Because people already owning shares in important companies or connections to politicians or company bureaucrats etc - they don’t need to scale up. That’s intended.
I swear, the humanity is stupid. I just can look at everything around me and see all kinds of socio-economic arguments to be right. All of them at the same time.
No. Standards might be tax funded and adherence to them enforced.
A market of resources (to provide services via standard way) is possible - standard format search, standard format service tracking, standard format storage service, and what not.
Only if they’d want that, of course. They literally say what they want - a Silicon Valley. With all the dystopian shit.
There’s plenty of oil already found in Europe.
Ah, yes, BTW, people are talking as if immigration doesn’t exist.
Once upon a time a certain Eastern Roman Empire was dealt the final blow by Ottoman Turks, and its former inhabitants possessing very valuable competencies and knowledge would be plentiful in South Europe.
Perhaps had that not happened, Europeans would get to the “colonizing the new world” activity a couple of centuries later.
… And it even doesn’t do anymore what it did to gain the past glory.
This picture doesn’t survive a request for higher detail.
The only reason the EU is not part of that great modern thing is because it’s impossible to match the margins achieved with such a scale that things
invented in Britain and built by the United States out of parts manufactured in Southeast Asia while Europe masturbated
have.
I’m of an opinion that some downshifting is desperately needed. It won’t happen anyway for surveillance and warfare, but EU-produced electronics are possible - they are doing it with MCs for cars and for plastic cards and for elevators and for microwaves and … .
The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!.
Those American things you list, they are not very good.
This brings up a point I’ve been meaning to make for awhile: I don’t think Europe has it in them.
Do you know who Fabrice Bellard is?
Do you know who, ah, ok, Linus Torvalds counts as a USian by now.
KDE developers are mostly from the EU, I think.
Opera browser, when that was a thing, were mostly from European countries, I think.
Nokia, eh, Nokia, Nokia. Siemens. Sony Ericsson. Bosch. German carmakers.
Minitel, do you know what Minitel was?
Many of the fundamental things used everywhere, like some error-correcting codes for satellite communications, have people from the EU as authors.
Actually, I think if you compare fundamental achievements, and not commercial ones, you’ll see that European countries are not that far behind.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them
Yeah, the hardware production thing is generally sad. This wasn’t so even in the early 90s, so my own modest honest opinion is that this was killed because of the US creeping patent war. Similarly to other things. A relatively recent development.
I mean, yeah, competencies don’t pop up overnight, but frankly there’s no magic in making a computer.
There’s hardly achievable level of minimization, involving patents impeding competition and very narrow margins, which prevent anything outside of the main “computing silk road” of ASML-TSMC-Intel&AMD&ARM from functioning.
If it were up for me, I’d just say that late 80s’ computers were good enough. Or at least early 90s’ ones. When that “computing silk road” hadn’t yet become as unavoidable.
and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French
France is still a great nation.
I simply don’t think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.
Y-yeah, that part has changed a lot, because on the other end of the pond there’s not much “innovation” now too.
But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.
The EU puts the interests of its elites and bureaucracies above all others. Because the EU is its elites and bureaucracies, that’s how it’s built.
OK, I don’t even live in an EU country (OK, suppose in like 50 years by some miracle Armenia joins it, and suppose I get Armenian citizenship before that …).
But - it’s not EU’s particular problem.
EU is sort of a system built entirely of “liberal democracy best practices” as they were seen in year 1999. And all its faults are highly average and general for liberal democracies.
It’s the crisis of liberal democracies as a thing, because modern technologies allow representatives to guide their populations like a Victoria II player does. Like in a global strategy. And it works. It’s not even only modern technologies, it’s also “political technologies” like what was normal for USA for many years, but to the rest of the world has spread only in the 90s and 00s. In USA those were, until some point around Reagan, balanced by functional journalism and protest culture.
Except the fact that it works in the sense of having necessary feedbacks and controls and computing power is only one side of the coin, the other side of which is that direct democracy can work too. This removes direct democracy’s disadvantage of impracticality, and removes representative democracy’s advantage of stability (the opposite of what politicians call stability, stability of democracy is the direct opposite of stability of elites, culture, morality, economics, laws and policies).
And the fact that it works in the sense of political technologies means that representative democracy gains a significant disadvantage of not being really democracy anymore. Those unfortunately work. Those can still work when voting for decisions, not people, but it’s harder to make a populace support two inconsistent (from the point of propaganda) actions than it is to make them support a politician who’ll support both and then make them doubt the inconsistency.
So to adapt for changes liberal democracies must become direct liberal democracies or turn into Russias. I have spoken.
One of old lines against left is that it’s just people who want free stuff.
Left ideologies are not, in fact, about getting more free stuff (and the “bread and circuses” thing originates earlier than right or left liberalism, and is used just as well by right factions, and Rome is generally loved by the right more than by the left, making a funny comparison to Sparta which is more loved by the left, while Athens is again loved more by the right).
