rdm_blackhole

You can't ban alcohol because it's been proven that it doesnt work or have you forgotten about the prohibition era?

You can't ban the sale of tobacco either because its been proven that any attempt to soft-ban it like they have done is Australia by raising the prices enormously has simply created a black market that the government has no control over.

Finally, the war on drugs which has cost hundred of billions of dollars worldwide has completely and utterly failed. You can get drugs delivered to your door step in any major capital of the western world today. The quality is better than before and the delivery is fast and discreet.

Absolutely spot on.

To think that your data is safe in the EU while the EU is actively pursuing ID checks for social media and pushing Chat control every 6 months is delusional. No, your data is not safe here. If the EU wants it, it will get it.

This cult of the EU privacy needs to stop. The EU wants the same access that the US intelligence has but for some reason, some people don't believe it and defend tooth an nail this idea that things are better here.

Just so you are aware, Europol was lobbying to have access to all text messages/emails in the EU at will without a warrant as part of Chat Control V2. Say what you want about the 5 eyes countries, this is no better.

If tomorrow the EU wants access to your data, Fastmail will give it just like it will give it to the US, to the UK or to Australia.

But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.

In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.

So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.

Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.

Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.

> China has not known freedom for some time, but citizens of the United States have a long experience of it.

This sort of statements are too broad and impossible to falsify. Freedom in what context? Political? Societal? Also can you have freedom or not have freedom? Is freedom a binary state?

Freedom in many countries is a scale, you are free to do this or that but not too much of it and not to everyone.

Furthermore, even in countries that are deemed to have greater freedom than others, they are still countless things that are banned so again freedom is really in the eye of the beholder.

> the escalating calls for an international treaty to ban superintelligence

There is 0 chance of that happening since we can't even define what intelligence is never mind superintelligence. A model can be great at coding software while hopelessly incapable at solving trivial things like when there was the whole "strawberry" spelling debacle not long ago.

> In other words, the present AI resistance speaks almost entirely of preventing risks still to come.

And that is exactly why this sort of effort is not going to succeed. If you are looking to ban or regulate things that don't pose a threat then what are we even doing here?

We have always started by allowing things and then restricting them when harm had been proven. Not the other way around.

Changing how things work and preemptively banning or regulating things in advance because of the harm that could result without clear evidence is opening the Pandora's box where a bunch of bureaucrats decide what citizens should or should not do based on vibes. Hardly a model to follow.

> Given what we have already seen of AI, we can be confident that its widespread adoption will create a less free society, a less virtuous people, and a degraded culture.

And this is supported by evidence I imagine? "we can be confident" is nothing but vibes. No sources, no peer-reviewed studies, just opinions. Is this supposed to be a good argument in favor of regulating AI because if it is then it's preposterous.

If you think AI is bad and will create chaos, fine, prove it then. And even if you could prove it, it certainly would not be a binary thing. AI is a tool that can be used in many ways. Some bad, some good.

> So far, opponents of AI have overwhelmingly focused on predicting its economic effects.

And we are supposed once again to trust these people because of what? Their track records? Experienced economists have trouble predicting what the global economy will look like 5 years from now but we are supposed to simply accept that the conclusion of the people who are for regulating and/or banning AI are infallible. That makes 0 sense.

At the moment the effect of AI is a known unknown. We do not know what it will do to the economy 5 years from now. Maybe it will destroy entire parts of the global economy, maybe it will create more opportunities in many industries. If we do not know then the best course of action and is to wait and see what happens before jumping the gun.

> It is—already—a moral and cosmological cataclysm

And the superlatives keep on coming...

I stopped reading after that. This article is not serious. We can criticize AI without using terms such as the ones above.

The author also never presents who "the people who oppose AI " are and what they really want. Are they governments? NGOs? Groups or citizens? We don't know.

I don't like the people who preach that AI is going to solve all our problems but the author is going in the complete opposite direction and using the same vibes to support their argument and that really does not help his case.

Nobody is stopping the western countries of doing the same exact thing with their own industries. As a matter of fact, the EU and the US are subsiding a lot of their own companies or even entire sectors of their economy (agriculture/arms/space/IT... the list goes on) already so why is it a problem if China does it?

You can't complain about something that literally every single country on this planet is doing and then somehow be angry because China does it as well. Rules for thee not for me and all that.

The real difference between what China does and what the western countries are doing is that China jump starts some industries with heavy subsidies and then gives them time to catch up to international standards and finally turns off the money tap and it forces these companies to export their production outside of China and makes them ultra competitive which is clearly a win for the consumers.

That is exactly how it played out with EVs today. Compare that to the auto industry in the EU which has relied on the same state support for the last decades and instead of using this support to innovate and compete they simply squandered their advance in these industries and find themselves on the back-foot thinking that they could just keep doing the same thing and that everything will work out somehow.

Who made the EVs cheaper today? China by competing heavily while the rest of the world was busy milking as much cash as possible from their customers. What about solar panels, batteries, wind turbines? China, China and China again.

And you believe that no other western country on this planet is doing the same exact thing? Every country spies on its enemies, allies and trade partners.

That is just the name of the game. I copy you, you copy me and hopefully I can copy you more than you can copy me. Singling out China for something that everyone does is just disingenuous.

The worst part of this whole enterprise is not the designs per se (although the buildings look like soulless buildings from the former USSR but that is besides the point), it is that very few stores actually accept 100/200 euro notes. Even 50 euro notes can be seen as suspicious in certain shops.

So my question is why bother with a redesign when you can't even use the notes in the first place?

As always the EU does not disappoint regarding it's stance on privacy. What a joke.

Your comment is all over the place and you are moving the goal posts quite a bit.

Since we are talking about Renault specifically, I will assume that you are not French otherwise you would not have written your comment.

Basically, it comes down to this, France is Renault and Renault is France. The French state has a 15% stake because it wants to influence the board, keep jobs in France and it will do that even if Renault loses money just like it did before Renault was privatized in 1996.

The French state will never let Renault fail and will always be there as a backstop if push comes to shove which is to say, it is there to make sure that if Renault needs cash it will give it. In 2021, at the height of the COVID period, the French state was ready to re-nationalize Renault instead of seeing it dissapear if necessary.

Then we have the countless subsidies and programs created all over the years so that French people buy newer vehicles from EU car makers. The same was done after 2008 when there was the massive cash for clunkers program to stimulate demand.

All of this money is coming from the state coffers, taxes paid to subsidize the purchase of new cars which benefits Renault and Peugeot immensely since these two brands are very strong in France.

So even though in practice the French state doesn't own a majority stake, it may as well because it will do anything it can to protect and help Renault keep it's market share.

Furthermore, nothing at Renault gets done without the French state's approval. If the French government thinks a merger is not good, it won't happen. If Renault wants to lay off people, it will have to through the government first, the unions second and only then will it happen.

As for the part of your comment regarding the profits out of China, that was not part of my response and not part of the original comment either so I am just going to ignore it.

Regarding the IP theft, every car makers steals from the competition. My uncle's job at Renault was to buy cars from their competitors and take them apart bit by bit to understand everything that was under the hood and then make recommendations to his bosses about all the new tech they found so that they could build their own version of it and include it in their newer models.

The point of the joint venture is moot. This is China's business model. If you want to sell cars there, you have to do it their way. It's the same exact playbook that the EU is using against the US tech companies by forcing them to comply with EU regulations if they want to keep distributing software and products here.

Don't want to comply, then no one is forcing you to do it. You just won't sell anything in China and that is that. Same goes for the EU.

Finally as another commenter said above, every country worth their salt on this planet is protecting to some extent their domestic champions, whether in the arms, space, car, food industry and whatever else. It's just the normal thing to do.

So you can complain about China all you want, it is doing exactly what the rest of the world has done for decades, but the difference now is that the Chinese brands are no longer the laughing stock of the car market.

They are leading in terms of price, quality and innovation and this reaction from the US government and the EU to apply tariffs on Chinese automakers is just a desperate attempt at stopping the flood of superior products.

That in itself is ironic because since Trump was elected and then re-elected, it's been a constant thing from the EU politicians to rally against the US tariffs just so that they can turn around and implement tariffs on China themselves.

When Germany sold millions of cars in China, that was just good business, when China does it in the EU, they are "dumping" their "over-production". When the US implements tariffs on EU companies and products, that is because Trump is an idiot who likes to start trade wars but when the EU does it on China, then it's simply "protecting" its industry.

I am honestly sick and tired of this double-speak, do as I say not as I do type of attitude coming from the most western countries. The western companies should stop whining and try to compete with China instead of crying because China just beat them at their own game.

> But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market

Do you think other countries do not subsidize their own automakers? What about the US government bailing out the entire US auto-industry during the GFC? To this day the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan and has given this company many tax breaks for the last 30 years or so just to keep some of the production in France.

It's too easy to dunk on China when the rest of the world has been doing the same exact thing for god knows how long but nobody had a problem with that as long as the EU/US auto-makers were making money hand over fist. Now, that it is changing, all of sudden everyone is screaming that China is the devil when it basically follows the same exact playbook.

As for free market argument, it is arguably harder to compete as a Chinese company in China given the cut-throat competition happening now than in the west and contrary to most of the western governments who would be too scared to let Ford or Renault fail for example, the Chinese government is very happy to see that some of its auto companies are failing because it means that the remaining ones are performing much better and have to keep innovating to succeed.

That is why the Chinese automakers are steamrolling the competition at the moment, they give people what they want: innovative products at a fair price point.

As it's been said many times in the past, don't hate the player, hate the game.

Ads in my opinion are not the problem.

The problem is the expectation that services/apps/radio/tv-channels need to be free when we know that there is nothing really free in this world (except maybe the air we breathe?).

This is the same problem that Firefox is facing. If you listen to the crowd here on HN, Firefox is either evil or dumb or both to take money from Google, yet at the same time, these same people would scream bloody murder if Firefox was a paid only browser that cost 5.99 a month because everything these days is a subscription and this is terrible.

Every product requires maintenance and has ongoing costs. Let me ask you, do you work for free? If not, then why should they?

So instead of spending hours debating over the value of ads in apps and sites, on the radio and so on, what is the solution if: - ads are a no go - subscriptions are bad - donations are unreliable and cannot ensure the proper remuneration of the creators

And let me say, that is is not a comment supporting ads, I am genuinely asking what the solution is because I just don't see it.

But that is a the problem though. You get stronger job protection because its very hard to find a job. If you could find a new job quickly and if the job market was more fluid, you would only rarely need this sort of job protection.

I mean we are still waiting for the European Apple or Microsoft or Google or anything of that scale aren't we? China has it's own version of all this stuff, where is Europe's?

Not OP but to respond to your question, like everything, there is a scale to this question. Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes.

What about 40%? 50%?

Most people agree that taxes need to be paid for the common good of society. However, many people disagree about the correct amount and increasingly about the usage of said taxes.

That is the real problem in my opinion.

> What does this rant have to do with the linked report in this article?

This is not a rant. I responded to OPs message point by point and simply expressed my opinion on these matters just like he did.

I also responded to OPs thinly veiled accusations that are completely unfounded and downright accusatory.

> Calling out blatant lying and bot propaganda isn't "smearing the opposition".

I am not sure what you are trying to get at.

Are you implying that this new draft is not in any way related to the recent Chat Control proposal that wanted to intercept all encrypted messages on phones in the EU, this same proposal that has been debated many times here on HN?

If so, then I am sorry if you think this blatant lying. You must have not been paying attention nor have read the many drafts of this law.

This proposal of tightening regulations around messaging apps and VPNs is being pushed as part of the other pushes for digital identity, age verification and potentially linking online identities to your real identity.

This is not happening just around Europe. It's also happening in the UK, Australia and more and I disagree with everyone of them.

This is not a conspiracy theory, this is publicly documented information that has been reviewed by journalist of all sides and has been decried by many human rights organizations who rightfully see all these moves as wanting to remove fully or partially the anonymity that the internet has provided thus far while curtailing freedom of speech.

> It's disgusting that people run here, write utter complete lying bullshit and then you attack folks that say "hey, this is complete bullshit".

I haven't attacked anyone. I am not sure what you are talking about.

I was the one who was attacked ad-hominem by OP who casually hinted that I was either a troll, a bot or working for Russia or China when the truth is that I am simply a EU citizen who is dissatisfied with the way the EU has handled a lot of it's tech regulations and I am simply voicing my personal opinions on these matters just like anyone else does in these threads.

Maybe you don't share my opinions and that's fine, we don't have to be friends.

> Be better

I will interpret this comment as simply someone who sees himself in the right and looks down on everyone else as poor souls needing to be guided to the light. This is not Reddit, you can get off your high horse now.

I appreciate the support but I am not surprised.

Even on HN there is been a surge of users who instead of defending their arguments or positions on certain sensitive topics such as the EU prefer to simply smear the opposition.

I write about the EU a lot because I live there and I am especially interested in what the EU is doing regarding tech.

I am especially critical of policies that target my private life and it irks me to no end that some people will claim loud a and clear that I should simply be grateful for what the EU is doing when the EU's actions in a lot of matters that I care about have either been deceptive and/or completely went against the supposed principles that the EU is supposed to have.

Politics and tech are basically intertwined at this point. Tech is also intertwined with Geo-politics, tax policies, mental health, and a bunch of other issues.

One cannot talk about tech without talking inevitably of the second or third order effects that derive from it which is again almost inevitably linked to politics either in the US or elsewhere.

> There is no such thing as the EU wants X. There are huge differences between what the European Commission, the European Council, and the majority of the European Parliament want.

Of course there is such a thing as EU wants X. The commission drafts laws and presents them to the MEPs who vote on them. The MEPs do not have the ability to propose their own laws. So all these bullshit laws that are voted on originate from the commission.

If I tell you that you can have a red balloon and you only choice is either to accept or reject the balloon, then you don't really have a choice do you? You can't say I want a blue balloon.

> Most of the anti-privacy crap hasn't happened thanks to the EU. Particular countries and lobbying groups have been pushing this through the Commission and Council and most attempts have been rejected by the EP.

Most attempts? And that should somehow reassure me?

Here is another law that was overturned after many years even though everyone knew it was illegal from the start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive. It only took something like 8 years.

When Romania protested that this was illegal under their constitution, the EU sued them and forced them to spy on their own citizens. So thank you but no thank you.

> If we didn't have the EU, some countries would have long introduced this nonsense (like the UK). But in the EU that does not make much sense, since there is a single market, so you have to enforce it EU-wide.

On the contrary, if we did not have the EU then it would not be such a problem because the same people who are pushing for this crap would have to repeat the same process 27 times, one in each country and they would have to convince/bribe their way into each government. Instead they can now push this stuff through the commission and it gets voted on and if approved gets applied to 450M people in one go.

That is the definition of single point of failure if I have ever seen one.

> The European Parliament + courts of justice/human rights are one of the last beacons of democracy/freedom worldwide that resist upcoming authoritarianism. We should support them and remind the Parliament over and over again that they should be continuing the good fight.

Do we now have to resort to this sort of emotional arguments? The EU as a whole is 27 countries, the world has more than 200 countries today. Are you claiming that most of them are hell-hole under some sort of tyrannical government? You can't be serious.

This is my problem with the EU supporters these days, you guys are so quick to shove in everyone throats the amazing stuff that the EU supposedly does for us every day but as soon as someone complains, you revert to using the same tactics as populists with the US vs Them rhetoric, the emotional manipulative language and what not.

Also your last paragraph is in complete contradiction with your previous statement. Somehow the EU/European parliament is the last bastion of democracy/freedom but it stills wants to access my private messages and emails (for my own good of course), and now it wants to force VPNs to record identifying information of its users (for our own good again).

If what you say is true then we wouldn't be having this conversation because anyone who proposes this sort of law should have been ostracized and kicked out of the commission in no time. Yet here we are.

> By the way, nearly all your comments on HN are about politics and all trying to sow dissent on Western (and especially European) democracies.

Ha, yes, you got me! I can see that when the push comes to shove it's easier to go for the subtle ad-hominem or character attacks.

God forbid someone in Europe could have any issues with the way things are going at the moment. Seems highly suspicious.

Should I send you a copy of my EU passports? Maybe that's whats going to be required in a few years time to post online if the all-mighty EU gets its way but I can understand if you want to start doing the policing early. After all we can never be too careful.

By the way, I love the new definition of democracy theses days: agree with us about everything or we will consider you a Chinese/Russian/Populist/evil (take your pick) troll.

Its perfectly fitting with the way the EU is trending down towards authoritarianism and subtle freedom of speech suppression.

> EU enshrined privacy in its charter of fundamental rights. GDPR was and still is a major protection.

GDPR does not protect you from governments snooping on you. The same way it does not stop governments from collecting data on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

It sometimes even forces governments to collect more data on their own citizens like in Romania.

The only difference between the US and the EU is that the EU has somehow managed to convince a bunch of useful idiots (not saying that you are part of it) that it is better than the US when in reality its the same shit just with a different color and smell.

Here we go again with new restrictions on civil liberties. This is Chat Control all over again.

The EU won't stop until it has access to all your data, all your messages, anything you read, save, send will be scrutinized by the the big great EU and it's little minions.

Hey, at least we get the freedom of movement right?

I a sure it's Russian propaganda that the EU has basically tried for the last 3 years to ban encryption so that it can access all your personal messages without a warrant?

Or is it also Russia propaganda that it wants to force VPNs to collect data on their users or force everyone to use their real identities online so that it makes it easy to prosecute anyone for wrong speech?

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-pr...

Nah, you are right the EU is good for us. No issues there at all.

> I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe, before the wall fell and Poland was still on the other side of that. Nice to see them moving on from that.

Europe is the outlier here. The rest of the world checks your passport when you come in their country because they like to know who comes and who goes for a lot of reasons including public safety, biosecurity and so on.

The fact that Europe has basically given up on trying to filter who comes in is not necessarily a model that is desirable for the rest of the world.

> Thanks to the EU free movement of people, I've now studied, worked and lived in four different countries.

You can do that without Europe as well. Do you think people did not move to another country or studied in another country before the European countries decided to remove borders? What about now with all the students moving to the US/UK/Australia/Canada?

Trust has been eroded for the last 30 years for many reasons and most of them are due to how the politicians and public institutions have behaved.

In all western countries, if you dig a little, you will find scandals after scandals from the ruling parties or the so called elite.

Why should a lambda citizen believe that there is any sense of trust anymore when those who are at the top clearly have no problem lying to get in or stay in power?

It's the same problem with the media biases. Newspapers and news organizations have completely stopped providing information and started pushing propaganda. Nothing more.

Then we lament the loss of confidence and the demise of democracy in the west.

> I looked at the 5 examples for a bit. Reading the Wikipedia talk pages, I'd tend to agree that the sources removed are representing a fringe idea and that the Wikipedia process has been followed normally.

Your comment is contradicted by this direct quote from the article:

> In the rejected New York Times articles, Wade was not presenting any controversial hypotheses, but simply reporting the findings of various genetics studies published in mainstream journals.

Maybe Wade put his own spin on the findings in his book/in the articles but does that undermine the credibility of the papers published in the mainstream journals?

In many subjects where we don't have a clear answer, we have different theories, some are bogus and others will eventually be disproved until we finally reach a consensus.

Until such time, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all points of view are represented.

> When Wade is “the only science journalist to cover a study” [...] around six paragraphs of text were removed from this article

The fact that they removed a point of view/theory on a subject because there are no other competing theories is simply wrong.

Imagine if we applied the same rule to physics. We don't know why the universe is expanding faster than anticipated. It could be dark matter, it could be something else.

Until such a time as we can prove one of the other, then all theories should be presented with caveats/warnings that these findings are not definitive and will most likely change in the future.

Instead of doing that in this case, it was decided that some theories should simply be removed because they do not fit with the conventional wisdom of what we consider acceptable or believable.

But science does not care about what is believable or acceptable. You gather evidence, you create a theory and you or someone else proves your it or disproves it. You don't simply sweep things under the rug because they make you uncomfortable.

And before you take this comment as supporting all fringe theories, we are not talking here about the flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism. Both of these theories have been disproved extensively.

Heck, there is even a Wikipedia page that was created just for this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism

So in conclusion, if there were multiple theories on this subject, I would expect them to be presented on Wikipedia warts and all so that the readers can see where we stand on the subject. Instead what we got is simple one sided censorship.

This is the same exact playbook used by the Church when Galileo came out with his theory of Heliocentricism. His idea made the Church uncomfortable and instead of trying to disprove him, they simply decided to silence him. Maybe we should avoid repeating the same mistakes?

And the next question is who's to blame?

News organizations each push their own agendas by misrepresenting facts or present rumors or second comments as certainty. Then months later, we finally learn really what happened and realize that a lot of the context of story was missing or completely fabricated.

Then we lament at the death of democracy.

On the contrary, injecting your own views/propaganda in Wikipedia is a great way for your content or your version of history to be included in the outputs of LLMs since they all rely more or less on it during their training phase.

That's awfully naive. China's cyber units or state actors most likely have access to Wikipedia and are not bothered by the Great Firewall. The citizens on the other hand, I agree with you.

> If your competitor is dumping (selling for an unsustainably low price) then competing your way to bankruptcy is not the right option

Italy is simply making a political choice to attract wealthy people instead of other people. Is it unsustainable as you put it, who knows? But what we know for sure is unsustainable is raising taxes like France every year on the middle class.

Also contrary to France who is running a 6% deficit annually, Italy is running a 3% deficit so it is managing its finances much better than France.

So much so in fact that France has become the de-facto "sick-man" of Europe because it is simply incapable of reforming itself.

Macron is on his way out and his government is paralyzed because they do not have a majority in parliament and he is pretty much hated by everyone. Meloni on the other hand is pretty well liked and has good chance of being reelected in 2027.

In France the situation is much more unstable with new candidates for the presidential election coming out of the woodwork every month including Francois Hollande, the most hated president of the entire 5th French republic who sees himself making a comeback somehow.

The outlook for France in 2027 and beyond is bleak. There are no parties interested in reforming France so the debt will keep on increasing, the public services will keep on deteriorating and none of the structural issues will be resolved either by the right or the left.

All of this to say that if I was wealthy French resident, I would consider moving to a country that is taxing me less and that is also much more politically and fiscally stable at the moment than France.

I can't wait for the EU to preemptively delete emails with language that is supposedly deemed offensive or possibly containing misinformation or god forbid, pictures of my nieces and nephews which could be interpreted as child grooming.

Yes, we should all let the governments decide if we should have access to our email addresses and pinky promise they won't use your data against you if one day you decide to disparage the sitting president/prime minister of the country you reside in.

Corporations bad! Government good! M'kay!