Another sensational headline. As someone living in Berlin, the capital of Europe’s largest economy, I see the effects firsthand. Germany’s aggressive green energy push has driven energy costs so high that heating has effectively become a luxury. This winter, air quality has been among the worst in recent years because many people are burning wood to stay warm instead of using central heating. At the same time, manufacturing companies are leaving the country, pushed out by some of the highest energy prices in Europe.
I'm also living in Germany and heating is in no way considered a "luxury" nor have many people started burning wood. I don't even think many people would have the possibility to burn wood for heating in Berlin of all places.
Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train.
The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition).
At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems.
Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.
The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.
Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.
The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.
> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany
Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.
> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.
Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.
Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.
Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.
Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka" with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least that was the case on several directions I knew about.
I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.
It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.
In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.
> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT
Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).
I believe general wisdom in the US is that trains are best when run by the government at zero cost. This is presumably the best way to get transit. So the idea that competition would improve things is odd.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
In theory, libertarian-type approaches seem reasonable when you model for cooperative actors. In practice, however, you hit tragedies of the commons and severe first-mover disadvantages. Well-meaning parents who ban teenagers from social media at the level of the family rather than at the level of society will mainly just socially ostracize their kids. I'd imagine you'd need to go Amish-mode and build a social network on behalf of your kids for anything like this to work.
If you want to restrict kids from social media (which is an open question), I would much prefer that the laws not gate kids from social media directly as this would require social media websites to ask for ID. Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
> Rather, abusive parents who don't lock their kids out of social media websites should be sanctioned. First offenders get all of their Internet accesses taken down for a few months.
Wow, people really will advocate for anything except actually fixing the harmful aspects of these sites.
Also, calling parents "abusive" who let their kids on social media is harsh and will likely only ever push people away from understanding your position.
What happens after the second offence, out of curiosity?
If you have been a teenager or adult before, you will be familiar with the concept of the clique. For teens, there are athletes, nerds, theater kids, Lululemon kids, etc.
There are cliques of kids who do not use social media (because their parents won't let them, or they don't want to, or they prefer to do something else, or their parents do not use social media, or they cannot afford the devices). Teens who do not use social media sort into different cliques. That's it. They are not ostracized any more than theater kids or computer geeks are ostracized. (The latter inclusion was intentional, as it may cause some self-reflection among well-adjusted adults who at one time were members of school computer clubs.)
Fairly recent teen here. This is simply not true. All my friends who started adamantly against social media had Instagram come end of senior year. At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.
I know personally, I was never entirely without social media, but I switched to iPhone because I was so tired of being ostracized with regard to iMessage (this was pre-RCS, perhaps this particular concern has been alleviated)
Sure I guess all the Android users could band together and form a clique and maybe that happened to some extent, but I didn’t wish to associate as an Android user. I don’t imagine kids want “social media Luddite” to be their clique. I wanted to be an outdoorsy kid with tech interests at the most. My choice of phone brand isn’t a part of this identity.
Noted. We have granted an exception for iMessage on the grounds that communications are primarily/wholly with people known IRL.
There's an analogy for older folks, which is kids who grew up without TVs (and radio, in some cases). I am friends with a number of such folks, and they are just fine. I would imagine they too were "ostracized" because they were largely disconnected from pop culture. I imagine they didn't like the situation when they were younger, but it did not damage them like people suggest will happen to kids without access to Instagram.
(Noting also here that as early as tweens, the kids have been using all kinds of stuff as social media sites. Obviously Google Docs etc. But also any unblocked site on the Internet with a textbox, including Asana, Monday, etc. Anywhere with an image upload can be social media.)
> At college, I could count on one hand the amount of people I met without it.
I'm in the US, will say that most students here are over the age of 16 by the time they arrive at college so this would not apply to them.
Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?
> Would love to get your thoughts on people who "have" social media vs people who abuse (or whatever you want to call it) social media. Is this like cigarettes, where having an account is too much, or more like sweets that can be enjoyed in moderation?
