Now would be a good time to have a functional FTC commissioner. Doing a bait and switch like on a product that was sold with a set of features should be illegal. If I buy a car and the sales guy stops by my house the next day to take back the wheels, it would rightfully be seen as ridiculous.
Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi.
The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.
We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)
Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life.
While increases in GDP don't all go to working class Americans, the two are not completely decoupled either. If you look at the small-scale variations in both they match each other pretty closely. I also suspect that it's the working class that would eat any dramatic GDP decrease.
We can at least agree that the working class would be on the receiving end of the worst of the consequences for any flavor of economic downsizing, just like they have been during every other recession, market crash, etc. to date. I would however like to suggest not letting yourself get distracted by the fact that the two lines kinda wiggle similarly. That massive and growing pie slice where the two decoupled is absolutely the larger issue.
You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life (especially talented ones) and why almost no american does it the other way around. (The number is ridiculously low in comparison)
People move east to west across the pond, because they want the life offered by the US economy.
The richest man in the world in 2008 was Warren Buffett with a net worth of 62 billion dollars. Now with 62 billion you are not even in the top 20. So the growth went into wealth inequality.
You see the contradiction between this and your previous post?
Here you say we can't eat/shelter better with GDP increases because they aren't distributed; there you said that [spending on] ability to eat/shelter was what they measured.
There is a huge difference between Mississippi and the UK:
78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females in the UK in 2020 to 2022.
68.6 years for males and 75.2 years for females in Mississippi in 2020 and 67.7 years for makes and 74.3 years for females in Mississippi in 2021. Might go up a bit if you have 2022 numbers, but the difference is huge.
Life expectancy differences in Mississippi vs. the UK is largely due to race. Mississippi is about 36% black, and blacks in the US have a 5+ year shorter life expectancy than whites.
Because if there's no discrepancy, or a smaller one, it seems to suggest that maybe GDP and square-footage-of-your-house is actually not all that important.
To me your comment seems to be implying one of two things:
1) Black people are biologically hardwired to have a shorter life expectancy than white people
2) A shorter life expectancy among black people doesn't count -- it's only life expectancy among white people that matters
Could you clarify further if you meant one of these, or if you meant something else that I was not able to pick up on?
Neither, simply that there appears to be little correlation between GDP per capita and life expectancy between Mississippi and the UK, and the lion's share of the difference is due to lower life expectancies amongst blacks (the reasons for their lower life expectancy being something I didn't get into at all).
The black fraction of the population of UK was never mentioned. If you're going to compare the life span of two places, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bring race up. If you're going to bring it up, you need to justify why its relevant. You can probably find lots of demographic lines along which you can split a population to support this argument or that argument. Some fraction of Mississippi is black, as is some fraction of the UK. And each sub-demographic has some life expectancy. Different places have different population mixes, but those mixes are de-facto representative of those places. If the argument is about non-black life spans, your argument would make sense. But if it's about the average lifespan of the region, and the demographic mix is different, it's non-sensical to filter using different cohorts since that mixture difference is a real difference between the regions.
I don't know anyone who doesn't want more space. And I couldn't imagine raising a family in 800 square feet.
Do we really need a "source" for everything? Would it be meaningful if you saw some survey asking: Would you prefer your primary residence to be smaller, larger or the same size?
I guess you can say all things being equal larger homes are more expensive so there must be some kind of preference for larger homes that indicates value
Do those same people also care about quality of education, availability and utility of public transit, etc? Or is the size of your home the only factor in what makes somewhere livable?
I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me.
I would look at cost + time. For instance, if it costs me an extra $2k per year for a car but it saves me 30 minutes round trip, and my time is worth more than $20 an hour (assume work 200 days per year), then car is better. Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer. I think there's some weird cultish behavior around "public transit" as though it is a good by itself is disconnected to how most people think about this.
So in this case not being able to afford a car or have anywhere to park it is not the win you think it is.
In terms of education, not sure its quantifiable but if you look at money, Mississippi spends considerably more:
In England, secondary school spending per pupil in 2024-25 is projected to be about £7,400 ($9.4k), while primary school spending per pupil is about £6,700 ($8.5k)
In Mississippi its around $12k
Do you have any other data or are you just going entirely off of vibes?
I explicitly care about "public transport". I strongly dislike cars, like trains and bike lanes, mostly commute by bus. I can't imagine living in a place without a good public transport. I strongly prefer cities and places without too many cars everywhere.
>Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer.
I assume you live in a place where cars are the default, or the only, mode of transportation? It's not like this everywhere.
Right, you can like public transport and that's fine. But most people don't care and prefer to have cars. This is especially true if you have a family.
Just two examples:
- food shopping is a lot more expensive if you have to buy local and you're restricted to how much you can carry
- it's kind of rude taking a sick or injured child to the doctor on public transportation
This is obvious if you look at behavior. When people get more money, they buy a car or often multiple cars. When they have a family, people tend to move to suburbs where cars are the primary mode of transportation. Even in cities with good public transportation, like New York, wealthy people still often own cars and use them along with private car service.
People might answer some survey stating they like public transportation but their behavior suggests otherwise. And these surveys are frame against an impossible ideal that does not exist. Look at behavior.
>I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me.
Let me take a guess, you are an American, living in a city without good public transit.
Small homes just plain suck. No room to do anything, stuffy, cramped. GF and I moved, rented a house for a month. 1400 square feet. 700 up, 700 down. Tiny and cramped, and it only had one very small bathroom.
We had to sleep on different floors. Master bedroom was barely larger than the queen bed, and no way 2 people could sleep in there because it would get blazing hot in minutes.
Garage was similarly minuscule. GF had a tiny suv and still couldn't open both doors.
I figure 1000 square feet per adult is just about right.
What are you on about? My wife and I live in a total of 1000 square feet in a Boston triple-decker and get along totally fine. We have a basement for storage and a parking space for our car. Somehow, we're both able to work from home without getting in each other's way, have space to do our own things, and temperature regulation is a non-issue with mini-splits. We even have a shared yard!
Maybe the space wasn't laid out well. I would imagine, with only 700 sq ft per floor, a good portion of that is taken up by the stairs. My condo is a flat in a 100-year-old building, built before the "open concept" plans came into vogue. It means out rooms are separated and lets my wife and I do different things in different parts of the house.
People used to raise families in these old buildings with 1000 square feet. Their third-spaces weren't taken over by profit-seeking companies and their interests took them outside the home. 2000 square feet for 2 people seems utterly ridiculous!
Lol. 1400sqft is cramped in the US? I have a 120m2 house, which would be about 1300sqft, and we have two kids rooms, one master bedroom with its own wardrobe and a bathroom, one shared bathroom, and na american kitchen and living room.
What are you guys even doing? Or maybe the 1400sqft included the garage?
If they hadn't done the math I'd have suspected a typo.
I'm in a place not all that much larger (1800 sqft) and it feels pretty luxuriously large for just me and my partner. Big open kitchen, two living rooms, 2.5 bathrooms, three bedrooms (one used as an office for myself) and a dedicated office for my wife.
sounds like a bad space distribution. I live in a 700 sqft apartment and my bedroom is large enough for a bed (where my girlfriend and I absolutely can both sleep) a small desk, a weight bench, a rowing machine, and some normal bedroom stuff (dressers etc)
Then if houses are larger and density is higher then one can conclude that the UK has more green spaces, non-developed areas whole NJ is fairly built up? Which also conversely has an impact on quality of living.
We've been told for decades that letting our economy turn out like Europe's was something to fear, while they outpaced us in virtually all quality of life measures.
We can no longer claim being the richest country in the world as a source of uniqueness or justification -- handed to us by the gods. I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.
I recently realized that people should understand they have more in common with (and must have solidarity with) the next people down on the socio-economic rung instead of trying to climb the ladder in hopes of joining those on the next rung up.
It's great if you are a wealthy business owner or investor, and you want to push deregulation propaganda, because deregulation would allow you to get even richer.
Mississippi is perhaps a poor example to use, as its wealth is highly concentrated, as well as segregated along racial lines. It houses some very affluent communities and also some with open sewers or no public utilities at all, and a state house entirely unconcerned about reconciling the two because it's been gerrymandered to hell in order to prevent the ethnic group that makes up nearly 40% of its population from having anywhere near commensurate representation.
A significantly better metric to compare would be median hourly wage (ideally, purchasing power adjusted, but that's hard).
The US average is actually behind wealthier European nations there (Ireland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Switzerland, Germany): 20$/h compared to ~20€/h. Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.
So the much stronger US GDP/capita output apparently does very little for the average citizen...
