It's always irked me. It's like saying a Photoshop binary is "open source" just because you can (theoretically) run it on your own computer instead of through a SaaS web app.
I mean if you push it, all software you can get your hands on is open source, it's just that binary code is a bit tougher to read than the form it was compiled from.
Also since you brought it up, I'd argue the difference between SaaS and local is way more important than "open source" vs "closed source". Closed source you can decompile. SaaS on someone else's cloud, you can do fuck all about.
> given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.
They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.
I don't care about sports betting. I care about government blocking websites just because it exists on the internet. It was already illegal for Polymarket to accept bets from French people.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
So if something is illegal you don't think it's moral to enforce that people don't do it because just being illegal should be enough?
Note there's no liability on the ISPs, they do not have to pay a fine for not having blocked it, they do not have to ban alternative DNS. In Europe there is apparently a legal mindset that you can recruit a third party to conduct an action that is not onerous to enforce a blockade. A court can point to someone who has a DNS server and order them to block certain lookups.
Your entire argument is based on the fact that France cannot fight all websites at once? Will you change your opinion if Fanduel and others are blocked in 6 months as well?
Sometimes countries can formulate energy policies that accomplish two goals at once.
They can keep taxes on refined petroleum products low in order to not destroy the present economy, while simultaneously fostering a budding renewable energy industry. USA is the second largest producer of renewable energy in the world behind only China. California + Texas by themselves rank 6th in the world.
Well the US could just pump their wells and outproduce the entire rest of the world in crude oil and refined products like gasoline if it wanted to. Or if it was forced to.
> There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.
> Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).
Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
A lot deeper than active wars and energy supply issues???
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
If you measure economical performance with PIB per capita, yeah, for sure, US has a better economy.
If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
>Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy.
You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
The plots for "comfortable living vs income" in the US and Europe are different, and that difference is endlessly arbitraged and any boring news day to pump out another "Life in Europe is better" story.
Sorry but I don't share your view. A society where the bottom 50% can't live a decent life is just dysfunctional. I don't care which country is best for the riches (and actually, Europe is good for the riches), I care that the economy is there to allow everyone to live a decent and meaningful life.
This perspective implies that you should be vigilant to keep out poor or unskilled immigrants who might struggle to afford the quality of life you require for citizens.
>You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
Poverty in the US is similar to poverty in Sweden, according to this dataset:
I think there is just a lot of misinformation out there. Americans love to complain, and other countries love to criticize the US. These effects create systematic misconceptions which no one bothers to fact-check.
I mean the real unspeakeable secret is how the American mid-high-middle-class/upper-class has so effectively turned financially transparent despite being the wealthiest group in the country. The 65% to 99% are just an absolute hulking bag of cash.
The battle in the US is between the mid-low-middle-class/lower-class and the 1%. Which is just so incredibly effective at diverting attention from where all the actual money is. When you can pull your head out of the swamp of social media and fountains of clickbait/class ragebait, there is this huge elephant sitting in the room with it's finger over it's mouth doing the "shhh, be quiet" motion.
> I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
>Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
Norway produces oil at Saudi Arabia levels per capita:
Since 2007, the European economy is in contraction if you look at physical indicators like "how much stuff do trucks move" or "what area is being built". That correlates directly with the peak of conventional oil and the fact that oil has been harder to get in Europe since 2007.
>The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
The most valuable American companies are not exactly in energy-intensive industries:
Everything depends on energy. Driving a car is a lot cheaper in the US because of abundant energy. That has an impact on the economy (the economy is pretty much trucks moving stuff around).
Is "GFC" the subprimes crisis? Because that one, in 2008, may well be a consequence of the peak of conventional oil. It's not "some peak for Europe", it is THE peak for the world of, well, conventional oil, which means anything that is not the shale oil in North America.
Peak oil means that oil becomes harder to get. That's the definition of the peak: the production increases until the peak, and decreases after. When the economy is directly correlated to oil, it means that a decrease in oil results in the economy slowing down.
> I don't see the peak oil connection there - what is it?
We got an economical crisis right when we reached peak oil production. Again, there is an extremely clear correlation between oil production and the economy.
Since 2007, the US has had access to shale oil and the likes, so they haven't reached their peak yet. Europe, on the other hand, has reached their peak in 2007. And since then, the economy (if you look at physical indicators, not artificial proxies like the GDP) is slowing down. Again an extremely clear correlation.
The world runs on Siemens, Bosch, Rolls Royce, Bayer. Even adversarial countries buy German Marine Diesels for their warships. Europe makes better warships than the US, who has spent the last 40 years twiddling it's thumbs and can no longer make modern frigates apparently, and prefers to spend it's naval efforts on the Tsar's moronic toy boat.
Unilever makes up half of the non-food items in your grocery store. Nestle makes up half the food items.
Novartis played a huge part in the Covid vaccines and also is just a giant medicine company in general. Novo Nordisk should be familiar to you.
ThyssenKrupp. It's twice the size of US Steel, which recently had to be sold to a US subsidiary of Nippon Steel because they sucked ass at keeping up with the times.
Britain makes better gas turbines than China and Russia for example. Europe reliably produces top tier weapons systems and infrastructure, competitive with American, often surpassing American systems currently. Thales, BAE, Airbus, Saab, Rheinmetal. The US Abrams tank uses a clone of a German gun. The Bradley is a BAE design. The US has always loved using European produced and designed large guns, such as from Oerlikon or Bofors, because they are always world class. Most of their military industry is.
Michelin tyres is a french company.
A lot of these names survived WW2. Thinking Europe doesn't know how to build big stuff, important stuff, etc, they seem to do a better job than the US at maintaining essential industry talent and continuation of industry. By value and jobs, the automotive industry facing competition will struggle, but Europe survived the rise of Japanese automakers far far better than US automakers did, primarily because they didn't just sit back and twiddle their thumbs for decades as the rest of the world advanced. Well, okay, Britain automakers struggled, but that's a good thing.
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