Came here just to write the same. I've squandered to find an explanation because I absolutely enjoy the subject. Perhaps it's because I'm not a native speaker and generally have non-native speakers around so I don't understand some of the metaphors, perhaps it's because I'm just not used to reading these kinds of long sentences anymore, or perhaps it's just not my kind of beer. I really don't know.
I think we work at the same little company. Tbh, we are already kind of at 5., some divisions are getting shut down and people have n months to find a new team. It's a game of musical chairs.
While others find him inconsiderate, I appreciate that Zuckerberg is at least not all corpspeak. Too bat he bet on the losing horse with the Metaverse and now has to stay in until either it succeeds or he gets sacked.
I think this depends on whether or not you agree on the premise:
less smoking ads -> less smoking
Assuming you accept this premise, this legislation leads to a reduction in smoking which leads to a reduction in second-hand smoke. It follows that this legislation prevents the harm of other third-parties.
Maybe, and so what? Let other people do what they want, as long as it doesn't affect you.
Unless of course you're the standard do-gooder who can't bear to see others do things you have decided is wrong for them. If that's the way your brain is wired, there nothing left to say.
>less people smoking -> less harm to bystanders is true (which it obviously is).
It don't think it's obvious at all.
A smoker polluting other people with their second hand smoke is a smoker infringing on other people's freedom and right not to be poisoned.
And this is one rare area where government are actually supposed to be useful: defending your freedom not to be subjected to other people's stupidity.
That can perfectly happen without preventing people to poison themselves should they decide to.
You're not responding on-topic. People can still smoke, their "freedom to poison themselves" is fully intact. Ironically, stopping advertisements for cigarettes would give the consumer more freedom of choice free from corporate influence.
Less people smoking means less second-hand smoke. Also just fyi smoke residue clings to interiors so when things get sold the new owner inherits a gross smell and some carcinogenic exposure :)
It's not just people blowing smoke in your face outdoors
It seems all but impossible to fully "ban" second hand smoke:
* how do you prove it?
* how do you measure the amount in case you've proven it?
It seems such a minor individual offense that courts would hardly accept cases.
So we probably have to rely on smoker's good will to not smoke near others instead of on the law.
Every population consists of nice people and inconsiderate people, with something like a normal distribution of niceness.
Assuming that smokers follow this distribution, there will always be inconsiderate smokers which don't care and stand in front of doors blowing clouds of tar into other people's faces. The amount of such people will be governed by the rate of smokers.
Hence, the best way to reduce second hand smoke is to reduce the count of smokers. Note that this even applies if we assume that smokers are much more considerate than the regular population.
Very happy to see this pass. It's idiotic that kids, while going to school, can be exposed to multiple tobacco ads that make tobacco appear as "cool" and "hip" and "desirable". These ads obviously work or else no company would do them.
The arguments used by the "No" lobby are:
* slippery slope of meat and alcohol being banned in advertizing; when meat is not even a drug (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope).
* free market disruption; when smoking is obviously a harmful substance and this law applies to all of the competing tobacco companies.
* little events like festivals, bars, and shops get less money; this is probably true but festivals can simply raise their prices a bit. For small owner-led shops, yes, less tobacco consumption => less sales and tobacco is a high-margin product.
It's a great example of direct democracy sometimes leading to better political decisions. It's easier for big tobacco to buy off just the legislators (whom actually made an extremely toned down counterproposal) than all of the public.
Additionally for the given example: orange juice contains as much sugar as redbull, a cup of coffee as much (or even more, depending on the type) caffeine and the rest (Taurin, etc...) probably has no effect on the body at all.
No one said that, but you don't have pictures of destroyed livers on wine-bottles, of a rotten feet on sweets, strong alcohol is getting cheaper and cheaper, a bottle of vodka was 25sFr around 2000, now you can get it for 7-8sFr..but no one talks about that.
>a cup of coffee as much (or even more, depending on the type) caffeine
I quote yourself:
>In general, two wrongs don't make a right.
>the rest (Taurin, etc...) probably has no effect on the body at all
When done right, Bauhaus can look pretty good. However, living in Germany, I've come to mostly dislike it. The 70's style Bauhaus buildings are everywhere here, they are ugly, clumpy, and break with the medieval/Jugendstil facades in the city centers. It does not help that thet often were built with cheap materials and are hard to maintain bacaude of that. Unfortunately, they often now are under Monument protection so also can' be demolished.
We don't really have Bauhaus influenced buildings in Germany there are only like 4 buildings still standing besides the campus in Dessau. Most of the architects went to Israel and build Tel Aviv which is the city with the most influence from Bauhaus architecture. The brutalist buildings in the 60s and 70s in Germany are not Bauhaus.
