And there's nothing you can do about it. The EU is not a democratic institution, I hope you're comfortable with an executive led by people who have not seen a single election in their lives.
The Parliament can approve the Comissioners that are put before it, not elect them. And you're correct about the council, except the President is also not elected.
Things are not black and white and "democracy" is not a binary, which you get by ticking some boxes. Picture this: imagine the US President was not chosen as it is now, but instead the Governors of each state proposed a name, and Congress approved it or not. Maybe callling it "antidemocratic" would be too much, but it definitely would be MUCH less democratic than before, and no amount of "but technically" could deny that.
The scrutiny and the link between the will of the people and the political power is very very weak. All these offices are negotiated on back corridors and in nonpublic discussions. It's very difficult, if not impossible, for a Commissioner to get sacked because they did a poor job.
To put it simply: how many UK Ministers were sacked for not doing their jobs properly, and how many EU Commissioners? There you have it.
I don't disagree. But the lack of accountability is perhaps not due to democratic laws being insufficient, but due to people/the media just not caring enough about what happens at the EU institutions. In the Netherlands, for instance, the most powerful positions are also not directly elected (the ministers including the prime minister, majors, the senate) but their work is most definitely scrutinized and fuckups can have consequences.
Unfortunatwly "keeping kids and teenagers off of algorithmic social media" is one of the most worthy goals one can pursue right now; so is keeping them off infinite porn.
Your mention of "social conditioning" a propos of nothing gives you away like the "three fingers" in Inglorious Basterds. I would highly suggest not basing your entire personality and opinions on a slack-jawed streamer's meandering rant delivered from his RGB gaming chair for 5 hours straight.
But to be honest, isn't this also true of the basic Hollywood or Netflix fare?.
I've been watching season 5 of Stranger Things. It has a budget of approximately 1 gazillion dollars. The writing is utterly basic predictable, boring, cliché, it's either a marvel-tier quip or a hollywood trope. Most Netflix shovelware isn't better than this.
My wife works a lot with LLMs and writing, and some time in episode 3 she was like, “I’m pretty sure a lot of this was written by AI.”
The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.
That’s in addition to repeating everything several times, which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account for people who aren’t paying much attention.
It's worse than previous series, I've noticed myself zoning out a few times, but the entire Stranger Things schtick is that it's a homage to the 80s. It's story lines are cliched, that's the point. They're predictable because you have seen them before.
They even highlight and play with it themselves in the show, introducing the big bad via the D&D table in the first episode of each season, referencing the films they're doing, sometimes including the same actors from the films they're riffing off (Sean Astin as Bob, Robert Englund as Victor Creel).
Season 1 : Aliens/ET
Season 2 : Goonies, The Exorcist
Season 3 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob
Season 4 : Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser
Season 5 : So far we've seen Home Alone, Lost boys, Terminator
Saying it's predictable and cliched is just saying they've done their job well! And missing one of the main points of the TV show. My friend was almost giddy that they'd used Technicolor in the Holly/Max world.
I tend to refer to this as a Mixtape versus Remix spectrum distinction. A Mixtape plays the "hits" in about their original form, just in a new order. A Remix might sample the hits, but adds in new original content and takes it in a new direction.
Personally, I bounced out of Stranger Things S1 pretty hard because it seemed far too much like a Mixtape and not enough like a Remix than I wanted. The part that hit me was a feeling that entire monologues were lifted from the originals nearly verbatim with maybe a couple Proper Nouns swapped Mad Libs style. That can be incredibly fun (one that worked for me: William Shakespeare's Terminator the Second, was a creative mixtape of Shakespeare dialog reordered to retell Terminator 2), but at least for Stranger Things I kept having too many moments pulling me out of the story with "I've heard this before" because of the worse follow up feelings of "I'd just rather watch the originals, because they did it better" or "This isn't really adding much new or original to this moment".
But I realize there are a lot of opinions in the Mixtape versus Remix spectrum and also a lot of opinions on where something like Stranger Things falls. If it feels more like a Remix to you, that doesn't necessarily change that I found it too much like a Mixtape. (And vice versa, just because I find it too much of a Mixtape doesn't mean that I missed things that others felt made it a useful Remix, just that maybe my opinions on Mixtapes are stronger.)
It's surprising that series and movies with gazillion-dollar budgets don't seem to have money for decent writers. About the only explanation I can think of is that the way the series or movie is made itself makes story too hard to do.
E.g. an action movie is designed around its stunts and then the plot is stitched together to support them. And series that are made one episode at a time can suffer from serious plot drift when they aren't planned ahead properly, or when executives can't decide whether they're going to have one more season or not.
There is quite a lot of daylight between “something to complain about” and “authoritarian regime”. I never said they had “nothing to complain about”.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that there isn’t authoritarian regime behavior happening. I am just trying to figure out what people are talking about when they refer to that as if it is happening.
I am using “Germans of the ‘30s” as a euphemism. Obviously I know the timeline of what happened, you are just misinterpreting as an opportunistic drama nitpick. Whether the misinterpretation is happening consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know.
If the “Germans of the ‘30s” had only ever done deportations, which they did do, i.e. had they stopped there, we would not view them in the same way. Ergo, if the current regime stops with deportations, which we have no evidence to show that they won’t, then there is nothing to suggest that they will end up behaving in an authoritarian way, because further massive steps are required to get there. And besides, the current American regime has tremendously more legal justification for these deportations than the Nazis had for the Jews deportation. The Nazis presumably had to change German law to even deport the Jews. No change of law is required here, because it is perfectly congruent with the existing legal framework (and was done consistently for decades prior to this administration, just more quietly and I guess in smaller numbers).
It’s weird how slippery slope arguments are only valid in public discourse when it comes to the Nazis, and in that case it’s so valid it is just taken as a fact. Just because someone is doing something that can be squinted at to look like something that happened prior to a genocide, does not mean that it will lead to genocide. The ad absurdum version of this line of thinking would suggest banning vegetarianism or painting, as genocidal mania soon followed.
Would this matter for performance? You already have so many execution units that are actually difficult to keep fully fed even when decoding instructions and data at the speed of cache.
Yes. As Joker_vD hints on a sibling comment, this is what killed all the classic CISCs during the OoO transition except for x86 that lacks the more complex addressing modes (and the PPro was still considered a marvel of engineering that was assumed not to be possible).
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