Creating chaos in democracies is forcing the elected politicians to focus on the interior, thus leaving them less resources (or public interest) for stopping remote invasions.
Based on the aggressive reactions all across the billionaire board toward the European wrist-slap initiative, I would guess Europe is moving in the correct direction with it and the slaps would correctly hurt.
On which grounds would you punish some companies which are using a fully legal platform? If you had beef with the ad contents, you'd punish them already for that. But if you have beef with the platform algorithms, punish them for exactly that. Not over proxies! As long the algorithm was designed for creating dependence, than regulate that - exactly like you (should) regulate other substances creating dependence. And some countries are going exactly this way: not only Australia but also Finland, Spain...
Ok, imagine a law punishing a platform comes out. How will it be enforced? You can fine the companies but they can just close presence in europe. YouTube will continue to work even if all the YouTube's servers in europe are gone.
Or should the only outcome of the law be that the police could confiscate phones from kids? punish parents for allowing social media?
Laws are not useless, at least teachers and parents will have a clear call to action. But still
You'd be surprised. I'm already sorry if I sound condescending, I just don't know how to rephrase this: please but please look around how effective is nowadays all that internet, dare to say more and more effective, in pushing "alternative truth" for the obvious goal of covering dirty businesses, wars, and even more crimes.
I'm using Jetbrain's AI Assistant (Junie, with different LLMs), and it also has frequent agent crashes (bye tokens) and sometimes is unreachable - albeit never longer than minutes so a few retries suffice. And even with the default Gemini 3 Flash I can easily burn through 10 or more bucks over a normal coding day (which is not every day, sometimes there's more reading). Do I still get value? Definitely. But it's not the easy life either.
Between zero fossil and full fossil there's a world of nuances, too often ignored. How much oil are those heavier aircraft using, as percentage of the whole country usage? The difference is the answer needed.
It is not just oil, but the necessity to keep up the entire separate infrastructure for its refining, processing, storage and distribution.
Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.
We still have coal mines open, what do you mean? For less and less uses, yes, but they still have their uses, and we are not (nor should be) judging them for that.
The last coal mine in my country just closed a few days ago, 244 years after mining started. I am a bit influenced by this, because I live in that region.
I'd be happy to pay taxes going to social programs also for my own benefit: not only as a form of insurance, but for getting a more pleasant day to day experience - like not having to step over homeless, less insecurity in darker areas, not having to live imprisoned in gated communities, and so on. A man can dream...
The thing really irking me is seeing how I pay much more taxes than the megarich and their corporations. Don't get me wrong, I can understand why this happens: they don't give a rat's ass on my safety concerns because they are very happy to live on their gated islands or travel between expensive resorts. But that we, the people (ha, ha) construct our society basically for them also basically holds me back from even discussing those numbers you asked.
Corporations pay taxes on distributions. In fact, C Corporations pay double taxes: once for the profit and then again when those profits are distributed to shareholders. Every employee pays income taxes. Why on earth would we want to create greater economic drag by increasing their tax rate? All that does is reduce their ability to reward investors.
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