Nice conjuring. First you pull "hundreds-not-dozens" of fake successes out of your hat then you wave a wand and accuse libertarians of ignoring "conflicting data" which you also fail to produce, but hey, let's all believe "Plugh" is a smarter and better informed guy than Milton... suuuure!

The EU’s escalating war on internet freedom and American tech companies is not about “protecting consumers” or “preserving democracy.” It is a textbook case of centralized power reasserting control over the greatest engine of voluntary exchange and uncoerced speech in human history: the open internet.

The EU’s flagship weapons: the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), GDPR, and the emerging AI Act, function as modern mercantilism dressed in progressive rhetoric. They impose sweeping prior restraints on speech (“illegal content” and “disinformation” defined by unelected bureaucrats), mandate interoperability and data-sharing that expropriate private intellectual property, and levy punitive fines (up to 6-20% of global turnover) that only entrenched European champions like Deutsche Telekom or Orange can hope to influence through lobbying. Smaller innovators and American platforms that refuse to build EU-specific censorship infrastructures are simply gated out.

Brussels resents that the internet’s infrastructure, protocols, and dominant platforms emerged from American libertarian soil; rooted in end-to-end principles, permissionless innovation, and First Amendment culture, rather than from continental traditions of étatisme and "licensed speech". When Meta, Google, or X push back against demands to pre-screen political content or surrender encryption keys, EU regulators do not negotiate as equals; they threaten existential penalties, knowing most companies will kneel to protect European revenue.

The EU is hostile because a truly free internet is inherently anti-hierarchical and anti-border. It routes around sovereigns the way markets route around central planners. To Brussels, that is an existential threat that must be regulated, fragmented, and ultimately re-sovereignized under the banner of “European digital sovereignty” :a euphemism for cartelizing information under state-supervised oligopolies. Internet freedom and American tech dominance are merely the most visible casualties.

Pseudo-official drug agencies, like the FDA in the US or the newly proposed African Medicines Agency (AMA), act as gatekeepers of death, not guardians of health. By enforcing a "safe *and effective*" mandate, they block patients from accessing existing, potentially life-saving medicines unless they're backed by billion-dollar clinical trials. This isn't about safety; it's about entrenching a monopoly for pharmaceutical giants.

The "safety" obsession already stifles innovation, but demanding proof of effectiveness at scale crushes smaller players entirely. Only mega-corporations can afford the $2-3 billion and 10-15 years required for FDA approval. As economist Milton Friedman warned "The FDA has done a great deal of harm by preventing people from obtaining drugs that would have saved their lives... The harm done by the FDA is not in the drugs that are banned, but in the lives that are lost because the drugs are not available."

In the 1980s, the FDA delayed approval of Misoprostol (a cheap ulcer drug) for use in medical abortions by over a decade; despite its proven safety and efficacy in other countries. During that time, thousands of women in the US resorted to illegal, dangerous procedures. The delay wasn't about science; it was about bureaucratic "caution" (safety cultism) and political pressure. The same pattern repeats globally: the proposed AMA risks mirroring this by harmonizing Africa's 54+ regulatory systems into one slow, centralized bottleneck: delaying generics and off-patent drugs that could treat malaria or HIV today.

Lawsuits, reputation, and market competition already punish bad actors. We don't need new rule-makers to "protect" us by pricing medicine out of reach and ensuring only Big Pharma profits. True healthcare freedom means patients and doctors, not agencies, decide what risks are worth taking.

CoC's are for censors and people more concerned about their virtue-signaling image than getting code written. They are a way for lazy-minded political people to shoehorn their issues into places they don't belong. Project leaders already can kick out people for bad behavior. There is no need to codify what woke gender categories are "protected" by your trendy Rust project. That's simply a political distraction akin to bringing Gideon bibles to a computer swap meet.

In general the more "complete" the CoC is for any software project, the bigger douchebags you are dealing with and the lower the probability is that anyone is actually coding anything.

97% of Slashdot is now outraged that, if the economy grew at all, the money wasn't stolen from the parties involved and spent on "climate change" (a giant scam) somehow, someway.

Those 'successes' are all built on DRM and technical lock-out. As long as manufacturers go out of their way to fuck their customers, it's no real surprise they do not embrace EVs. There isn't a single EV that doesn't use DRM to lock mechanics out of battery service and the battery controller. There is no excuse for this that anyone should accept. It's pure greed. At least one can buy 3rd party parts for ICE cars.

As you perhaps are alluding to, it's not about increasing points of failure, it's about interdependence and SINGLE points of failure. All devices fail. What matters is how well you plan for the events that actually happen. The more simple you can keep those plans, the better. When it comes to using "Cloud" providers and "Hyperscalers", this seems to have been quantitatively proved to be a great way to knock off a few nines. They don't know how to keep cascading failures from disabling their entire operation, as we've seen over and over. Just about everything they do can be done with a set of CoLo's or a smaller player using more standards-based approaches and engineered much more soundly and simply. They are an expensive & dumb idea: simple as that.

