> Otherwise why would anyone else (someone else living on the other side of the world) care? People have their own countries to fix let alone worry about other peoples problems.
Do you care about your neighbours? How about people in the next town over? Why should that concern stop at the border of your particular nation state?
I care about my neighbours because I know them. I don’t care about the next town because they might as well be same as people living in Tokyo.
Also it’s their town, neighbours or country. Let them fix it however the way they want, why should I care or mingle on strangers business. A lot of problems in the world would have been solved if people actually minded their own business
My understanding is that a clinic or hospital can’t legally charge you for a procedure that’s universally available through the provincial healthcare system.
So you’re free to pay for anything else if you want.
It is possible to "spoof" numbers in the UK. I've seen it. Calls from outside the UK masquerading as UK numbers. They tend to use London numbers which is the main giveaway.
I'd say the deregulation of the telephone industry in America, breaking up the baby Bells, etc would have probably been the biggest hand.
We broke everything up and let any old player enter the telco world over here which broke the entire sanctity of the security of the telephone network.
I'm not sure if that's the whole story, because I speak from a Canadian perspective where telecom ownership is quite protectionist. And these spoofed numbers are almost always local. I guess bad-faith US telcos could allow spoofing Canadian NANP numbers...
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.
While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.
Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
I may be a socialist but being able to bring your heavy luggage to the door of the place you already pay a fee to be at (airport taxes) should be free, no? Like in all other parts of Europe
And they say, oh, no, you can come for free if you’re willing to walk 15 minutes to the terminal. No, that’s greed plain and simple.
Not everyone takes the car.
Why should people who don't deem it necessary to take a personal vehicle to one of the most expensive locations on the planet(city airport) subsidize those who do?
Capitalists say "you will own nothing" and want a Gini coefficient of 1. Communists don't say "you will own nothing" - they say "abolish private property" and refer to a Gini coefficient of 0.
It was tried many times, it never worked for exactly 1 same reason over and over again - for all that utopia to actually work sustainably long term, it expects ideal citizens. As in selfless, truly dedicated to society above their own needs, uncorruptable and non-realistic in other ways.
I've seen it personally fail miserably and destroy entire nation's spirit for generations to come (on top of other things destroyed for good).
Needless to say, capitalism with its harshness to laziness and carrot on the stick for hard workers got within 2 generations massively ahead, to the point where Gorbachev didn't believe it wasn't Potemkin village setup when visiting some random grocery store in western Germany and seeing the vast amount of produce and quality available to everybody, on level even he personally could only dream of back home.
Depends on the news you read I guess, to me the word "slammed" is pretty commonplace in politics news-reporting and has been for a while (read: well before the modern take-down content that's so common to social media platforms).
You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.
Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.
(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)
I agree it’s a bit sensationalist. Here’s the EU Commission spokesperson’s criticism:
>“The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU.
>“Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards,” Regnier said.
Obviously he's going to champion the EU's position, but his framing is internally inconsistent.
1. he claims the DMA doesn’t prevent Apple from launching products in the EU
2. the DMA sets certain requirements which determines whether features can ship in the EU
It's fair to say “the DMA doesn’t ban Siri AI,” but that's not the real issue. The regulation sets conditions, and Apple is arguing those conditions make rollout infeasible. The Commission claims its a compliance problem, not a regulatory block, but the reality is less binary. At a certain point the regulation is self-defeating. What is that point? This is the discussion that the EU lawmakers cannot acknowledge.
You are likening the DMA to China's protectionist laws. China requires 51% Chinese ownership of domestic operations, adherence to CCP censorships laws, etc That benefits domestic companies nothing and foreign companies a lot. It's protectionism.
Whereas the EU laws apply to foreign and domestic companies alike, and the goal is consumer protection. The compliance difficulty does not vary between foreign/local.
This is a common sentiment of EU tech regulation proponents. You may want protectionism but that's not really what these laws are about. Why not simply adopt the CCP's policy towards technology?
Do you care about your neighbours? How about people in the next town over? Why should that concern stop at the border of your particular nation state?
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