We don't let kids turn up to school drunk because they went to the cornershop on the way to school. I guarantee that would be happening if alcohol sales were not age gated and enforced by the government.
In the same way kids should not be infecting their minds with social media slop, or porn, or plenty of other internet content.
The only way this is stopped is when a social norm is created which shames all but the most negligent parents into compliance.
At the moment the absent and bad parents have all the power. Their kids scroll all night for memes, injest YouTube brainrot and turn up at school disruptive. Kids with responsible parents either want to that as well, or can't escape it.
Surveillance from age gates is a red herring. That horse bolted long ago. You are surveilled already by tech bros when voluntarily logging in, or by making yourself stand out a mile by using a VPN and a uncommon browser setup. This data gets handed to your government on request.
Having an anonymous VPN won't stop the tech bros or an authoritarian government forming, or bring one down.
People taking part in their existing democracy and maintaining the foundation of that is the best course of action. Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is a key part of this.
So maybe there should be better education for parents. Maybe there's other solutions. I can't accept that the nanny state parenting our children for us is the way to go. If people are being negligent of keeping their children safe, maybe they should face consequences for that. The point is, the parents should be solely responsible for deciding what's appropriate for their children, and if they don't have the resources maybe that's something that should be addressed, or if they're not doing their job that should be addressed, but age verification just ain't it.
That's contradictory logic. If you have to parent your children a certain way or else the state will take them away, then you aren't solely responsible, and the state is a nanny state.
Will there be increase in production if the 3 companies that make the RAM decide they can profit more by keeping production mostly the same and flogging it for 10x the price of a couple of years ago to a few AI companies happy to burn cash?
China spoiling the party is still the system working though. The price of ram is so high that it makes sense for new producers to start to exist. The fact that all the ram in the world comes from 3 suppliers is a big problem, and the high prices are a forcing function for solving that problem
The reason they have the largest sovereign wealth fund (aside from getting it right in the 80s, unlike the UK), is that there is quite a bit of regulation around where and how the money is invested.
It is run to maximise growth for example, so even though Norway is way ahead with electric car usage and infrastructure (presumably because they have a climate likely to be most affected by global warming/heating) their fund still invests in fossil fuels as they are a profit/growth opportunity.
Anyway, i don't think it's as easy as "simply stuff shit loads of cash into buying whatever they need". I believe there would be a serious political discussion needed for that to happen.
I suspect is very hard to get a consultant that doesn't hand over a repo of AI generated nonsense right now. For the reason above, they are (usually) under time pressure to deliver, and they can wash their hands of the results at the end of the contract.
I am at 2 for 2 at the moment in the "infrastructure as code" arena (I wasn't involved with choosing to use a consultant, just dealing with the output). Which is an area that AI was supposed to eat for lunch. And it seems like it should, DSLs with a narrower scope seem perfect for an LLM, but I'm not convinced.
I think the issue is, infrastructure DSLs like Terraform or Azure Bicep are distilling down an architecture that has complex interactions and often needs a lot of "inside baseball" knowledge from outside of the code to create a congruent result. Unless you feed a bible of markdown files to the LLM to guide it in the right direction the output goes off the rails fast. The time spend creating the bible might as well be spent creating the code.
Of course there are areas where an LLM will definitely help, like re-factoring, stamping out boiler-plate or even building on a solid base. But attempt to create even a semi-complex architecture from scratch using a few paragraphs of prompt and you are asking for trouble.
The trouble with the consultants I have interacted with is they don't write the bible first, as far as i can tell they just iterate on slop and you end up with multiple 800+ line PowerShell scripts in IaC pipelines and other craziness that is almost impossible to unpick after they have gone.
Honestly, rather a "unelected EU bureaucrat" (What does this even mean? Are we going to individually elect the entire civil service, or require elected officials to delegate nothing and personally review every decision?) than an American tech-bro governing my internet usage.
The only people that think global free trade is a good thing are the top .001% net worth individuals which use it to wield power.
Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that the persistent barriers to the EU single market still represented the equivalent of a 110 % tariff on services.”
There is a good amount of work to be done to complete the single market, what we currently have is way too fragmented
That is politically impossible. Everyone knows it is impossible because if you open up some countries to free services trade then the political basis for the EU and the traditional governing countries would collapse.
The limitations on trade within Europe are intentional design. The attempts to stop the economy from collapsing with these massive government spending packages are the death throes.
I mean, it is extremely difficult, but the whole union was seen as impossible the last century. With strategic developments over decades I don’t think it’s impossible
The European Coal and Steel Community was established over 74 years ago.
The idea of Europe as a nation goes back to the early to mid 20th century, at least. One example i can find a citation for (but it was far from the first): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_a_Nation
What you said comprises the exact error in logic that people make. Because we did this, this other thing is possible.
