The Commission argued that the American lobbyist was the "best candidate" for the job. That a group of 27 countries with one of the world's most sophisticated antitrust arsenals is unable to provide talent to rival the skills of Scott Morton is surprising, to say the least.
If the EU Commission proposed the appointment, then it's a safe bet the commission itself is captured/corrupt. Very corrupt, given how outrageous appointing a non-EU-citizen to a high-ranking EU political position is.
It has been for quite some time (at least it was already dragging this reputation for the EU constitution referendum in 2005).
To the point that the schematic vision for EU organization is the EU parliament expected to represent EU citizens vs. the EU commission expected to defend private interests.
And Ursula von der Leyen has a horrendous track record when it comes to doing anything remotely positive. But having Margrethe Vestager defend this appointment was more of a letdown.
> The draft legislation defines misinformation as material that is unintentionally “false, misleading or deceptive” and is “reasonably likely to cause serious harm”
The usual trick of "false and harmful" lets whoever decides what is "harm" tilt the scales to their benefit. Inevitably, falsehoods that help their politics will be seen as less harmful than falsehoods that harm it. That's before it gets applied to statements of opinion, like "policy X will help/hurt our country".
That's because official translations follow the rule of “Readers in English should be able to enjoy the story without thinking about it being a translation,” - an impossible standard.
Think about what it requires - to cut out or replace any signs of the culture it came from, that would cause any friction with the target culture. To trick the reader into thinking the world is one big homogeneous mush, where works coming from the other side of the globe don't contain anything that would so much as confuse them. Nothing that would require a translator's note or explanation.
It's not translation, it's butchery. It's making a sausage come out on one end, no matter what parts come in at the other.
Yeah I understand the constraints. I just wish there was an official version that was targeted for people like me instead of scanlators getting lawyered into submission and we end up with less.
In Yugoslavia, a family with a single modest income (relative to Yugoslavian incomes) could afford a house with a garden, a cheap car, and to support two children, including college. That was about 60 years ago.
Yugoslavia was a communist country, same as Poland where I'm from, if a little richer. Technically you could afford a home and a car in communist Poland easily, too. Prices and salaries were set by the state. The problem was that waiting list for actually buying the car/home you could theoretically afford was 20 years :)
If you waited for your car (or had contacts that let you skip the wait) and bought it - you could then immediately sell it for 5 times the original price on the black market :) But almost nobody did - because money had little use.
> Unemployment was a chronic problem for Yugoslavia.[20] The unemployment rates were among the highest in Europe during its existence, while the education level of the work force increased steadily.[20] The unemployment rate reached 7% in the early 1960s and continued to grow, doubling by the mid 1970s. There were extreme regional differences in unemployment, with the Slovenian rate never exceeding 5%, while Macedonia and Kosovo constantly had rates over 20%.[21] There was also a notable element of gender discrimination in the unemployment rate. When forced to cut workforce, enterprises usually fired women first,[22] expecting that women can be supported by their male family members.[23] Some enterprises also requested that candidates for a job needed to have their military service completed, which excluded women.[24] Female participation rates were lower than in other socialist countries and closer to traditionalist societies of Southern Europe.[22]
If a country turns into a civil war clusterfuck the moment the state control loosens up slightly - there must have been something seriously wrong with it.
> Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling.
At issue is compensation. The studios don't want to share the income they gain from your "impact". They want all the benefits of this new technology to accrue to themselves. Reminds me of self-driving cars coming with EULAs that forbid commercial/taxi use of self-driving.
I also have no problem owning a self driving Tesla with the provision that fully autonomous commercial use shares revenue.
Just like studios paying gfx artists to incorporate my visage, the Tesla engineers are doing all the work. I literally do nothing in both scenarios. Why would I be entitled to compensation?
I imagine that the reason car companies don’t want taxi or Uber to use self driving mode is because of liability reasons, not because they want a share of taxi companies profits. Taxi/uber drivers still have to pay for fuel/maintenance costs, and currently most self driving cars still require a driver in the seat (except for companies like Waymo and Cruise, that operate their own fleet).
So even if taxi companies were allowed to use self-driving mode in a car like a Tesla, they’d still need to pay a person to be in the drivers seat.
No, that analogy is flawed. Programming now is more like the studio recording a scene then being able to edit it however they want.
Imagine that you sat down and wrote some code to guide a wheelchair around bumps for one day, then your employer said “thanks, we’re done with you” and re-used your code to guide an autonomous killer drone. You might argue that’s technically possible now, but most developers would go out of their way to avoid it.
Fair point - my hasty response was over the top. I was thinking of someone whose likeness had been scanned being 'made to appear' as something like an SS soldier in a WW2 movie.
Thinking about it a bit more, it's not just that your code can be re-used in ways you haven't anticipated, but that you'll never get to code again - in that one day, all the code you could potentially write had been expressed, and there was no need to ever hire you personally again to code anything.
Always the same trick - bad actions earn you guilt and responsibility, that can spread to anyone associated with you, to the whole society. But good actions earn you zero benefit, and only a very small group of individuals that are the most directly involved get credit, not the society that enabled their work.
"What do you have to be proud of, you didn't do that" vs. "You indirectly benefit from those things and are thus responsible"
So no, the US won't get any credit for their leading role in vaccines, antibiotics, MRI, the green revolution, etc.. But yes, it will be held responsible for carbon emissions.
This sounds like they sold something they never owned - i.e. "the right to sell without paying you royalty". Reminds me of the recent case where Disney tried to argue that in an acquisition, they bought only the rights, but not the obligations (royalty payments) that went with them [1]. Basically, writers were promised X% in royalty payments, but Disney argued they didn't buy that part of the contract, only the part where they now owned the works.
This is not something that should require, in any remotely sane legal system, an explicit contractual clause to prevent.
The larger context is that what they bought was my entire business, along with all rights to the intellectual property. What I got was a sale price and defined ongoing royalties for the product I formed the company to create.
They did sell something they owned. I neglected to attach a method by which I'd get compensated for them selling that particular thing.
In the mindset of cutthroat business, they legitimately won. They 100% adhered to the terms of the sale, and it's not their fault that I left a loophole they could leverage.
My attorney did say that if I wanted to, a case could be made for a lawsuit -- but it would have been expensive and wouldn't have had high odds of success. I just wanted to move on.
This whole event was my first real business success, and the mistakes I made were legion. It taught me quite a lot -- including that I won't do business with anyone that I am nervous about doing business with. Contracts can only protect you so much.
Also, I feel the need to repeat... I did pretty well from this deal. I was angry when this happened, but with the passage of time, I see that even with this event, I came out of the deal better than I went into it. So I hesitate to even call it a "regret". It's more of a "learning experience".
> A couple of years ago some of the leading media companies in our country (Norway) started consolidating "power" by acquiring small local newspapers all over the country.
This sounds like it should be a pretty big story. "Extremely dangerous to our democracy." On the other hand, it also sounds like it wouldn't be.
If the EU Commission proposed the appointment, then it's a safe bet the commission itself is captured/corrupt. Very corrupt, given how outrageous appointing a non-EU-citizen to a high-ranking EU political position is.