In a year or so when there's truly new stuff to complain about the ln the message becomes "you voted for them".
If the get defensive I just shrug and repeat "you voted for this".
(when exactly is that anyway? I'm dimly aware of some drama with continuing resolutions)
Its unsurprising that when republicans finally get a chance to demolish basically every social program, they would not get stopped by democrats. (Aside a few progressives like AOC, Sanders, Ilhan, etc)
How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?
Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.
If the US harms its population, it is harming itself, because -- like every state -- it's at least partially made of its people.
I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.
I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc.
That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away.
There's another way to do things.
There are plenty of local authorities who exercise strange levels of power over small changes to people's houses. The difference is that when that happens to you vs a HOA, you're also paying their salary to avoid jail time.
EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified.
Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.
Or let me be more flippant- sure I get 50 paid days off a year. I call it Sunday.
So yeah, not a typical "business owner" :)
If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract.
"It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.
The fines, if they ever arrive, are merely the cost of doing business - a small tax.
I do agree fines take too long to come and are too small.
How long does this process typically take? When do you think EU consumers either get the functionality back or receive compensation?
The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Interesting, there seem to be a consensus about it.
Sure, America has the most school shootings and medical bankruptcies. But they also have the biggest houses, the biggest cars and the most private swimming pools per capita.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...
That’s a huge gain in 20 years. Where is the commensurate equivalent growth in housing, education, healthcare, cheap food, etc…
There is a huge disconnect between GDP increase and the economic pressure the majority of Americans feel.
Here you say we can't eat/shelter better with GDP increases because they aren't distributed; there you said that [spending on] ability to eat/shelter was what they measured.
Mississippi: The average home size 2,065 square feet
United Kingdom: The average home size is 818 square feet
No, you cannot "eat GDP", but its a useful proxy as it correlates very highly to a lot of things we do care about
We had to sleep on different floors. Master bedroom was barely larger than the queen bed, and no way 2 people could sleep in there because it would get blazing hot in minutes.
Garage was similarly minuscule. GF had a tiny suv and still couldn't open both doors.
I figure 1000 square feet per adult is just about right.
Maybe the space wasn't laid out well. I would imagine, with only 700 sq ft per floor, a good portion of that is taken up by the stairs. My condo is a flat in a 100-year-old building, built before the "open concept" plans came into vogue. It means out rooms are separated and lets my wife and I do different things in different parts of the house.
People used to raise families in these old buildings with 1000 square feet. Their third-spaces weren't taken over by profit-seeking companies and their interests took them outside the home. 2000 square feet for 2 people seems utterly ridiculous!
What are you guys even doing? Or maybe the 1400sqft included the garage?
If they hadn't done the math I'd have suspected a typo.
I'm in a place not all that much larger (1800 sqft) and it feels pretty luxuriously large for just me and my partner. Big open kitchen, two living rooms, 2.5 bathrooms, three bedrooms (one used as an office for myself) and a dedicated office for my wife.
Do we really need a "source" for everything? Would it be meaningful if you saw some survey asking: Would you prefer your primary residence to be smaller, larger or the same size?
I guess you can say all things being equal larger homes are more expensive so there must be some kind of preference for larger homes that indicates value
I would look at cost + time. For instance, if it costs me an extra $2k per year for a car but it saves me 30 minutes round trip, and my time is worth more than $20 an hour (assume work 200 days per year), then car is better. Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer. I think there's some weird cultish behavior around "public transit" as though it is a good by itself is disconnected to how most people think about this.
So in this case not being able to afford a car or have anywhere to park it is not the win you think it is.
In terms of education, not sure its quantifiable but if you look at money, Mississippi spends considerably more:
In England, secondary school spending per pupil in 2024-25 is projected to be about £7,400 ($9.4k), while primary school spending per pupil is about £6,700 ($8.5k)
In Mississippi its around $12k
Do you have any other data or are you just going entirely off of vibes?
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/annual-report-education-spen...
https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/per-pupil-spending-by-sta...
>Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer.
I assume you live in a place where cars are the default, or the only, mode of transportation? It's not like this everywhere.
Just two examples:
- food shopping is a lot more expensive if you have to buy local and you're restricted to how much you can carry
- it's kind of rude taking a sick or injured child to the doctor on public transportation
This is obvious if you look at behavior. When people get more money, they buy a car or often multiple cars. When they have a family, people tend to move to suburbs where cars are the primary mode of transportation. Even in cities with good public transportation, like New York, wealthy people still often own cars and use them along with private car service.