Erm, I feel most comfortable with an analogy to alcohol, perhaps. It has a high capacity to be abused yet is used in moderation by almost everyone. It’s almost incontestably physically harmful yet I still, of my own accord (as contrasted with nicotine which is addictive), choose to partake because there are benefits which I find valuable. I find social events much more enjoyable after a few drinks.
You can measure all these different harms of social media but I do think there are social benefits which are harder to quantify despite the companies who make the platforms being exploitive. It’s nice to see what my friends are doing. It’s nice to have a new avenue to hold conversations with new and old friends, far and near. I know that at points it’s taken a toll on me but today, despite considering myself to be fairly enlightened to the whole situation, I still continue to partake in social platforms and would likely reluctantly allow my children to do the same (I never really had open dialogue with my parents about social media, alcohol, and all these other vices. I turned out alright but I’d like to be there in that sort of sense for my children if I wind up having them in a way that differs to how my parents were.)
We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law. It's how we stand together as a society, otherwise one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents. There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.
The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
> There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.
Yeah but, there's no precedent for regulating something that parents are opting into (by buying their kids devices and then turning them loose with no oversight).
We should be punishing liquor stores when a parent willingly buys their child alcohol, then?
> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents.
So what is wrong with that? parenting is not equal among all parents in UK and why should only this aspect be normalized?
> The vulnerable elder population is more difficult to define by a simple age threshold. We all decline at different ages and different rates.
This is a hypocritical statement. For children we are more than willing to normalize and enforce rules as us adults wants because we assume all children grow up at same age and same rates, but when it comes to policing adults, the line is gray and more difficult because everyone is different.
The parent in your conversation is just stupid and no matter how many laws we pass we cannot fix stupidity.
In that case only thing I can suggest is to pass a law to assess the eligibility and maturity of people if they want to have children and issue a permit if they are suitable to have and raise children and otherwise they cannot have children.
> one child's rules will seem draconian against their friend's lax parents
That’s how it has been for most everything. Someone else’s parents let their kids watch TV on a school night, or stay up past 10pm, or has a curfew of 1am instead of midnight, or lets them drink soda at the dinner table. The response from my parents to me, and from me to my kids, has always been to point out that families are different, they have different rules, and that in this house we do X.
> We absolutely do need regulation of this harm by the law
> There's plenty of precedent in other threshold ages at which children can start indulging in other potentially harmful vices.
In those other vices, we have various other regulations in order to reduce their harm as much as possible. Yet, there has been no similar push for the purported harm done by social media - or, apparently, the Internet in general. It's like we've tried nothing and are surprised it's still an issue.
Driving on public roads is prohibited until a certain age.
That age is 17 here in the UK but me and many of my friends growing up in a rural area learned to drive from the age of 14 or 15 on private land. Our parents would take us there/back, provide the car and be our "instructor". Some friends who lived on farms had cars/trucks/etc of their own that they could use to drive around and their parents were fine to let us try too. But we knew that we were never allowed on public roads.
By the time we all got to 17 we applied for our tests and had a few lessons with an real instructor on real public roads. We still had to learn all of the rules/etiquette/etc but most of us where completely happy with the physical aspects of controlling the vehicle, that saved us a huge amount of time.
My kid is 15 and if a suitable opportunity arises I'll let them have a go behind the wheel (not illegally obviously). Unfortunately I live in a city not a rural area, and don't own a car, so there hasn't been the chance yet.
(In the UK land like a supermarket car park is still considered as public roads despite being privately owned. Generally anywhere where the public can access it easily is not considered "private" in terms of the Road Traffic Act.)
If we need regulation of "this harm", then what we need to be regulating is the social media networks, not the children (and adults!) that use them.
We need to be banning algorithmic feeds. We need to be banning promotion of hateful content. We need to be banning moderation that is biased against marginalized groups, or against criticism of the platform.
If they weren't being subjected to feeds specifically designed to create maximum "engagement" with fear, hate, and self-doubt, most young people using social media would be interacting in similar ways to how they interact offline. Perhaps there would be a little less inhibition due to the feeling of anonymity, but overall, anything harmful they might be doing or saying to each other on there is very similar to what they would be doing or saying to each other in person, regardless of what social media you let them access.
