Notices by kravietz 🦇 (kravietz@agora.echelon.pl)

@ElDeadKennedy

I read in Alabama it’s illegal to dress as a priest for Halloween, but I wouldn’t generalize it as “haha stupid US citizens can’t dress as a priest”. Different people say different things. That guy on video isn’t the sole authority on the EU law and he’s expressing his opinion. You may agree or not, but it’s not binding.

@theorytoe @7666 @phnt

@7666

Chat Control is probably the only example of an EU digital regulation that I disagree… except it’s not a law and it’s far from it That’s how every democratic country works - some people see a problem and propose a fix, and then they’re having a debate. There certainly is a real problem in what Chat Control wants to fix, the debate is about whether the fix is proportional and doesn’t cause more problems. So far it seems it’s not proportional and it does cause more problems, which is why the law is being discussed.

What most people don’t understand about EU is that it’s not some single commission sitting in Brussels, it’s 27 Member States with delegates to the European Commission, then dozens of technical commissions and bodies, and then 700+ elected people in European Parliament.

Of course there’s debates and proposals being raised all the time, including ones we don’t like.

At the same time the typical news cycle of an average EU critic looks like this:

1. Not giving a shit about the regulation while it’s being proposed and debated for five years
2. Seeing a random article hyping moral outrage from an organisation that has a vested interest against this particular wording that has been agreed
3. Post some angry “stupid EU wants X” comments online, sign a petition
4. Back to item 1

@theorytoe @phnt

@theorytoe

I don’t know what “the government” you’re talking about because, thanks to GDPR, I have no idea who you are and where you’re from. From your rather pessimistic stance, I imply you must be living in Russia or North Korea… Neither in US nor EU “the government can do whatever the fuck they want with your data”.

@phnt

@theorytoe

It never starts from “EU doesn’t like”, it’s always “EU citizens don’t like”. I’m EU citizen and I don’t like my every move being tracked, analyzed, monetized and resold by some shady company running in Seychelles. And I don’t give a shit about the business profits of an US citizen running a company in Seychelles any more than he gives about mine.

@phnt

@mischievoustomato

I never click Accept all if there’s Refuse All or Necessary Only, which is like 90% cases.

@theorytoe @phnt

@divVerent

It’s not “overly complicated”. It’s you who’s making it overly complicated in spite of efforts of several people who are trying to explain how this works.

@samueljohnson

@theorytoe

Do you know that US enforces US income tax against all US citizens regardless of whether they live physically? And Russia enforces Russian censorship laws against any website globally regardless of whether it’s hosted or what language it’s published in?

Countries just do this and there’s nothing surprising in this, but the whole concept of jurisdiction implies that we may not give a shit about Russian or Chinese censorship laws if you live in EU or US because we are outside of their jurisdiction.

That is, unless you start doing business with them, which is why Musk politely registered Twitter International in EU so that he can process his EU income there, and this is why Apple complies with Russian censorship requests for the same purpose.

So if you run an US website you don’t need to care about EU regulations - and Russian, and Chinese, and Australian ones - as long as you start generating income in these countries.

@theorytoe

And that’s fine, I personally prefer to be spied upon by one country rather than the whole world including US, China, Cyprus, Seychelles and Russia.

As JD Vance delivered his speech about “European overregulation” and criticized “endless compliance costs imposed on the US companies by GDPR” I have seen some voices from Europe who said something to the effect “I don‘t know a single EU company happy about #GDPR either”.

Well, it’s kind of obvious companies aren’t happy because GDPR was not made to make companies happy but to protect the privacy of consumers 😄

This regulation is based on fundamental differences between US and EU legal systems. In EU, you own and control your personal data. In US it’s owned by whoever managed to extort it from you, and then aggregate, personalise and resell to any other entity anywhere.

For example, if you want to pay higher insurance premium because you have genetic tendencies to diabetes or obesity - well, that’s the US way of doing business, but it’s not the only one, nor it’s somehow axiomatically “better”. And yes, high insurance premiums also have the effect of increasing overall country’s GDP, just as a house burnt and rebuilt also does this magic, yet somehow few people celebrate it 😉

Then someone asked me if I really “feel that my data is better protected thanks to GDPR”. And yes, as a matter of fact the most invasive behavioural profiling aren’t being rolled out by companies like Twitter or Facebook to EU specifically because of GDPR, while in US they just roll them out without asking anyone.

Anyone… of course except for the states which have regulations very similar or even more restrictive than GDPR, such as California. Yet, because California is “their”, these companies and their CEOs with high media presence simply shut up and make their apps compliant with CCPA without all this barking about “how GDPR kills out business”.

It’s the same with EU VAT, about which Vance also whined, whereas US sales tax accounting rules are not even harmonized across states. But hey, you know what? An US business that has to emply a tax consulting company to get multi-state accounting right also increases overall GDP! 😄

So effectively what in US is perceived as each state’s fundamental right, sign of their diversity and key part of their autonomy, in the EU is portrayed as something equivalent to Soviet Union style central planning. And when they post all the memes about “bottle caps” in EU, they of course never mention a gazillion of state-level archaic or absurd regulations which are nonetheless binding, especially if someone likes to build a class lawsuit around them.

