ironsoap
Iphone-to-iphone using iMessage and are blue. Iphone-to-SMS are green. Grey in an inbound message irrespective of source.
"The European Commission on Thursday unveiled its annual strategic foresight report, setting out its focus for the coming years.
The 21-page document illustrates the EU’s take on where the world is going. It's also a rough guide to understand the ideology of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who still hasn’t indicated whether she intends to continue in her role for another five years.
Spoiler alert: There are no major surprises. The report includes many of Brussels’ favorite words: “open strategic autonomy,” “resilience,” “sustainability,” and “geoeconomics.” The overarching idea is that the EU needs to beef up its autonomy as the golden age of globalization comes to an end. But in so doing, it must push forward its green transition at the cost of €620 billion per year and clamp down on domestic inequality.
POLITICO unpacks the details and answers critical questions about the EU's big-picture exercise.
- The return of geopolitics The world is ever more divided between the West and China — and Europe cannot be a bystander. “The time where liberal democracy was the model of obvious choice is over,” said Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič in a press conference on Thursday when the report was unveiled.
The Commission foresees a “battle of offers” as Europe and the U.S. jostle with Beijing to lure developing nations over to their side. The key takeaway is that the old model of globalization — built on free trade and global supply chains — is gone. Instead, we’re entering a new era of “geoeconomics.” In a nutshell, that means Europe must cut back its strategic dependencies on other countries and instead tap its domestic resources and boost production on the Continent.
- A sustainable economic model The EU needs to adapt its capitalist model to a new age where net zero and sustainability are the overarching priorities. Though the Commission’s proposals might freak out hardcore neoliberals, they do reflect a new post-COVID economic consensus where the state plays a larger role. “It [the EU] should also consider how to reduce the tax burden on labour and to shift it to other tax bases less detrimental to growth, also to address inequality in a context of population ageing,” reads the report.
One of the most eye-catching ideas is to consider in GDP estimates noneconomic factors such as life expectancy. Šefčovič indicated that with these new rules, the size of the EU’s economy would exceed that of the U.S., China and India (separately, not combined).
- Boosting investment The European Investment Bank (EIB) must scale up its role and cough up the lion's share of the €620 billion needed to finance the Green Deal and REPowerEU each year. “[It] should provide stronger support to strategic investments relevant to the two [digital and green] transitions such as raw materials, green tech or biotechnology, especially for cutting-edge projects,” reads the report.
The document is thin on details — but senior officials told Playbook that one way to achieve this would be to review the EIB’s mandate and expand its role.
-
A more skilled workforce The EU’s workforce is more educated than ever — but new industries are struggling to fill vacancies. Problems include a mismatch in skills, rising numbers of low-quality jobs, and too few women studying STEM subjects.
-
Too much inequality Life is getting tougher for lower-income workers, who are bearing the brunt of climate change while paying more for food, and other goods and services. To make matters worse, inequality among EU countries is increasing, not to mention the wealth gap between young and old.
Record levels of wealth concentration are stifling social mobility and fueling political polarization. The answer? More redistribution, according to the report.
- Crisis of democracy It is pretty rare for EU officials to analyze political headwinds — but that’s exactly what they do in the final section of the report. The argument is not exactly original: Polarization and disinformation are pushing EU voters towards populist parties. And for that, there is no easy solution.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/4/23783822/free-speech-ruling-missouri-v-biden-dhs-fbi-cisa
A US federal judge ruled that a slew of Biden administration officials are prohibited from contacting social media companies about moderating posts protected by the First Amendment.
Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote in a 155-page memorandum ruling that he believes the plaintiffs are likely to prove that federal government officials are targeting and suppressing “millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”
Doughty:
The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country.
As the Washington Post reports, Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri suing President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, claim that “starting in 2017 — four years before Biden was president — officials within the government began laying the groundwork for a ‘systemic and systematic campaign’ to control speech on social media.”
The New York Times cites Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, responding to the ruling saying, “It can’t be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies... If that’s what the court is saying here, it’s a pretty radical proposition that isn’t supported by the case law.”
The NYT also has a statement from an unnamed White House official saying, “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present,” and notes that the Justice Department is reviewing the ruling while evaluating its next steps.
The injunction bars people like DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leader Jen Easterly, and FBI Foreign Influence Task Force leader Laura Dehmlow, as well as employees of those agencies and several others, from contacting, working with, or asking social media companies about posts protected by the First Amendment.
Exceptions listed include:
Posts about criminal activity or criminal conspiracies National security threats Threats to election security Permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern Public safety threats Efforts to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity Those named in the suit are also barred from working with academic groups that focus on social media, like the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory.
NYPost so I'm going to start with a grain of salt and wait for more sourcing to come out.
With that said, I love the way you put that. I could not agree more.
Agree with the comments about discussion as well as not changing other people, but as you describe it as a dopamine hit, that signals addictive behavior to me.
I would suggest slowly introducing information regarding how addiction and dopamine works in humans. Allow him to learn more about it, perhaps as a reciprocal gift of books, shows, etc.
Ultimately he'll need to wean and change his own brain chemistry, and that is not easy.
(If I get time I'll dig up a few articles on it.)
Now that's a result the Reddit board can act on, although it's likely to late even if they did.
https://lemmy.ml/post/1450855 sparked multiple memes, and obviously the expectation of more wonderful weirdness.
A transcript for those who prefer to read. (using flixier so forgive the lack of speaker indication and the few corrections I made.)
Transcription:
[redd]it is very unhappy that people are talking to us.
They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism.
That's straight up what they're doing.
I know this is what they're doing because we have a statement because they told us.
They told us Tim Rami, who runs coms at Reddit. This is the blanket statement will no longer comment on hearsay.
Unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge will be in touch as corrections are needed.
Oh, my God.
I've been playing this game a long time.
We'll wait for you to make a mistake.
So then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book and we are just not gonna fall for it.
So we're just gonna print this statement in every story from here on out, like that's the way it's gonna go.
If they want us to get it right they can... They can tell us what is actually happening, but I will come back to we're gonna take the people on the ground.
We're gonna take the users.
We're gonna take the moderators.
We're gonna take the employees every time.
And if you think they're wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they're wrong.
But we're not gonna stop because you've you're running like a 1920 press playbook.
Like whatever.
Like I'm we're just gonna burn you every time and that it's that attitude.
It's this aggressive posture where people are worried and they're coming to reporters and saying,
Here are our worries.
Here's the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened.
And Reddit's response is Shut up.
That's what breaks your community.
While I understand the sentiment, I think you might want to describe why you think Bing is better then Google in 2023. Is your frame quality of results, privacy, usability, etc?