Indo-European Western Whites drove innovation: Aristotle's philosophy, Newton's science, Shakespeare's literature. They invented democracy, modern medicine, electricity, flight and a ton more. Western explorers spread light, ending savagery and building empires of order and prosperity. Protestantism fueled individual responsibility and capitalism (boot good things). Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution enshrined God-given rights: free speech, property, limited government; creating the freest, wealthiest societies in history and put the most significant effort of any culture to end slavery. The West eradicated diseases, defeated totalitarianism, and pioneered universal education and human rights. Its holidays unite families; its work ethic lifts nations.

I see. You just hand-wave away centuries of art, music, science, etc.... and the summary is Viking Metal? I mean I'm all for a good Amon Amarth song, but you maybe are narrowing your scope a biiiiit to far. Sounds like a typical racist trope from a racist. "White people just dance stupid. That's your culture." Your juvinille response is typical anti-white tripe.

It's definitely not "about" letting in a flood of Muslims and non-white anti-white hostile military age men. People in majority white countries have the same sovereignty as anyone else and they get to decide about their own country not the hostile refugees.

We'll be fine, but women are having a moment.

I don't doubt it, but thanks for the reassurance, lol.

Anyone who doesn't like brown Muslims flooding their majority white sovereign country is a complainer? Okay, color me a complainer, then.

The West still needs westerners to represent our culture or it'll die and be replaced by Muslims and a flood of brown folks which are already mad Finland isn't stuffed to the gills with hostile immigrants like Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden are. Folks wanted to convince western women that childbearing is a capitalist plot to disenfranchise them of rights and they clearly got the memo.

Now they cost a mint and will definitely reduce your opportunities (unless you're already rich enough to have other people take do 100% of the chores they generate). When you get too elderly to work, they will threaten you for money or rob your house. That's what I see happening to my co-workers who are about to retire.

It's designed to be more like the web was when it was just getting started. It's a lightweight, application-layer internet protocol launched in June 2019 by "Solderpunk" and designed as a minimalist alternative to the modern World Wide Web while drawing inspiration from the text-based simplicity of the pre-web Gopher protocol. It uses a custom markup language called Gemtext for hypertext documents with basic links, supports mandatory TLS encryption for secure connections, and operates on a client-server model with a single request-response structure to keep things straightforward and extensible-resistant. The aim is to revive the early web's ethos of easy, ad-free browsing and organic discovery without JavaScript, trackers, or multimedia bloat. It won't force you to run client-side code. Gemini fosters "Geminispace," a decentralized network of public capsules (sites) accessible via specialized clients, promoting privacy, low-bandwidth efficiency, and sharing.

There are some cool sites and the Lagrange Gemni Browser is pretty nice.

Ol Huang is just mad he cannot find any Chinese girls that want him to sign her tits. Then again, it's gonna take a much smaller signature and much less ink when he does!

Teachers make a huge difference in student performance. This has been studied and simply documented over and over forever. Why do we let bad and mediocre teachers teach when better teachers get better results? Since the 1980's we've been able to provide remote access to good teachers. The whole thing would have been easy to simply swap out 90% of teachers in the 1980's for a VHS (or betamax if you must) A/V carts. That's right. They should have been fired and replaced with folks with better methods and proven results. Proctors to administer testing and keep the kids quiet and paying attention can keep the kids behavior controlled, but are much cheaper than teachers. However, they also should be trained in the proven-best methods to deal with disruptive kids.

I'll give you an honest example. My brother almost didn't learn to read/write because his teacher believed in some ridiculous teaching methodology that excluded phonetics (the so-far proven-best way to teach kids to read). My parents had to get him an external tutor/teacher to teach him phonetics. He want from a straight-F to straight-A student after that, but the teacher he had in 2nd grade would have left him illiterate and not given a damn. This was a public school teacher who is going to RETIRE after teaching only 20 years. They have the same deal as the cops, firefighters, etc... It's pretty cushy considering private sector workers get no such promises.

Oh and that retirement is something we taxpayers pay for many years after the utility of that teacher is long since gone. It all goes under a heading of "education" like it's just the cost of doing business. It sure doesn't have to be. Those people shouldn't get cushy retirements, constant pay increases, or anything else besides what the private education market will bear (despite public schools constantly under-performing private ones).

Who cares if they use AI or not. What matters is not giving a bunch of whiny teachers gold plated retirement deals, but giving kids the best chance and the best education. We should have long-since been using every scrap of tech we have to do it, but a lot smarter (ie.. use what's proven to work, teach using methods the best teachers use or use those teachers directly by recording them). Right now I see more teachers with a passion to let kids choose their gender rather than to educate them and give them the best chance in life or enjoy learning/reading/etc... No wonder our test scores and literacy keeps dropping. They appear to care more about virtue signaling and their compensation packages.

None of that addresses his very strong point. I read his post as "Let markets work". I have no idea what your point is. All I want to know is who do you want to coerce or steal from to accomplish this pro-EV dream or can you suck it up and let markets work?

For me what ruins them now is the shamelessly communist slant on just about any article that touches any political topic. Elon is about to disenfranchise them with some basic competition. I'm sure that'll cause just as many tears as when he fired Twitter's censorship team (about 3000 people). I wonder how many of those Wikipedia donations ends up paying some Leftist to smash-"moderate" any unfriendly Capitalist propaganda. I'll definitely support Grokopedia over Wikipedia once it gets going and I've already pretty much banned using Wikipedia for any non-technical articles. I used to donate to Wikipedia, but I will never do so again.