Still, see, in a situation where European nations are gradually becoming less and less democratic, without significant resistance utilizing modern technologies for building a dystopia worse than cyberpunk books promised, and the questions in computing revolve around dependence on governments and corporations in all things done with computers, - in this situation you write about “open source and socialized”.
Not about using those same technologies for building a direct democracy before “elected representatives” use them to make us serfs or surplus biomass. Not about using them to track all state officials’ locations and their finances (if they don’t want that, they can pick another job). Not about revision of patent systems benefiting corporations and in practice making any truly free system of communication on the Internet dubiously legal.
No, about “open source” - which is the “circuses” here, for things to be cool and interoperable, and about “socialized” - which is the “bread” here.
Yes. Also Silicon Valley is a wrong example.
Old Nokia is a good example, Acorn, ARM of old.
Except what those people want is exactly a second Silicon Valley, just loyal to them.
That and also - humans not knowing something can man up and learn it. When they need, they’ll learn.
And OP’s question about European clouds - it depends really. A lot of what this endeavor needs is just advanced use of OpenStack. I’m confident there are plenty of people with such skills in the EU countries.
As for the post content - I dunno, my experience with Kubernetes consists of using it, but not trying to understand or touch it too closely, because it stinks. Maybe those engineers were like that too.
Soviet surveillance drones, which Ukraine has used a few times as suicide drones, were not much more complex than a radiola. Had a flight program in the form of perforated tin disc, if I remember correctly, and an electro-mechanical system of following those instructions (not a computer). They’d be just sent on preprogrammed routes, make photos, those retrieved and analyzed on return. No radio communications, stealthy enough for their purpose.
Will happen anyway, so rather embrace it as early as possible so that we would be those bad actors and not the sucker good actors on the receiving end.
Though maybe not this with apparently how insecure and poorly thought out it is. Which I suppose is on brand for Dorsey.
I just had a thought how weird it is, there are people whose names millions know, with preconditions (like what basic capital would be in XIX century) millions can easily have (it’s an application in Swift running on iOS), and a lot of people can judge how well or not well they are doing those things.
Yet it’s even a case for discussion, an important thing, like a new interpretation of some opera in theater.
Maybe it’s on brand, but honestly all this is cuckoldish a bit, as if we were criticizing Jack Dorsey for f-cking our proverbial wife not well enough.
I wish there were “anti Silicon Valley” solutions which are to decentralized transport-agnostic chats and forums what Gemini is for Web. A protocol intended to be understandable for everyone, for which you can make a decent client in two-three days. Except all the notes I make for myself are not worth anything until I make a working application, because that process will help me see what I didn’t when imagining.
Not even “further”. They are driving to as many splits as possible, as opposed to ideological differences.
Difference is good, because two different systems can, eh, have kids. One can disassemble them, mix them, see how it works, make thought experiments, discuss again and again. A split doesn’t involve the kids making process.
A split is different from a discussion in the sense that you use a prepared set of shibbolets to tell friend from foe, not leaving any room for synthesis.
When you have that split mentality, you punish attempts at discussion by others by interpreting it always as the biggest split possible, - as if it were worse than actually being a foe applying the same split approach, just like you.
Totalitarian societies usually poison and punish and implicitly tax discussion, but they are always welcoming to splits. And that split mentality endures far longer than the original totalitarian regime, usually. Look at Germans, not the eastern ones, but all of them, - their political and group thinking still reminisces Nazi propaganda. Israel and Palestine are one good example, but this can be seen in many other things.
Which is also why I don’t entirely align with the idea of “new middle ages”. The mechanisms we are seeing are from 1930s, not 1330s and not even 1630s.
Nazis were a bunch of tough but dumb veterans and their conservative sponsors, doing things the way obvious for these groups.
Bolsheviks were a bunch of thieves and college dropouts and their small-noble and intelligentsia sympathizers, doing things the ways obvious for them (that crappy Soviet elitism existed because the sympathizer layer wanted some sort of Plato’s state with a “better” subset of society, ya knaw, the right kind of professors, the right kind of poets, the right kind of journalists, necessarily social sciences as you see, teaching everyone else to live (if you’ve read “Heart of a dog”, professor Preobrazhensky is very clearly that, he’s not a positive character in any way, he’s one of those people who liked social inequality, just felt markets are a wrong way to decide who is where in the hierarchy), and ex-Soviet societies still are divided into “the popular Bolshevik” view of taking everything from the “enemies of the people” and dividing it as the main solution to every problem, and “the elitist Bolshevik” view of “the wrong people that can’t be allowed to make democratic decisions”, the funniest part is that these mostly intersect in the same people, these are two sides of the same coin). They too did things the was obvious for these groups. By the way, thieves and murderers are usually the same kind of personality, and failures tend to use power they have to take revenge, and intelligentsia of the described kind.