This was honestly surprising to me, I actually expected the US to be comfortably ahead in this (specifically significantly ahead of Germany). France is also much weaker than I expected in this (~17€/h) not including it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super poor (Bulgaria under 5€/hour!), and the top contenders were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did (~30€/h).
Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what I wanted on bls.gov)
> Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.
I doubt it. Germany and especially Switzerland have a quite hight cost of living. Coming from Canada, I get sticker shock every time I go to the US because of how cheap everything is. I had the opposite reaction going to Europe (except for Italy).
It would also be interesting to compare take-home (after tax) pay.
You are 100% right about Switzerland (but its so far ahead that adjustments would not matter too much), for the others its probably barely double digit percentage adjustments.
My personal experience is that German supermarkets are priced extremely competitive (Lidl/Aldi specifically), and Italy felt more expensive by comparison to me (except maybe for local produce and cheese).
Comparing after-tax pay instead would help the US pull ahead for sure, but I feel a bit mixed about that because those taxes pay for stuff like child- and healthcare, which in the US is probably significantly more expensive out-of-pocket than the median EU citizens pays in taxes for the same.
I'm sure the GDP evenly distributes amongst the population right? It's not like the US has massive wealth disparity or anything that could massively affect the implications of a simple per capita GDP comparison.
I have to imagine you cherry-picked maternal death rate (which is anomalously high in the US for reasons that even experts in maternal death cannot explain) in bad faith because the all-cause mortality rate in the US is 1,044 per 100k compared to 1,412 per 100k in Greece - 35% higher[0].
Life expectancy in Mississippi is 10 years shorter than in Greece
>Mississippi ranked dead last in a CDC ranking of all 50 states and the District of Columbia when looking at 2021 data. The magnolia state had a 70.9-year life expectancy rate, slightly lower than West Virginia's 71.
>The current life expectancy for Greece in 2025 is 83.10 years, a 0.18% increase from 2024.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2024 was 82.95 years, a 0.18% increase from 2023.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2023 was 82.80 years, a 0.2% increase from 2022.
The life expectancy for Greece in 2022 was 82.64 years, a 0.2% increase from 2021.
Yes but you didn't mention life expectancy, you chose maternal mortality then generalized that to "because Greece's maternal mortality is lower than Mississippi, Greeks are healthier." That was my point.
In no universe does a few ultra wealthy people in Mississippi make it a better place to live than half of Europe, which is what I was originally responding to.
That's all per capita GDP means.
Not like maternal mortality is only slightly higher in MS, it's drastically worse to the point where you can argue the healthcare standards are closer to that of a developing country.
Can you find a single health metric which would point to people in Mississippi doing better than those in Greece ?
> which is anomalously high in the US for reasons that even experts in maternal death cannot explain
Doesn’t seem like a mystery that a country who is so “pro-life” they’d rather let women die than properly treat miscarriages has a high maternal death rate.
Abortion has nothing to do with it. Abortion laws vary state to state from very restrictive to very permissive, and even states with much more permissive abortion laws than the majority of Europe, maternal mortality remains higher.
Wisconsin's abortion law is from before the Civil War and its maternal mortality is lower than Massachusetts.
Personally I think it has more to do with access to healthcare and the general physical fitness of your average American compared to your average European but I have no data to back that up.
A miscarriage is not a voluntary abortion. The point is not to criticise these cases specifically, but to point out there is a cultural underpinning to the problem. To treat someone appropriately, you have to respect them and not be constantly afraid that what you’re doing will get you in trouble.
If a doctor is afraid to treat a miscarriage it's because they're worried about abortion laws in their jurisdiction. You can't pretend they're not linked; we should talk about both when we talk about either one.
My point about Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and US maternal mortality vs. Europe stands.
Wisconsin's abortion law was completely irrelevant in the modern era until Roe was overturned, so that's not really a great point. At best, it's incredibly dishonest. Besides, the poster wasn't saying it was because of abortion specifically, but that having such a large population that views women's reproductive health as a political issue, rather than a medical issue, is probably the reason why the US has such poor maternal health outcomes.
Beyond what everybody else has said, I wonder how much of that difference is due to the healthcare in Mississippi being counted as part of GDP instead of as a state service? Ever ballooning healthcare costs are the cancer that is eating the developed world alive.
How do US state GDP per-capitas compare to the GDP per-capita of Ireland? And if this comparison is not meaningful or relevant, what does that say about the choice of metric you made?
