No, EU is not the root of the problem, whatever the problem is. For example, countries are stronger, more resilient and business is more effective together than everyone trying to do it alone. And of course the EU is not perfect and there is room for improvement.
In my experience, one concrete problem is that so many people misunderstand or are unaware of basic things about the EU and why EU even exists. With the former I mean things like how the EU Parliament is put together, the relation of the EU Commission to the EU Parliament, how is the President of the EU Commission chosen (no, it's not "undemocratic"), what does Schengen mean, what is the Euro and WHY does it exist, why was there legislation which mentioned the curvature of cucumbers, and so on.
As there is no big picture, or it is rejected due to ideological reasons, the lack of knowledge and misunderstandings then manifest as fear of the unknown (=the EU). At this point, these people become against everything in EU: whatever new things are proposed from the EU side, it is somehow "lousy", "bad", "failing", "won't work anyway", and so forth. Any EU company has "bottom-barrel products" and "can't succeed", euro cannot work between countries, Europe is "weak" and "gay" and "collapsing".
Also, some people look at an individual member state and confuse it with the whole EU. For example, the nuclear power stance of Germany is seen as an EU-mandated position and then the whole EU is seen to be against nuclear power. This can also work in reverse: Poland sends generators to Ukraine, well done Poland and why is the weak and failing EU doing nothing (except the generators were from RescEU stores, and one such store was located in Poland, so EU was sending them).
When people understand what the EU is and know the basics, of course they might still disagree with things, that's normal, but at least the arguments are more factual.
If one were to simply assume that yes, electrons are in fact photons in a toroidal configuration... are there special "hacks" enabled by this configuration which could be tested?
If things are of higher quality, higher cost is acceptable to many.
As a trivial example, talking about a ca. 5 EUR purchase here, I bought a German-made pencil sharpener (Möbius-Ruppert nr. 0603 "Vertex").
It's basically a small metallic block (brass) with two holes with blades attached. It is surprisingly heavy and while it may sound strange, the sharpening result is simply excellent. (I bought some Japanese-made pencils to pair with it)
Chinese sharpeners can be had for under 0.5 EUR at best, they can be very cheap.
However, I had Chinese sharpeners and they actually were the reason I ended up buying a German one. Unless I lose the German sharpener, I will never need to buy another.
The Chinese are absolutely capable of making some of the highest quality products in the world. Pretending that it is some unique feat of German engineering to make a good pencil sharpener is ridiculous.
You are right that quality matters, which is why the Chinese producing cars of the same quality for 70% of the costs is such an existential threat to the German car industry.
Associating China with cheap products is a false way to look at things. They absolutely are capable of excellent engineering and manufacturing.
>I will never need to buy another.
What a bizarre statement. The only hard part of the sharpener is the blade. This blade needs to be made of the proper material and sharpened the right way, you will absolutely need to buy new blades at some point in time. You can buy them here: https://www.moebius-ruppert.com/produkt/standard-ersatzmesse... they are user replaceable. If you put them into a Chinese made one you get the exact same quality of sharpening.
Lastly, these are pencil sharpeners. Being the best in the world at pencil sharpeners is irrelevant. Germany needs its car industry and they need to catch up to the quality of the Chinese if they want to keep it.
Yes, of course I need to buy new blades... What I don't have to do is to buy a new sharpener because the old one made of "stainless steel" rusted.
Yes, Chinese companies CAN do high quality products. Of course they can, they're not lazy or stupid. But if the price difference isn't too big, I'd rather buy something made close-by, to keep the money in the local economy (my country or Europe), instead of bleeding it into some faraway place.
Some people do not consider that aspect, they only look at the price in numbers and think that's the end-all, which it isn't. There is an "invisible cost" added. On the surface it might be cheaper for me, but it ends up hurting the local industry, it will create unemployment, at some point social problems, and so forth; in short: it will harm the place I call my home.
For this reason, to me a Chinese (or US, whatever) product would have to be vastly cheaper than something made close-by, yet have a parity in quality to be worthwhile at all. And the equation of vastly superior quality for a substantially cheaper price is rare.
As for the car industry and cheaper Chinese cars: I don't see the how German industry is "dying", as it's not really a level playing field. It's easy for Chinese producers to be cheaper when the Chinese government subsidizes the exports. I'm sure Germany could do higher quality cars cheaper than the Chinese, if the German government were to subsidize a large part of each produced car. Would government subsidies then mean that the industry is "not-dying"? I don't think so.
Yeah well there are now plenty of Chinese designed products with quality as good or better than what you get in Europe: roborock, dji, bambu labs. The old Chinese = bad quality is no longer true.
One thing that the Chinese are really good at is cost innovation, reducing costs as many ways possible to make their products affordable for the majority. Their aim for good enough quality.
I bet the sales ratio of the Chinese vs the German sharpeners exceed 20:1
"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."
Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?
Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.
These categories of data are already somewhat special under the GDPR. I think we've committed enough genocide that now they're enshrined into protected data types.
In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.
Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.
I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.
So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.
Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.
[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".
Might aswell outsource the responsibility of fund management to highly regulated third parties and you're basically describing Australia's superannuation scheme.
Issue is due to the same politics as everyone else, Australia is having trouble reigning in the state pension (ideally in this scheme meant as a fallback to provide a minimum subsistence level).
It might have been poorly worded, English is not my native language, but there was nothing mean in my message. To put it more clearly, I meant: fork it and make a pull request to help me implement it.
Don't worry, at least I didn't think it was mean or anything.
The "joke" was that implementing bitbanged I3C on an ESP32 (!) sounds absurd. Like doing raytracing on C64. (Of course some crazy folks have done it though)
In my experience, one concrete problem is that so many people misunderstand or are unaware of basic things about the EU and why EU even exists. With the former I mean things like how the EU Parliament is put together, the relation of the EU Commission to the EU Parliament, how is the President of the EU Commission chosen (no, it's not "undemocratic"), what does Schengen mean, what is the Euro and WHY does it exist, why was there legislation which mentioned the curvature of cucumbers, and so on.
As there is no big picture, or it is rejected due to ideological reasons, the lack of knowledge and misunderstandings then manifest as fear of the unknown (=the EU). At this point, these people become against everything in EU: whatever new things are proposed from the EU side, it is somehow "lousy", "bad", "failing", "won't work anyway", and so forth. Any EU company has "bottom-barrel products" and "can't succeed", euro cannot work between countries, Europe is "weak" and "gay" and "collapsing".
Also, some people look at an individual member state and confuse it with the whole EU. For example, the nuclear power stance of Germany is seen as an EU-mandated position and then the whole EU is seen to be against nuclear power. This can also work in reverse: Poland sends generators to Ukraine, well done Poland and why is the weak and failing EU doing nothing (except the generators were from RescEU stores, and one such store was located in Poland, so EU was sending them).
When people understand what the EU is and know the basics, of course they might still disagree with things, that's normal, but at least the arguments are more factual.
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