These modern idiots are a bunch of piss-smelling mommy’s cheats like Zuckerberg or Bezos who managed to capture a new industry, and their (kinda elitist) professor-cultured predecessors who think that the treatment of the industry that allowed mommy’s cheats to do that should be maintained, and all of them willingly reinforcing the hierarchy of them, a relatively small group of “founders and visionaries”, deciding where it’ll go, but I beg your pardon, there’s no technical reason for any decisions to depend on what they want. I’m certain most of these people are actually not technically more competent or understanding of the domain areas than many other people who’ve never were anywhere close to that “Silicon Valley society”.
But still all of them used different, but similar in effects and covered areas, means of propaganda. Eh, I think I’ve recently seen a wonderful article about various ways in which human psyche adapts for totalitarianism and abuse, except I suspect it was in Russian.
So - IMHO one can draw an analogy between early USSR with Bolsheviks like Stalin (the thief kind) and Bolsheviks like Lenin (the elitist intelligentsia kind) and the tech industry, where Zuckerberg, Brin and Bezos would be like the former, while Linus Torvalds, big people of Microsoft, and so on - all very different people, it’s about culture of the resulting “elite”, - would be the latter. But combined together, as some community with a vision of the future, they are pigs. They look at the world as if it were their place to decide what it will be.
So all I have to say is - in the last ~30 years we have evolved paternalism of a very harmful kind, combined with the split mentality, combined with a structure where paternalists are in power in a hierarchical system. It doesn’t matter that those paternalists employ anti-paternalist slogans and say anti-paternalist words. What matters is what they do.
In any case - in 2012 the former group were in appearances very “liberal”, now they are the opposite thing, and some known FOSS personalities have more right-wing views than you’d expect from their public appearances (which are very liberal). But all this doesn’t matter.
What matters is that for a sane discussion about politics, for example, you should have participants equally ready to accept ancap, fascism, ancom, Confucian monarchy, Buddhist theocracy, direct democracy for every decision, Trotskyist Soviet system (no professional state bureaucrats, all state apparatus roles are filled with random citizens elected\sortitioned by councils, perpetually rotated, no professional military commanders\sergeants, the same thing, and the problem of expertise is solved by good enough common education), I can go on.
Point is that you don’t get into an argument in order to tell friend from foe, you get into an argument to synthesize something new and wonderful. An argument is like a blind date. Why the hell even spend your time on telling friends from foes, unless you are taking notes for a very big kill list, but that wouldn’t be good faith behavior.
So if you think something, you might think differently after the argument.
Except this good faith behavior I described is dangerous when there are a lot of cowards in the society and the legal protections don’t work (you sort of irritate people who’d like a hierarchical society with non-transparent concentrated power, because power is concentrated by groups, and those groups accept new people of their kind, and thus such people have a chance of getting a piece of that power and don’t like you dogfooding mechanisms for preventing such a system).
This is also funny in the sense that one of explanations of Bitcoin is “digital gold” - that world economies and societies went in a wrong direction once they stopped being gold-backed, except gold and everything RL is controlled by governments, while Bitcoin is a subject to freedom of speech and whatever.
An already archaic viewpoint TBH, that many even western governments respect freedom of anything and human rights. And in another sense too archaic - the idea that a currency being gold-backed is something valuable was kinda libertarian around year 2007.
Which is also an answer to people saying that Bitcoin is not backed by anything (like country’s economy in this sense and not technical ability to exchange it for gold), it’s the main cryptocurrency, and it seems to work well enough despite high volatility.
This won’t be a circle though. Today they really like their control and surveillance. A gold-backed currency is where anyone owning N of M can exchange them to gold with which an M is guaranteed by a rate that doesn’t change, load that gold into bags, carry it to another country, go to a bank and exchange that gold to its currency. Perhaps declaring that they are carrying that gold at customs.
Gold-backed for governments - we-ell, maybe in some way.
Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar … being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they’d use different incompatible currencies.
You seem to have a misconception that you are sort of a gentleman to whom others have to justify something. There’s such a thing as unneeded waste of time.
Kill Hitler fundraisers are unironically one of supposed ancap mechanisms against tyranny.
I just love how reality keeps proving me right.
(Would prefer a heaven where it doesn’t, of course)
It’s not just a multicultural area, it’s as if they made the African continent two states, drawing the border randomly for one of them to be majority Muslim (and consisting of two unconnected parts).
It’s a whole world with a few language families of completely different cultures, inside which there are languages as big as German not mutually intelligible with their related languages near them.
There’s no such ethnicity as “Indian”.
BTW, about religion - there is an ethnic and religious group in India, their Church is Apostolic Christian, Miaphysite, and it’s in communion with Coptic and Armenian churches, and it has way more members than there are Armenian Christians in the world. Yet when listing Miaphysite churches, it’s usually not even remembered.
I mean, they use English as the main international language inside India, the fact that there’s no native language fitting the role of lingua franca more talks for itself. It’s not about policy, it’s about the fact that Hindi or Urdu are nothing for Dravidic regions. Not even oppression, just WTF and why should they use it.