People might answer some survey stating they like public transportation but their behavior suggests otherwise. And these surveys are frame against an impossible ideal that does not exist. Look at behavior.
Let me take a guess, you are an American, living in a city without good public transit.
Mississipi: 24.5/km2
UK: 279/km2
Maybe, only maybe, that has an effect on house sizes?
New Jersey median home square footage: 1,740
Doesn't look like it?
There is a huge difference between Mississippi and the UK: 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females in the UK in 2020 to 2022. 68.6 years for males and 75.2 years for females in Mississippi in 2020 and 67.7 years for makes and 74.3 years for females in Mississippi in 2021. Might go up a bit if you have 2022 numbers, but the difference is huge.
Could you clarify further if you meant one of these, or if you meant something else that I was not able to pick up on?
Because if there's no discrepancy, or a smaller one, it seems to suggest that maybe GDP and square-footage-of-your-house is actually not all that important.
People move east to west across the pond, because they want the life offered by the US economy.
Where are you getting your confidence that that is so?
If you believe there's nearly as many people trying to get out than there is trying to get in, you will be surprised.
The difference (per capita) is a factor of at least 10x
I can guarantee you that number is now not growing so much.
I don't know much about others, but perhaps you should be comparing ratio of GDP in the last 20 years, not absolute values. With Poland coming very poor out of communism and all.
That's long enough for everyone aged about 50 in 1989 to have aged out of the system.
How many decades should pass before we stop blaming present circumstances on the past?
Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy in the U.S. (about 73 years), significantly lower than the national average (77).
Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the U.S. (about $52,000 in 2022), compared to a U.S. median of around $75,000.
Mississippi has high rates of obesity, diabetes, and preventable diseases, partly due to poor healthcare access.
France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare, while the UK's NHS, despite challenges, still provides free-at-point-of-use care.
In Mississippi, many rely on Medicaid or have limited healthcare options.
Mississippi’s school system ranks among the worst in the U.S. European countries have stronger public education systems and more government support for higher education.
GDP of Mississippi looks great only because of a strong dollar. It doesn’t really account for living conditions.
We've been told for decades that letting our economy turn out like Europe's was something to fear, while they outpaced us in virtually all quality of life measures.
We can no longer claim being the richest country in the world as a source of uniqueness or justification -- handed to us by the gods. I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.
unfortunately the wealthy are going to concede more wealth and power or it will continue.
https://bsalert.com/news/2596/Who_Are_You_Better_Than.html
People in this country perennially choose wanting to be "better than" over wanting to be happy.
I recently realized that people should understand they have more in common with (and must have solidarity with) the next people down on the socio-economic rung instead of trying to climb the ladder in hopes of joining those on the next rung up.
Which? The American descent into authoritarianism or the European descent into authoritarianism?
While average GDP sounds like it’s something that everyone participates in, in reality, under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. As a result, GDP per capita tells us more about total output than about how it is actually distributed among the population, who is benefiting, and thus the well being of the society as a whole.
And under the other forms of government thus far tried?
Anyway, Capitalism doesn't explain wealth inequality. The ability to accumulate capital and apply it to industry with limited liability doesn't inherently cause wealth inequality. That's the fault of Greedism, Over-inflated-sense-of-selfism, and Giving Money to Politicians is like giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teenage Boys-ism.
We're over taxed and over regulated, that's nothing to do with Capitalism.
I do agree that a capitalist economic system isn’t alone in manifesting inequality. I would further acknowledge that under capitalism the amount of wealth inequality differs from one capitalist society to the other. Yet the present levels of inequality we see around us are nearly unprecedented.
You blame greed. But capitalism enshrines the profit motive. It incentivizes capitalists to maximize profit regardless of the effect on the working class even if that means bribing politicians or whatever. Greed is a central feature of capitalism, not some personal failing to be explained at the individual level.
Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulation has been enacted for the last 45 years. What are the effects of this? Real working-class wages have remained stagnant while the wealth gap has drastically increased. Should we believe the answer is more deregulation?
Under a deregulation ideology, the wealthy push for deregulation when it suits them on the one hand while benefiting from and expanding government influence on the other (subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, etc.). That’s why after 45 years of a deregulatory ideology operating at the highest levels of our governments, subsidies and regulatory capture still exist.
Consider the present moment. Elon Musk slashes government spending while receiving millions from the federal government. This is not a bug. It’s a central feature of this ideology.
