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Apple, Google Could Face Large Fines Under New UK Digital Consumer Bill
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That article is over a year old, That bill is dead as of now, new Congress this year, has to be reintroduced, I am guessing you have no idea how many bills are introduced in congress, it means almost nothing, 99% go nowhere
Yes, and EU could figure how it its citizens can call one another and what cell Ojibwa they would use. And how they would search the internet.
Pretty sure they’d not forgive Apple easily for walking away from 1/4 of their yearly revenue. It’s a minor inconvenience to deal with the regulation vs giving up all that revenue and profile.
This makes no sense.
1. The economic boom and the industrial revolution, began in America in the 1800s. Very limited government.
2. Russia is over-regulated, insanely so, with the government's hand in everything. Thus, the corruption and incompetence.
Well maybe not. Could be a permanent rift with the United States. Who knows? So another large company can step in to fill the void.
I’m in the outback(auf dem Land), the dogs are the minor problem, but the COWs, the loud COWs…sounds like they adapted the one from the EU
You think those regulations are bad? Google what an "Ordnungsamt" is.
Here are a few examples of Germany:
I could go on and on
- You are not allowed to vacuum clean between 1pm and 3 pm (resting hour) or Sundays*
- You are not allowed to throw away your glass after 7 pm or on Sundays (too much noise)
- Your dog leash is only allowed to be 1 meters on streets or 2 meters at parks **
- You are not allowed to wash your car on the street (oil could spill to the ground water)
- Your dog is only allowed to bark 30 minutes per day, only 10 minutes at a time. No barking between 1 pm and 3 pm and 7 pm to 8 am
- No loud noise after 10 pm (neighbors are very serious about that one!)
*people still do it and so do I but if you have a bad relationship with your neighbours, they could call the "Ordnungsamt"
** depends on the city / state
Note: I only posted this to point out the cultural differences and why those company regulations may seem excessive to Americans but pretty normal and reasonable to us since we are "used to it"
Just joking, I love the cow noise!
This makes perfect sense unless you still subscribe to the fallacy of perfect markets that somehow police themselves. The America of 1800 is rather a different beast from today's mixed economy. No more gold rushes, slave plantations or driving off native Americans from their ancestral homes so their land can be exploited for the resources it held. However, if you want to go back to the limited government you think you had at the time and expect the American people to thrive then be my guest.
Russia is not a functioning democracy today. Whether it has many or few laws now makes little difference as the military and security services run the show there. There is basically only one law that matters there: You do whatever the president commands.
If said alternatives don't already exist, they never will and extracting money from other companies isn't going to cause them to sprout. This is extortion, plain and simple.
We haven't been anything like Cuba or Soviet at any time. We never had 5-year plans or Kolkhozes or anything even close.
The "monopolies" that existed were inherited from the time when the King ruled the country. Railway? "Royal railroad" founded in 1856. Mail? "Royal Mail" founded in 1636. Telephone? "Royal Telegraph" founded 1853. And so on. They kept doing business as usual when the King was ousted, just that the King was no longer running things (he never did, it has always been civil servants in charge), but the state. They were the largest in their field, but certainly not alone.
We had private alternatives to both mail and railways long before the huge old government owned companies were sold out, but we still have government owned huge companies, but they have to compete on an open market.
I'll gladly acknowledge that the last 30 years have seen more sellouts than at least I would've wanted, but the "socialism" here was never about owning, but making sure people got a fair salary.
We never had a revolution where the people took over means of production. Instead, "the Swedish Model" established in the 1930s rely on unions and collective bargaining. 88% of salaries are decided through collective bargaining. Employer federations and labour representatives bargain at the national level mediated by the government. For example: we're not allowed to go on a strike unless it has been decided by a union. Rail workes went on an 3 day unsanctioned strike last week in Stockholm. They are now being charged in court for "unlawful strike" and will have to pay a hefty fine, individually.
Around 30% of the workforce work in the public sector (myself included), compared to around 18-19% in the US.
Public spending is at 56% of GDP in Sweden, compared to 37% for the US (and we have a puny military in comparison). Tax burden is at 44% of GDP, compared to 19% for the US.
To quote wikipedia:
"Some economists have referred to the Nordic economic model as a form of "cuddly capitalism", with low levels of inequality, generous welfare states, and reduced concentration of top incomes, contrasting it with the more "cut-throat capitalism" of the United States, which has high levels of inequality and a larger concentration of top incomes, among others social inequalities."
