EU discussion / and other European countries

Red Star One said:
I'm fecking balling tonight like there's no tomorrow, it's an excellent result by the looks of an exit poll so for and it seems like PiS (Law and Justice) is set to lose power with almost no way to build a majority. Incredible for so many reasons - turnout at around 74% is astonishing and something we've never seen before. PiS had a huge unfair advantage due to their takeover of public and some regional media and numerous other filthy, plain illegal or just shockingly bad taste tricks they did. We've been on a course to become another Hungary and stay as an oligarchish authoritarian state with one party for decades. Winning today is huge and it's the first time in many years I can feel any optimistic about Poland and the direction it's heading.
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I'm a little hesitant to be positive cause I read a piece about exit polls in Slowakia pointing to a leftist win - only for the right to win anyway. But here's hoping! I think it would be huge for Poland, and also very positive for the EU.
 
Exit polls may paint too bright of a picture for the opposition, Poland isn't exactly a left-wing nation, so i will believe it when i see it, that the current government loses.
 
Cheimoon said:
I'm a little hesitant to be positive cause I read a piece about exit polls in Slowakia pointing to a leftist win - only for the right to win anyway. But here's hoping! I think it would be huge for Poland, and also very positive for the EU.
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Late polls just started coming in and the adjustments are minimal, PiS went from 36.8% to 36.6%. Something unprecedented would have to happen for them to get the majority, even if they were to coalition with nationalists.
 
Lemoor said:
Late polls just started coming in and the adjustments are minimal, PiS went from 36.8% to 36.6%. Something unprecedented would have to happen for them to get the majority, even if they were to coalition with nationalists.
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Indeed. I am usually skeptical about celebrating too early, but with the results coming in slowly it seems like it will be next to impossible for PiS to get the majority. Get fecking in
 


We all know where this is going....
 
nimic said:
I don't understand. Isn't the Euro already digital? What's the difference?
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It's a cryptocurrency. I'm not sure why the latest step requires an announcement all of a sudden. They've been looking into this for years along with every other central bank on the planet.
 
nimic said:
But why though?
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It's the first step of phasing out cash altogether. It will give governments more control by allowing them to be able to track all payments far easier. It will also make it much harder to buy things that usually require cash for whatever reason. The digitisation of currency is basically a huge invasion of privacy and an assault on personal freedom.
 
P-Ro said:
It's the first step of phasing out cash altogether. It will give governments more control by allowing them to be able to track all payments far easier. It will also make it much harder to buy things that usually require cash for whatever reason. The digitisation of currency is basically a huge invasion of privacy and an assault on personal freedom.
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But why would you need a special digital currency for that? Nobody uses cash already in Norway, with very few exceptions. There have been some disputes about having to accept cash, but it's definitely already well on its way to a cashless society.
 
nimic said:
But why would you need a special digital currency for that? Nobody uses cash already in Norway, with very few exceptions. There have been some disputes about having to accept cash, but it's definitely already well on its way to a cashless society.
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Cash is still used a lot all over the europe from my experience.

(while it's blunted in the states)
 
nimic said:
But why would you need a special digital currency for that? Nobody uses cash already in Norway, with very few exceptions. There have been some disputes about having to accept cash, but it's definitely already well on its way to a cashless society.
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Your financial data currently sits with the banks and in order to access that data, governments generally need to apply for a court order and provide a lot of evidence to show that they have a legitimate need for that information to be disclosed. The digitisation of currency removes that barrier and it's not hard to see what that will lead to.
 
Knowing EU and their politics, this will come to hunt in down in few years as terrible decision that they didn't think through, no doubt.
 
P-Ro said:
Your financial data currently sits with the banks and in order to access that data, governments generally need to apply for a court order and provide a lot of evidence to show that they have a legitimate need for that information to be disclosed. The digitisation of currency removes that barrier and it's not hard to see what that will lead to.
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Well, that's another reason for Norwegians to vote no if we ever have a 3rd EU vote, I guess. I can't see that ever happening in here.
 
nimic said:
But why would you need a special digital currency for that? Nobody uses cash already in Norway, with very few exceptions. There have been some disputes about having to accept cash, but it's definitely already well on its way to a cashless society.
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Because the settlement process of moving money around involves numerous counterparties, systems, clearing houses and so on. A digital currency on a distributed ledger doesn't need any of that.

Don't worry about the access to your financial data, banks have been legally required to disclose all that for years now.
 
11101 said:
Because the settlement process of moving money around involves numerous counterparties, systems, clearing houses and so on. A digital currency on a distributed ledger doesn't need any of that.

Don't worry about the access to your financial data, banks have been legally required to disclose all that for years now.
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I don't worry about my financial data. The government already has all of it, which is how know how much I should pay in taxes. I don't know about the process of moving money around, but it seems to be working fairly smoothly in Norway. Everything happens digitally already.
 
11101 said:
Don't worry about the access to your financial data, banks have been legally required to disclose all that for years now.
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That's a huge understatement. Currently in the UK the banks will only share transactional information with government agencies if they suspect the accounts are being used for criminality and money laundering. The government don't know how much is in your current account, yet alone how you spend your money on a day to day basis. As I already mentioned, currently the government agencies need to to go court and convince a judge to approve the request to see confidential information like bank statements. These requests often get rejected because the judiciary are naturally suspicious of government interference into the private life of individuals. Going from what we have now to a centralised digital currency overseen by a public body is a massive cause for concern and erosion of the right to privacy.
 
