Top irony is watching a journalist whining about how this “makes us dependent on China” because they sell infrastructure for renewables, as if it was not plainly our fault for having failed to, and obstinately continue to refuse investing in it, despite it being an obvious way to go for Europe.
Yeah, it is indeed external influence which somewhat competes with democracy. What’s really bad is the reaching of consensus within the government via mostly trust in designated experts, instead of the voters individually studying the topic.
Ok makes sense, we then have basically indirect influence of the majority via trust in smaller groups of designated specialists.
Ok and they still need majority vote… often, at least? In which case there seem to be a lot of politicians who are just misinformed (if the lobbying has negative consequences), which doesn’t relate to lobbying specifically but their general decision making.
So mostly not a consequence specifically of lobbying, if the majority votes due to actual conviction. Rather of disinformation/laziness, which will affect non-lobby initiated proposals too.
The part with the smaller committees sounds anti-democratic. The later is a different problem (politicians being misinformed/lazy is not specific to lobbying)
So the lobbying is, in each particular instance, of potentially 100+ people (in the case of EU parliament 300 or so +), likely across parties? That seems difficult to organize, at first sight.
But why do individual politicians or groups have the power to get these things through? Is it not subjected to a majority vote or something?
The reality of the situation is more or less clear, but it helps to understand how things are supposed to work. They make their case and then what? does the audience decide on its own? Otherwise it seems difficult to buy the entire… voting majority?
That “ready” is just typical political advertising speech. Could have been worded more carefully, but it’s forgivable. As long as the git repo and website correctly identify it as a demo/prototype, it seems fine to me. E.g. not using the security enclave is totally fine for a demo. It doesn’t affect the general protocol design. There’s a lot of hostility both to these initiatives as well as to the EU (often by different actors, there’s e.g other countries pushing for less privacy respecting mechanisms), so the clever criticism tends towards nitpicking. There’s actually merit in releasing such an ambitious project as open source and so early, which even with the nitpicking and negativity, is a good thing.
What’s the official stage of it? was it already intended to be released? If not it might be less of an issue.
Anyway it’s good that it’s open source. At the very least it encourages public discussion and in this case noticing the flaws.
I keep reading about lobbying. I don’t fully understand how it works. Are there requirements for disclosure, approval and public transparency, or is this just something individual politicians or groups can do just like that?
As far as I understand, there’s no need for “verified apps”. The third party just verifies your token with the emitter.
Government could generate anonymous time-limited access tokens for specific scopes like age, citizenship, etc.
These ape NFTs are also the ugliest and dumbest thing ever. Their faces look like hairy testicles. Whoever spent more than like $0.5 for this, fully deserves the outcome.
The other day there was a discussion here about just having government id generate a token that can anonymously verify the user’s age. It’s not as privacy friendly as full anonymity, but at least it’s only between you and the government, which you have to trust for a lot of things anyway. And supposedly some countries in Europe are implementing it that way. Why is this not brought up more?
But on public discussions, also remember that there can be undecided people watching / reading too.
The entire world needs to stop. It’s seemingly being considered to drop nukes on millions of people like you and me for no reason. Hello? This is not a matter of tapping on little hearts and arrows on social media, we’re all financing this, in one way or another, and allowing it to happen.
Well said, it lives in the realm of posturing, saying things because of how they sound and not actually thinking and wanting to solve problems.
Hundreds of millions? That might be exaggerating a bit.