8 ms·

Laughs in European Consumer Protection How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

by tanepiper 2y ago

stavros 2y ago
Well, it's working out really well for corporations to extract maximal value from their users, for sure.
usrnm 2y ago
It's actually working very well for the US, just not the US consumers
- gryfft 2y ago
  "It's actually really good for me, it's just bad for almost every cell in my body"
  - oblio 2y ago
    Well, I think the proper analogy would be that it's good for me but bad for my kidneys and colon. Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.
    - Planktonne 2y ago
      Something bad for your kidneys is bad for you as well, even if you don't notice at the time/don't mind that level of damage. If the US harms its population, it is harming itself, because -- like every state -- it's at least partially made of its people.
      - eitland 2y ago
        Which seems to be exactly the point of the person you replied to.
    - ohmygoodniche 2y ago
      Not sure why you're downvoted? I can't think of almost anything that isn't designed to cripple poor or vulnerable people? Health insurance, medicine costs, student loans, etc etc. I never thought about it like this...
      - oblio 2y ago
        My initial version didn't have the edit and I guess people assumed I was being callous.
- kerkeslager 2y ago
  Can we not do this? I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.
  - technopol 2y ago
    I think Americans do similar for the EU- think of the government and other things we see in the news or identify with it first before its people.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    You're right, we shall not do this, however when corporations have privileged rights over their consumers and their abuse of "the people of the nation" is not only ignored, but applauded for value generation, not doing this almost impossible. I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc. That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away. There's another way to do things.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > HOAs abuse home owners There are plenty of local authorities who exercise strange levels of power over small changes to people's houses. The difference is that when that happens to you vs a HOA, you're also paying their salary to avoid jail time.
  - bsenftner 2y ago
    Ha! The United States has "special" citizens called corporations that due to the US's "law of wealth", get to do anything they want as humans legally without any of the drawbacks. It's so ass backwards here, in the USA, smart people are turned inside out with nonsense. Then the fact that there is no real effective communications training at all in all but the media manipulation educations, nobody knows how to communicate, they try, but it's pathetic, seriously sad parrots just echoing talking points with nothing being communicated.
jajko 2y ago
Well, depends what your goals are. Agile economy focused on health of companies, high revenue, and ability to quickly adapt to changing environment? US is great for that. It sucks to be the bottom 70% maybe, OK till maybe 95% and great above. EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified. Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Trust me, if you own your own company anywhere, 50 days paid vacation is unlikely. Owners tend to work more, not less. Or let me be more flippant- sure I get 50 paid days off a year. I call it Sunday.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    If we use Elon as an example regular CEOs probably have 300+ days off.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      I'm not sure Elon is a "regular CEO". He's more like an active investor where the companies are mostly run by other people without him there at all. So yeah, not a typical "business owner" :)
pjc50 2y ago
Has anyone checked whether this is also happening in the EU? Whether they've bothered about GDPR compliance or not.
criddell 2y ago
Amazon also sold the Echo in Europe, so it’s going to be interesting to see how European Consumer Protection helps out in this case.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  GDPR says "hi". If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract. "It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.
  - mantas 2y ago
    Isn't Alexa already quite a bit limited in EU?
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    There is no downside to breaching the GDPR, as demonstrated by Facebook and Google still being in business. The fines, if they ever arrive, are merely the cost of doing business - a small tax.
    - latexr 2y ago
      Clearly it is not true that there are no downsides, because those companies had to change behaviours and offer more data protections as a result. The goal of GDPR is not to bankrupt companies, but to fix behaviours. I do agree fines take too long to come and are too small.
  - criddell 2y ago
    > "It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask. How long does this process typically take? When do you think EU consumers either get the functionality back or receive compensation?
eadmund 2y ago
Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi. The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
- kzrdude 2y ago
  We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)
  - heresie-dabord 2y ago
    It is generally understood that GDP is a poor measure of what matters to people. The OP should know this. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-life-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...
    - pc86 2y ago
      It may be generally understood to you, but not to me, and the link you provided says absolutely nothing about GDP.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
TheDong 2y ago
America will continue to cripple EU consumer protection too. The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked. So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.
  - CivBase 2y ago
    Making this example even worse, both Firefox and Chrome are open source (except for a few proprietary add-ons). An EU company wouldn't even need to make their own browser. They could just hard-fork one of those.
    - TheDong 2y ago
      I mean, currently they couldn't because EU's laws are too weak too. An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers. They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase. But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.
- eddyg 2y ago
elif 2y ago
Who said it was to innovate? The administration is cancelling research, actually deleting the department of education, bullying the university system into censoring, revoking diplomas, forbidding Chinese research collaborations. Innovation is not on the menu. The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

stavros 2y ago

Well, it's working out really well for corporations to extract maximal value from their users, for sure.