Thanks for this reply! I did not know this fact and the new info made me go down the rabbit hole of Brutalism vs Bauhaus. Very much appreciated. Comments like this make me love HN!
Constructivism shares a lot with Bauhaus, but for some reason constructivist buildinga usually look OK and in some sense are the last generation of modern (but not post-modern) architecture
It's an interesting case of the limits of a design language, where it works great for furniture and scales horribly to buildings. Brutalism is a different language, there are valid criticisms of both Bauhaus and modernism in general that are not merely nostalgic or fascist, unless one thinks someone like Christopher Alexander is some kind of crypto-nazi, (and oddly by extension, Prince Charles but royals are probably not a good example).
The minimalist and arguably crude geometry of Bauhaus looks a lot like a revolt and a reaction against nature and divinity, which makes sense when Europe had recently come out of a romantic and nostalgic period of revivals and suffocating sentimentality. Personally, I think there are deeper and more meaningful criticisms of modernism(s) than what often reduces to mere anti-cosmopolitanism. To me, the intrinsic humanism in Bauhaus buildings begins with a definition of human that is in opposition to wildness, nature, and is explicitly secular, if not atheistic, which is understandable given what was going on at the time, but Bauhaus is one of those things where what you do in opposition isn't what you do as the incumbent. Bauhaus and modernisms are a reaction and a critique, instead of say, an expression of awe, humility, generosity, or other higher virtues. When I read about this stuff back in the 90s, my impression was modernism and Bauhaus were not so much cosmopolitan novelties, but assertions of humanity, both in opposition to nature but also to european clericalism, which has some pretty deep psycho-spiritual stuff wrapped up in it, so I can see why people who hear criticisms of Bauhaus start picking around the edges to see if they can unravel underlying anti-semitic urges. The need to assert humanity begins with a presumption of disadvantage, which in many cases was true and necessary, but also not. (An irony being that it was Italian fascism and its similar ultra modern futurist design that the german fascist/national-socialists adopted for their propaganda.)
The reason I like Bauhaus is because I think it encodes a valiance, resiliance, humility, humanism, generosity, accessability, and a peculiar universality of being not-of its environment, which is arguably a beautiful echo of the Jewish experience in Europe. Criticism of Bauhaus and modernisms are difficult to fully isolate and extricate from that experience, but that shouldn't be a criteria for talking about it, and it's also a proxy for discourse about where western history comes from. In the background, I'm working on something now about how the world owes our appreciation of J.S. Bach as a pillar of the western cannon to Felix Mendelssohn's revival of his work as the effect of his conversion from judaism to christianity, likely as a means to assimilate, but it was his sadness and self denial from being born an outsider that gave the world one of the most beautiful pillars of our civilization in the form of the works of Bach. Just as we can't talk about about Bauhaus without acknowledging the experience of Jews in Europe, our notions of a western "white" "civilized" "us," stand on pillars made explicitly by people who identified as another "us," and "not-us," which I think is proof we are not "us" without "them." By definition, they were us, and necessarily, we are them. Sure, nice furniture and ugly buildings, but that's not the point. Architecture is a rich discourse about meaning and experience, and anyway, it's just a pleasure to think about.
Microsoft even removed the default web browser setting from Windows 11. Instead of a single setting for the default web browser, customers must set individual “link associations” for the http:// and https:// protocols; as well as file associations for the .html file type.
This is just horrible. They are so desperate to get back market share that they resort to "purposely bad ux in new versions" tactics. What is their goal? Get more users on Bing? Get more tracking data via Edge?
> Beat their record fine from the EU? None of the others seems like a plausible result.
The reason they dare to try is because they know they might even get away with it.
I'm definitly not condoning it but the situation is very different from when they got fined. At the time Microsoft was fined smartphones weren't a thing. One might argue that this competes with Microsoft desktops marketshare. Also in notebook sales Chromebooks have on average (roughly) about a 20% market share [1]. On top of that Microsofts browser market share was 90+ % at the time of the fine, now it's almost non existant.
If it were up to me they would be fined into oblivion for this anti-competitive behavior but I think they might actually get away with it.
I don't know, Apple are being investigated for anticompetitive behaviour in the App Store[1], while iOS market share is below 30% across Europe ( I can't find the numbers for the EU only), and no in no EU country is iOS at more than 35% [2]. (In both cases, market share in smartphones, not general computing devices). You don't need to be a (quasi) monopolist to be anticompetitive, and I'm glad regulators know this.
You know the problem. Some VP somewhere has his bonus and review structured around the growth of Edge. Like a dark pattern, but for employees, not customers.
