IsaacL

Then, last year, I stumbled across the following pair of articles. It's about the correspondence chess world championship, where both players are allowed to use engines, and (crucially) have a very long amount of time to analyse each position in-depth and consider long-range strategic implications of each move. The chap interviewed learned to exploit his opponent's over-reliance on the engine, and played in such a way that he was able to gradually accumulate small but compounding positional advantages that eventually gave him an edge. The whole time he used his own engine to catch tactical weaknesses in potential move sequences. A fascinating read.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

My own story has some similarities to yours -- I joined an elite startup accelerator straight out of university, thought I had a bunch of pretty damned good business ideas to work on (and looking back, I did -- I had a pretty good understanding of business strategy, engineering, product design, etc) -- but then ended up bouncing between jobs and quickly-aborted startup attempts, before crashing pretty hard around age 26-27. Meanwhile plenty of my peers steadily moved forwards while a few others shot off into the stratosphere.

I actually knew Leo Widrich, author of the article, back in university! Two guys had set up the "Internet Entreprneur Society" at our university in the British midlands, I was helping them run it as they were about to graduate. Leo was an Austrian business student with lots of passion and just starting to learn about tech startups. He ended up working with one of the two guys I mentioned (Joel Gascgoine) on some tweet scheduling app which is now apparently worth about $80m :) Small world!

As for myself, after several setbacks in my late 20s, I realised I had a whole bunch of psychological/emotional issues stemming from an unstable childhood. What's surprising is that with time and effort all these problems were, in fact, fixable... and through lots of reading and self-work I've managed to fix 80-90% of these issues. Like you, my desire to build a startup business empire has diminished greatly, and, nowadays, after learning all the things I've learned, I've rethought my career plans, and figured out a new direction to go down which ties together the various things I'm interested in, and which I'm very confident I can succeed at. (I'd rather not go into details in a public forum, but's it essentially a path that combines intellectual and technological projects).

(For those in a similar situation, the best books I read were: "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents", "Running on Empty: Overcoming your Childhood Emotional Neglect", "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" and "Psychology of Self-esteem". I also recommend the post "What is a central purpose in life?" (plus comments) [1] for a discussion of how to integrate one's career values).

[1] http://aristotleadventure.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-centr...

Yes, totally. I became interested in startups in 2009. I was a CS major and there was a tiny group of other students who shared my interests - we had a weekly "internet entrepreneur society" meetup where we'd discuss Paul Graham, Eric Ries, "Getting Real" (37Signal's book), and so on, along with the various projects we were working on and ideas we had.

By the time I graduated in 2012 the field was already starting to change. In the first two years out of university I worked with 3 different co-founders on various ideas, none of which went anywhere (frustratingly). Two of those co-founders had no genuine interest in technology or innovation -- I believe that they only became interested in startups after they became the hot thing to do. They wanted prestige and they wanted to raise funding for the sake of it. They weren't excited by the potential of the new platforms that had just appeared.

(After that I ended up working for a medium-sized tech startup for a while, got disillusioned and burnt out, took some time off, and then spent the last 3 years building myself back up. I still want to take a real shot at starting a startup, but the industry has changed so much now. The fun and excitement has gone).

I think there were several factors that changed startup culture:

1. The technology of the web matured. We are now in the Gartner cycle "plateau of productivity". Once upon a time you could upload some PHP scripts and a little bit of AJAX and have an interactive app that was admittedly crappy, but also genuinely novel and interesting. Now you need to know a complex backend framework, the modern JS ecosystem, automation/build tools, etc, just to compete. That's fine for a 10-man dev team, for 2 founders out of college it's a daunting amount of work.

2. Startups became a much more popular and prestigious career path. "The Social Network" movie (2011) made startups much more glamorous. Tons of articles were boosting "disruptive innovation". By the time I graduated, suddenly all the kids who'd been polishing their IB/consulting applications decided they wanted to be entrepreneurs, maybe after 2 years at Goldman/Bain/etc. Some of these guys were genuinely talented and cool. Many were arrogant and douchey, had a shallow understanding of tech, and treated their technical cofounders as code monkeys (yes, I had a few bad experiences).

