It feels heartless. I wish there was a better system.
You have massive selection bias in your sample. “Morally-based decision ends well” is not exactly something that makes headlines or that is seized upon by historians to explain memorable cataclysmic events.
You don’t need to be an ethics expert to see a difference between moral principles that lead to suffering, and moral principles that don’t.
Waving away all morality in moral nihilism is teenage-level ethical sophistication.
Name one non-capitalistic system more moral than the currently existing ones.
All rankings trying to quantify morality and order societies by it, are consistently topped by social market economies, a form of capitalism.
> Waving away all morality in moral nihilism is teenage-level ethical sophistication.
It is also something I have never done. With the edits to your post, its nature became more and more apologetic to dictatorships. I hope this was not what you have intended.
What are you talking about?(!)
It’s easy to point to some barbaric act and say “see, this is what morally motivated policies result in”.
But in reality, moral value judgments are all around us in the most mundane of places. It’s moral value judgments that cause us to have anti-monopoly laws. It’s moral value judgments that cause us to configure tax codes one way or another. It’s moral value judgments that cause us to appreciate the things that capitalism gives us. Etc etc. You can’t escape it.
I would highly recommend the book!
I'm honestly curious (and adding this as a disclaimer to be clear it's not an attack): why would you think there was any shard of imbued morality when the whole point of the system is based on greed?
That's a category error. Economic and political system don't have morals. Not capitalism, socialism, democracy, autocracy.
Economic and political system should be designed to create incentives where externalities are positive and not negative.
Note how I didn’t mention capitalism to have bad morals or to be evil. I did say heartless because neglecting morality (good or bad) feels heartless.
Chokepoint Capitalism with Cory Doctorow - FACTUALLY Podcast: https://youtu.be/vluAOGJPPoM?si=zuezwnlUHhuoQFNt&t=2668
As a consumer, I can't visit every factory to check if the pasta isn't tainted with lead, if the chicken meat isn't full of antibiotics and hormones and if the webapp I am using isn't selling my data.
We have market regulations for reasons. Companies that won't comply should be punished and if it's a repeatable offence they should lose a license to operate in EU.
Clearly the American capitalist strategy is working since all the products you keep regulating are made in the US. I’d welcome Europe to make some alternatives to what the US is providing before you just unilaterally say we’re immoral and wrong, because currently if all the US companies got fed up enough with the regulation and for some reason pulled out of the market it would cripple the digital life you’re used to in Europe.
Revenue has to come from somewhere otherwise a company can’t grow. “Enough revenue to survive” doesn’t incentivize the kind of rapid business development that consistently comes out of the US versus Europe and is just a naive economic worldview. You have to either sell user data, serve ads, or sell the product wholesale or a subscription. Currently the market (including European users) have decided that they’d rather click skip on an ad and have their usage data sold to drive those ads than pay for the product.
clearly:
https://www.flossbachvonstorch-researchinstitute.com/fileadm...
Even though the rules are great, I'm just not sure if it will be good or bad long term for EU.
The analogy to China during the industrial revolution is simply non-applicable, to the point of not being even wrong.
America loves to pretend that no other data points exist so they can attribute whatever good performance they’ve historically seen to whatever supposed cornerstone of American life is advantageous to make whatever point they want to make.
Could you explain how the Uber drivers are worse off due to their data being in the USA?
Following your reasoning, then the whole legislation is moot, and all European citizens data should be sifoned in the US without anyone complaining, because "hey, I'm in the UE so you cannot touch me", no?
They are now at risk if there is a data leak in the USA. There are higher fines for data leaks in Europe, so they aren't as well protected as before
It’s not from us to explain why would drivers be worse. It’s from the one who took the datas to explain why would drivers be better. Because if they would have been better I guess Uber would have done a marketing campaign around it to talk about the benefits instead of doing it this way without anyone noticing.
And ideas like Uber aren't hard to copy by local companies.
There was even a time where copy cats were an easy way to get rich.
Copy a US company, wait to get bought by that company. That made the Samwer brothers rich.
I would love it if companies from the U.S.A. left the EU. Not solely for the economic boost it would give local competitors (who have all but shut down when U.S.A. companies came), but also because they clash with our culture in negative ways.
We can speculate this all we want, but I think it's fair to say with confidence that leaving companies unregulated (or poorly regulated) is bad for everyone in the long term. A slightly different example is the poor enforcement of antitrust laws being one of the reasons we have the tech oligopoly we have today with Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta.
We had app based ride hailing services before Uber and still have them so it can't be that. Surge pricing also has existed before them.
For example, for Uber, lack of it (it took a while to come to some countries) already spawned lots of successful competition.
This is largely a false meme, an urban legend. There is no meaningful privacy difference between Europe and the US.
This is simply a money grab; it won’t move the needle on privacy one bit. You’ll still be surveilled everywhere you go in Europe by the state, the mobile operators, and most of the other apps on your phone.
Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the data stays inside the EU or not. Google collects the same data and the US intelligence agencies can compel them to access the data on EU citizens, stored on EU-located Google servers just the same as if it were in Mountain View.
The US is where companies from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to Visa, Mastercard and Equifax are headquartered.
EU-based snooping companies just aren't as good at it, and don't have anywhere near the same scale.