Notwithstanding the other comments about the effect GDP per capita might or might not have on individuals, how much of this GDP difference is driven by the strength or weakness of consumer protections within a given economy?
Is higher GDP per capita truly a strong argument against consumer protections?
Some people think deregulation equals productivity equals prosperity.
Sure, America has the most school shootings and medical bankruptcies. But they also have the biggest houses, the biggest cars and the most private swimming pools per capita.
Mississippi has much higher rates of infant mortality, poverty, preventable deaths, and lower overall education levels than most of the EU. Economic output fails to capture the degree to which the economy serves its people.
While average GDP sounds like it’s something that everyone participates in, in reality, under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. As a result, GDP per capita tells us more about total output than about how it is actually distributed among the population, who is benefiting, and thus the well being of the society as a whole.
> under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution.
And under the other forms of government thus far tried?
Anyway, Capitalism doesn't explain wealth inequality. The ability to accumulate capital and apply it to industry with limited liability doesn't inherently cause wealth inequality. That's the fault of Greedism, Over-inflated-sense-of-selfism, and Giving Money to Politicians is like giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teenage Boys-ism.
We're over taxed and over regulated, that's nothing to do with Capitalism.
Wealth inequality isn’t simply a side effect of capitalism—it’s structurally necessary thanks to the division of society into two classes, capitalists and workers.
I do agree that a capitalist economic system isn’t alone in manifesting inequality. I would further acknowledge that under capitalism the amount of wealth inequality differs from one capitalist society to the other. Yet the present levels of inequality we see around us are nearly unprecedented.
You blame greed. But capitalism enshrines the profit motive. It incentivizes capitalists to maximize profit regardless of the effect on the working class even if that means bribing politicians or whatever. Greed is a central feature of capitalism, not some personal failing to be explained at the individual level.
Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulation has been enacted for the last 45 years. What are the effects of this? Real working-class wages have remained stagnant while the wealth gap has drastically increased. Should we believe the answer is more deregulation?
Under a deregulation ideology, the wealthy push for deregulation when it suits them on the one hand while benefiting from and expanding government influence on the other (subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, etc.). That’s why after 45 years of a deregulatory ideology operating at the highest levels of our governments, subsidies and regulatory capture still exist.
Consider the present moment. Elon Musk slashes government spending while receiving millions from the federal government. This is not a bug. It’s a central feature of this ideology.
We may have different members of the upper class at the wheel now, but they are still using the same siren’s call of deregulation to justify their policies, ostentatiously reducing government influence in some areas while tactically expanding it in others - not just handouts to Trump’s cronies but also expansion of executive powers and erosion of civil liberties.
We get touchy if you call it a tax dodge but yes it’s generally not considered an accurate measure of wealth in Ireland. Modified GNI is the term used for the adjusted number.
I don't know much about others, but perhaps you should be comparing ratio of GDP in the last 20 years, not absolute values. With Poland coming very poor out of communism and all.
Mississippi is the chronic showcase of american wealth inequality.
Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy in the U.S. (about 73 years), significantly lower than the national average (77).
Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the U.S. (about $52,000 in 2022), compared to a U.S. median of around $75,000.
Mississippi has high rates of obesity, diabetes, and preventable diseases, partly due to poor healthcare access.
France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare, while the UK's NHS, despite challenges, still provides free-at-point-of-use care.
In Mississippi, many rely on Medicaid or have limited healthcare options.
Mississippi’s school system ranks among the worst in the U.S. European countries have stronger public education systems and more government support for higher education.
> That it’s actually usable? Great healthcare is pointless if you cannot afford to go to the doctor.
And yet Americans seem to survive more often with a healthcare they supposedly do not use than Italians and Frenchmen with a healthcare they use.
> Sure, but what standard of high school degree?
Surely you aren't implying that the standards of an American HS degree are so low that the education that that huge percentage of the population with a middle school degree or lower is receiving is comparable to it?
And that GDP is one guy.. if you take him out of the state though, it gets dark pretty fast.. people dont vote for a return of monarchy if things are going well.
America will continue to cripple EU consumer protection too.
The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.
So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
> you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america
I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.
Making this example even worse, both Firefox and Chrome are open source (except for a few proprietary add-ons). An EU company wouldn't even need to make their own browser. They could just hard-fork one of those.
I mean, currently they couldn't because EU's laws are too weak too.
An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers.
They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase.
But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.