usrnm 2y ago

It's actually working very well for the US, just not the US consumers

gryfft 2y ago
"It's actually really good for me, it's just bad for almost every cell in my body"
- oblio 2y ago
  Well, I think the proper analogy would be that it's good for me but bad for my kidneys and colon. Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.
  - Planktonne 2y ago
    Something bad for your kidneys is bad for you as well, even if you don't notice at the time/don't mind that level of damage. If the US harms its population, it is harming itself, because -- like every state -- it's at least partially made of its people.
    - eitland 2y ago
      Which seems to be exactly the point of the person you replied to.
  - ohmygoodniche 2y ago
    Not sure why you're downvoted? I can't think of almost anything that isn't designed to cripple poor or vulnerable people? Health insurance, medicine costs, student loans, etc etc. I never thought about it like this...
    - oblio 2y ago
      My initial version didn't have the edit and I guess people assumed I was being callous.
kerkeslager 2y ago
Can we not do this? I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.
- technopol 2y ago
  I think Americans do similar for the EU- think of the government and other things we see in the news or identify with it first before its people.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  You're right, we shall not do this, however when corporations have privileged rights over their consumers and their abuse of "the people of the nation" is not only ignored, but applauded for value generation, not doing this almost impossible. I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc. That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away. There's another way to do things.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > HOAs abuse home owners There are plenty of local authorities who exercise strange levels of power over small changes to people's houses. The difference is that when that happens to you vs a HOA, you're also paying their salary to avoid jail time.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  Ha! The United States has "special" citizens called corporations that due to the US's "law of wealth", get to do anything they want as humans legally without any of the drawbacks. It's so ass backwards here, in the USA, smart people are turned inside out with nonsense. Then the fact that there is no real effective communications training at all in all but the media manipulation educations, nobody knows how to communicate, they try, but it's pathetic, seriously sad parrots just echoing talking points with nothing being communicated.

jajko 2y ago

Well, depends what your goals are. Agile economy focused on health of companies, high revenue, and ability to quickly adapt to changing environment? US is great for that. It sucks to be the bottom 70% maybe, OK till maybe 95% and great above. EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified. Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.

bruce511 2y ago
Trust me, if you own your own company anywhere, 50 days paid vacation is unlikely. Owners tend to work more, not less. Or let me be more flippant- sure I get 50 paid days off a year. I call it Sunday.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  If we use Elon as an example regular CEOs probably have 300+ days off.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I'm not sure Elon is a "regular CEO". He's more like an active investor where the companies are mostly run by other people without him there at all. So yeah, not a typical "business owner" :)

pjc50 2y ago

Has anyone checked whether this is also happening in the EU? Whether they've bothered about GDPR compliance or not.

criddell 2y ago

Amazon also sold the Echo in Europe, so it’s going to be interesting to see how European Consumer Protection helps out in this case.

bayindirh 2y ago
GDPR says "hi". If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract. "It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.
- mantas 2y ago
  Isn't Alexa already quite a bit limited in EU?
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  There is no downside to breaching the GDPR, as demonstrated by Facebook and Google still being in business. The fines, if they ever arrive, are merely the cost of doing business - a small tax.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Clearly it is not true that there are no downsides, because those companies had to change behaviours and offer more data protections as a result. The goal of GDPR is not to bankrupt companies, but to fix behaviours. I do agree fines take too long to come and are too small.
- criddell 2y ago
  > "It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask. How long does this process typically take? When do you think EU consumers either get the functionality back or receive compensation?

eadmund 2y ago

Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi. The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

kzrdude 2y ago
We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  It is generally understood that GDP is a poor measure of what matters to people. The OP should know this. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-life-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...
  - pc86 2y ago
    It may be generally understood to you, but not to me, and the link you provided says absolutely nothing about GDP.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

TheDong 2y ago

America will continue to cripple EU consumer protection too. The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked. So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.
- CivBase 2y ago
  Making this example even worse, both Firefox and Chrome are open source (except for a few proprietary add-ons). An EU company wouldn't even need to make their own browser. They could just hard-fork one of those.
  - TheDong 2y ago
    I mean, currently they couldn't because EU's laws are too weak too. An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers. They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase. But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.
eddyg 2y ago

elif 2y ago

Who said it was to innovate? The administration is cancelling research, actually deleting the department of education, bullying the university system into censoring, revoking diplomas, forbidding Chinese research collaborations. Innovation is not on the menu. The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.