How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal.
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Guess who else is very much interested in that happening.....
"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-meg...
Well, this was the case decades ago, too, just few people paid attention. The US made sure their interests are always put before Polish interests, and these were regularly reported by the US embassy in Warsaw. See e.g.:[0]
"Rozanski went on
to explain that Polish food products are viewed in the EU as
healthy and natural, and are competitive in their current
state. Use of GM seeds could threaten this perception, and
thus Poland's place in the market. When Spirnak and Embassy
Agricultural Counselor noted that such an approach would be
of great concern to the U.S. and would be contrary to EU as
well as WTO commitments, Rozanski backed off and said that
Poland must comply with EU and international commitments
(Note: Rozanski softened this message further at a subsequent
meeting that Agricultural Counselor attended)."
The bright point is, since it's more or less clear that the US basically stopped caring much about Europe militarily, the "great concern to the U.S." cited above is not that relevant. Trump basically destroyed most of the soft power the USA had over Europe.
I've seen other articles showing how Meta/Facebook profits from scams. Instead of blocking publishing, the company instead charges a premium for impressions.
In this instance, a Swedish police officer was deepfaked, and the video used by a scam campaign to give credence to the outlandish claims.
Unfortunately I believe a lot more similar cases need to be exposed before any regulations can reign in on ad tech, platforms monetising ads should be responsible for what they distribute.
Define inefficiency, I'd much rather pay for local inefficiency which is still money changing hands in my local economy rather than paying a bit less for my money to be siphoned out of my local economy with increased efficiency.
Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).
Most local produce initatives fail because they're not actually better than the global/international variants, especially considered from a price/quality pov.
Reductionism is the sign of a lack of nuance, I speak badly of the USA but still would like to attend a friend's wedding if they choose to have it there. It doesn't mean I don't have contempt for how the country is being run, or how its society is quite flawed, saying those things don't make me an enemy of the state nor do I hate and dislike every single person and thing from there.
This lack of nuance is exactly one of the major flaws of American society, it's either team red or blue, in-group or out-group, black-and-white thinking is rather childish...
Slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason... Yes, controlling children access if done wrong could lead to control adults but it doesn't mean it inevitably will.
Social media for teens has been studied, we know what it can cause psychologically, the humans programming it are incentivised to make them addicted to it, and addictive they are by using any manipulative technique to increase engagement, and attention spent.
What would you like to see as evidence for it to be regulated as "not for children" like tobacco, and alcohol?
The research on social media harm is far from conclusive, despite what people seem to believe. To quote the National Academies report:
> The committee’s review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.
Having read through the couple hundred page report, causality was not established and the studies found both positive and negative effects in different subgroups.
Given banning social media might cause harm to a some groups of children, perhaps decisions on whether to forbid use are better left with parents for now.
> Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
They... Didn't? It's been defanged and reduced to the aberration it is right now, instead of being single payer, universal healthcare.
> Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
Without campaign money you have no chance at all, could you run a successful presidential campaign on 1/10th or 1/100th of the budget given you had a hypothetical bright candidate, someone that could objectively be a much better president than any of the moneyed ones? No, hence campaign money does buy votes, it just doesn't buy them completely but without campaign money you have absolutely no chance.
Sooo...Harris' failure to win proves that money doesn't win elections...you do realize that her opponent also had to spend dozens of millions to even be able to compete, right?
Really hard to imagine how you aren't being willfully ignorant on this. Money doesn't win elections. It just puts you in the only possible position where one can win. Those are your own words, yet you somehow conclude that money doesn't win elections? Money literally decides what choice WE HAVE in an election. You cannot vote for someone who doesn't have the extreme wealth required to compete. & someone who isn't competing, isn't a choice given to voters.
Electricity doesn't make computers run, pushing the on button does!
Sure, money buys a stage, and an outsized stage for a worse idea is still persuading many more voters than a smaller stage with a better idea. If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Where I vote money doesn't play much of a part in elections so no chance for my vote to be bought; in the USA, a society much less politically active and educated, money goes a much longer way to persuade, convince, deceive, and outright lie to voters. Hence so many Trump voters coming out of the woodwork to say "I didn't vote for this".
Both sides say that voters who didn't vote for their favorite candidate because they are uneducated fools and deplorable.
> If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Carly Fiona is another example of a big spender that got trounced in the polls.
BTW, no matter how much campaign money is spent by socialist candidates, I will never vote for them. If all the candidates on the ballot are socialists, I will turn in my ballot with no vote on it. My vote is not for sale.
You know about statistics and how population-wise aggregate data can be skewed given you know which levers to press and where, I don't know why you play dumb about money in politics being a massive influence. Nowhere is said "money buys YOUR vote", money does influence votes, it does influence people who are less educated (or less politically engaged) who watches ad after ad pushing the precise button they need to be pushed to tilt scales.