You know uBO installs just fine in Orion by Kagi⁽¹⁾ (which is in the regular App Store) and that it has a much better privacy policy,⁽²⁾ right? Fuck yeah.
Unfortunately I'm only able to use browsers which run on linux so I can share history between my phone and all other computers.
If Orion had a linux version, maybe I'd consider it, but the firefox-skin on webkit lets me share history even if I can't install extensions, and my history is more important.
A browser that only works on iOS and macOS doesn't have a better privacy policy for me in practice, apple collects all sorts of information that my linux devices don't.
> So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
Well, America has never prohibited Apple from allowing iOS sideloading, either specifically in America or worldwide. I completely agree that it would be a beneficial economic regulation for the US to require the major gatekeepers to allow such access like the EU has (although ideally with fewer opportunities for bad-faith half-assed compliance attempts than the EU gave Apple), but the biggest blame here goes on Apple and not on any government.
If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract.
"It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.
Clearly it is not true that there are no downsides, because those companies had to change behaviours and offer more data protections as a result. The goal of GDPR is not to bankrupt companies, but to fix behaviours.
I do agree fines take too long to come and are too small.
Who said it was to innovate? The administration is cancelling research, actually deleting the department of education, bullying the university system into censoring, revoking diplomas, forbidding Chinese research collaborations. Innovation is not on the menu.
The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.
Well, I think the proper analogy would be that it's good for me but bad for my kidneys and colon.
Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.
Not sure why you're downvoted? I can't think of almost anything that isn't designed to cripple poor or vulnerable people? Health insurance, medicine costs, student loans, etc etc. I never thought about it like this...
I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.
You're right, we shall not do this, however when corporations have privileged rights over their consumers and their abuse of "the people of the nation" is not only ignored, but applauded for value generation, not doing this almost impossible.
I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc.
That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away.
There are plenty of local authorities who exercise strange levels of power over small changes to people's houses. The difference is that when that happens to you vs a HOA, you're also paying their salary to avoid jail time.
Ha! The United States has "special" citizens called corporations that due to the US's "law of wealth", get to do anything they want as humans legally without any of the drawbacks. It's so ass backwards here, in the USA, smart people are turned inside out with nonsense. Then the fact that there is no real effective communications training at all in all but the media manipulation educations, nobody knows how to communicate, they try, but it's pathetic, seriously sad parrots just echoing talking points with nothing being communicated.
Well, depends what your goals are. Agile economy focused on health of companies, high revenue, and ability to quickly adapt to changing environment? US is great for that. It sucks to be the bottom 70% maybe, OK till maybe 95% and great above.
EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified.
Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.
I feel the issue is deeper than that.
We no longer buy products, we rent them, it's hard for consumer protection laws to catch up with that (even European).
I’m afraid the only thing we can do at this point is gun for an economic depression, ride out three years of that just like with Hoover (1929–33), and upgrade to New Deal 2.0 beta. There’s no amount of protests that can convince the median Trump voter that anything is wrong in America unless it affects him personally. And no amount of protest will convince Trump that he has made a single mistake in his entire life.
I should have a bit more faith but at this point I feel like the median voter might see their world getting worse but still be convinced somehow that Democrats are behind it because Republicans have their messaging on point and Democrats are doing the equivalent of a silent protest.
All democrats really need to say is "you voted for this". None of these actions are surprising so far, they were all well telegraphed before the election.
In a year or so when there's truly new stuff to complain about the ln the message becomes "you voted for them".
Protip: voters don’t like to be blamed for their actions, it makes them defensive, this is a losing strategy. Voters like to blame politicians for letting them down.
We need to have a close look at free speech, especially now that techniques from psychological warfare are being used, not only in political propaganda but even in advertisements.
And a multi-decade effort to shift courts toward a certain flavor of right wing perspective, so you can get a ruling like Citizens United, among others.
I suspect Democrats remain silent because they believe nothing new can be said about Trump's policies. His supporters will counter any argument, so it's better to step back and let them experience Trump 2.0 without distractions. Over time, they may realize the harm he causes.
Except it won't work, they will retro justify the leopard eating their face to their death bed, taking down everybody with them as they do so. Their reasoning isn't just impervious to logical arguments from others, it also resists the painful reality and consequences of their choices. It's a media induced debilitating mental illness.
It's very likely that they're going to Liz Truss the budget, but without any comparable way of dealing with the consequences by swiftly removing the bad actors.