We have never been "hardcore socialists", but have not embraced capitalism fully either but instead tried to be inbetween. The main goal has always been about fighting social inequalities, the thing that almost ruined Sweden during the 1800s. We've had private alternatives for ages, its just that we've gotten more of them in recent time, but the goal of fighting social inequalities have not changed, money is being "taken from the rich and given to the poor".
It's what's called a Ghost Tax, in that government imposes stricter regulations on corporate bodies, who then impose the cost of compliance onto the customer through higher prices.
Then you add the VAT, and it's a nightmare.
Yes, VAT plus higher regulatory costs force EU companies to impose higher prices on consumers to recoup.
I will confess I'm not entirely sure whether this is parody or not. In any case, I'd think the Industrial Revolution starting in Britain may have had a thing or two to do with the rise of modern capitalism, as did the various New Deal policies in the US, the rise of social democracy in Europe, the introduction of healthcare, workers rights fought for by unions etc etc etc with mortality rates and the betterment of the population.
Ah, yes, we all remember those wonderful years prior to WW1 and in the inter-war period. The poor houses, poor health, child labour, the Great Depression, the rise of extremism not least because of economic deprivation and income inequality. It was all good fun. Good old days!
I don't know why every proponent of privately run services likes to proclaim that things cost money as if that's a revelation and somehow an original thought.
Of course services cost money, no one is disputing that. The point of contention seems to be that somehow meeting that cost through taxes is bad, even where that would mean that the cost is lower, while making people pay more to private insurance companies is somehow good because ... things cost money. That's not an argument.
So life isn't fair, no one said it was. That doesn't mean we're completely devoid of policy choices. We can either make it unfair by making some people cover the tab of those who can't, or refuse service or financially destroy those who can't afford insurance. Not having adequate healthcare isn't really a choice for most people and actually costs society a lot of money. The only upside, a lot of people get to choose which healthcare plan that won't meed their needs they want to go with. Gold star!
What kind of Ayn Rand fan fiction is this?! Did the whole push for neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s somehow escape you? Heard of Reagan and Thatcher?
The idea that capitalist societies are good meritocracies is as much a myth as that the socialist states in Eastern Europe were somehow workers' utopias.
There's plenty of shades of grey between the extremes and ultra capitalism just creates its own self-perpetuating elite class. Capitalist market economies work in the long-term because the state evens the odds to some degree.
Anything else is just wishful thinking and capitalist fanboying.
Big corporations may wield more power and have more influence over your life than government, yet are accountable to no one other than their shareholders. Your whole line of reasoning seems to suggest that they should be free of social responsibility or obligations.
It's a recipe for disaster and who has to pick up the tab when things break? Without exception its the state and the taxpayer, so there's your mandate for reining them in.
He's deluded. Capitalism was not a theory until the mid 1800s, based off the seminal work by the Scot Adam Smith.
The problem is that Marxism forfeited the argument that Capitalism had propagated in the halls of European monarchies after the success of the French Revolution's Laissez-Faire ideas from Rousseau. That combined with the Assignat proving successful to prolong a liquidity crisis also led to Fiat Currencies the US and Europe would experiment with in the 1840s-1890s (US Greenback the most well known to Americans).
The forfeited argument is the Social Revolution fantasy Marx proposes later where governments fall to rational communism, which is nothing more than Anarcho-Syndicalism. This is because Marx argues that government is the source of power to steamroll communism overthrow of bourgeoisie.
Marx, unfortunately, did not leave anything more than ad hominems against greed. This is where socialism rises as Stalin eliminates the idealist naïveté in Lenin and Trotsky. So, bourgeioisie rose in CCCP, where wealth was party connection, not money.
Same happened in China, however the Chinese such as Deng foresaw this and made the shift back to western capitalism as a hedge against political civil wars like Brezhnev and eventually Gorbachev suffered. No reason to make political reforms if the party is materially wealthy. And then the government does not need to regulate industry, as it is party controlled. Large corporations in turn become Ayn Rand's wet dream of government run capitalism in, ironically enough, Communist China.
Somehow the Chinese intelligentsia found the path Lenin had failed to recognize, the Social Question Marx had posited and failed to listen to Louis LeBlanc and others on. The path to power is not through union/corporate antagonism such as in the USA or EU, or through government mandated unionism (communism) in the CCCP , but through a Roman Republic style government that gives spoils to party enthusiasts who in turn give power to the "communist" party.