Many interesting startup ideas (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google) came from young technologists working on ideas they thought were cool, yet were niche and weird at the time. Once the IB kids started entering tech en masse the culture shifted. (Granted the Winklevoss twins tried to recruit Zuckerberg back in 2004. So this is not completely new. But I think the techie/suit ratio changed dramatically in the early 10s).

3. Lots of cheap capital. This meant more ideas funded, ideas that got funded raising more money, and more market saturation in web, mobile, everywhere. In some ways this helped entrepreneurs, but it also made fundraising more necessary.

4. A controversial one: all the "sexism in tech" controversies that kicked off a few years ago. I paid close attention and I remember that this exploded in 2013. You had things like a Github founder being ousted (along with Github apologising for their "meritocracy" carpet), people being fired for tweets, etc. Sexism is wrong and there were probably many invisible barriers to female founders. However the big social justice activists (Shanley Kane, etc) were not concerned with technology, they were motivated by ideology, and they created a very hostile atmosphere. Make an edgy joke on a blog post intended for about 100 friends to read? Suddenly 50,000 people on Twitter have read it and are calling for your head. PG made a poorly-worded comment during a long interview -- suddenly every media outlet quotes it out of context, takes it as proof of his sexism, and it becomes untenable for him to remain in charge of YC. (I know this wasn't the only reason he stepped down, but it was a factor).

5. Regulation. GDPR is the biggest one, though there are others. It is not a startup killer, startups can still operate, but it makes it much harder. The idea of putting a prototype online, getting some early users, and rapidly iterating based on feedback is now much more dangerous. You need to invest heavily upfront to become compliant (even then your legal status will be unclear), and if you pivot, or make drastic changes, you bear the risk of becoming non-compliant. The EU legislators assume that everyone is a big company with a stable business model, not a 3-man team experimenting with various ideas. These regulatory changes went hand-in-hand with increasing political hostility to tech entrepreneurs. Say you manage to succeed despite all the obstacles put in the place of tech entrepreneurs in 2018, and become the next Mark Zuckerberg -- you can expect to be treated like the current Mark Zuckerberg, that is, have everyone hate you and try to get you fired.

1. I've just come off a call with a university friend who is now a manager at a big startup out in China, working on a really ambitious side project, and building tons of relationships out in the Asian startup world. I used to hang out with tons of people like that, then I had some bad life experiences, and disconnected from many good parts of my life. At the same time I got sucked back into HN procrastination.

2. Even times when I'm not producing or meeting interesting people, I have a stack of interesting stuff to read. Sebastian Marshall, who I mentioned above, has this amazing "Strategic Review" series, of which I've only read a fraction. There is never a single second of my day when HN is the most valuable thing I could be doing.

3. For the last 2 years I've had a second account under a pseudonym where I could be more outspoken about my political beliefs. (Hopefully at least a few people followed links I've posted from this account, or that other account, and learned something). Aside from the timesink aspect, the reason I'm leaving HN now is because it's become way too much of a political echo chamber.

I can cope with a place that's dominated by liberal/progressives, but not when they take a haughty, dismissive tone towards anyone who disagrees with them. (E.g: commenter takes a controversial stance, people who reply jump to the worst possible interpretation of their words).

To be clear I'm not remotely any kind of alt-rightist, Trumpkin, Milo fanboy or anything like that. I have tons of idiosyncratic opinions based on years of living abroad and reading every thinker I could get my hands on. People like me usually find their way into fringe communities of similar people -- and then slowly see those communities colonised and turn conformist, and leave to find somewhere else. It's a constant search to stay ahead of the world.

4. HN comment threads are usually noise, but one super interesting thing to do is read the comment history of an interesting poster. lionhearted I mentioned above, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bane is another good guy to "follow". As was https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=michaelochurch, though he went a bit nuts for a few years. Deep in my comment history I'm in a thread with Aaron Schwartz (on Austrian economics!), which illustrates the unusual paths that cross on this site.

Aside from that, I'm done here.

The reason I use it is that sometimes there's a link posted to something genuinely novel, fascinating, and/or perception-shattering. Likewise, sometimes a comment will be deep, insightful and/or informative on a poorly-known topic. These are what bring me back.