(when exactly is that anyway? I'm dimly aware of some drama with continuing resolutions)
It's over. The Republicans larded up the CR with poison pills and dared the Democrats to block it. Chuck Shumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, didn't have the stomach to do so, fearing the populace would be convinced all the resulting harms of a government shutdown would be pinned on the Democrats. He's probably right. They did vote for Trump twice in sufficient numbers to give him power. Anyway, that was the only point of leverage the Democrats had and now it's gone. In Shumer's calculation they never had it anyway.
The democrats haven't been fighting for the 0-99% class for quite some time. Its been special cause this, social rage that.
Its unsurprising that when republicans finally get a chance to demolish basically every social program, they would not get stopped by democrats. (Aside a few progressives like AOC, Sanders, Ilhan, etc)
And yet this is what Tesla did. They sold a car and added a surcharge for full self-driving as a future option, or they added it as an upgrade option. But they never delivered. That's like buying a car with the promise of wheels but the wheels are never delivered (except you actually need the wheels etc).
I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.
I have no idea what you mean. The executive branch didn't routinely ignore court orders and disregard the constraints set out in the Constitution before that date. The government broke laws, but it was a scandal when it did and people -- the perpetrators, not random civil servants doing the jobs they were hired to do -- got fired for it and sometimes jailed. Now it's just another day that ends in y.
In theory Biden could have taken the SCOTUS grant of immunity to disregard the Constitution as Musk and Trump are doing, but he didn't. Trump's taking power was a step change.
We still have laws, but the executive branch under Musk/Trump regards them as mere words on a page. They bind others, not them.
ToS have limits, people in a practical sense aren't really able to read and understand the ToS of every product they buy, which means a ToS can only go so far in the ways it allows companies to be predatory against consumers.
Has that been tested in court? I would have thought a user wilfully or negligently misreading a ToS would not be a good legal defence (not that I agree with how I think the law would play out)
> Unless the website operator can
show that a consumer has actual knowledge of the agreement, an enforceable contract will be
found based on an inquiry notice theory only if: (1) the website provides reasonably conspicuous
notice of the terms to which the consumer will be bound; and (2) the consumer takes some action,
such as clicking a button or checking a box, that unambiguously manifests his or her assent to
those terms.
Its part of why changes of terms generally require you to accept them, before you can continue using a service.
Unambiguous consent, and understanding of consent, are required, as ToS fall under contract law. Which does make most ToS... Unenforceable.
The claim there is that they never saw the terms of service updates, and thus weren't aware of an arbitration clause, rather than terms of service generally not being valid.
I always wonder how valid these actually are. There's probably a reasonable range.
Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.
The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.
They're not gonna refuse to sell you the car if you take the time to read the paperwork. And it's probably a large enough amount of money that you should take the time to at least skim it.
Perhaps there should be license allowing the procurement and operation of consumer devices having overly complex (including language) ToC, making sure that the user knows what it takes to have and to operate a device like that. With categories for the various device categories, just like for vechicles (although cars and trafic rules are much simpler than ToCs, still that is a simple analogy to build up the complexity of ToCs).
It was not yours to begin with. Think of it as a service. Just give it back and go to a competitor. Ohh wait, there are no competitors! Monopolies suck! Especially if they are world-wide.
These are not viable options for the vast majority of users. Most peppe don't have a clue how to set up open source options, let alone set them up with usable hardware.
The average consumer wants out of the box solutions that don't require a degree in Computer Science to use.
Home Assistant is getting far easier to set up than you might expect, especially because they now do in fact have out of the box devices. It's not quite as ridiculously simple, not quite yet, but they're rapidly improving and it won't be long until they're better than Amazon Alexa/Google Home/other commercial solutions.
I am relatively tech savvy, installed HA recently in a VM on my media server and the thing was just a massive pain in the arse, particularly trying to migrate Thread devices from Apple Home to HA.
Sure things might be getting easier but they’re certainly not easy.
Just to chip in with a plug for HomeAssistant. I am really not very techy at all, but so far I have used the out-of-box HA Green version and:
-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable
-installed various interior sockets
-installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator
So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.
I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.
What are these "out of the box devices"? I looked into things a couple of years ago, and back then it was all too much effort to set things up and keep things running and integrated, so I just went with Smart Life stuff from AliExpress. But would love to have Home Assistant if it means I don't need to spend weekends just reading docs, pairing, setting things up, connecting stuff...