They have been attempting this in Europe and the USA for decades but because of open politics, the left-right antagonism of the French Revolution consumes economic cycles focused more on funny obsessions such as hats, flags, clothing styles, bedroom and bathroom preferences, as well as arguments over who is allowed to be rich based on political beliefs.
So, you two can have some stupid argument over the founding fathers or who has a larger "moral" or "ethical" requirement in the society based on a confused and schizophrenic post modern "philosophy" formed as a PTSD reaction to World War II.
Or you can recognize that the USA and EU have been a Roman Republic style oligarchy since about the 1980s when all of the major walls of the society were deconstructed by drug binging college academics more sympathetic to the anarchy of the CCCP's bureaucratic academic strangled collapse than the judgmental and extremely focused simplicity of Chinese ambition and human understanding.
In simple, there is no onus on a corporation to act in good faith towards their consumers. Government has been used as a cudgel of financially jealous academics that think that they deserve all the wealth and power like in the USSR than some random idiot from Cupertino who peddles high quality electronics.
How do you have less competition with less regulation and more innovation?
That doesn’t make sense
I have stage 4 cancer. I thank god that I live in the US rather than anywhere in Europe or Canada. The time between detection at a (free) screening exam and getting a first scan and seeing a surgeon was a little more than a week. I saw an oncologist a week after that. Chemotherapy started about 3 weeks from initial detection. First surgery was about 4 months after detection, which, given medical considerations of "how it works" was about as soon as possible. Hard to complain about any of that, compared to what I read about the NHS in the UK or Canada and their ridiculous wait times and hoops to see specialists. As for cost, insurance covered most of it. My total out of pocket cost, a little more than a year into it, has been a few thousand bucks, thanks to my private, for-profit insurance company. Big deal. It's way cheaper than having a huge portion of my income confiscated as taxes cover healthcare costs.
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It’s more like government boosting their coffer than anything else. A real fine would have To exceed company‘s revenue, or so high that company would need to work very hard to recover. But some $28 billion vs $284 billion doesn’t feel like a substantial amount and barely would make any difference.
How can you manage to read at all? Or does your brain just skip over the "monopoly" part as a part of some orwellian self-discipline?
Funny thing, those who like to comment on other’s intelligence tend to be the smooth brains
Oh yeah monopoly? Riiight
So again, re read what I wrote and comment better
Are you saying that without iPhones no one in the EU will be able to make phone calls? What a flat argument. Plenty of other devices out there?
Good for you, I hope you defeat it, cancer is horrible!
But if you, like my son, were born early (preterm birth) by 2 months, what would your situation look like? Afaik, preemies aren't really liked by US insurance companies and some downright deny coverage.
We spent a month in NICU and had another 2 months of home care. During the care, we were both allowed to be off work with pay and only after those months did we start our 16 months of parental leave.
What did we pay out of pocket? Zero. Will he have problem getting heathcare in the future? Nope.
Both my parents had cancer, both were admitted to hospital for care the same day(!) of detection.
Having a preemie and 2 parents who passed away in cancer after weeks of hospital treatment you really start to appreciate free healthcare!
I wonder whether our lexicons are different, we understand that words like socialism and liberal are used as a pejorative in the USA. A word used to attack and shut down ideas avoiding further debate.
For me socialism can’t work, individuals have greed which corrupts the philosophy, but we can certainly benefit from aspects of it, these are typically the services that government provide. It is understood that capitalism can play in these areas but that fundamentally it will only chase profit and not worry about total coverage. For example eduction, it has to be provided by the state, markets can tinker but they could never operate profitably and provide total coverage.
Capitalism in its purest form cannot work, the profit chasing ignores the poorest/weakest citizens. For example health care in the USA, if you are very poor, you get a very poor service provided by the state.
I think we agree more than disagree. I am just more realistic that socialist ideas are common place in societies that call themselves 'capitalist' and to use the word as a pejorative sells a country short.
We recently moved to more capitalism. In the 80s government sold off all of our utilities to private marketeers. They are now largely owned by a) banks b) Other nations utilities firm (Energie de France). Whichever owns them is providing a very expensive service whilst investing virtually nothing in infrastructure. Currently our water companies are discharging raw sewage into our rivers thousands of times a day. We could do with a little more socialism here I think.
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