What the US media (and Elon Musk) call EU censorship is actually a request to follow EU rules if they want to operate in the EU market. What, exactly, is controversial about that?
Yes? It’s not exactly a surprise that you are expected to follow the laws where you do business. This doesn’t mean those laws are inherently good or bad, that’s a judgement which requires analysis to make and businesses quite reasonably might choose not to stay in a market based on that decision as Google did with China.
It's not that controversial, every single country has limits on speech, including the US. So European countries control a little bit more than the US, largely when it comes to racial abuse and other hate speech. So? The American model when combined with social media and the internet appears to have disastrous outcomes, judging by who has been elected there. It clearly worked in the past, but not any more.
Americans supposedly being outraged at other free, democratic countries (often in reality both more free and democratic than the US) having different laws regarding speech is really just a smoke screen for what they really want: for their social media companies and billionaires to completely control our media, so that we end up just as fucked up and insane as they are. In the end if we allow Americans to poison our countries, we will lose our freedoms and democracies. Why would we allow that? What do you expect?
P.S. it's cringe to cry about lack of free speech in Europe as if we've changed. We never, ever had 100% free speech in Europe. Stop trying to hark back to some free speech utopia that literally never existed. This is the continent that up until 110 years ago was overwhelmingly ruled by kings and queens and indeed we are in many ways far more conservative than you are. Get over it and stop trying to turn us into you.
I would just like the early American project of liberal democracy and Constitutional rights to outlive American capitalism and American militarism, even if it means it survives it in some other country. Because it's looking pretty bleak over here.
We ought to avoid repeating your mistakes, no? Maybe unlimited campaign donations and so on, all this wonderful "American free speech (money = speech)" is a fundamentally bad idea. Worked exceedingly well for ~225 years, now it has lead to the implosion of the empire by electing a sociopathic retard to the presidency. Yes to free speech, no to whatever fucked up shit the US, its billionaire "libertarians" and Christian nationalists are pushing for us to adopt here in Europe.
If the likes of JD Vance are pushing for us to adopt his idea of free speech, you can be sure it's a bad idea.
The American political system didn't implode until its system of capitalism had the conditions necessary to escape its popular control. That wasn't necessarily an eventuality. We had a semi-functional campaign finance system in living memory.
Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law, I worry that your issues with capital-government overreach will arise even faster than ours.
I don’t disagree with you but I disagree on a point of history.
> Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law
If I recall correctly, Britain had joint stock companies from the 1600s, and Adam Smith and all that. They also even before this had “trusts” and “trusts which own trusts” which had certain rights, and the court of chancery had established precedent around these.
The French also had a massive state stock company in this time, and it became a massive bubble which imploded in XXXX. This attracted a lot of attention and commentary and it’s impossible that the American Founders were ignorant.
The Brit’s never had a freedom of speech, but in English common law, companies had property rights, standing to sue, and so on. Most activities a business person could take, they could take on behalf of their company instead.
So in the American context, it seems that the founders were likely aware of corporations. Why they didn’t put explicit limits in the first amendment, who knows. Maybe it just didn’t seem important at the time.
It came very close in the 1930s, it is arguable that the New Deal headed off revolution
The USA should have been considered a pariah state since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, now it is rapidly becoming one
The USAnian system has been a corrupt oligarchy with only trappings of democracy since it's inception. Those "trappings" run deep, but are not allowed to unseat the true source of power: money
The Founding Fathers [sic] gave that a lot of thought and worked very hard to make it that way from the very beginning
Ask Alex Jones about his free speech on Sandy Hook to understand how bad (EU) censorship really is!
Jokes aside. Restriction of freedoms, including speech, is not bad by definition, it's the scale and intention behind it that matters but this aspect is always missing, kind of censored, in public debate. You may downvote me now :-)
Edit: In the same sense, Alon does not cry about specific and obviously unjustified cases of EU censorship on X.
Of course not. It's only censorship if the rules are censoring rules. Just because a billionaire right wing extremist cries "cEnSoRsHiP" everytime people who criticise him aren't imprisoned doesn't mean it is.
I don't see how being in the sun could be bad for us. We've been doing it for as long as we've existed and every other form of life does it as well. Anecdotally, I feel amazing when I'm sunbathing and I feel terrible during winter when there's less sun. The only explanation I can come up with is that modern people are somehow uniquely sick so their bodies can't do what every other organism has done for billions of years.
Uv rays are not safe. But not getting uv rays is also not safe. Like so many things in biology, bodies are optimized for ranges in the middle and not at the extremes.
That's been my conclusion recently. While I'm sure it's true that people aren't getting enough vitamin D because they are indoors a lot, I'm not convinced you can't easily get enough of it in supplement form. If UV is only needed for vitamin D then you might as well avoid the aging effects of UV exposure and pop a pill.
I don't think we know the entirety of what happens in the skin with UV exposure. We are pretty sure that vitamin D is good, and that cancer is bad, and that seems to be all that people talk about, but there are a lot more things happening that we don't fully understand.