We may have different members of the upper class at the wheel now, but they are still using the same siren’s call of deregulation to justify their policies, ostentatiously reducing government influence in some areas while tactically expanding it in others - not just handouts to Trump’s cronies but also expansion of executive powers and erosion of civil liberties.
https://mississippitoday.org/2023/01/26/maternal-mortality-r...
In Greece , 8 per 100k https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/greece
That's just a random health stat, but it's clear the Greek have a far healthier population.
But Mississippi has more millionaires so I guess it's fine.
I guess it's not so clear.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/death-rat...
>Mississippi ranked dead last in a CDC ranking of all 50 states and the District of Columbia when looking at 2021 data. The magnolia state had a 70.9-year life expectancy rate, slightly lower than West Virginia's 71.
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2024/12/29/cdc-data...
>The current life expectancy for Greece in 2025 is 83.10 years, a 0.18% increase from 2024. The life expectancy for Greece in 2024 was 82.95 years, a 0.18% increase from 2023. The life expectancy for Greece in 2023 was 82.80 years, a 0.2% increase from 2022. The life expectancy for Greece in 2022 was 82.64 years, a 0.2% increase from 2021.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/grc/gre...
Greece has a older population. Plus we're talking about Mississippi not the entire US.
That's all per capita GDP means.
Not like maternal mortality is only slightly higher in MS, it's drastically worse to the point where you can argue the healthcare standards are closer to that of a developing country.
Can you find a single health metric which would point to people in Mississippi doing better than those in Greece ?
Doesn’t seem like a mystery that a country who is so “pro-life” they’d rather let women die than properly treat miscarriages has a high maternal death rate.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/27/texas-abortion-death...
Wisconsin's abortion law is from before the Civil War and its maternal mortality is lower than Massachusetts.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/mmr-2018-2022-st...
Personally I think it has more to do with access to healthcare and the general physical fitness of your average American compared to your average European but I have no data to back that up.
My point about Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and US maternal mortality vs. Europe stands.
The US average is actually behind wealthier European nations there (Ireland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Switzerland, Germany): 20$/h compared to ~20€/h. Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.
So the much stronger US GDP/capita output apparently does very little for the average citizen...
This was honestly surprising to me, I actually expected the US to be comfortably ahead in this (specifically significantly ahead of Germany). France is also much weaker than I expected in this (~17€/h) not including it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super poor (Bulgaria under 5€/hour!), and the top contenders were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did (~30€/h).
Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what I wanted on bls.gov)
I doubt it. Germany and especially Switzerland have a quite hight cost of living. Coming from Canada, I get sticker shock every time I go to the US because of how cheap everything is. I had the opposite reaction going to Europe (except for Italy).
It would also be interesting to compare take-home (after tax) pay.
My personal experience is that German supermarkets are priced extremely competitive (Lidl/Aldi specifically), and Italy felt more expensive by comparison to me (except maybe for local produce and cheese).
Comparing after-tax pay instead would help the US pull ahead for sure, but I feel a bit mixed about that because those taxes pay for stuff like child- and healthcare, which in the US is probably significantly more expensive out-of-pocket than the median EU citizens pays in taxes for the same.
Is higher GDP per capita truly a strong argument against consumer protections?
The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.
So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.
An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers.
They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase.
But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.
⁽²⁾ https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/respecting-...
I might not even have to rely on a VPN into my house with a DNS blackhole anymore...
If Orion had a linux version, maybe I'd consider it, but the firefox-skin on webkit lets me share history even if I can't install extensions, and my history is more important.
A browser that only works on iOS and macOS doesn't have a better privacy policy for me in practice, apple collects all sorts of information that my linux devices don't.
Well, America has never prohibited Apple from allowing iOS sideloading, either specifically in America or worldwide. I completely agree that it would be a beneficial economic regulation for the US to require the major gatekeepers to allow such access like the EU has (although ideally with fewer opportunities for bad-faith half-assed compliance attempts than the EU gave Apple), but the biggest blame here goes on Apple and not on any government.
The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.
I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.
This is about removing a privacy feature.
Source e.g. https://eletric-vehicles.com/lucid/saudi-pif-now-controls-64...
Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?
And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.
> Unless the website operator can show that a consumer has actual knowledge of the agreement, an enforceable contract will be found based on an inquiry notice theory only if: (1) the website provides reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms to which the consumer will be bound; and (2) the consumer takes some action, such as clicking a button or checking a box, that unambiguously manifests his or her assent to those terms.