I don't care about your view on socialist candidates, it doesn't pertain to this discussion whatsoever. People would vote for a socialist candidate who said the right stuff to them, that's just how the statistics work.
All steel production is pushed out while the EU still produces some 10% of all global output?
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
The issue with the green steel production in Sweden is not about regulations, nor even about energy. It is that every aspect of green hydrogen is more expensive in reality than what was promised/predicted 20 years ago, and the prices are not going down in the way that people wished. 90% of Steel foundries work through using natural gas, and when natural gas prices went after Russia invasion of Ukraine, the result has been a struggling steel industry and production moving to countries which continue to buy gas from Russia (at a discounted war price).
The market price for energy regularly reaches close to 0 in nordpool during periods of optimal weather conditions, but the market price for green hydrogen do not. It has been and continue to be quite more expensive than natural gas. Hydrogen is also a very tricky and expensive to work with, and the cost to modify or construct new foundries to use hydrogen is not simple nor a cheap upgrade. Regardless of what they do with regulations, the problem with green hydrogen are not one that politicians can solve without reaching for subsidies and pouring tax money into the black hole (which is what the Swedish government decided a few days ago).
Agree that green hydrogen is still in its infancy but I don't think it can be considered a "black hole", it's a new technology which requires, as any novel technology not yet proven commercially, government investments for research and further development.
I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.
Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
I describe it as a black hole since there is no limited on how much funding it will take in, and once in, there is no reasonable expectation that we will see anything come back out. Fundamental research is useful for humanity as a whole, and rich countries should use some excess money for that purpose, but this technology was sold to the population as already solved and commercial viable.
Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.
There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.
You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production. Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc. That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
It's not purely electricity-based, your greenwashing statements are based on a false premise/assumption [0][1].
Secondly, Sweden is an exporter of electricity to the EU, the huge undersea transmission cables are for selling electricity to the detriment of ourselves as shown after the Russian war against Ukraine when we had to pay the massively higher spot prices for electricity set by the gas/coal plants in Poland, and Germany. You can check right now that Poland is importing ~2-3% of its electricity from South Sweden (SE-4) [2] using 98% of the available transmission, Poland is always saturating the undersea transmission from Sweden with imports.
> You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production.
Yes. And?
All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?
That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.
> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
Nothing important like digital rights, environmental issues (pesticides, nitrogen levels), harmonising trading so every member-state can compete as equals through the whole EU/EEA market.
Only useless bureaucracy which you don't give any examples of.
What's the issue with non-detachable bottle caps? It markedly reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see in Sweden, no idea what's the issue with that.
EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Its environmental regulations have endlessly complicated the most basic of business operations like selling anything that comes in cardboard boxes or fixing a car with non-OEM parts.
Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
> EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Completely agree but that's from national governments, not the EU parliament; and I'm glad we've been able to keep Chat Control tamed for now, even though it will keep being brought up. Still, it hasn't become regulation nor even a discussion in the Parliament.
> Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
Cucumber and banana regulations are for grading, exactly to harmonise trade so those can be sold at similar levels of grades and marketed as those grades, it doesn't mean you can't sell out-of-shape bananas or cucumbers, it's a deceptive move used by all EU-sceptic movement (like Brexit) while the regulations themselves are not an issue.
Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
De minimis still exist, current regulations are set all the way to 2030 [0].
You changed my mind on some points, but this still ticks me off
> Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
>Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
> In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
Bearings suffer wear and tear, and needs replacement, you don't replace your whole car because of worn bearings unless you're talking about complete engine rebuilds (like piston rings/rod bearings/camshaft), I still would like some data to substantiate this discussion because I don't have it.
> Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
It's not a dire pollution situation, it just normally done by teenagers not caring too much and littering their soda bottle caps around. I don't see why you need to remove the bottle cap for refilling, I do it just as I used to and nothing has changed that requires me to remove bottle caps for them to be refilled/reused.
So it's not a big issue, it made it harder for people to litter while not having big drawbacks, I don't understand why it was an example of bad regulations...
Whats the problem with attached bottle caps or volume warnings?
I used to find these things annoying when I was younger but I do realise things like that can be very useful, even though they are small steps.
Chat Control is being pushed by national governments, either directly or through the meeting of their leaders, the Council. EU institutions are the ones continuously keeping it at bay.
Where I live, we have and exercise the right to legislative referendum, which stops such legislation in a very clear and decisive way. If something like this passes in the EU, we have no way to fight it (international treaties are not subjects to referendum). The influence in EU parliament is delegated on so many levels that it's impossible to transparently see what your vote influences.
Chat control is being pushed by national police forces as well as europol. It's... Lobbying. Basically. The whole story of how it started with ylva johannsson is the result of strong lobbying by Thorn and Ashton Kutcher
It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.
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