As an IT professional, I don't like it at all. The plethora of laws makes it much harder to do business in the EU: If you want to process any kind of data you are immediately forced to spend a lot of money on security certifications. This increased cost and velocity reduces the competitiveness of EU based companies which need to capture their home-market first. This is one of the potential factors why the EU loses out to other markets in startup-friendliness.
Do you actually work for a small to medium-sized EU business? Because I do and the amount of money we need to throw at compliance, both in direct costs and dev hours, is immense. And we're not doing ads, user targeting, or any other such "nasty" industry practices. Our product is widely thought of by both our customers and investors, as wholesome! But our product does require customer accounts and data storage because wheeling in a server rack to wherever they are is the last thing they want.
I used to be think GDPR was a good thrust for user privacy but years later what I see is an adorned web already suffering under the weight of its own crap super-adorned with these cookie banners that impact my actual, day to day life of the net.
That's not a failure of the companies doing the tracking, that's a failure of regulation. The EU could have legally enforced the existing Do Not Track flag but instead we get a worse web that has literally shaved off hours (days?) of my life clicking through cookie forms. And no number of uBlock scripts that promise to erase them from the web has been enough to stop them.
So, report these privacy invading companies to your local data protection body, you say! Sir, madam or epithet of your choice, have you tried reporting a breach to the Danish Data Protection Agency? They will do everything in their power to invalidate your claim. That was the last straw for me. Our protectors are indolent or powerless and here we proclaim victory!
All I've seen from these rulings is spinning wheels, wasted labor, money set fire and pain.
Our German clients have screamed and hollered (thanks, Schrems II!) to bifurcate our clouds so that one side is AWS and the other is a German cloud that moves with the glacial pace of the 90s and with that decade's service portfolio. Don't even get me started on the service level difference:
AWS: how can we literally give you everything you need to build your successful business? How about these free recruits who just graduated out of our program that specifically re-trains people from disadvantaged backgrounds to be cloud all-stars? How about regular consulting sessions with our teams to identify how you can save money with us?
German cloud: let's make setting up a managed DB the most horrifically onerous process possible that's unreliable and flaky with your data and then charge you thousands of euros for support fees fixing the things that were our fault to begin with.
Additionally, let's break out out of the HN bubble and assume the role of somebody who is not a tech aficionado. E.g. the C-level exec of small and medium sized producing company in Germany (e.g. automotive).
Now they not only face the burden of having to modernize their often dated tech system but also get the handicap of having a whole new sea of GDPR complexity before them which, if something goes wrong, can be business ending. I've seen this being a preoccupying topic for meetings for years for companies which really should not have to care (producers of automobile parts). It's a significant part of the IT budget going down the drain which could've been spend improving existing processes.
> who is not a tech aficionado. E.g. the C-level exec of small and medium sized producing company in Germany (e.g. automotive). Now they not only face the burden
Let's start with this question: how are they running their business?
> also get the handicap of having a whole new sea of GDPR complexity before them which, if something goes wrong, can be business ending.
1. There's nothing complex about GDPR
2. GDPR is not business ending, as data controllers are expected to help and guid the companies who are found to be in breach of GDPR
> I've seen this being a preoccupying topic for meetings for years for companies which really should not have to care
It means they don't care in the least. GDPR is an amalgamation of the various data protection laws that existed before GDPR. So, these "poor companies who are in meetings for years" didn't care about data protection then.
Then companies were given two years of transition to get in shape and get their act together. Omg, these "poor non-technical companies" are still "in talks for years".
GDPR has been in force since May 25 2008.
So. At least a decade of data protection laws (and German laws have always been quite strict) + 2 years of transition period + 3.5 years of the law being in effect. And it's still " preoccupying topic for meetings for years"?
> It's a significant part of the IT budget going down the drain which could've been spend improving existing processes.
Yes, indeed. If 15 years later they still can't figure out why they shouldn't keep personal data around, they definitely need to improve their processes. And IT has nothing to do with it.
> Do you actually work for a small to medium-sized EU business?
I did. And I do.
> Because I do and the amount of money we need to throw at compliance, both in direct costs and dev hours, is immense.
It's not immense, with emphasis. It's just the cost of doing business.
If you run into having to do compliance or certification, it means that you're doing something that requires you to be, you know, compliant.
For example, financial institutions have to be compliant. And we, as society, really-really want them to be compliant and responsible for what they are doing. Not like Equifax in the US.
> And we're not doing ads, user targeting, or any other such "nasty" industry practices.
It doesn't matter, if you do it or not. The "immense" cost of compliance is just your business deciding to cut corners and then realising that no, you shouldn't cut corners, and then scrambling to fix that when you were most likely caught red-handed.