But, most often, the community is prickly, fad-driven, and increasingly conformist.

It's always been a mix. I don't think it's actually gone downhill - I think the metric of quality has changed. The new moderation team has cracked down on overt rudeness and trolling. However, the userbase has shifted - it's larger now and more dominated by employees than entrepreneurs. That leads to a narrowing of opinion. The tech industry has also become much more high-profile, and everyone is hyper-aware of the media criticism of startup culture.

Once upon a time people would express controversial opinions and expect at least a fair hearing - it felt like a friendly gathering of smart friends. Now, it feels like people standing on soapboxes shouting to a hostile crowd. People like Sebastian Marshall (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lionhearted) used to be top posters here, and he's no longer active -- and I doubt he'd go down well with the current crowd. Steady changes in the userbase like that change the vibe in hard-to-define ways, but it's definitely changed.

It has a violent revolution. But your question contains an unstated assumption: that capitalism leads to "the majority of the citizenry [ending] up in the underclass". Feudal societies saw most people living in poverty. Communist societies saw most people living in poverty. Properly functioning capitalist societies have a healthy middle class, and a tolerable standard of living even for people at the bottom.

"So you can pontificate about the ideological merits of extreme Libertarianism all you want, but in practice it works exactly as well as extreme socialism."

The society that came closest to "extreme Libertarianism" was the United States in the 19th century. (Especially after the civil war). That was the century of the industrial revolution, huge advances in technology and wealth production, and an unprecedented rise in the standard of living.

So I know first-hand the benefits of "going up in the world" and getting into a higher-quality network of clients. I now look at websites like ClientsFromHell.com and see freelancers managing their careers really badly, not knowing they could be doing much better.

All that is true but it's not what came through in your original comment. You could have said "Ouch, poor guy, he got shafted, but all of this was avoidable. He should start acting like a business rather than a temp worker, and aim to build up his skills, learn to market himself, and find a better class of clients". Instead, you victim-blamed him, and poured scorn on him for speaking out.

"It's easy for me to armchair quarterback these situations"

You have the self-awareness to recognise that you are "armchair quarterbacking", then you decide to... blame the guy for his problems, judge him negatively for speaking out, and go off on some airy tangent about the history of social security.

"This is a person who is susceptible to disasters, being forced into the street and can't manage the basics of living in the modern world."

What the hell? Basing your career on one online platform is not the best life decision, true. There's lots of freelancers who do more stupid things. Yes, this guy could have done things differently, but he doesn't deserve this kind of treatment.

If you are based in a tech hub or major city you can build a freelancing career with numerous digital agencies and other professional firms, and learn to sell yourself, manage client relationships, build a specialised skillset, etc. If you do that you also deal with a much better class of clients (have money, know what they want, don't screw you around). That is the exception, though.

The average freelancer hustles for generic projects and deals with the shittier kind of clients. This guy sounds like he is one of the more competent individuals in that category. Then he had a key relationship (with freelancer.com) turn sour, and as a result he's been absolutely shafted.

"If the reviewer posted this under his real name, then he should remove it. This review will kill his reputation" He's fighting back with the one weapon he has, which is going public with his experiences. He knows he is a taking a big risk with this. He is courageous.

On a final note: Jesus F'ing Christ where do you people come from. I've seen comments like this on similar stories. The temptation to victim blame (under the pretence of dispensing helpful advice) seems irresistible for many. I've been on the receiving end of this, so it gets my goat. An experience like this doesn't just hurt you materially and financially, it also smashes your self-confidence. But people are very selective in the things they are sympathetic towards. With other things, they respond with scorn and condescension.

https://keithweinereconomics.com/2013/12/28/the-theory-of-in...

http://www.economicprinciples.org/wp-content/uploads/ray_dal...

That’s about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot’s job I’ve ever heard. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn’t just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. It isn’t just a little bit false. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn’t know better, and would allow such a statement to be published, shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times not long ago, you would have read how Boeing pilots spend “just seven minutes” piloting their planes during a typical flight. Airbus pilots, the story continued, spend even less time at the controls.