Look at Home Assistant Green [0]. They've also got a smart speakers as of just recently [1], although they're still a "preview edition". The prices seem comparable to other similar smart home devices, IMO.
For the wifi smartlife stuff, you can use the official cloud based integration or if you want local control, the unofficial tuyalocal. The official integration is really easy to use but if your internet connection drops, you can't control your devices so I prefer to use tuyalocal it still requires to add the devices to the smartlife app once and then you add a device from the addon by scanning a qr code with the app. Once this is done you have local control over the device.
Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something
useful.
I've got HA set up (nearly 2 years now with a whole host of things connected: Bluetooth, WIFI, iOS devices, Zigbee, etc.) and I think I'm only just getting to the point now of two weekends worth of reading docs (primarily because their documentation seems to be written by developers rather than technical writers). Most time I've spent tinkering with HA was modifying their embedded `mastodon.py` to make it work with GotoSocial (but I think someone upstreamed a fix for that and it's no longer required.)
They're already better compared to commercial solutions regarding device/service support and complex automations.
But missing opinionated defaults, really, you still have to roll your own home/away/vacation solution. Creating a dashboard requires you to understand the meta of Home assistant which takes a lot of time.
People asking should I get PI or NUC every single day in the reddit. I am happy with my 2000lines long configuration file except scripts and automations. But it won't be easy for someone is not tech savvy.
Home assistant is a nightmare to set up. Even with their hardware, you need to learn a whole new vocabulary and God help you if you stay off the happy path.
If HA (which is a wonderful project) is your example of usable OSS software, then your bar is set lightyears away from what actual consumers need.
At no point did I say it's usable by the average, non-tech-inclined user. I said it's getting much better, quickly. It absolutely still needs work to replace something like Amazon or Google have.
I like your confidence in the competitors. Which ones do you recommend?
I need a timer, integration with smart home (turn things on and off), play songs and radio, I need to announce to my other devices. And the set up should not be a month long side project.
How much will it cost me to replace Alexa in at least 5 rooms...
Home Assistant. Sure, non-tech people might have an issue setting it up today (it's easy and getting easier, but it's not turn-key easy yet), but for you personally, this shouldn't be an issue.
Assuming you have a spare Raspberry Pi or some other compute you can dedicate to it, replacing Alexa in every aspect except the microphones is at most a couple hours of installing, configuring and testing stuff. I don't personally know how things are on the market with replacing the always-on microphones in every room, but ignoring that (let's assume for a moment you're fine with using either a phone or a smartwatch as voice I/O), you get:
- A better and more capable integration with smart home than anything on the market;
- A chance to pick whatever LLM you want to power your logic (just bring your own API key, ofc.), which instantly makes it much better than Google's Assistant, Siri and Alexa; this has been the case for around a year now, and the Big Companies are still playing catch-up with the simple "just feed it to GPT-4 / Claude along with some context and tools, and let it do what you want" approach.
- You can configure the activities whichever way you like, expose whichever smart devices you like, and you don't have to speak brands anymore. No more "Hey ${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to play ${brand 3} on ${brand 4}" - you can just say "Please play whatever in the living room" and it just works.
(In my case, some of the most frequent commands are off-hand lines like "warm up the kids' room a bit, please", and "kill the ACs", or any variation that rolls off the tongue best. Claude knows what to do with zero config. Home Assistant alone cut the time to operate ACs from 2 minutes to 5 seconds (cold-start) relative to the vendor app; running things by voice from a watch is just a cherry on the cake.)
- If you're on Android, you can (and, again, could for around a year now) expose your phone to Home Assistant; setting the HA app as your assistant + coupling it with Tasker lets you also replicate the on-phone feature of commercial assistants, but better, because LLMs. It's smarter and sends less sensitive data to iffy cloud services (you control where STT and TTS happen).
- Timers and announcements and weather and such, you can obviously also handle through Home Assistant. The defaults should be enough for this (you might need to "add weather integration", "add timer integration", etc. - couple UI clicks in the UI, each). HA is simple by default, but you can also do more advanced stuff, at any complexity level between this and arbitrary code execution, through no-code, low-code (e.g. NodeRED) or yes-code means.
