jeanjogr

I guess the main difference is that in the US (as far as I understand) there is no official workers representation outside of unions, thus some characteristics of workers' representatives are done by the union in the US (you get represented even if you did not vote for them).

Much like the role of the party and State organs in one-party state vs many parties democracies. In the former the roles are much more muddied between the two.

Is that not the case in the US as well?

I have never been able to quite grasp what it means to "unionize" in the US.

Here in my country, unions work like political parties (which I understand is not exactly enticing right now):

- you are free to join or not

- there are elected workers' representatives whether there are unions are not

- unions serve to organize workers for action and representatives elections, support candidates, and provide additional services as well

In this context, there is no one big vote to unionize or not, and no "union jobs". How does it work in the US?

You seem to argue that politics is whatever issues where you support change and "not politics" is whatever issues where you support the status quo.

It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists.

> Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political

If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.

- Industrial Society and its future, by Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski

If you only need that, all the extra stuff is useless.

There's (somehow) a widely held belief that there is no barriers to entry, on any market, ever. Things from anticompetitive behaviour of incumbents to needing enormous upfront capital invesment simply do not exist. This has to implications:

- Nothing should be done, whether regulation or consumer action, because everything can and will be fixed by the entry of a new company.

- We are living in the best of worlds. Otherwise, a new company would have sprung to fill the gap and then we would be living in the best of worlds again.

I am yet to convince people holding this belief that it may not be the case.

Shoes last longer if they are not worn everyday.

Anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity is on-topic here

The usual caveat about Paris applies: the city of Paris is but a tiny core of the larger Paris metropolitan area (Paris: 2.1M people, Paris metro: c. 10M). Paris is about one fifth of its metro area, a city like NYC is about half.

A closer analogue to being able to distinguish accents from Montparnasse, Montmartre and La Villette would be to able to distinguish accents from different places in Manhattan.

I think even today there are substantial accent differences within the Paris metropolitan area (think Versailles vs le Marais vs Aulnay), but within Paris proper not so much.

You missed the point. All the examples obviously all have at least one line of code, otherwise there would be no program to display "Hello, World!" at all. The goal is to have a program that is _counted as 0 line by the software "sloc"_ even though it is not 0 line.

I typed "UK data watchdog" (for I did not know its name) and while it is true that I needed more clicks than for France, I found their enforcement page with their list of fines [0]: £18m here, £2m there...

[0] https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/?facet_type...

Are cookies banned?

I typed "cnil fines" (the CNIL being the French data watchdog) on google which led me to their sanction page [0] which features 100M€ fines to Google and 35M€ to Amazon _last week_. It is surely not much in the grand scheme of thing but surely this is more than a mere Potemkin village.

[0] https://www.cnil.fr/fr/tag/sanctions

> 3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.

This if from article 7 of the GDPR [0]. Clearly the situation described involves a much harder time withdrawing consent than giving it - which goes against the law.

I may have misunderstood what you meant but how is this being laser focused on cookies? This articles applies beyond the Internet anyway.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

I was responding to the statement I quoted.

> There is no good reason for French military units to be interfering in former colonies in North Africa; let it go.

The French intervention was after both the UN security council (though France is part of it) and, more importantly, Malian authorities asked France for help [0]. "Let it go" in this context means refusing to help someone asking for help when they are on the verge of being overrun by Islamists.

[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20130111-mali-asks-france-milita...

There are three things.

First, being part of a larger whole may have material advantages that are not directly related to money or security. A good example is free travel between countries.

The second point is that people actually believe in their morals. That is not to say that all "moral" arguments are made in good faith - sometimes they are thinly veiled economic (or else) arguments. But people generally believe in their morals. If I - for instance - believe that people are endowed by their Creator of inalienable rights, I may favor institutions that support such rights, and the EU may be more effective at that that nation states. If I believe that all Europeans are brothers and should decide their fate together, I will favor a strong EU. I wager that the reasons most Americans believe that the US should not be split in different regions has very little to do with how much more or less money they would make if the US was to be divided. Don't quite recall Lincoln's speech on the GDP implications of the South secession. Morals matter.

Finally, not everything is zero sum. It is possible that everyone wins from the recovery fund, or that benefits for those that benefit are greater than the losses from those who lose.

This is the whole point of having your headquarters in those countries: make money in country X but be taxed according to country Y laws. Why would they not want to be under country Y laws for things other than taxes?

I agree: any company which does not respect DNT should be heavily fined at a minimum, with executives in jail. This would ensure fast adoption.

You still have to appoint a censor who decides what is false for libel, don't you?

> That was not helped by the motto of the 90s, when the 'glory' was to become "a company without factory"...

Was that so silly? AMD seems to be doing alright.

More than make the price reasonable, I would wager it was to anchor the Apple Watch in the "watch" category, rather than the "electronic gadget" category in people's mind. It's not some $XXX toy for notifications and whatever. Much like watches, it is as much about functionality as it about style. Much like watches, it both exists in a expensive, luxury form and in an everyday form. You're buying a Swatch, with Rolex available if you want - not a fitibit.

For the first point, I agree that _legally_ the Stewards rules depends on Gondor being a Kingdom without Kings. But legality and legitimacy are two different things. We can only speculate whether the people & the nobles of Gondor think the Kingdom part matter or if they would still think the Stewards ought to rule even if they did not put up with the Stewards waiting for the King charade.