Confident assertions like these appear in the media all the time, to the point where they’re taken for granted. Reporters, most of whom have limited background knowledge of the topic, have a bad habit of taking at face value the claims of researchers and academics who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the day-to-day operational realities of commercial flying. Cue yet another aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, without a doubt, a pilotless future is just around the corner. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology.

I’d like to see a remotely operated plane perform a high-speed takeoff abort after an engine failure, followed by a brake fire and the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring a diversion over mountainous terrain. I’d like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. The idea of trying to handle any one of these, from a room thousands of miles away, is about the scariest thing I can hardly imagine. Hell, even the simple things. Flying is very organic — complex, fluid, always changing — and decision-making is constant and critical. On any given flight, there are innumerable contingencies, large and small, requiring the attention and visceral appraisal of the crew.

[1] http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/

Granted it is a problem that 3 firms are so dominant.

For example, the US is by far the world leader in medical research spending - 44% of global medical research is spent in the US. (Until recently it was even higher). [1]

On the same note, many nations regulate the price of prescription drugs - drugs where the initial R&D was done in the states. (Yes, drugs are sold at a huge markup, but that's to recoup the huge initial costs of research). In other words, Americans are taking it in the chin to invest in pharmaceutical innovations, which other countries then treat as a public good.

An additional point that's often obscured: there's no purely capitalistic healthcare system in the world. Even pre-Obamacare, the US system was about 46% funded by the government. (As with the US education system, the availability of government funds has massively pushed up prices). [2]

On a personal note - I'm a brit, but I've lived abroad, and the NHS is one of the reasons I'm considering settling abroad long-term. I simply don't trust the organisation as a whole to take care of my health. If you get assigned a good doctor for your condition, you're OK, but I have my own stories (and I've heard many others) of conditions being ignored or misdiagnosed, even after multiple visits.

In contrast, I went to a hospital in Bangkok that was of far higher quality than the average NHS hospital. (Granted, this was a private hospital, but it puts things into perspective). One Israeli friend said that walking into a UK clinic was like walking into a clinic in a third-world country. It's shabby, the wait is long, the bureaucracy is confusing, etc.

Strange as it may sound, I trust a for-profit entity more with my health, because their livelihood directly depends on taking good care of me. The common argument that healthcare can't be a market because of information asymmetry and doctors being in a position of power doesn't wash: the same holds true for other complex services, like auto repair, and the solution is simple: third party reviews. (On the moral argument, about affordability, I think with a truly private healthcare system entrepreneurs would be able to drive the costs down for people on middle-incomes, and only the bottom 15-20% would be reliant on government or charity spending).

[1] https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/4233/u.s.-slipping...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_health_ex...

Recently there's been tons of favorable discussion about:

- the "right to repair" (I.e. regulators forcing a ban on non-repairable products)

- basic income (I.e wealth redistribution, to people who don't even need it)

- EU fines on FB buying Whatsapp (I.e. regulators enforcing vague laws, that, if interpreted consistently, would lead to a ban on all B2C acquisitions (obviously they're not intended to be enforced consistently))

- EU fining Google for entering the online shopping market(I.e. regulators forcing a company to modify what they display on their website)

- net neutrality (I.e regulators controlling the pricing model of ISPs)

Confusing matters is the fact that people have a fuzzy definition of capitalism (especially in the case of net neutrality, which is painted as a way to protect competition, but that's a more philosophical debate).

Basically, HN skews overwhelmingly liberal - like most liberals, they are not anti-business, but believe in a regulated free market with high taxes to pay for public services. (I.e. a mixed economy).

Likewise, who are these pro-capitalist folk who see the world as a zero-sum game? Care to share some actual quotes from these people? Every pro-capitalist thinker from Adam Smith to von Mises to Ayn Rand makes the case that capitalism is all about non-zero-sum transactions. (If a trade is entirely voluntary, both parties need to benefit or they went enter the trade). The supposed negatives of capitalism (like that in the article) are when one party either refuses to trade with another or exits an existing trade relationship (as Walmart exited the small town). That sucks for the people in the town, but Walmart aren't their slaves. Walmart is free to close their stores as they please and the townspeople are free to set up new retail stores to capture the new market.