Going back to the topic of microphone arrays - I didn't look into it much; there are DIY solutions (with DIY quality of listening - which may be OK, depending on environment; almost 2 decades ago, I got a lot of mileage out of cheap microphone soldered to a 2M cable and glued to the side of the wardrobe, + Microsoft Speech API on the PC), I think I recall some people selling packaged microphone arrays, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could reuse Alexa hardware for the I/O part. But I honestly don't know. I'm fine with my phone and watch for I/O at the moment.
Yes boycott is a solution. I don't need Amazon for anything except maybe to buy cheap off-brand toner, and honestly for the time toner can last I could've stayed with the brand.
Pardon my French, but fuck "free market" remedies. The actual "free market remedy" here should theoretically be a lawsuit. But, you and I both know that Amazon's TOS are locked down pretty hard to pre-empt this sort of thing. Even if they weren't, it would take either an individual with deep pockets to pursue such a suit, or it would have to be a class action. Except that neither of those would be likely to succeed, because there's no law that says once a company offers a feature or feature toggle that they have to continue to offer it for the life of the product. And, if there were, that, by definition, wouldn't be a "free market" solution.
The solution here is regulation.
Edit: I forgot to mention that a lawsuit would take years to resolve. Meanwhile, Amazon would continue to benefit from their unfair tactics.
This is actually part of our (Australia's) Australian consumer protection laws, which are considered pretty beastly.
Its simply a test of reasonableness. If you had another source of information about a likely fault and you purchased anyway, it can reduce your protection.
If you have a reasonable expectation that a brand is really good and often lasts 7 plus years it can also go the other way. Netting you government guaranteed replacements by manufacturers far longer than their competitors.
To continue the metaphor, shouldn't someone close down or regulate "wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer" so that they don't keep stealing people's wheels?
They aren't wheel stealing jimmies, but they're definitely data railing bit bangers itching for their next fix. I think choosing to do business with Amazon comes with the same sort of reasonable assumptions. Lie down with dogs, and all that.
It doesn't sound like a good idea to blame the victim more if the offender is a repeat offender. If anything repeat offenders should be treated harsher.
>Yes but reputation is a factor. If you bought that car from wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer you might need to shoulder some of the blame.
You think the same for food and medicine? remove the "evil" regulations and let the reputation be a factor and every individual should do their research ?
This is actually part of our (Australia's) Australian consumer protection laws, which are considered pretty beastly.
Its simply a test of reasonableness. If you had another source of information about a likely fault and you purchased anyway, it can reduce your protection.
If you have a reasonable expectation that a brand is really good and often lasts 7 plus years it can also go the other way. Netting you government guaranteed replacements by manufacturers far longer than their competitors.
I wasn't applying any free market assumptions here, but the (very popular) regulatory framework I already live under.
This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference. It's ok for people to feel things, and it's ok for people to want laws addressing anti-consumer behavior.
> This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference.
None of these comments are fixing issues or trying to make a difference. Sending the product back is a really good idea, especially if this change in terms means you can get a refund even if you've had it a long time.
The reason I replied to the parent comment was because of their dismissive tone. Of course returning the product is a good idea, but telling reasonable people to "chill out", and dismissing their concerns by suggesting they "just XYZ" is truly unproductive. It ends the conversation rather than engaging with it.
Still not an argument against people being allowed to be mad regarding this. You just can't give a fuck about data privacy and expect people to not oppose this and speak up.
No one can stop you being mad. No one's saying it's not allowed. It's possible someone is still young enough to misinterpret adult interactions as parental fiat, but it's not the case.
The framework that exists is crap and should be replaced with something where you as a consumer should not have to watch the eula changes like a hawk, and then the onus should not be on you as a consumer to do extra work to get refunded for a bait and switch.
The car is no longer usable without the wheels, I believe the argument for Alexa would be that the core functionality is still usable without the privacy setting.
I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.
"Do not send voice recordings" back to Amazon HQ =/= "privacy focused." It's arguably a necessary feature for minimal privacy in one's home, and I expect that a lot of people bought those devices with that in mind.
If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.
If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?
Jumping to criminal fraud feels a bit hasty in this context. It'd be important to know whether Amazon ever marketed this feature specifically, promised privacy, defined what that privacy they promised meant, and whether there's any legal argument to be made that this setting should be considered core to the basic functionality of Alexa.
IMO no one should have ever expected Alexa, or products like it, to be private. The meet fact that it has a microphone, and potentially a camera, and promises to respond simply by you saying something to it means they're always listening. I don't really care what they say they'll do with the recordings, I care what they can do with the recordings without me ever knowing about it.
