You can’t have communist countries in “Latan” America because their industrial base and population expertise is even worse than the USSR. Not to defend the CIA’s actions, but Venezuela was never going to work out.
I like how you, with actual concrete real-world experiences you are sharing, are being downvoted by silent armchair enthusiasts who mostly just like GDPR because they get the sense that it’s vaguely bad for Facebook.
As a private citizen I like GDPR - even if Facebook will find ways around it (but I do not really care, I've left Facebook many years ago because of privacy concerns).
As someone who implemented it in several companies, I don't like it because it hits smaller companies much harder than bigger ones, and because it tries to be technology agnostic it is quite fuzzy, compate to something like SOX or PCIDSS (which I also implemented as CTO). In Germany at least data protection agencies declared they will go after companies that use e.g. Mailchimp.
As both a private citizen, and one who implements it, I hate it. It’s increased regulation around a subject that I was not doing in the first place (I don’t care what you’re doing online, never tracked, etc) that only increased the cost of business. We need more competition, not less.
> It’s increased regulation around a subject that I was not doing in the first place
Maybe you were handling personal data correctly. Very many were not (witness numerous data breaches and private data exploited that was held for no reason). Therefore regulation was needed.
Where does relaxed regulation and the reintroduction of morality into business mean a race to the bottom?
It also could’ve been implemented in such a way where there were no required new positions and the gov spent tax dollars to write a greatly detailed dummies guide to GDPR, how to implement it, etc so that smaller companies without the resources would have just as much of an advantage.
When stories make baseless and grandiose claims like
> While women have always made outstanding contributions in research, education, leadership, finance, and entrepreneurship in the Valley—although always in numbers curtailed by tremendous sexism, not talent
It makes me question how much credence I should put in the rest of the story. How does the author know that talent or desire had nothing to do with it, and any deviation of the world from their counterfactual ideal is the result of “tremendous sexism”?
You people obsessed with reducing humanity’s energy usage are so tiresome. Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of humanity should be focused on increasing the amount of energy available. I want to climb the kardashev scale, not live in an eco-pod and eat bug burgers so I can scrounge every last joule.
Bingo! The more energy a system has available the greater capability it has. For example, if a mining community is able to generate cheap excess power it opens up possibility for local smelting and foundry industries.
I think of each community as a game of Civilization. As you progress you unlock higher rungs of the tech ladder. Exporting your raw materials to later import finished products made from them is a waste of resources and stagnates the local industries at the raw material stage.
What industries could be developed in your community if the power was available?
Bitcoin mining creates a price floor for energy. It is a buyer of last resort with infinite appetite. By pushing up the value of energy in the market, it encourages expansion of energy production.
This kind of thinking is harmfully simplistic. When you rely on rules of thumb ("this sort of thing should go slowly") to make public health decisions, you are going to harm people.
In the US, we suffer from an insane degree of regulatory medical conservatism. No one else in the world takes as long to approve life-saving medications as the FDA, and this is not rational; it's a reflexive political reaction to the Thalidomide disaster that isn't grounded in sound reason or statistics.
Here is an extensively cited analysis demonstrating that the FDA's extreme standards kill vastly more people than they save.
As a quick aside, your source also advocates for free-market healthcare and rejects national healthcare legislation and Medicare under the guise of individual choice.
It has _also_ published such gems as "The Scientific Case against the Global Climate Treaty" and “New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn't Telling Us”.
In light of that, I'll take their advocacy with a grain of salt.
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On topic, while I can't comment on the EMA specifically, during my (extremely) brief period working alongside a medical device manufacturer, fear of FDA was oftentimes the primary motivating factor in keeping them honest.
While that's entirely anecdotal, when there are _significant_ financial incentives on the table people's morals tend to get more than a little flexible. Pharmaceuticals represent an area with _significant_ financial incentives, and, while I do agree that the FDA takes more time than is strictly necessary, it's a little fallacious to say they "kill vastly more people than they save" through regulation.
The monotonic IQ increase can be attributed to improved nutrition and schooling. However, most evidence suggests that intelligence is genetically heritable to a large degree. Improved nutrition only goes so far; a really healthy pig still won't have human-level intelligence. At some point, we would expect selective pressure towards being less intelligent to catch up with us. Or, looking at it another way, we might be a lot smarter today if we had both the nutritional and educational advances of the last few centuries and a birth rate that wasn't higher in lower-intelligence populations.
Being poor or jobless has vastly more to do with (lack of) technology and access to resources than it does with your position on the intelligence distribution.
Freezing sperm costs on the order of $200-400 per year depending on how far you pay in advance. Worth paying if you're getting a vasectomy, but probably not worth it for this kind of (hopefully) temporary BC.
This person’s political opinions are not worth listening to.