2,678 karma · joined March 4, 2013
Closer home, in California, there are 3000+ families who don't need affordable heating anymore, their home burned down due to climate-change related wildfires just this year.
Do you think it would be more affordable to relocate some populations and rebuild a few cities after floodings, droughts, famines and wildfires caused by that cheaper fossil energy? 'Artificial' depends on your definition of who is paying, and when.
And we destroyed much of the planet doing it. Maybe it was a bad idea when we did it too. When joy becomes an argument for leniency you imply there is really no urgency. That is probably why the environmental movement is not very joyful. They want change now.
You rightly mention lobbying and corruption together. But somehow you miss that they are on the same continuum. From my EU perspective lobbying in the US is corruption, as the lobbying comes with money and paid-for political promotion.
The situation around guns itself is a clear example: as I understand it, a majority of US people is in favor of more limitations to gun rights (banning automatic weapons, screening psychiatric patients and criminals) but politicians are only expanding gun rights (open carry etc).
If democracy would work as intended then "common sense" limitations would have been introduced long ago.
Note that I am not talking about corruption in the criminal sense: US politics and supreme court have fully legalized and embraced it, conflating it with lobbying.
Choice is real only when you have options. Here, the option of having a fixed-income, fixed-time taxi driver job will get out-competed in the long term because it is more expensive, so the other option will be to have no job. Not paying into social security and pension funds saves a lot of money! It may even seem beneficial to the driver in the short term. But it offloads the costs further down the line to society or the driver personally (when reaching pension age or getting sick).
Maybe that type of innovation is simply not good for society and better avoided.
There are also tax-discounts for large and profitable companies ('innovatiebox') that innovate (companies like ASML, NXP) that Booking.com would probably benefit from too.
The author seems to think that Facebook would suddenly stop doing all the other things it does to make money, once a user would pay. Of course they would not.
On the contrary: Facebook would see those paying users as extra valuable for tracking, keep harassing and confusing them until they click the wrong button once, and then sell that "premium" user data for more.
Ad-tech companies get more and more emboldened lately. They see that the GDPR is not really enforced, they assume that big, cash-rich companies will get taken on first, competitors are doing it too, so they gamble they can get away paying lip service to GDPR while continuing their illegal tracking practices.
I have seen several startups pitching schemes that seem blatantly illegal to me, while assuring that their tech is fully compliant. Often using the words "legitimate interest" to prove this point.
Not so much the product. The problem I have with them is that they make the money for all this good stuff by selling expensive and extremely unhealthy drinks to youngsters. I'm wondering if they are a net positive for the world, my conscience whispers maybe they are not.
Red Bull may be the only company that I like for their marketing but whose product I'd like to be taxed to oblivion (together with all sugary softdrinks).
At least you are getting it. We Europeans seem to have pre-funded production and now it turns out much of it is shipped to higher-paying customers first, and we must wait until "production issues" are solved.
When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff done", and the result of this is massive profits with a secondary effect of death and destruction, then the consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but let me guess nobody goes to jail).
The consultant may have been hired only for the first part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The minute you understand the possible consequences of the things that you contribute to, you become partly responsible for it.
As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial crimes, or worse.
The think I took from it was that I am always responsible for anything that results from my actions. So in my career I always tried to consider what work I do, what customers I work for, and what might come from the things I do. In a business environment that is often not easy, most people work from a mindset that anything profitable is good as long as it's not illegal.
Which makes sense, when you hear from your news sources that the other party is committing massive fraud, that gives some people an excuse to do so too.
XFLR 5. A nice graphical UI using XFOIL for 2D section CFD and basic algorithms for 3D flow analysis too.
It is funny how people in the US expect exactly nothing from their government/city. Does nobody think they could provide shared charging infrastructure for people who live there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands#We...
Of course there are corner cases that are really hard, but that is no different than audio/video recognition, where a 95% solution (that also has many imperfections) gets forced on users anyway.
When there is money at stake, laws en enforcement can accomplish things that are unthinkable when it is at the expense of the common good.
I don't know the specifics of this proposal. But I live in a country that has a similar wealth tax, and it doesn't work that way here. When you found a company, its shares remain valued at nominal value for tax purposes, until you sell or transfer them. Only after that they'll be taxed as wealth.
...so you go along in the doublespeak. Please elaborate, because the article says it's without merit and also rather rich coming from Facebook.
> violating terms of service
prohibiting independent research to find if what they promise is actually true, after they have been proven untrustworthy many times?
Those are strong words, but I'm afraid the "we as a society" are not as much of a power as one would hope. Facebook as a company might turn out to be more powerful. Facebook can bring lawsuits, PR doublespeak and over time wear down adversaries threatening their business.
I think the underlying problems need to be fixed before there can be hope of restricting what businesses like Facebook can do.
Especially never talk to any ad-tech companies. They are worth billions, but really do not offer anything on top of what Apple and Google have in their docs about advertising.
Think it through: you read this very article, and many cookies on that page you will have consented to will let many ad-tech companies know that you should probably be labeled "privacy conscious". Which, as any good AI will teach them, is closely related to the "extremist left" and "anti fascist" labels. Next, you start Youtube or Insta on your Apple device. Now you suddenly see promoted content from those bubbles because you probably want to click on it.
Ad-tech is dangerous.
You should read again. Under "Determining Unique Users" you can see they link every "device id" to a unique user ID. A device id can be a browser cookie, an Apple IDFA or an Android AdID.
> Apple took this step without needing to be pressured by consumer rights groups.
Well, Apple is a smart company and better than most others with privacy. They may have concluded for themselves that they would probably get under pressure for this.