ArkVark

And now we have the War on COVID.

Europe generates a lot of content, but owns none of the platforms. Lower commissions on those stores would translate directly to higher profits and investment by those content creators, which would be taxed directly and indirectly.

COVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria.

If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.

Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.

Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.

I think the inevitable move here is for the EU to enact a maximum % commission for platforms above $1b revenue, at something like 20%. Maybe for sales from that region or for developers in that region.

Unfortunately the EU is going the opposite way - increasing VAT and digital taxes, which are passed straight onto developers.

IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.

In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.

I struggle to see anything Fascist about Donald Trump. I'm significantly more concerned about the role of BLM, woke politics, and the rise of Leftist racism, which is basically part and parcel of modern Democrats.

The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.

The economic migrants that have travelled to Europe illegally are mostly illiterate and with few skills. They are consistently borne out to be at the bottom of society and over-represented on welfare rolls and jails. Essentially they will form a permanent underclass in Europe and a forever burden.

They come into Europe to work on huge farms owned by wealthy Europeans. Here is an example - essentially all of the manual labour in these towns is illegal:

https://www.dw.com/en/spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...

Without these workers the production would be automated and picked by robots (providing jobs for European engineers, technicians, developers). When you can pay someone $2/hour, with their lives subsidies by the taxpayer, there is no justification for robots.

The most dastardly action performed by the ruling class of Europe is to bring in millions of exploitable workers and claim they are doing it on the basis of human rights.

The EU is not a great place for innovation, period. Here are the major problems:

1. No common language

2. Incredibly high taxes, particularly sales taxes

3. Unfinished transition out of Communism in many Eastern Countries

4. Preference for cheap illegal labor instead of automation

This could be solved by:

1. Formalising an 'EU English' language so that schools teaching it can open up around the continent and families can move from one country to another without having to pay for extortionate international schools

2. Eliminate payroll taxes, limit sales taxes to a maximum of 10%. Deport all illegal immigrants (who are huge burdens on the State and society) and raise pension ages to 70 in order to save money. Limit bachelor degrees to the top 20% of the population and Master's degrees to the top 10%, to encourage people into the workforce earlier in life. Raise taxes on land and pollution.

3. Limit EU funding for countries like Bulgaria that have not transitioned to modern Democracy or Bureaucracy.

4. Withdraw from the UN convention on refugees, deport all illegal immigrants, pay and help North African countries to guard their own coastlines, and replace migrants with robots and automation.

This will immensely boost the living standards of the average European, but hurt bureaucrats and old-money.

The simplest explanation for Madrid is that it locked down too early, and herd immunity (which seems to occur at about 20-25%, based on Antibody testing of New York and Sweden) was never reached.

Lockdown also seems to increase the threshold for herd immunity and increase deaths, by dramatically changing the demographics of who is infected. Without lockdown, the youngest and most mobile people are likely to be infected - with minimal/zero deaths since COVID mortality is incredibly age dependent.

Under lockdown, those people are at home and intermingling with family. The only 'social' activity is shopping for food, leading to an unnatural mingling of old and young.

I live in Ukraine which has masks and little else against COVID. In shopping centers particularly in the evenings there are essentially zero old people - they fear for their lives, as they should.

The most effective policy we could have adopted was 6AM-10AM public transport and shopping for the aged only, and everyone else from then on. Segregate the elderly population into the mornings and let the masses in in the afternoon. This might have required shifting school and work to later hours in the day for three months, which seems a minor inconvenience.

You are paying for your Dad's pension, and for the Government services consumed by millions of migrants.

Those same migrants increase labor supply (thus lowering the equilibrium price) and increase demand for land and real estate.

The end result is high taxes and high real estate cost. Of immense benefit to your dad (and other Baby Boomers) who receive risk-free pensions, and supercharged capital gains for their own assets.

The missing component is the need to integrate Electric Vehicles into the grid on a fundamental basis including selling electricity.

We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters, by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the network.

If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.

The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy.

Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.

With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.

We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West.

At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.

The solution is point-to-point, subscription-based and private autonomous minibusses, which generates routes based on demand and can seat 10 passengers.

Cities should subsidise these services, or at the least not charge sales tax on them.

Because without fancy, bespoke packaging people will be less inclined to buy copious amounts of junk food.

We need to fundamentally rethink our entire food system. For example, having every individual buy, transport, cook and dispose of their own food is a huge inefficiency, particularly now with smaller and individual households.

