For Brexit in particular, it seems clear to me that EU politicians, but the UK ones in particular, used EU as a scapegoat for unpopular economic policy that they themselves actually want, but can't justify effectively to their constituents. "We can't help it, it's an EU requirement" when leaving out that in the EU, their guys totally supported it.
That was bound to backfire at some point or another.
I think you're right that politicians prefer not to defend complicated (and possibly good) policy to the public. But if they choose easy ways out to avoid it (and they do!) then they're to blame too when it collapses. To blame the public for not blindly trusting them won't do.
The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves. I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
Which has been a popular argument against democracy since at least Plato: just look at the average voter/person and their intelligence, understanding of the world, and their character.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
I'd frame this another way -- the public are largely responsible, but we put all the blame on politicians/government. we vote for these people while we all know they're all talking complete and utter nonsense just to get past the job interview. it is the game. i wish it wasn't. i wish i could stand in the house of commons during PMQs and point out every BS line every single one of them says. stand up during question time and shout at all the idiots on the panel, disproving every single bullshit line they've fed the audience with stats and analysis and data [0]. but then we'd probably end up everyone in the country showing up to PMQs/question time shouting over each other all at the same time... which wouldn't really work lol.
the system is not perfect, but it's what we've got.
> I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
> It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
yeah, like, i'm kind of lucky that i don't have children or any other dependants and i went to posh schools, got a decent academic education [1]. i can afford to sit around, pontificate and moralise about what the large scale right or wrong way of doing things should be. i earn enough and don't have kids. hell, i'd be happy if they increased the rate of tax in the top bands. more money to spend on public services for everyone else who actually needs it. seriously, take my spare disposable income! i'm only gonna spend it on expensive food and cigarettes that's gonna make me overweight and have lung cancer and become a drain on the nhs anyway!
my mate with three kids doesn't have the time for that. she just wants the school to give her daughter the help she needs and has to fight through a bunch of bureaucracy to get there. bureaucracy which exists because the system is under strain because lots of people are asking for the same resources and they've got to figure out some way of apportioning out the resources. same with my mate who is a single parent to a son with pretty hefty ADHD. it's no wonder they fall into the "my group first" attitude and/or rhetoric with, for example, immigration. they're constantly told there's all this money is being spent elsewhere on "some other people" and then they look at their kid's school struggling with one support worker for hundreds of kids and it's like ... well, wtf. same thing with income taxes etc. "we need money for our kids, why on earth is my tax money being spent on X, Y, Z" etc.
to be clear: i don't agree with the political views of my friend, and i don't really care to debate the politics either. i'm responding to the "myopic" comment from my own perspective, having previously noticed the interesting differences between myself and my friends. they're really lovely people! really nice and kind and loving folks. but they have a selfish/fear-based-protectionist side to them, like all humans do.
that last bit is the important bit for me. fear leads selfish behaviour. people are worried, the "system" is unstable and constantly under strain. and that makes them act in their own selfish interests because they're having to jostle for position within the "system" :shrug:
> Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
this has always been the critical problem from where i sit. like, we're forced to vote for people who, ultimately, may only be in the job for a maximum of 5 years total. we don't get to vote on the next 30 years cos the next lot could just undo it all. just look at upcoming negotiations with the EU apparently might involve us moving back towards the single market again, which was the whole "once in a generation" brexit vote thing. turns out it's not quite so "once in a generation" [2]
the trouble for me is that the commonly implemented "long term" model for governance tends to be stuff like authoritarianism, dictatorship etc. ... so...
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i wrote way more for this than i thought i would lol
[0]: yeah! let's properly hold them to account! i can finally use my autistic powers of calling bullshit for the benefit of all! instead of getting into trouble with my boss at work. again. o_o
[1]: the non-academic parts were really damaging though. expensive doesn't always mean good. highly rated academically doesn't always mean good.
As a side note if you did just get fat and smoke you wouldn't be a drain on the NHS because being fat and smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and you are likely to die right around retirement age, after you paid most of your lifetime taxes but before you start consuming the very expensive age-related healthcare.
Ironically it is the unhealthy that are overpaying and the very healthy who are underpaying because age related care is such a huge proportion of lifetime medical costs, and that is still before adding in potential sin taxes paid.
The alternative is everything falling apart at home and our manufacturing industries declining dramatically. Maybe the "unpopular economic policy" wasn't such a bad idea after all.
> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.
As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.
The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.
But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.
A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.
So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.
There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.
Yes, with a few gotchas, especially related to end handling. If the government extracts the hidden bits from possibly stego-streams, and half of the ones theyv encounter give an "unexpected end of input" error, but yours never give that error, they will know that your hidden bit streams likely contain some message.
You can avoid it by using a bijective arithmetic encoder, which by definition never encounters an "unexpected end of stream error", and any bit string decodes to a different message. That's the cool way.
The boring practical way is to just encrypt your bits.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
Nope. All that does is create a rash of execs/decisionmakers who become sacrificial fixtures who absolutely do not travel to the jurisdiction in question, thusly handily sidestepping the accountability. It has to be fines. At the end of the day, it's going to become a political sticking point one way or another if we're going to share and coexist on the same planet.
If it has any relation to Celtic languages, then it's Indo-European by definition.
We can tell how much neanderthal ancestry someone has, more or less. Basque people have no more than others. Despite their odd language, they are much like other Europeans genetically: a similar mix of European hunter gatherers, Anatolian farmers and the bronze age invaders which we believe brought the IE languages to Europe.
Maturity is a value judgment. At best. At worst it's simply a power move. There's no objective way to measure your brain juices and say now you're "fully developed" or whatever.
People eager to define other people as insufficiently adult adults, should be viewed with the same skepticism as people who want to put their political opponents in an asylum.
If you think it's a problem that young adults today play too much video games or whatever, take the ball and not the man. The problem then is in the behavior, not in people's essence. The youth are as bad as every generation complains that they are, no more, no less.
Can you elaborate on this? My guess would be, that because of their status as a government backed research institute, they invent a lot, but let others do the commercialisation. So patent fees seem like a natural choice for them, to recover their investments.
Fraunhofer has a ton of top of the line innovations. I'm glad it exists. If the only way to exist is for them to collect on patents they've produced, I don't see the issue.
I'd gladly take every Fraunhofer "innovation" 5 years later if it meant Fraunhofer didn't exist. Compression patent extortionists are the scum of the earth.
I can promise you that Fraudhofer has NEVER made an algorithmic innovation which would not have been "discovered" within 5 years. Of the things they have patented which are coherent enough to even qualify as an innovation, they're more likely to have been actually discovered 20 years ago by someone else.
And they're pretty much worst in class, there's no practical way they're better than other algorithm patent extortionists.
By the way, algorithms should not be patentable, and legally aren't patentable, but some presumably corrupt bureaucrats decided they for all practical purposes are patentable anyway.
Civ 2 was without doubt a much uglier civ 1, though. Isometric graphics in win 3.11 wasn't a good bet.
Civ 1 had good pixel art (look at those mountains! Not to mention the intro), good colors (and more of them!) and clean iconography. For me the look was part of the magic, so I never got into Civ 2.
That was bound to backfire at some point or another.
I think you're right that politicians prefer not to defend complicated (and possibly good) policy to the public. But if they choose easy ways out to avoid it (and they do!) then they're to blame too when it collapses. To blame the public for not blindly trusting them won't do.
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