Every single right you have can be taken away by the justification of it will protect children or it is wrong because of something some person wrote in a religious text.
Parents who think they need this are bad parents and bad citizens.
Someone pointed out that every single one of these laws in spirit does not need the website to verify and block the user. There is no need for complicated schemes of all websites implementing complex screening software and storing all our IDs. The website could report a single string saying if there is adult content and software the parent or authoritarian governments ISP has installed on the device could block it.
Why does that mean people who don't want this law's privacy gets to be invaded? How is this not those parents' responsibility to ensure their child doesn't go on those sites they don't like?
The fact of me being a parent is non of your concern I would say.
If most of voting age parents want this, then what prevents them from enforcing it on their children. Why do they have to rely on government to be the parent. Maybe those parent should not have been parents in the first place if they need government to step in to raise their children.
In which bubble are you living right now? Almost all the EU tech companies uses AWS, Google cloud or Microsoft Azure. Good luck with recovering any data if you completely cut off Mag7. Also Without iOS or Android play store, you're back using Nokia or Chinese counterpart.
The pure ignorance the europeans have on their tech reliance on US tech is astounding.
While I agree the other comment is overstating a bit on the speed of transition for all of the big seven at the same time (though we could probably do that for Meta, Tesla without any substitution, and Apple and Amazon if we keep Alphabet around):
> Also Without iOS or Android play store, you're back using Nokia or Chinese counterpart.
Yes, and? It's not like Chinese OSes (forks of Android or whatever) are noteworthy for being bad.
Stability is a valid reason for a lot of people. China likes stable, the USA today is not.
More generally, even just having the option to switch is important for purchasers in general, so that the vendors know they don't have a captive audience and don't try all the usual stuff that makes monopolies bad.
Stability and China in one sentence is amazing. One word to offend CCP and you would see how stable it it. Also if you're talking about having option to switch is better, then wouldn't banning the American counterparts go against your logic? That would actually limit the number of options to switch. Also at the moment no one is prohibiting anyone from switching.
> One word to offend CCP and you would see how stable it it
Clearly you mean something very different by the word "stable" than any use I have ever encountered before. Also, one word to offend Trump or Musk seems to lead to more problems right it now — in normal times, saying that "China's at least willing to agree to disagree about human rights" would be faint praise indeed, but compare that to Trump and Musk where saying "cis" on Twitter is considered "hate speech", where being a journalist and asking Trump about something he himself said on camera the week before will have him rant at you, where interviewing someone who doesn't like him will lead to him calling for your broadcast licence to be revoked, where judges who listen to cases about America's friend Israel get sanctioned.
More importantly to this topic however, your responses seem to be shifting the goal posts somewhat.
You replied to a comment which I agreed in my opening words was overstating case, that it was under-estimating the difficulty and time needed to switch.
What I'm saying is that Europe can, in fact, switch — just slower than bgwalter said.
I'm not saying it should ("should" depends on things I don't know), I'm saying it *can*. I'm saying the option is open.
Why don’t you elaborate on what you meant by "stable" because you seem confused about the meaning of the word. You also appear to be confused about the difference between Trump or Elon going on a rant on Twitter and how the rule of law works in a democratic country.
Trump or anyone else can absolutely go on a rant on Twitter as a First Amendment right. It doesn't matter if you or anyone doesn't like what he has to say. But his rants are not the Law and any law that is passed in US can be challenged in the Supreme Court. If you believe that calling someone “cis” on Twitter is not hate speech and should be considered free speech, then sue Twitter, you have that choice and freedom in the US.
The situation in China is completely different. Laws there are effectively set in stone, whether you like them or not, and regardless of whether they violate your rights. Good luck challenging them.
Finally, Europe can do many things, it can switch to Chinese tech, keep using whatever they have or it can ditch modern technology altogether and go back to 1980s technology (if we're talking about what they can do). Given the current rate of deindustrialization in Europe’s largest economy, they may soon be using 1980s technology anyway.
Why does is feel like EU is creating problems out of nothing just to keep their bureaucrats busy rather than actually doing something worthwhile with tax payers money?
Appropriate compensation is a non-issue? I have the impression many people jump on the hate-EU train for no other reason than there's many comments reinforcing it.
What do you really think about this case in particular? I'm pretty curious where this comes from.
Who should receive the compensation? If I want to know the answer to a particular question and most search results point to SEO garbage which doesn't even answer it, then who should be compensated and for what? If those SEO garbage websites are to be compensated, doesn't that just incentivize more garbage?
I don't know. I don't really care about the details in this case, I just don't really get the dismissive attitude that often surrounds things like this. Do you think this is not something that is worth looking into if it happens at such as large scale?
Just do be clear, I use genAI all the time for finding info and answering questions, so my browsing habits changed as well. I'm the kind of person who this case would indirectly be about. But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.
Many people seem to have the feeling of 'oh it's too late and those websites were garbage anyway (whatever that means), who cares'. Don't you think that's a bit of a silly way to go about this?
> But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.
But why should we compensate them simply because their content is being consumed by AI? For me, any kind of compensation MUST take relevance into account, otherwise we'll reward quantity and not quality, thus quality won't be preserved.
Maybe the answer is to actually NOT do any compensation like that, instead focusing solely on attribution so that it's in people's interest to reward select creators manually to keep the content valuable.
If using data from those websites in a way decreases their visitors or something similar then I think there's an argument to be made for that. I don't know the details to case but just because something is publicly visible doesn't mean that you can just do anything you want with it.
Every major news site in Europe is full of articles full of "The New York Times reported that [summary]" so I'm a bit confused as to why, all of a sudden, it's a problem.
Newspapers have been doing this for at least a century, while news radio and news broadcasts have done it since their inception.
There is no guarantee that a website would get a visit if there was no AI summary. Also you can do anything you want with public domain information. That's the whole point of it being public. Otherwise it should be licensed or copyrighted content.
This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
In the same sense one could argue that social media like Facebook or WhatsApp should be banned among older population because that's one of the major ways mis/fake information being spread among elderly people and now with AI videos they actually believe those fake stories to be 100% true as well. I think that's more risk to modern day democracy and well being of the society in general.
> This is the exact policing we don't want government to do regardless of the age. In my opinion it's the responsibility of the parents to decide how to raise their children and teach them how to live and adapt in the age of social media and maintain a balance.
It's complicated. I can decide how to raise my child when he's inside the house. But if when he goes into the world he's sorrounded by people addicted to their phones, what do you think it's going to happen?
The same way parents of previous generations dealt with it. Whether it was phones, tv's, drugs, etc. Helicopter parenting is not the solution and not an effective method to produce well adjusted adults. You have to equip children with the tools to respond to different scenarios. Not prevent from ever knowing other things exist.
A) Forbidding your children something does not equate to helicopter parenting. You're attacking someone else's position.
B) Forbidding your children something DOES WORK as long as that thing is not easily accessible. That's why we make certain things illegal to sell to children, so that their rate of usage is lower than otherwise.
Cigarettes (nicotine products) are easy to identify. What is social media? Why would I want to acquire and provide an ID just to comment on HN? In the case of social media, there is not a well enough defined product to ban.
Big tech has had decades to self-police, and I don’t believe for a second they didn’t know that at some point they would be forced to if they didn’t do so.
This is just the adults in the room drawing the line.
Stores don't require you to present an ID to enter them. They don't record that ID, add it to a pile of other data they've collected about you, and sell that information. In short, the privacy concerns are vastly different.
Furthermore, nicotine products are much more easily defined than social media, as another commenter points out.
That's the whole point then right? It's whole another policing and maintenance burden created to be funded by tax payers money without actually achieving anything useful at all.
This cannot be stressed enough. In my experience working in multiple tech startups in Germany, the power compliance, legal and all other 2nd line has over engineering is quite immense. Most of the time they act as a hindrance for innovation rather than a supporting factor.
This AI law is a clear example of that. Pencil pushers creating more obstacles for the sake of creating more obstacles rather than actually taking a pragmatic approach.
It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.
I agree. And I also know how much of that experience comes from having a legal dept. that are collaborative and supportive of what the tech org wants to do. Which I suspect is quite rare.
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