Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies. Every feature, every website, every innovation that doesn’t launch in the EU further plunges the bloc into technological irrelevance.
It also often impacts more than the EU, we still have cookie banners on websites globally because EU came up with a good-intentions idea when 3rd party tracking ad cookies were a major privacy concern. But like a lot of regulations they stick after the world changes/adapts. Now 3rd party cookies are officially dying out at the browser level and browser fingerprinting has long ago eliminated any privacy gain of cookie banners (unless you care about some first party cookie on a site that can already track you across pages server side, or use URL identifiers and other JS/AJAX). Yet annoying non-standardized, sometimes mandatory, modals before you can read a news article or blog post persist for non EU internet users...
This is definitely a bit off-topic compared to the article, but it's worth noting that those modals are there to obtain consent to store and use your personal data, and aren't specifically related to cookies (anymore), but the GDPR. If the news website didn't store personally identifying information about you (anywhere! not just in cookies), it wouldn't have to obtain consent, and wouldn't need any modals.
I think the most annoying part of the regulation has been its lack of enforcement, because it has led to a weird sort of complacency where there's no clear knowledge of what is and isn't required, and then websites half-ass the banner (for example, they should be making it as easy to click Reject as it is to click Accept, not sending you down a dark pattern of checkboxes and stuff), or throw up a banner just to say they have one, even if they don't need it (I've seen that!).
So we get the worst of both worlds: bad modals that don't even do what they're supposed to, and no enforcement to correct any of it.
The European Union official website has a cookie banner (https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en), does that mean it is spying on me ? Should I be worried ? Or is the definition of "tracking cookies" so wide that even extremely innocuous websites still have to display that banner because the law is stupid ?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor)
I would much prefer that to living in a state where Apple holds the power to simply kill any law or regulation they dislike by threatening not to launch their products in the EU.
EU productivity is already lagging its peers. Being locked out of having the most cutting edge technologies will further plunge the block into a productivity decay. Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards. This is not an outcome Europe can afford, especially considering its aging workforce.
There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
Productivity is not a goal in itself. It is a means to a healthy and happy populace. Europe doesn’t have record breaking GDP but features many of the happiest people in the world. Different values result in different measures of success, I guess
Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.
All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.
You're conflating productivity and wealth, and wealth and happiness. These are, you'll forgive me for saying - very American fallacies. The productivity of a country says little to nothing about it's levels of relative and absolute poverty, social inequality, and capacity for social reproduction. Compare say Berlin - an historically 'depressed' city with a smaller economy than most German cities, with any first tier US cities. Free public kitas (similar to kindergarten), decent holiday leave, a significant amount of paid maternity / paternity leave, a large number of parks, excellent public transport, subsidised health care and (until very recently) affordable housing, make raising a family on a moderate wage possible. The overall potential for happiness and observable comfort and stress levels of the population are measurably different from a comparably sized American city where raising a family or living a normal adult life are compromised for a large percentage of the population by the absence of all or most of these things.
> Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
I'd argue the reverse - any society that privileges productivity over social reproduction and liveable cities will never be able to tame violent crime, achieve real social mobility or provide a safe and enriching environment for a majority of its citizenry.
It’s real easy to say this right now, because the EU has only lagged its peers in productivity for only the last decade —- thus the compounding effects of lagging productivity are not yet evident. However several more decades of lagging productivity will eventually result in European living standards being several decades behind their peers.
If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.
Genuinely, look at the US in the same time period. The quality of life for most people across a a range of measures is enormously worse. Hours worked, health outcomes, housing security etc. Productivity - like GDP, is enormously more relevant to capitalist investment classes than normal people. A teacher, working in a US city any time between say 1900 and 1980 could save and buy a house, get married, have children - likely on a single salary. Towards the latter half of that period, they could also afford a car, pay for their children's university education, take annual holidays etc. Is that true today? Is it true in most cities of a nurse, a factory worker, a service economy worker? You're confusing the metric with the outcome. The metric is designed to measure only what is relevant to the most wealth, privileged people in society.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Just patently untrue. The more productive you are the more work your boss will send your way, while walking away with fatter margins. If he can. Which is where EU regulation comes in.
Europe’s rules govern the balance between capital owners and labor. It’s far from perfect but it has resulted in fairly stable and happy societies. (At least apart from certain external factors)
Now there is of course nothing wrong with productivity. It is, as you say, very good in many ways. But you cannot look only at a society’s productivity metrics to judge success-and my by success I mean happiness, because that is my goal. Look at happiness in the US vs Europe for example. I know where I’d rather live.
> Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Due to the demands for constant economic growth increased productivity does not actually result in more free time, just more economic output.
The average human throughout human has existed at subsistence level. That means that nearly all of their time was spent producing/collecting the food to feed themselves.
The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.
If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In a profit-driven business, the more productive the workers are, the more work you can throw at them. Free time doesn't enter into the equation unless business owners need to manage a compliance issue regarding labor regulations.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy
Right, there are so many countries in the world where increased productivity led to 4-day work week. In fact, I could count these countries on the fingers of one hand.
I don't suppose you've heard of the Paul Krugman quote? "Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything." Without productivity improvements you are in peril of replaying the ant and the grasshopper as the grasshopper.
> Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards
We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
> There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
> We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism
To each their own I guess. Every human-centric development in tech over the past decade which puts people before the interests of corporations seems to have been pushed by the EU. I applaud it all. And it’s making the whole world a more private, less exploited place
Except the only ones building products and services actually used every day by humans are corporations - not “the EU”. Hardware, software, stuff I use for fun, work and live, comes from corporations of all sizes - not politicians.
Yes, europe suffered a hard decade once denied access to the technological utopia that some of the most mathematical minds in all of the san fransisco bay area had created, gpt 4 voice mode WHEN you push SIRI BUTTON technology.
I think the EU’s regulations are boneheaded, but I appreciate that there are multiple ways we’re seeing societies deal with the ambiguities of technology, and we can see how it plays out. Different strokes.
This take seems a bit overwrought to me, given that the AI technologies that Apple is launching look more like fun toys that are integrated into the OS.
Maybe less integration will turn out better. Do we need native apps? You can use a website and then cut and paste.
> Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies
Agreed, and; hooray!
Rather than plunging us "into technological irrelevance", it saves us from nonsense nobody asked for, mostly existing to sell more hardware that nobody needs.
Europeans will continue to buy the hardware, except rather than being able to afford the Apple devices they’ll buy some very low quality knockoffs from Shein.