Its part of why changes of terms generally require you to accept them, before you can continue using a service.
Unambiguous consent, and understanding of consent, are required, as ToS fall under contract law. Which does make most ToS... Unenforceable.
[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-4_20-cv-07...
Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.
The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.
However the question is whether other laws have been broken in the first place.
The average consumer wants out of the box solutions that don't require a degree in Computer Science to use.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/green [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something useful.
If HA (which is a wonderful project) is your example of usable OSS software, then your bar is set lightyears away from what actual consumers need.
-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator
So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.
I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.
Sure things might be getting easier but they’re certainly not easy.
But missing opinionated defaults, really, you still have to roll your own home/away/vacation solution. Creating a dashboard requires you to understand the meta of Home assistant which takes a lot of time.
People asking should I get PI or NUC every single day in the reddit. I am happy with my 2000lines long configuration file except scripts and automations. But it won't be easy for someone is not tech savvy.
I need a timer, integration with smart home (turn things on and off), play songs and radio, I need to announce to my other devices. And the set up should not be a month long side project.
How much will it cost me to replace Alexa in at least 5 rooms...
Assuming you have a spare Raspberry Pi or some other compute you can dedicate to it, replacing Alexa in every aspect except the microphones is at most a couple hours of installing, configuring and testing stuff. I don't personally know how things are on the market with replacing the always-on microphones in every room, but ignoring that (let's assume for a moment you're fine with using either a phone or a smartwatch as voice I/O), you get:
- A better and more capable integration with smart home than anything on the market;
- A chance to pick whatever LLM you want to power your logic (just bring your own API key, ofc.), which instantly makes it much better than Google's Assistant, Siri and Alexa; this has been the case for around a year now, and the Big Companies are still playing catch-up with the simple "just feed it to GPT-4 / Claude along with some context and tools, and let it do what you want" approach.
- You can configure the activities whichever way you like, expose whichever smart devices you like, and you don't have to speak brands anymore. No more "Hey ${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to play ${brand 3} on ${brand 4}" - you can just say "Please play whatever in the living room" and it just works.
(In my case, some of the most frequent commands are off-hand lines like "warm up the kids' room a bit, please", and "kill the ACs", or any variation that rolls off the tongue best. Claude knows what to do with zero config. Home Assistant alone cut the time to operate ACs from 2 minutes to 5 seconds (cold-start) relative to the vendor app; running things by voice from a watch is just a cherry on the cake.)
- If you're on Android, you can (and, again, could for around a year now) expose your phone to Home Assistant; setting the HA app as your assistant + coupling it with Tasker lets you also replicate the on-phone feature of commercial assistants, but better, because LLMs. It's smarter and sends less sensitive data to iffy cloud services (you control where STT and TTS happen).
- Timers and announcements and weather and such, you can obviously also handle through Home Assistant. The defaults should be enough for this (you might need to "add weather integration", "add timer integration", etc. - couple UI clicks in the UI, each). HA is simple by default, but you can also do more advanced stuff, at any complexity level between this and arbitrary code execution, through no-code, low-code (e.g. NodeRED) or yes-code means.
Going back to the topic of microphone arrays - I didn't look into it much; there are DIY solutions (with DIY quality of listening - which may be OK, depending on environment; almost 2 decades ago, I got a lot of mileage out of cheap microphone soldered to a 2M cable and glued to the side of the wardrobe, + Microsoft Speech API on the PC), I think I recall some people selling packaged microphone arrays, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could reuse Alexa hardware for the I/O part. But I honestly don't know. I'm fine with my phone and watch for I/O at the moment.
Is there a way to flash the Echo hardware to make it work with Home Assistant without pinging Amazon HQ?
Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.
None of these comments are fixing issues or trying to make a difference. Sending the product back is a really good idea, especially if this change in terms means you can get a refund even if you've had it a long time.
No one can stop you being mad. No one's saying it's not allowed. It's possible someone is still young enough to misinterpret adult interactions as parental fiat, but it's not the case.
That isn't trying to make a difference? Excuse me? Read that back.
You can claim detrimental reliance though, but it's a stretch and bad faith imo. Try your luck with a judge and attorney fees
I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.
If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.
If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?
IMO no one should have ever expected Alexa, or products like it, to be private. The meet fact that it has a microphone, and potentially a camera, and promises to respond simply by you saying something to it means they're always listening. I don't really care what they say they'll do with the recordings, I care what they can do with the recordings without me ever knowing about it.