And now as Tesla opened a new factory in #China, I’ve never seen Musk make a single critical remark about the overregulation in China, even though it’s even more complex than EU and US taken together due to its vast geographic and administrative diversity.

Ryan Chenkie:

Developers, please be careful when installing Homebrew. Google is serving sponsored links to a Homebrew site clone that has a cURL command to malware. The URL for this site is one letter different than the official site.

Note: Google allows the ad sponsors to specify an URL that will be displayed on the ad (original brew.sh here), but the click takes you to the malware domain brewe.sh.

#Apple #HomeBrew #Google #MacOS

The 2025 #Russia “is not invading” season can be considered to have begun 🥳🥳🥳

21 February 2022: ‘Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine, Lavrov announced’.

13 January 2025: ‘Russian Foreign Ministry: Russia does not intend to invade NATO countries’

#Poland Olympian Maria Kwaśniewska refused to give the Nazi salute while receiving a medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When Hitler referred to her as a “little Polish woman,” she retorted that she was taller than him. To save face, Hitler reworded it to “little Poland.” Later, Kwaśniewska used a photo of herself with Hitler to bypass guards at the Pruszków concentration camp, allowing her to rescue several prisoners. She passed away on this day in 2007.

No, this is no a new CAPTCHA, this is a new malware vector which tricks users to open #Windows command line and paste a command to download some harmful stuff.

Just reported by Mohamed Aruham on Twitter.

You may have been spared exposure to this periodic shitstorm if you’re not Polish or French: was Maria Skłodowska-Curie a “Polish” or “French” scientist? 😱

The only useful lesson we may draw from the whole story is the answer to the question: why was young Maria even forced to go to study in Paris?

And she had to because universities in Russia-occupied Poland did not accept women, who could at best obtain secondary education 🤷 Leading Polish scientists organised covert education for women called Flying University (due to frequent changes in the teaching location), which is an amazing but entirely separate story. But, using modern analogies, you can’t study CERN-level physics at lectures organised in private flats at risk of arrest.

For me, the main lesson from Skłodowska’s story is that state policies, obviously, do impact personal choices of people, including emigration. States complaining about “brain drain” are essentially like the popular meme guy putting a stick into his bicycle’s wheel and complaining about this entirely self-inflicted harm.

Yet another topic is the nationality-obsessed attribution of “ours” and “theirs” scientists or artists, which expresses the more the person in question doesn’t care about it. One Russian Jew told me a suitable joke, which perfectly sums up the public perception of this:

— Mom, other children call me a “Jewish mouth” at school

— Well, you have to stand that for a while and then when you get the Nobel prize everyone will start calling you a “renowned Russian scientist”.

You can’t see any better response to #Russia “peace proponents” that what #Germany Foreign Office has just posted on Twitter:

There has been no lack of efforts in the last two years by the international community and by the #Ukraine to get Putin to end the Russian war of aggression. But his answer is always: more suffering, death and destruction.

1 March 2022 — When peace in Ukraine was negotiated in Istanbul, Putin responded with the most brutal crimes against the people of Bucha and Irpin.

2 Summer 2023 — When several African countries wanted to enter into peace talks, they had to leave Moscow disappointed. During earlier talks in Kyiv, they were greeted with the explosions of Russian missiles.

3 June 2024 — When around 100 delegations from all over the world, from Argentina to Qatar to Thailand, met in Switzerland to discuss peace based on international law, Putin responded with waves of bombs on Ukrainian power plants.

4 July 2024 — When the international community called on Russia to withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant at the UN General Assembly, Putin did nothing of the sort and instead once again fired on targets in the region around the nuclear power plant and throughout Ukraine.

5 July 2024 — Nevertheless, Ukraine invited Russia to the next peace summit. But Putin’s reaction was swift: missile terror, violence, death and a clear rejection of diplomacy.

Nevertheless, people are still screaming for peaceful negotiations. That it was the West’s fault that Russia invaded, and that the war is still being carried out. That Ukraine is supposedly not interested in negotiations.

This list proves once again what not only the Ukrainian government, but leaders from all over the world always say. Russia is not interested in peace talks. Russia is only interested in one thing, to prolong this war and to win it by any means necessary, and to overwhelm the country and its people with war and terror.

Original: https://x.com/AuswaertigesAmt/status/1828725371228856677 (in German)

Translation: https://x.com/deaidua/status/1828731994953453970 (in English)

@bperruche

Poza tym warto co mówi @polamatysiak i Horała bo tam jest wyraźnie określony program - nie zlanie prezentowanych przez nich systemów wartości tylko wspólna praca nad projektami, które są ważne dla wszystkich.

@wariat @rcz

Polska lewica już nie lubi w internacjonalizm i preferuje ścisłe tradycje plemienne 😉

@rcz @bperruche

Zwłaszcza, że zobaczcie ilość reakcji na ogłoszenie tej inicjatywy…

@polamatysiak