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P-Ro said:
That's a huge understatement. Currently in the UK the banks will only share transactional information with government agencies if they suspect the accounts are being used for criminality and money laundering. The government don't know how much is in your current account, yet alone how you spend your money on a day to day basis. As I already mentioned, currently the government agencies need to to go court and convince a judge to approve the request to see confidential information like bank statements. These requests often get rejected because the judiciary are naturally suspicious of government interference into the private life of individuals. Going from what we have now to a centralised digital currency overseen by a public body is a massive cause for concern and erosion of the right to privacy.
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I'm afraid they do. Every year all banks must upload your accounts and balances for any government to see. Virtually all countries signed up to it.

But you are right in that day to day transactions are not shown.
 
11101 said:
I'm afraid they do. Every year all banks must upload your accounts and balances for any government to see. Virtually all countries signed up to it.

But you are right in that day to day transactions are not shown.
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Ah apologies, I see it's a relatively new thing introduced in 2020. I specifically said current accounts in my previous post because I knew the interest from interest bearing accounts was disclosed so effectively the real time balance was also disclosed . Frankly the bank balance thing isn't what I'm concerned about anyway, it's the transactional data.
 
nimic said:
But why would you need a special digital currency for that? Nobody uses cash already in Norway, with very few exceptions. There have been some disputes about having to accept cash, but it's definitely already well on its way to a cashless society.
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They could just call it a software upgrade to improve the way money is moved around to improve tracking and speed (i.e remove the numerous companies required to work together with different systems to get it working with thousands of banks).

Distributed ledgers were always going to be the next step as it gives them full control, a single "database" for all transactions and less companies to pay to do it.
 
utdalltheway said:
Time to remove Hungary from the EU?
And also time to change the rules requiring unanimity in votes.
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I don't think there's a mechanism to remove countries is there?

Something requiring a change to unanimity would be both a huge opportunity and a hugely risky period for the EU I think.
 
utdalltheway said:
Time to remove Hungary from the EU?
And also time to change the rules requiring unanimity in votes.
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That's not how it works, not everyone handles countries that don't align with their own interests like the US does.

Hungary is also a textbook example of the downside of the blob strategy.
 
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VorZakone said:
Thoughts?

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Europe is definitely far behind in tech (computers) and basically non-existent in AI. Essentially the only two AI EU companies who are worth anything interesting are Mistral (a startup of 18 people doing fundamental research) and Helsing which is part German, part UK (a Palantir European version). There are dozens of US equivalents of them, not including the big tech companies.

What is worse for EU is that even big tech companies who have presence in Europe are mostly in UK and Switzerland. Google has the European headquarters in Zurich, DeepMind is in London, Meta’s biggest offices are in London and Zurich, Nvidia’s biggest is in Zurich, Microsoft’s biggest European office is in Cambridge. The cool fundamental research companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are opening their second offices in London. From Chinese ones, Bytedance has presence only in London, while Huawei is pretty much anywhere in Europe (Alibaba and Tencent have no presence in Europe). So for reasons, US companies are not that much focused in the EU. There are some European big companies who have started doing some AI research like Airbus, Siemens/Bosch, VW but they are not even players (as a personal anecdote, in my last job search I applied to Airbus as a safe option just in case I fail everywhere else, and yes, it was that easy to get in).

In general, I am for heavy regulations in AI, and for them to be as strict as possible, cause I genuinely believe that this discovery will decide the future of humanity. But EU should care much more for innovation rather than regulation. They are orders of magnitudes behind the US and China in AI field, EU’s strongest country Germany is below UK, and probably below Israel and Switzerland in the field. Even UAE is starting to produce better AI research than EU, Saudi Arabia is also entering the game, but EU is sleeping on this. So they can regulate all they want, but if they have nothing to show in innovation, there is not much they can do. They do not have a significant influence over the US and China’s companies which are the ones who lead the innovation.

Talking about regulation, at the contrary, I think that the US and China should go heavy in regulation (and in an ideal world, collaborating). I think it is a very hard field to regulate though for two reasons: 1) no one really understand how these models really work, 2) for any regulation to be worth it, you need deep expertise. Good engineers/researchers are paid 300-500k/year, great ones twice as much, so very hard to attract talent to work for the government where it does not pay near as much.
 
They are fecked, and many other smaller countries that are supporting them could be fecked too.

People are in demand of new homes/apartments, but considering how high interest rates are at the moment, people have stopped buying, so construction companies are at their lowest point in years from what I have heard too. So many suppliers of these construction companies are having problems of selling their products too, chain reaction.

I am not quite sure how on earth are interest rates here in Bosnia much lower than one in Germany for your average working man, are they fecking nuts? Are they intentionally trying to sabotage their country?
 
I think the short-term use of nuclear over the next 30 years is imperative to moving from carbon sources and Germany have gone too early like a few others by the looks of it. If they can't restart them increased demand will go back to gas / coal. Reduced demand for electricity doesn't necessarily mean lower production though - there might be, but the graphs don't show that.
 
I've seen a lot of hyperbole on Reddit and Twitter. Anyone know the official German decision making on nuclear? What were the policies taken and why?
 
VorZakone said:
I've seen a lot of hyperbole on Reddit and Twitter. Anyone know the official German decision making on nuclear? What were the policies taken and why?
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People got scared after Fukushima, and Germans being Germans, went all in (or in this case out), and decided to turn them off. Didn't help that the Green party was also vehemently against them.

I found it very weird how very intelligent YOUNG people, who are left wing, were voting Green or SPD were completely in agreement that nuclear is evil and should be turned down. We also saw in Caf how German posters, who tend to be sensitive any time Germany is criticized, were defending that decision.
 
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