We need to encourage more neighborhood kitchens, with food prepared cheaply and healthily, that people can eat multiple times a day at. For starters remove the tax loophole where if you buy your own raw ingredients and cook something yourself, you pay no or reduced VAT, whereas if you buy the same ingredients at a restaurant you pay full VAT.

Banning Instagram and Tinder would be great for America and the world. Get people, relationships, and social networks back to reality.

The bigger questions is why waste $7,000 on this when that sum could have gone to your heirs?

Why not just eat the soy beans directly? This stuff is just glorified processed food.

The logical next step is for individual countries to regulate the maximum % commission that a digital marketplace can charge its developers.

Which will place Apple in a much more difficult position than if they unilaterally reduced their commission level to 15%.

Poland is not a great place to live either. Sales tax is 23%, stores are all shut on Sunday (by decree of the Polish Catholic church, essentially), real estate prices are similar to the midwest USA due to restrictions on new builds, and taxes on labor and small business are high and complicated.

The language itself uses a bastardized version of the Latin alphabet which is inferior to Cyrillic, and general pronunciation is the much more difficult compared to Ukrainian or Russian.

Many of the cities are cold and dark owing to latitude, and in winter filled with air pollution from out of control coal and trash burning in urban chimneys.

The main thing Poland has going for it is a massive flow of EU funds and no refugees from Africa or the Middle East, as well as a population with a generally Western mindset and work style.

The poor outcomes for healthcare in the USA can be mostly attributed to obesity and the poorer diets and habits of the population.

The USA's privatised healthcare system would operate a lot more efficiently if sugar was heavily taxed, fresh fruit and vegetables consistently available (no 'food deserts'), and coal and oil burning for transport and energy minimised.

It is definitely psychological.

I was suffering daily after COVID when living still under lockdown.

I moved to a non-lockdown country (where the strategy is now herd immunity) and felt better immediately, and now have zero lingering symptoms.

Lockdown and Government restrictions are more suffocating than COVID.

Extreme wealth is not valued in Europe. To the contrary, income (even upper-middle class income) and consumption is incredibly highly taxed.

Many small and mid-sized business struggle or refuse to scale because it exposes them, their owners and management to taxes which cannot be escaped (by contrast small businesses can pay their staff in cash, and charge personal expenses to business accounts for VAT writeoffs).

Alternatively many European businesses are optimised to receive Government and EU grants and subsidies, not to compete on the international market.

Yes, the USA is unequal compared to Europe, but this might be the price worth paying for innovation and technological dominance: America's poorest are richer than the average Europeans:

https://www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2019/08/27/...

The solution is for Europe is to dramatically cut taxes (eliminating payroll taxes and reducing VAT to 16% across Europe should be a priority), increase the pension age to 70, and limit access to bachelor's degrees to the top 20% and Master's degrees to the top 10% (many Europeans spend their entire 20s at university, when they could be working instead).

The alternative is basically slow Demographic decline and descent in complete central planning, which Europe seems to be pursuing.

Excess atmospheric CO2 still causes major problems with human cognition and building ventilation.

At about 800ppm there are measurable falls in human cognitive performance. Might not happen outside for a while, but the increase to the outdoor level makes ventilation much more difficult.

I would argue that whatever the USA is doing is working.

The USA has substantially lower taxes and higher salaries, including for the poorest, than the rest of the Western world.

The USA policeforce seems focused on policing, whereas Police Forces in countries like the UK spend time monitoring online behavior whilst ignoring child grooming gangs.

Its also interesting that in the original article, the examples listed are mundane traffic offenses, and the only serious abuse is entirely fictional - from the Sorpranos.

I'd welcome these applications being banned worldwide. Dating should be brought back to the real world: through friends, communities, family recommendations, and events.

The emphasis should be on finding a compatible mate, marriage, co-financing and procreation. Dating apps encourage endless hookups and destabilisation - this is their business model.

China also has a higher average IQ than much of the rest of the world: 104, vs 98 for the USA:

https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

China is also pursuing eugenic strategies with the one-child policy, and controlled migration into cities (which encourages assortative mating). The Fertility Rate of 1.6 is reasonable.

By contrast many Western countries are pursuing dysgenic strategies through the provision of mass-welfare, and the intake of migrants from lower-IQ countries.

China just needs to sit back for 30-50 years and wait for these trends to play out, if it has the patience. We're already seeing the first reports of IQ declines:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-...

The problem with many of these marketplaces is that they charge VAT to buyers, even if the creator is below the threshold for VAT registration.

Try thousands of years due to differential evolutionary pressure, population bottlenecks in Europe and East Asia and interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovians.