StopDisinfo910

The interesting part has more to do with the ideological fundation than with the electoral reality. It's not about winning a few percentage points, it's about the ground work for their political vision.

Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.

It's pervasive throughout Project 2025.

I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.

In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.

Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.

It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.

Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.

It flagged me saying UBI by giving money to the rich was a form of negative transfers as "negativity" and said it was polarizing. I don't think it's ready for prime time.

The filter is implicitly tuned on American culture. It's very easy to trigger the negativity one by merely pointing facts if you don't give opposite but unequal arguments and it deeply dislikes lightly oppositions which would perfectly acceptable in my own culture. It reminded me a bit of the Copilot email coach and it's unceasing invitation to add sentences devoid of meaning to "improve the tone" your email. The overall score is mostly opaque too.

I think there is a confusion between engaging and culturally palatable to the average American and of quality.

If I add to go through this, one, I would be deeply annoyed, two, I would just pass all my comments through another LLM if I really had to interact.

The main thing Google is screwing up is that if my API key somehow leaks and I end up with extremely out of line billing at Microsoft, I will be on the phone with a customer representative as soon as we or they notice something weird happening and a solution will be found.

Google will probably have me go through five bots and if, by some kind of miracle, I manage to have a human on the phone, they will probably explain to me that I should have read the third paragraph of the fourth page of the self service doc and it's obviously my fault.

As far as I know, they are merely shifting capacities from the customer market towards the data center market with minimal retooling. I am unaware of any of the three actively investing in new capacity. Some modest increase are planned but nowhere near what you would expect given current demand.

You were asking for legitimate purposes. That's some of them.

That's not how this works. Unregulated markets are not a free for all. Law still apply in the absence of a regulator.

Also, unrelated minor pet peeve, but what's the deal with the "not ai emdash"? You can just use dash or comma, you know.

Keeping track of which of your citizens are outside of the country. Ensuring the state knows you are a citizen and should be treated as such.

France had a weird issue recently about the media talking for ages about someone who committed a crime while the state had asked for him to be deported months before on the basis of his foreign passport and it took weeks for someone to finally notice that the guy was actually French. It made the police looks clownish.

RAM production is highly inelastic and controlled by an oligopoly. They have little desire to increase production considering the lead time and the risk that the AI demand might be transient.

They actively prefer keeping confortable margins than competing between each other. They have already been condemned for active collusion in the past.

New actors from China could shake things up a bit but the geopolitical situation makes that complicated. The market can stay broken for a long time.

I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.

It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.

I don't think it explains everything.

I think social norms have a lot to do with it. It's like the actual social costs of being the one who broke the social trust is so high it dissuades people.

It worked for me on a lower level. Everyone cut queues and will grab an empty seat if it looks available at a packed restaurant here so I do it too but I never did that when I lived in Singapore because I knew that's not how things work there and people would genuinely be mad at me for doing it.

It's like a self-fulfilling, self-improving environment. Same with Japan and cleanliness.

State provided housing for most and a booming economy with low unemployment must help too.

AI doomsday scenarios all have the same flaws. They systematically confuse social constructs with laws of nature.

Everything that starts with mass unemployment and don't finish with strikes, riots and the technology being massively regulated can safely be disregarded. If people have to chose between AI and society, they will chose society.

It's important to remember that things like the economy, the market or even money are social constructs which hold because people collectively decide to believe in them. Watch what happens to data centers when the people controlling the electric grids, manufacturing parts, growing the food, or driving the trucks carrying it stop doing so.

People in power know that. They also know they would be collateral damages if it reaches this point. Generally speaking people in power like to stay in power. This power depends on society staying an acceptable choice to most. Except regulations to happen far before AI starts rocking the boat too much.

The cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.

I mean innovation going faster than security department is not a new thing.

You have to understand that the security department operates with a fundamentaly different mindset and reality than a business executive. One is responsible for compliance and avoiding adverse events and the other for ensuring the ongoing survival and relevance of the organisation.

Specific waivers for high level members are fully expected. They also have waivers for procurements. It makes sense because they can engage their personnal responsibility for this level of decisions. They don't need the security department to act as their shield.

It's clear that something like Open Claw has the potential to be deeply disruptive so seeing leaders exploring makes sense.

their primary purpose is to crack down on the next Just Stop Oil or Palestine Action so for that reason should be opposed.

Could you explain to me how a digital id standard involving a mechanism for zero knowledge proof of identity is supposed to help the government crack down on activists (skipping the fact you are using UK examples for a EU spec)?

Take into account the reality we live in where every communication platform already requires you to provide your phone number and you can't get a phone number without providing an ID the European Union please, not some disconnected threat model.

It's crazy to me that we want to force age verification on every service across the Internet before we ban phones in school.