More fundamentally, every society in the pre-capitalist era was essentially stagnant, with minimal growth, and required slavery to function. In the modern era, a simple glance at East and West Germany, or North and South Korea, makes clear which of capitalism or socialism is zero-sum. The only legitimate debate is between pure capitalism (as in 19th century America) and the mixed economy (as in modern Europe, and modern America, which only differs on the details). But almost no-one argues for pure capitalism. You talk like you're an open-minded rebel yet you seem to have missed the glaring fact that your views are entirely mainstream, on HN and elsewhere.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-chri...

Innovator's Dilemma is way better thought-through than most business theories. If Clay is right, and the article author simply ignored most of what he's written in the last 30 years on the nuances of his theory, then her article is a (very eloquent) hatchet job.

As an example of the kind of person who spreads such ideas: a few years ago I knew a recent university graduate who was very friendly, enthusiastic and reasonably intelligent. He was interested in entrepreneurship, but non-technical, and focused mainly on networking and building connections.

One conversation I had with him concerned online advertising. He was convinved Facebook would never make money and that no-one clicked on ads online. I know a lot of people believe this, but I pointed out Google makes $20 billion revenue/year or whatever, and there's whole industries devoted to optimising PPC ads. "Nah that is just people who click by accident. Believe me it's completely nonsensical." Thinking him to be an non-serious person I didn't stay in touch but kept him on Facebook.

Next I see he's doing a masters degree in internet innovation in Oxford. Then he's at Harvard for a while. Now I see he's back in Oxford starting an academic career. A while ago I saw him post an article on the awesome power of "nudges" to his FB feed. I know not everyone in academia is like this, but academia doesn't awe me any more now that I know the bar is not that high.

"This is just the 2017 version of The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, which I wrote about a few years ago, where I showed some stats indicating that email marketing open rates are on the decline … and that traditional banner CTRs seem to be asymptotically approaching zero".

I.e., he indicates that this is a continuation of long-running trend, and that those particular charts illustrate the trend from several years ago, so your criticism misses the mark.

I thought it was a very interesting article, and identifies a set of fundamental trends. The main weakness is too much focus on B2C, but that's the author's area of interest.

Even the renewables would then need more subsidies, to pay for increased manufacturing costs and the fuel for the trucks that repair their transmission lines.

Point is its obviously misleading to say that fossil fuels are more heavily subsidied than renewables. People who hear that will assume that fossil fuel companies are being given taxpaper money, as the renewable companies are, when that is not the case. I don't think lumping together "companies that receive free money" and "companies we think should be fined" is an honest way to frame the situation.

Not mentioned in the article is whether Gideon tried to find another buyer. Given the previous owner sold the place for just $10k, he was probably desperate to get rid of it. Gideon realised he'd been the rube that bought a massive liability, and I'm guessing he found it impossible to find another buyer. (If he could have sold it, he'd have done that rather than try and burn it down).

https://www.howtogeek.com/166507/why-most-web-services-dont-...

There's a few startups working on platforms to make adding E2E encryption easier, but I doubt the EU is planning to mandate everyone use their services.

The plan sounds nice from a distance (who in tech is anti-encryption?) but closer inspection reveals problems. All legislation can do is ban certain activities. You want to release a new dating app, or add a basic messaging feature to your Q&A site, and you're not a crypto expert with 3 months to spend adding E2E encryption? Should it be illegal for you to release your app without encryption?

"The principle of confidentiality should apply to current and future means of communication, including calls, internet access, instant messaging applications, email, internet phone calls and personal messaging provided through social media," said a draft proposal from the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs."

How would this work in practice? Would any web service that includes a private messaging feature need to ensure it is end-to-end encrypted? Would there be fines or penalties for startups that included an unencrypted messaging feature in their product?

But many implicitly ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. I hear many variations of the comment I originally replied to, i.e., "even if there's no climate change, reducing fossil fuel use is pure win". I think many imagine we could keep roughly the same quality of life with the majority of our power coming from solar panels and wind farms. Smarter environmentalists realise this is not true, but the general public is very confused on the issue, especially as the more rational greens get lumped in with the activist crazies.