I suspect when we know more, the best answer is going to be moderation. But it's really anybody's guess right now.
There are even things that we do know about but generally aren't talked about such as UV-triggered nitric oxide release[1] which moderates blood pressure among other positive effects.
I want to be clear that there being pros and cons whose relative proportions change is very different than what some other commenters seem to be implying which is closer to a threshold model of UV safety which clearly doesn't exist and is non-scientific.
I'm aware of the importance of wearing a hat (with a brim) when in sunlight, to protect scalp and ears from UV radiation.
"Researchers think the three primary types of skin cancer -- melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma -- are mostly caused by too much time in the sun. So it’s very important to use sunscreen or cover up if you’re going to be outside longer than 15 minutes or so." https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ss/slideshow-sunlight-he...
there's nothing wrong with being in the sun. but there's no denying UV rays damage the skin, accelerating the signs of ageing- hence the recommendation by dermaotlogist to avoid it.
They have arrested some. Have heard of Teslas getting keyed too.
My sense is that Elon being less in the spotlight recently has allowed some of the anger he provoked to cool off. But the brand damage, I am afraid, is permanent.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/tesla-vandalism-incidents-conti...
I am unhappy about Tesla's slide. My car is indeed worth less as there uncertainty about the company's ability to provide parts and services long term.
More importantly, Tesla was an American company making cars in the U.S. and leading the world in production and technology of EVs. Musk has stupidly pissed away Tesla's position and ceded it to Chinese companies. Perhaps this sounds overly nationalistic, but leading in one of the key industries of the coming decades in the U.S. would have been good for the country.
The police are underfunded and understaffed since Covid here in Silicon Valley. They won’t pursue your vandalism cases if they are just the value of a car.
This idea that you're supposed to accept worse pay because you believe in the idea doesn't apply to George. If his companies succeed, he'll be rich. Of course, there's nothing wrong with even working for free if that's what you like, just don't make a moral principle out of it.
I don’t mean to imply it’s to get employees to accept lower pay. I mean that there is some implicit screening against people who are solely optimizing for high pay.
Lots of reasons why you would want to simultaneously pay well and not attract people who are optimizing for pay.
I don’t fully understand why you wouldn’t want to attract people who optimize pay. You always should aim for getting paid what you’re worth which is understandably hard to define. I think that’s the whole point of OPs argument how this is exploitive. You’re trying to sell a “vision” for lower pay.
We live in such a capitalistic world by now, that most people’s happiness is, if they want it or not, tied to money. And I think society is moving further towards this.
Having kids would be a large financial burden and given my projection, would mean I wouldn’t be able to guarantee a decent living and the mental stability, because kids are brutal and societal pressures are very hard to free yourself from.
I grew up very poor and only very recently I was able to get out of debt i racked up just to survive (and sheer ignorance/living above my means, because I had nothing to lose and no perspective). I would hate myself of putting a child in that position myself.
If money wouldn’t be such a dominant force in current society, I’d very much consider having children.
>We live in such a capitalistic world by now, that most people’s happiness is, if they want it or not, tied to money.
This is how people feel, but that feeling has to be wrong. We know from history that people lived with much less and they were much more mentally stable than we are today. To be fair, if everyone is poor, it's probably very different than just you being poor in a rich society.
social media means people have realized how poor they are relatively. otherwise we are not in a substantially more capitalist world in the west and people are only more affluent than in the past.
obviously social media cannot explain everything about fertility, but i suspect it explains a significant portion of modern economic discontent among the professional/middle+ classes
I tend to disagree, I think a lot more in our society has changed due to the commodification of basically everything combined with the capitalist tendencies to pervert and corrupt anything, as there is no limit to greed. I think the housing market, food pricing and many more aspects of live have started to outpace the average workers wage to a point where it’s hard to be optimistic about a brighter future. The dream of ownership, a car, a family has gotten significantly more expensive in relation to incomes. At least from the POV of an European
Do you mean poor countries? I believe fertility is most closely related to education of women. If they have other options, many choose not to have a dozen kids like our ancestors. It's both hard on their bodies, and they typically get stuck with almost all the domestic and child care duties.
The delta between "make a small requirement that you can check and verify" vs "create the code yourself" is pretty big. A well crafted sentence can sometimes still be hours of work.
Therapy is effective, but not always. sometimes, especially with children, there is no root cause in life to the depression beyond "genetics". Additional, therapy may simply be useless and unproductive without medication being used concurrently.
There's also simply death. I didn't feel like mentioning it, but I think its worth pointing out that without treatment, death is a very real possibility.
Do we know that, though? Historically the lives of most people were bleak and miserable. You don't really have much time to feel depressed when you have to work for 14 hours in a factory 6 days a week or lose your home and eventually die in the streets due to malnutrition and disease. People who couldn't take care of themselves and didn't have a support network just didn't live that long and/or were entirely erased from history...
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