France banned phones in elementary and noddles schools in 2018. It's not the only European country to have done so.

It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering".

The EUDI spec is tech neutral.

What the EUDI mandates is a high level of assurance under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation and the use of a secure element or a trusted execution environment to store the key.

Would banning the whole system have any downside? It's still unclear to me what crypto is supposed to be useful for.

Using a mixer would taint the mixer and every wallet it sent to. I'd think this would end up tainting almost everything before too long.

Is that actually an issue? I am looking for it but I can't see a downside.

That's not where the interesting discussion is. The interesting discussion is with the notion that free unregulated markets are universally good and will naturally lead to positive outcomes because...

The textbook desirable outcome is that competitive markets minimize suppliers'surplus which is good for consumers.

Not that this doesn't mean unregulated markets. Monopolies and oligopolies acting like a monopoly are textbook examples of pathological markets where suppliers can maximize their surplus.

I think pretty much everyone would agree that the current situation is a failure of regulation not over regulation. Regulator and legislation have been constantly weakened in the name of international competitiveness since Reagan.

When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere.

This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly.

You act like it's a competitive market. It's not the case. It's an oligopoly with an extremely inelastic supply side.

The market is already completely broken and ineffective due to concentration and export controls. The actual response to a major demand shock should be investments to increase capacities but it's currently extremely limited because suppliers want to protect their margins and fear the market contracting again.

It's 4% per fine. Each violation is a fine and Meta owns multiple companies that can be fined. But 4% of global revenue already can't be treated as just a cost of doing business. Their shareholders would murder them.

Google services are banned at the very large company I work at and that's not because they are technically poor.

It's just that the last time we had to deal with their customer support, they were so bad someone at the exec level said they were banned from now on. It's to the point we have to explicitely schedule high level meetings and carve out exceptions when they happen to buy products we use.

We work with nearly everyone in the cloud space except Google. That should tell you everything you need to know.

The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent.

1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design.

Reading a lot will not make you a good writer. It will hopefully get you familiar with the main characteristics of a good story, give you vocabularies and some ideas of how you should structure your writing and what you can do, but anyone who has attempted or studied creative writing now that it's fundamentaly different than just reading. It's like solving puzzles and building puzzles. To design a good puzzle, you need to understand how people will solve it but it's not enough.

Same with code but even worse because code is non linear. The reality is that you need to manipulate things to understand how they fit. You can read all the architecture schemas you can find and review a ton of good implementations - hopefully you will have done that during your study - but you won't trully understand any of that until you have successfuly added something to a code base. That's why onboarding new people is so difficult. But I think I fundamentally disagree with your premise. Most people work all their lives on things they weren't involved with developing. Green field development is the exception not the rule.

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

Top 5 fines:

1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion

2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions

3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions

4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions

5 - Google - France - €60 millions

I wish every law barely got enforced this way.

I think the idea I see here that young = modern = pro-EU and old = anti-EU by ignorance is a gross oversimplification which doesn't stand.

I personally was very pro-EU in my youth and deeply soured as I knew more and more to the point I'm staunchly against nowadays.

It started in 2005 with the referendum result being ignored. Then 2012 came with the shambolic management of the Greek crisis, something even the IMF points as ineffective. Then I was paid to put in place the Green Taxonomy and I saw how unready and dumb the whole thing was. Then there was the rejection of the Draghi report which made lose hope.

I find the mix of the euro being a deeply unfair currency union strongly advantaging Germany at the expense of the periphery, the fact that Germany keeps playing on it and amplifying the effect in direct violation of the treaty and yet always get a hall pass and their holier than though attitude despite being basically free loaders completely impossible to tolerate.

The 2019 CEP study showed it well. The union costs billions of GDP to France and Italy to give a minor advantage to the German. It's a dogmatic straight jacket managed by priests with zero actual economic understanding and serving the interests of a big mercantilist using development funds to shore up its tributaries in the east and still managing to gradually lose relevance as it can't even manage having a proper strategy despite the advantages, and a few fiscal parasites around it.

At 36, I deeply wish from my country to be free of the monster than the union has become and deeply ressent being a prisoner of a monetary union which intentionally didn't plan an exit path. And for what? Surrendering the ability to make law to the citizen of other countries who share neither my language, nor my culture, clearly don't have the same vision of the future than us and wants to force us into their ineffective model? No, thanks. No GDP gains or alleged diplomatic weight is worth this debasement.

I don't understand Brexiters because being out of the euros they had the best of both worlds but I respect their desire to be truly sovereign and free from the constant Germanic hegemonic push.

Edit:Lots of downvotes, very few counterarguments. I'm guessing facing the tensions at the heart of the project makes some of you frankly uncomfortable.