(One very important point in to explain Alex's context: many greens (not all, granted) are opposed on moral grounds to nuclear, and even to hydro, which floods valleys and messes with nature. The root of this is the desire to minimise human impact, but "minimising human impact" is ultimately at odds with "maximising human flourishing").

to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now

He doesn't think this. Obviously improved nuclear power, ultimately fusion power, is the real long-term solution. However, hopes that we can significantly improve solar or wind power are doomed to crash into reality -- there's fundamental limits to how much energy you can extract from the wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law) or from photons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...). Burning wood and dung works for poor countries that lack infrastructure, but it's more expensive that fossil fuels, and more polluting, even more polluting than coal.

This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF...

The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy:

There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy.

It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.

"The safest place to be online

In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content. Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline. It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically.

Where technology can find a solution, we will pursue it. We will work with industry to introduce new protections for minors, from images of pornography, violence, and other age-inappropriate content not just on social media but in app stores and content sites as well. We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm. We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis.

We will continue to push the internet companies to deliver on their commitments to develop technical tools to identify and remove terrorist propaganda, to help smaller companies build their capabilities and to provide support for civil society organisations to promote alternative and counter-narratives. In addition, we do not believe that there should be a safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online and will work to prevent them from having this capability.

We will educate today’s young people in the harms of the internet and how best to combat them, introducing comprehensive Relationships and Sex Education in all primary and secondary schools to ensure that children learn about the risks of the internet, including cyberbullying and online grooming.

Where we believe people need more protections to keep them safe, we will act to protect them. We will give people new rights to ensure they are in control of their own data, including the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18, the ability to access and export personal data, and an expectation that personal data held should be stored in a secure way. To create a sound ethical framework for how data is used, we will institute an expert Data Use and Ethics Commission to advise regulators and parliament on the nature of data use and how best to prevent its abuse. The Commission will help us to develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence that their data is being handled properly. Alongside this commission, we will bring forward a new data protection law, fit for our new data age, to ensure the very best standards for the safe, flexible and dynamic use of data and enshrining our global leadership in the ethical and proportionate regulation of data. We will put the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care on a statutory footing to ensure data security standards are properly enforced."

-----

I don't know how the data regulations mentioned at the end compare with the EU's Data Protection Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive), which is already part of UK law.

It's also interesting to compare the comments in this thread with the recent thread about the EU's fines for Facebook (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828), where the EU was praised for protecting consumer rights.

I am genuinely undecided on this issue. I'm basically pro-freedom and pro-capitalist in politics, so Theresa's May's anti-market and authoritarian policies have made me much less likely to vote Conservative. Still, I think the right to privacy is an essential part of the right to liberty, so there's some justification for the government regulating the use of personal data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan

"The privatised network is highly efficient, requiring few subsidies and running extremely punctually."

(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often).

> because regulations hinder innovation or whatever

How did you get this from my comment? I said that in the case of food, regulations remove cheap options, and remove job opportunities.

To make it concrete: consider a low-income Western neighbourhood. Joe is a young single guy in his 20s working a low-wage job. He's tired after work and doesn't like to cook, but can't afford to eat out. Sally is a grandmother, in her late 50s, and needs a source of income that isn't too demanding. In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.

In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

(Sometimes Westerners do make this trade. On my UK university campus, some local Indian stay-at-home mothers would cook up extra food and deliver meals to students for £2 ($3) a pop. They were breaking a ton of laws, of course).

Until you compare to Asian countries where you can visit nice restaurants if you're so inclined, but you also have abundant choice of street food and little diners, which aren't super clean but are cheap and tasty. This also changes the economy - it doesn't take hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a restaurant and obtain the proper licensing, which means that new locations can spring up for cheap. Which means there's an extra source of jobs for people at the bottom of the economy, and so on.

Multiply that by every regulated industry and you start to see the real downsides to gov't control of private enterprise. This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post. As well as ample evidence, there's also the fundamental principle - govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value. All it can (and should) do is define laws to protect everyone - this covers things like fraud, but not decreeing what products can and cannot be sold.