The EU was a certainty in a region that is hostile to change, wants big government, wants centralization, is suspicious of democracy, etc. Free trade would be a massive change, that is why it hasn't happened. The EU is basically the logical conclusion of European forms of governing.
I have no idea how you can be aware of the history of Europe or the people involved with the EU and think this. It is incomprehensible. One of the most bizarre aspects of the EU is that has become a religion for people who have no idea that the basic principles of the EU are everything they oppose.
But the EU started out as an industry group, the ECSC, to limit competition in coal and steel (with the helpful side effect of making German industrialists who did very well under Hitler even more rich).
If there is any founding principle of the EU, it is that competition should be limited because the view of people who founded the EU was that economic competition caused WW1/2 (a very generous interpretation of Germany's role in events but one that was used because there were a lot of wealthy Germans who wanted to use the EU to limit trade...btw, the situation today is beyond their wildest dreams, it is has made a small handful of German billionaires very wealthy for no effort).
The ECSC was about creating a common market. So we are talking about free trade within the community. Which is the literal opposite of what you’re describing? We are talking about a trade community that is literally about blocking countries from introducing discriminatory policies. I assume you see the EU as anti-democratic somehow? You seem to have pretty much everything backward. The ECSC is something covered in school as a teenager, it’s not a secret or hidden history you’re somehow finding out. Yes after the world war there was a huge push to get neighboring countries to compete in a local free market instead of via military expansion. And yes that eventually served as a framework to develop EU institutions. And yes some people in Germany and other countries made quite a lot of money from the trade. How do you arrive to the conclusion that the region is hostile to change, wants big governments (we are talking about a region split in multiple countries, each with their own political systems, multiple of which are federations split in states that have their own autonomy and political systems. Somehow this huge community of small political entities becomes a huge government?), want centralization, and are suspicious of democracy?
Somehow whenever European powers collaborate together it is framed as anti democratic, anti innovation, anti trad. Complete nonsense
I wish European countries would love big government and centralization just as much as EU detractors say. We have way too much fragmentation, the overhead of coordinating so many small entities is just so high and a waste
My hope is that eventually the "fast ring, slow ring, adjacent ring" system of the EU becomes a thing. I then imagine BeNeLux, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, maybe Czechia entering that fast ring. And as they synchronize their business and tax laws and capital markets, it'll show such an acceleration of growth that almost immediately more EU countries will want to go in on it. The nice thing is that because the "fast ring" would be more of a gentleman's agreement than a true EU institution, it wouldn't be bogged down.
The only hair in the soup I see for the start is that Denmark and Sweden would have to join the Euro, but their currencies are already effectively pegged to it anyway.
Services trade within Europe is often less free than services trade outside of Europe. The reason why is because there is a strong political constituency within Europe to ensure that certain kinds of sinecure jobs are not impacted by competition (and yes, as you helpfully point out, to blame that on "global corporations"...and people wonder why Europe had such a long period of dictatorships in the 20th century, "globalism", right? wink, wink).
> Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
Most of those global corporations are in favour of these trading blocks - they are the best placed to take advantage of them.
The EU is far more than just a trading block. The trading block is the countries they have free trade agreements with - the EEA,, plus the UK, plus Turkey. The EU is a political union.
Global corporation can lobby far more effectively than anyone else at the EU level.
FWIW our local car industry had decades to prepare to compete in the EV sector and decided to do pretty much nothing + train China how to take over their market. We’ve been way too protective of that industry, I’m personally happy they finally have to face some real competition. Protectionism has its place in global trade but it should be with a very specific goal in mind, such as giving the companies some room to breath while transitioning to new technologies and avoid a complete disruption of your economy. You cannot do it just to keep a dying industry alive. But you’re supposed to replace the external economic pressure with internal political pressure (or similar), otherwise corporation just go with the status quo
I doubt it makes people sad (well not me at least) because the buy in to get Citadel to invest for you is what 10? 50 million?
You could hit up juleiie from above for his/her winning method I suppose, or you put a portion of your savings into an appropriate ETF and get on with your life.
The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.
That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.
Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.
In the same way kids should not be infecting their minds with social media slop, or porn, or plenty of other internet content.
The only way this is stopped is when a social norm is created which shames all but the most negligent parents into compliance.
At the moment the absent and bad parents have all the power. Their kids scroll all night for memes, injest YouTube brainrot and turn up at school disruptive. Kids with responsible parents either want to that as well, or can't escape it.
Surveillance from age gates is a red herring. That horse bolted long ago. You are surveilled already by tech bros when voluntarily logging in, or by making yourself stand out a mile by using a VPN and a uncommon browser setup. This data gets handed to your government on request.
Having an anonymous VPN won't stop the tech bros or an authoritarian government forming, or bring one down.
People taking part in their existing democracy and maintaining the foundation of that is the best course of action. Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is a key part of this.
reply