I worked at a company which was a bit lax with its practices, and then had a run-in with an unexpected audit. Omg, you wouldn't believe, but the cost of compliance with laws was immense as we rushed to meet al requirements before the deadline imposed on us. Had we not been lax, this wouldn't even be a problem.
> I used to be think GDPR was a good thrust for user privacy but years later what I see is an adorned web already suffering under the weight of its own crap super-adorned with these cookie banners that impact my actual, day to day life of the net.
Ah yes. Another person who complains about compliance, and then immediately pretends that the state of the web is the result of a law.
No, the web is the way it is now precisely because these companies flaunt and break the law. All those cookie banner with dark patterns? They are illegal. The only real downside of GDPR is that it's not enforced as rigidly as required, and nowhere on the required scale.
As for compliance with GPDR, it's essentially zero added cost for small companies with greenfield projects. For small-to-medium companies the cost of GDPR compliance is the function of data practices. If it's "immense" for you, this only means that you were already siphoning user data you didn't need and did nothing to protect it. I can't feel sorry for you.
> Our German clients have screamed and hollered (thanks, Schrems II!) to bifurcate our clouds so that one side is AWS and the other is a German cloud that moves with the glacial pace
Once again, you blame your own technical decisions on the law. Of course German customers would want their data in Europe. Why wouldn't they? Data on American servers is basically forfeit, and can be examined, analysed, and seized by the US at any moment. Wow, I can only imagine why German customers would not want that. Whatever might be the case, hm?
> German cloud: let's make setting up
Once again: it was your decision. AWS (and GCP, and Azure) literally provides a service to European customers where they keep data in Europe only, and that is more than enough for most any compliance (I know banks in Europe who use AWS and/or GCP). [1]
So, your poor technical decisions have lead you to suffer increased costs, and you blame that on laws. Keep it up, it's a good way to stay in business.
You don't know my company and you've ascribed practices to my company that we don't practice to create a straw man. Please don't do this.
We're working, willingly and early, with an independent auditor we hired.
As for the German cloud, no AWS Outpost or anything else we (and AWS' legal team) pitched was enough.
> The only real downside of GDPR is that it's not enforced as rigidly as required, and nowhere on the required scale.
Whose actual fault is this? The EU pushed through a ruling without teeth. It's a lose-lose for everyone from business all the way down to the person assaulted by these cookie notices.
> So, your poor technical decisions have lead you to suffer increased costs, and you blame that on laws. Keep it up, it's a good way to stay in business.
This is just rude, please don't.
> If it's "immense" for you, this only means that you were already siphoning user data you didn't need and did nothing to protect it.
Why are you continuing to state things as fact you don't have a clue of? This is completely false.
> You don't know my company and you've ascribed practices to my company that we don't practice to create a straw man.
You've asked if I worked at small-to-medium company in the EU. I told you I did. My experiences are significantly different from yours. This only tells me that there's definitely something wrong you're doing, and blaming it on the law. Since you're not giving any details, it's pure speculation at this point.
> Whose actual fault is this?
I think no one could even predict the scale of the issue. No one could imagine that:
- even well-to-do commercial companies would include literally hundreds of trackers on their web pages
- almost literally everyone would decide to break the law instead of, you know, stopping wholesale data consumption
The ad industry played a nice trick: now everyone believes the EU with its GDPR is the bad guy, and not the motherf@ers who siphon your data to 500 advertisers on every page.
As for the teeth, GDPR can fine you for a significant chunk of your global turnover. So yes, it has teeth.
> Why are you continuing to state things as fact you don't have a clue of?
I would argue that human rights make it easier to do business in the EU.
For example, a government which ensures that you don't go to jail for some bs reason is a government which I would be more trustful of as an enterpreneur.
As a human being who wants his information to be secure, I love it. If companies are going to peddle the personal information of individuals, and that information could potentially harm them if it became public, then getting security certifications is the very LEAST a company can do if they want to do business in that sphere. Everyone everywhere should demand it.
So you're going to keep asking people until you hear what you expect to hear instead of looking at the evidence? Based on your behavior here, it seems like you have already formed your conclusion and are only looking to hear specifically what you want instead of listening to the majority.
Something akin to: "mandatory travelling/flexible work location." Not only for reasons of me having to travel but also for being a pointer to a non-remote friendly and probably outdated work culture.
If it's for a consultancy and is described as "Location: London, UK with some travel" what they mean is potentially "small village anywhere in the UK", if you have a family so you can travel back for weekends or if you're young and single, "Ashgabat, Turkmenistan or other exotic location where we need non-local boots on the ground" because that's what everyone above you was "apparently" prepared to do to get the wages they're on.
