Americans seem to think the middle-east is some dystopian place where everyone is near poverty living in mudhuts, when places like Iran have a higher level of literacy than the USA, with more female college graduates.
There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.
Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).
I’m not really surprised. The US (and their allies) has made a concerted effort over a number of decades to turn them into to the third world. The current sitting US president has threatened to blast them into “oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. A lot of imagery of middle eastern countries seen in the west is of the places they’ve collectively destroyed.
Use Firefox/Fennec which allow you to install a variety of the add-ons you can install on the desktop version such as UBO, Stylus, ViolentMonkey, Bitwarden, SponsorBlock, etc... or install Brave which comes with adblock by default. As for iPhone, you can install Brave which has adblock, I don't think Firefox has add-ons in that version though, not sure.
I don’t think you can write off Apple or Microsoft just because Thiel made some investment in them.
Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.
If you want to see the end state of lack of oil, look no further than Cuba's current state of affairs. It's dire.
Also for the naive people in the comments who say "invest in renewables" it's not that simple. You can buy electric cars but the car's whole manufacturing process had multiple steps that required oil. The same applies to everything, it's not a single layer issues, it's a multi-layer issue that needs addressing from the ground and takes years and years with full investment. The boats, the planes require fuel. The industrial machinery requires fuel. We need to address it from the ground up and it's not an easy feat.
We should 100% invest and diversify energy production, but the reality is that even if we had a surplus of renewable energy on the grid, that wouldn't save a country because there are too many cogs that need oil right now that need replacing.
It’s not 100% of oil production capacity that is lost, but 20%. You need to cut demand by that, so electric cars can help extremely, because most oil is consumed during car use, not production.
They were saying, if you want to see the end state of lack of oil. Like how would it look if your oil spigot were turned off? A lot of people haven't thought about it.
Totally agree, although an issue that's not talked about enough is that this isn't simply an energy crisis, but a logistics crisis for other products from the region (helium, fertilizers, rare minerals, etc) and to the region that affect other sectors of our global economy highly.
Also another issue that's not being talked about at all is the impact the war will have in displacing a population of 90 million people. For reference, Syria only had 20 million people and the impact was quite big, although we're still far from reaching that point for now.
I'd much rather a third party ID that I can easily bypass because they're lazy and cost saving every step of the way, than a governmental ID which will be x100 harder to bypass and can be abused by the goverment whenever there's a man-child in power who likes going after groups of people who don't agree with him.
But in a perfect world it would be parents doing their job and parenting. You can grab your child's pad, phone, laptop, whatever, and black list the entire internet allowing only a few select white lists of your choice. But it's too hard to educate parents on how to do that I guess, assuming this was ever about children and not data collection, which it is that.
I don't care if it's a human, a chatbot, or a dog if they fix my problem.
I don't want to contact customer support in the first place, if I'm forced to, it's because something is very wrong and in that case I don't want to be listening to elevator music and "your call is important to us, please hold" for an hour, and get my call disconnected forcing me to call again.
Issue is that I've yet to have a chatbot actually fix my issues, or most 1st contact human operators for that matter.
This comes from the same EU that's wholeheartedly embracing gambling across their member states, gambling mind you that children can just as easily jump into with their phones and some will, but devastating for grown-ups just as much.
They're not alone in this by any means, America has also opened their doors for all forms of gambling like Kalshi which now even sponsors news networks of all things.
The EU has this disconnect with the things they push, which makes sense considering their size and the speed at which it moves. One example that comes to mind is how they're both pushing for more privacy online while also pushing for things such as chat control which is antithetical to privacy.
Does social media need regulating? Yeah. Is infinite scrolling where they should be focusing? Probably not, there's more important aspects that should be tackled and are seemingly ignored.
Every member state has its own laws for it, and AFAIK all of them now regulate (or ban) online gambling more or less.
There were many startups here in Sweden in the early '00s, and I believe they had taken advantage of a legal loophole which has since been plugged. Regulation has tightened. Players have to be 18 y/o, use digital ID and not be registered as a gambling addict. But I still find the industry to be depraved, to be honest.
In Spain I can’t even have a meal at a restaurant, get groceries or go to IKEA without someone trying to sell me lottery tickets. They really need to regulate that.
Allowing something isn't the same as enforcing it to be allowed. If there's regulation, like with ending roaming charges between countries, then it's required to be followed simultaneously across the EU. If there's a directive, like the Working Time Directive, goals of legislation are set out and each member state is required to introduce legislation that implements it. There's also decisions (for one country for one issue), recommendations and opinions (obviously non binding).
There's also the Court of Justice which is the highest court, but only in EU matters. National courts can refer cases to it, or the commission/member states can bring cases against other member states, if they believe they are not following EU law. This would mean either they are not following a regulation, or that the state has not fully/correctly implemented a directive into their own national laws.
As I understand it, there's no specific regulation or directive aimed at gambling itself. There's things tangentially related (data protection, anti money laundering etc). But since there's no regulation or directive saying "gambling must be allowed", there's nothing stopping a member state banning it completely if they so wish.
The only point in which the EU might step in would be if the law was somehow discriminatory or inconsistent (e.g. we ban all foreign gambling sites, but not our own, we ban lottery tickets but not state run casinos, etc).
Germany has regulated it, (though states have slightly different regulations, some states even allowing online gambling, some banning all except the government run lottery).
Technically no, because EU directives aren't applied as written. They're goals for member states to make into national laws, which intentionally leaves them some leeway.
However, national law must reasonably satisfy EU directives, otherwise CJEU could determine that a member state is infringing EU law and fine them until they amend their law.
It also doesn't matter. It doesn't feel like it, but Win11 released almost 5 years ago (October 5, 2021) and there's already rumors of a Win12 in the near future.
We're way past the "release issues" phase and into the "it's pure incompetence" phase.
Oh wow, I hadn't even paid any attention to that. To me Windows 11 was released on October 1, 2024, when the LTSC version came out, and is roughly when I upgraded my gaming PC to the said LTSC build from the previous Windows 10 LTSC build.
There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.
Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).
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