Perhaps people think it's just ceremonial and the reason Stewards and their lines ought to rule is because they have done so for time immemorial (well, almost) and they've done a great job at it. A wannabe King arguing that _akshually_ they should be the ruler would be met with scorn - a random nobody bereft of any lordship that presses ancient and irrelevant legal rules.

Or perhaps the waiting-for-the-king part is essential, and people think that Stewards ought to rule because they've been appointed by the Kings and are doing a great job keeping the Kingdom ready for the return of any King.

I do not think we have much evidence whether it is the former or the latter. Aragorn - as a leader of the Great War, with the Steward dead and the heir of the Steward owing his life to him - has much more going for him than just being technically the heir. The fact that he is acclaimed does not tell us how important was being the legal heir vs. saving the kingdom vs. being installed by the Steward heir & Valar operatives. Perhaps a random noble from Gondor would have been able to claim the throne in the same conditions, à la Bonaparte. We do not know.

In the end, it's been 1000 years. Not many people support 1000-year-old claims. How many people care about the Byzantine Empire succession, or what the Capetians are up to?

For the second point, I poorly worded what I meant. What is painted as grand achievement and positive thing - the return of the King - is just one noble replacing another noble as the dictator, with a not so insignificant part of the story being about noble #1 campaign to depose noble #2. Hardly something to praise.

This quote often comes up when people discuss Tolkien's works. However:

- either "allegory" is meant to be a very strict one-to-one map, like Gandalf is really Jesus but has a different name in this story. Then the quote is irrelevant to almost discussion because nobody is trying to make such a point.

- or "allegory' is meant to be some loose inspiration, like the War of the Ring drawing from Tolkien's experiences in the Great War, the role of providence being similar in Catholic theology & in the legendarium, or more controversially the description of evil men or women being a product of its times. If such is the meaning of allegory, and Tolkien denied using it, then he is wrong.

I think Tolkien meant meaning 1. In either case it is irrelevant to most claims of some connection between a real word thing and a legendarium thing.

Indeed it was, however:

- Stewards ruled for 1000 years. I would wager that the idea that Kings would return and that stewards rule was a temporary thing was a purely ceremonial thing. We do not know (or at least I do not know - perhaps it is stated somewhere in the books) whether the people of Gondor would find a randomly found King more legitimate to rule them than the Stewards' line. Aragorn is a special case, since he had been running a long-con PR campaign well before the War of the Ring, and was acclaimed as a ruler because he was an effective commander in the great war - Dunedain heritage may not have been necessary.

- Right to rule some land because of one's birth is of course wrong. Aragorn pressing his legal (but immoral) right to rule because of his birth should not be praised, and should be seen for what it is: elites fighting to reclaim more power over the common folk.

i think there are a lot of plot points in Tolkien's legendarium where you do not need to change the fact to change the perspective:

- the Elves are a puppet of the Valar, doing their bid in exchange for land and favours in the Undying land. Numenor is even more so a client state - sided with us? you're rewarded with longer life and your own territory.

- while the Valar do not encourage the colonization of the land of the "lesser" races (note: there are "lesser" races) in Middle Earth by their clients - Elves following Fëanor and the Numenorians colonies -, they really do not do much to prevent it. When things go south for their clients, they of course help them survive in Middle Earth through open warfare and pardon almost all of the rebels (so much for not supporting the colonization!). It is not so much different from the US being ostensibly against colonialism but bankrolling France in Indochina.

- they keep their "no direct support, but no condemnation" policy on colonial powers for a while. They do not want to harm their clients when their second-rate clients want to renegotiate their terms (aka the Numenorians wanting immortality) so they call on big boss Eru. In line with their history of not wanting to dirty their hands, but still pursuing their policy objectives.

- when their colonial clients are on the verge of disappearing (Gondor before the War of the Ring), they send CIA political operatives to engineer resistance, coups, and remake Middle Earth in their fashion. My bad, they are "Istari". Those agents have no qualms scarifying the lesser people and getting involved in their politics. I have no doubt that the sole purpose of reinstalling the Numenorian dynasty is to help the war effort (it is well known that internal strife bolsters the war effort), not to replace the current leadership - now quite distant from the Valar - by a man who owes everything to the Valar and their subordinates. He was even raised in a pro-Valar Elven colony! The Dunedain program exists only to have a convenient leader to choose if you want to topple current Gondorian leadership. I mean if, say, the US had hosted the descendants of the Capetian - Bourbon kings of France since the French Revolution and tried to push for France to become a kingdom again under their brand new American-raised kingdom after WWII instead of that pesky de Gaulle, would anyone think it is solely for French interests?

- speaking of which, it is good that Aragorn becomes the King because he was born to become king. Right-of-birth is not a very compelling point. Cheap tricks ("the hands of a king are the hands of a healer!") are used to prop up the new Numenorian regime.

- industrial technology is terrible, because it is direct competition to the nature/magic based technology of the Valar and their surrogate.

- Saruman is beyond help because he chose to get power for himself rather than prop up the Valar client states' power. I guess you can make a point that betraying your bosses is wrong, but is a Numenorian disctatorship (whose leader is put into power by one of the Istari) that much better than direct dictatorship by one of the Istari?

And that's just on the top of my head.