This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
Anything other then capitalism with slightly more regulation is just going from the US to Germany. Great, but they have software updates on cars too.
If you want to change anything more fundamental, you are going to have to do a planned economy.
At best you can say, maybe could be slightly better Germany by having a better political process or something. But even then, software updates in your car are going to be a reality because it solves are problem for manufactures, saves consumers lots of time in many cases and generally the positives outway the negatives.
I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
At best we can argue for some better practice about OTA Updates in regards to security and functionality. Maybe forcing manufactures to have a 'security only' feed an a 'feature feed'.
> I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.
More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.
And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.
The Party doesn't care about the Proles, only the members of the Outer Party.
I think that it's rather funny that people like to appeal to 1984 as if the only point of Mr. Orwell was that surveillance is bad, missing the entire point about stuff like the control of the language or the idea that the only self-justification of the (Inner) Party is power for the sake of power (see also: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism).
I'd even go as far as to say that if "telescreens are horrible" is the only thing that someone takes away from 1984, they've frankly missed the point.
You most likely can.[0] Of course, banks don't tend to advertise these kinds of authentication devices, probably because people tend to find apps easier, but you absolutely should be able to get one from your bank. It's very much not a Danske Bank specific technology, and it's explicitly there to allow for accessibility for those people without "suitable" phones, e.g. old people.
It's certainly not as convenient to use the online bank with a fob like this vis-à-vis a banking app, and we should absolutely push for banks to not be reliant on Google and Apple for their apps, but it is possible to use the services without being reliant on Google or Apple.
> my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website solution, but still.
Now admittedly I don't know how this stuff is over there in Denmark, but here in Finland we have access to the digital healthcare services via a website, both for the national patient database and the healthcare region access. Again, not as convenient as the respective apps -- although the app for the national patient database, OmaKanta, is very much in beta stages still, and it's way more convenient to use the website even on the phone -- but it's possible. I would be very surprised if that wasn't also possible over in Denmark.
And authentication can happen via couple means that aren't reliant on the smartphone duopoly, with authentication doable with online banking -- which as established, doesn't even need a phone -- and via a "phone authentication" which IIRC only needs support insofar as it's supported by the SIM card, and then of course authentication can be done with the national ID card and a smartcard reader.
And again, the point isn't that this kind of de-Googling or de-Appleing isn't difficult or inconvenient, or that we shouldn't improve the situation, but that it's absolutely possible to get away without using these vendors. And that we should make sure that these kinds of alternatives remain possible to use.
> Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
Well that's the big question. Do they? Like, why was a 15% tariff imposed to products from here in the EU? And why was Trump toying with the idea of imposing extra tariffs on my homeland of Finland alongside Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands for sending troops onto Greenland -- after having insulted the whole lot of us -- and of course also to France for daring to not join Trump's little "Board of Peace".
Even if there were massive tariffs towards the US, these are clearly politically motivated economic attacks, not motivated by economics. And that's not a thing an ally would do, regardless.
> So in your opinion, the solution is that individual national serenity should be abolished and the EU should have the liberty, nay, the authority to fleece its highest payers into the system, like France and Germany, and then redistribute their money to whoever and whatever it sees fit, for the "greater good" of the union, with no accountability or obligation to provide them equal benefits in return?
There indeed won't be equal benefits, but instead France, Germany etc are going to benefit a lot more in this kind of situation than without the integration. We've already seen the massive benefits of the single market integration for example for the German economy and industry. It'd be strange to think that further erosion of barriers and better integration wouldn't bring further benefits to the economies involved.
> How is this not communist tyranny with extra steps?
Um, by the fact that the EU wouldn't be taking over the means of production when it'd be integrating? Like come on, this is just silly, to call a block dedicated to free market principles and social capitalism "communist tyranny".
I swear, this kind of economic illiteracy is going to be the end of us all.
> How do you expect those people footing most of the bill to give up their status quo and voluntarily sign up for something like this? Oh wait, I remember, that's why they're pushing chat control and digital-ID on us.
The EU isn't pushing for the Chat Control and whatever, it's only certain member countries like Denmark doing that. They should absolutely be reprimanded for that, but nevertheless the difference is important.
Also, the people "footing most of the bill" would also be benefiting massively, for example by making sure that we would no longer have a situation like the Greek debt crisis messing everything up for the entire currency block.
I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever actually heard someone give a reason why the US having open borders would be a bad thing. You are a country of immigrants, and your greatness was built upon that foundation.
Yet now it's getting undone for seemingly no reason. But I hope that there would actually be one, so please enlighten me and the other commenters.
> You are a country of immigrants, and your greatness was built upon that foundation.
This makes a great talking point, but those immigrants eventually assimilated into the culture, and also importantly, they were specifically allowed to come because the US needed more people in order to power its economy. The Chinese came to build the railroad, the Irish and Italians and Germans came over and worked in factories and as police and many other industries. This was badly needed 100 years ago.
Today most illegal immigrants are uneducated and are either working in the unofficial economy or in service-sector jobs, which depresses wages for everyone with low education. We don't need every restaurant to have an unending stream of desperately poor would-be busboys and dishwashers, or for Uber to have a stream of poor drivers. Or for rich people to have an ample supply of housekeepers paid in cash. All that does is keep wages in the toilet for working people.
But about open borders, why are so many Latin American countries such bad places to live that so many of their people want to come to the US? Open borders just means anyone can walk right in and bring all of their problems with them, not to mention their drug and human trafficking operations and the criminal gangs that operate them. We already have enough of that as it is.
No Western country can stay civilized with open borders. Anyone with half a brain can see how it is going in the UK and France, where they are only a bit more "open borders" than the US has been. Thankfully for Americans, Latin-American culture is more compatible with Western culture than Islamic culture is.
But why though? Why shouldn't they be restricted to only using the tools they're legally entitled to? And why shouldn't they be held in account when they act like the SA just because they're "enforcing immigration law"?
i suppose with this idea, they only homin in on illegals that use smartphones who willingly offer their realtime location to their app providers and is already sold, ICE could just buy it off them like others. they doin nothing illegal while illegals are illegally in the country bro.
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
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