Hacker News Reader

Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I know they've been pushing for this when they're pretty reasonable and independent on other issues. How come?

Ar they, though? The established longterm consensus is pretty reasonable in the EU, it’s not self evident that things have been going in the right direction on the whole in recent years.

Is it?

The green deal stuff seems to be pretty bad. Manufacturing seems to have a hard time. The next tier economy, e.g. AI, is not seen on the horizon. Over-the-top regulations for agriculture and then opening up the market from goods where such regulations don't exist does not seem smart either.

And there're lots and lots of small things like those.

Denmark is a world leading producer of windmills

Meanwhile local solar industry is loosing to Chinese at fast pace. Batteries industry ain’t looking good either.

The point was the conflict of interest. But yes what you said could maybe even make the conflict even more pronounced

IMO it's conflict of interest of some short-sighted naive idealists vs people who want to get stuff done.

For example, solar. Shit ton of euromoneys is poured into subsidies. But those subsidies are not geofenced. Thus vast majority of people go for chinese stuff. It could have been much better to subsidise locally produced components only. Then price would be +/- the same.

Now chinese components are dirt cheap with all the subsidies. I myself went for chinese components, because break-even period was like 5 vs 10 years. I'll just pihole the inverter from calling home once I figure out how to get some statistics without the manufacturer's app.

I guess some people decided it's better to get 2-3x more solar installed power ASAP rather than prop up the local solar industry.

Yeah, I meant mostly the 80s and 90s (i.e. the period when the Western European countries were able to keep up with the US or ever narrow the gap). Since then they have just been coasting on top of that.

EU became a thing in 1993. And soon after Europe could not keep up with US of A anymore. Even though USSR was gone, EU expanded and so on. Coincidence?

I'm completely serious here; the former minister of law was beaten as a child and it informs his whole world view.

That can make a lot of sense. People do tent to put too much value on their own experience - there is a tendency to think your experiences are normal.

I don't want to enter into conspiracy territory, but it seems that there's a big insistence from whomever is behind pushing for this to pass at any cost. First it was Denmark, now the EU parliament president, a Maltese. What's for certain is that those that stand to benefit massively are governments and politicians themselves.

And no, it's certainly not that bullshit astroturfed story that has been going around, of Meta behind this concerted effort across the Western world because they're too lazy to validate one's age.

How would members of the EP benefit from Chat Control?

Not sure what OP meant, but they talked about goverments and "politicians" rather than EP specifically.

I think several EU governments want chat control paving the way for domestic surveillance. Though I don't consider that conspiracy theory really. Last years, there have been big scandal cases with use of pegasus, predator and similar spy software from several EU governments for domestic surveillance (eg Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain). The issue is that legal surveillance, the regular phone tapping kind, is inefficient due to people using E2EE chat apps rather than regular phone calls and SMS. There is no legal basis for the more advanced spyware afaik, so these surveillance cases were illegal and kinda "off the books", even though rather widespread. A legal way to surveil the people would be welcome to those who did that and those who want to do the same.

Some sort of perverse inclinations of controlling other people’s lives and knowing what’s “better” for them. Delusional and narcissistic people seem to be generally significantly over represented in politics (another demographic is useful idiots, put those two together and well..)

They would be exempt, along with military and intelligence personnel. So they can enact mass surveillance, stop any form of dissent before it has a chance to grow, while themselves remaining above the law.

https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...

https://privatecitizen.press/episode/160/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com