioning that the town had a population of 5k and the municipiality 63k, halving that just to count the men doesn't give you a short list
- A white car was seen at the 2016 scene of the crime, suspected to be a Hyundai i30, but with a degree of uncertainty, just to illustrate how uncertain they were, the article mentions the police confiscated a white van
- The guy owned and sold his 2016 Hyundai around the time
- Thanks to Big Brother dragnet perma-retention surveillance (mobile cell info), it was established that the guy was in the area (a train station!) of the 2016 crime at the time (which is a large window considering the exact time of the disappearence of the first girl is not well known)
From this it's unclear to me whether the same guy was the perp in the 2016 and 2023 cases. If he was, I'd argue the dragnet-collected evidence is only circumstantial. I feel like it was possible that the police wanted to pin the crime on him as they had an expectation to catch the 2016 killer and he was obviously a pedo.
Even if he did it, I'd say the digital evidence was neither necessary nor that important in convicting him.
"- The data was collected in 2016, and was used in 2023 - a retention period of 7 years, way longer than the specified maximum of 2"
Normally, when there's an ongoing police investigation, the police can either request and retain a copy of the data, or request the holder of the data retain it until "further notice". I'm assuming that's what was going on here.
"If he was, I'd argue the dragnet-collected evidence is only circumstantial."
The phone logging was not conclusive evidence, only used to establish that he had been in the area. They found various artifacts in his house, like a roll of duct tape with the dead girls DNA on, that he explained he had found while walking around the lake, the same type of duct tape used to bind the girl. They also found various other items with the girls DNA on.
They used the logging data to establish his whereabouts for the night in question and compared it to his statement of where he'd been. They also used various financial transactions, like buying a cup of coffee with his credit card at a gas station, etc.
In Denmark, DNA cannot be used as a single evidence, only as supporting evidence, and the same goes for phone logging. But combined, if your location data says you've been there, and your DNA is found at the crime scene, even though it may not by itself be enough to get you convicted, it makes all other evidence much more believable.
I've read on a bit and found the additional details about the tape with DNA on it, which makes him look more guilty - but this wasnt mentioned in the wikipedia article, and the phone logs which you mentioned as justification for mass surveillance are less than worthless.
Establishing that both the perp and victim was at the same train station some time during a longish window time doesn't mean jack.
As for DNA I'm not a criminology expert, but if courts don't accept it as conclusive evidence means there's something wrong with it - courts have a long history of accepting official sounding bunk ('expert' witnesses, polygraph etc) in order to manufacture evidence to their conclusions.
Anyways I don't want to detour from my main argument that even from the official PoV the phone evidence is very weak, I'd argue it's meaningless, and using this as justification as mass surveillance is a counterargument if anything.
Though I can imagine it's incredibly easy to deliberately misrepresent it as 'we used digital records to catch a pedo murderer' by dishonest supporters of the policy.
Probably because dash cams have a questionable legal status in Denmark.
There's a law that prohibits all video monitoring of public spaces, and a register where you must register your video cameras if you're a business owner. Video surveillance in Denmark has a maximum legal retention of 28 days, unless there's an ongoing investigation.
Considering that dash cams mostly monitor "public spaces" and are moving around, the legality of them have been questioned multiple times. They are however also becoming more and more common, so I'm guessing they will eventually be allowed with a relatively low retention, like 1-2 days, enough to get footage off of them in case of a crash.
You brought up a light computing load that a laptop from like 2005 wouldn't struggle with?
People ran multiple browser windows, a 3D video game, irc (chat application), teamspeak/ventrilo (voice chat) and winamp (music) all at once back in the early 2000s. This is something an 8 year old phone can do these days.
I’m responding to the comment above claiming that modern software is slow on modern hardware. It’s an HN meme to claim that Electron apps are unusable.
They are slow though. There are noticeable delays on any machine I've used with them compared to native desktop applications. It's absolutely not just a meme.
A GTX 1080 came out in the first half of 2016. It had 8 GB of VRAM and cost $599 with a TDP of 180W.
A GTX 1080 Ti came out in 2017 and had 11 GB of VRAM at $799.
In 2025 you can get the RTX 5070 with 12 GB of VRAM. They say the price is $549, but good luck finding them at that price.
And the thing with VRAM is that if you run out of it then performance drops off a cliff. Nothing can make up for it without getting a higher VRAM model.
> "They say the price is $549, but good luck finding them at that price."
I did one Google search for "rtx 5070 newegg usa" and they have MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 5070 12G down from $559 to $499 for Black Friday, and ASUS Prime RTX 5070 12GB for $543.
reply