The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
Agreed!Two things here: 1. Totally deficient regulatory framework and 2. The argument for those on the Right or Left is - do those running the company bear the consequences of their actions? Do public servants? Almost never. We need water, power, roads etc., So define the goals for these and get people to run them (public or private) who will bear consequences for a F.U. Politicians almost never face the consequences of their decisions. If there was at least some linkage the future might be different. That is a fundamental problem with bureaucracy as well.
As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
We meet this casual use of acronyms all too often on HN. It only takes a line or two to enable everyone to follow along without recourse to a search expedition.
You wouldn't spell out HyperText Markup Language each time.
RDF is one of those things it's easy to assume everybody has already encountered. RDF feels fundamental. Its predicate triplet design is fundamental, almost obvious (in hindsight?). It could not have not existed. Had RDF not existed, something else very similar would have appeared, it's a certitude.
But we might have reached a point where this assumption is quite false though. RDF and the semantic web were hot in the early 2000s, which was twenty years ago after all.
Tim Berners-Lee, now co-founder of Inrupt [0], has launched Solid Project [1] where he kept working on semantic web concepts and linked data specs. Looks like Inrupt went full AI today. What ailed Solid was I think the academic approach mentioned in other comments, the heavy-weight specification process (inspired by W3C), and overlooking the fact that you better get your dev community on board and excited as a good road to adoption. Inrupt didn't spend much attention to their Solid community, except for the active followers in their chat channels, and were directly targeting commercial customers. I don't know the health of Solid project today, but there are a couple of interesting projects around social networking and the fediverse.
My impression too. I felt that in the past "solid apps" in practice boiled down to "rebooting the semantic web", and adopting / maturing the whole host of specs needed for end-to-end generic linked data app development defined by open standards. Solid as "Out with the old, in with the new. The web done right, this time". Which may be too ambitious.
Update: Reboot the semantic web seems still the goal. From About Solid page [0]:
> Solid is an open standard for structuring data, digital identities, and applications on the Web. Solid aims to support the creation of the Web as Sir Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned it when he invented the Web at CERN in 1989. Tim sometimes refers to Solid as “the web - take 3" — or Web3.0 — because Solid integrates a new layer of standards into the Web we already have. The goal of Solid is for people to have more agency over their data.
A more manageable scope for the project would be "Personal data vaults for self-sovereign linked data" or something like that. That positioning would make me more interested than current "let's reboot" call-to-action.
Right. I was thinking "RDF - vaguely remember that as some XML thing from Semantic Web era".
Yup, it's still that RDF. Inevitably, it had to be converted to new JSON-like syntaxes.
It reminds me of the "is-a" predicate era of AI. That turned out to be not too useful for formal reasoning about the real world. As as a representation for SQL database output going into a LLM, though, it might go somewhere. Maybe.
Probably because the output of an SQL query is positional, and LLMs suck at positional representations.
Well yes of course but don't think this couldn't happen here either. A lot of countries like France or Germany are very close to falling to the same extreme right forces the US has.
I don't think unlimited free speech is the answer anymore. I see a lot of bad actors taking advantage of this. For example a lot of republican anti-LGBT propaganda is flowing across the Atlantic through Instagram and TikTok. A lot of people are now repeating the same tired tropes like the toilet thing (which make no sense of you think about it). A lot of people making themselves angry about made-up scenarios that aren't even real. These are organised manipulation campaigns targeted at demonising entire communities.
This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France. This is not a good thing IMO. We need buttons to be able to push to disconnect from that when it gets too bad.
So I don't think this is a bad thing. Though Thierry Breton was a stooge who was mainly interested in promoting his befriended French tech companies yes. Still, even bad people can produce ok things sometimes.
Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information. We should never accept censorship.
> This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France.
These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
> Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information.
This doesn't work. As an example the toilet BS. So many times I've tried to explain that that is such an unimaginable scenario that it's completely unrealistic, let alone warrant the amount of anger against the community. But people don't care. They love being angry at someone, they revel in it. They don't want to know facts, they want to be angry and rile against something.
The same with the migrant thing. They're blamed for everything that's wrong in society. Even though these things are actually the result of decades of externalisation to the poorest in society, driven by right-wing pro-corporate policies. They try to convert that into even more right-wing votes.
> These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
It's not the will of the people but of a small group of tiktok influencers that are riling the people up without any actual facts.
It's the same in the US, it's not about facts anymore. Most of the things Trump says are provably false. Yet his followers worship him. It's become a religion. You can't fight that with facts. Nor does this 'will of the people' originate with the actual people. Nobody wakes up and thinks "Hey let's cut healthcare today", "Hey, let's hate on all the gay people that never harmed anyone". They're slowly manipulated into it.
What we have to do is stop the algorithms that try to maximise 'engagement' with hate. And the dark forces that publish all this misinformation.
Have you been to Berlin, Frankfurt, Antwerp or Brussels recently? Not watch some videos but actually been there? These cities are slowly turning to drug-ridden illegal immigrant hellholes. Many of those immigrants have been order to leave but the governments do not follow thru and they just stay. The current governments do nothing to stop it and EU is pushing for more immigration and have established quotas for countries to take in immigrants.
Europe is losing its safety and identity in pursue of "diversity". The immigrants refuse to integrate and instead bring their work ethic, religions and habits that made their own countries shitholes they are desperate to leave. European people naturally do not want this. What do the right-wing parties have in common? They are strictly against immigration. They will gain more and more support as long as nothing changes and rightfully so.
This is not true. The EU isn't asking for immigrants to "pursue diversity". It's just about sharing the load of legitimate asylum seekers as currently the load is too heavily borne by the border countries.
And we had crime before we had immigrants. It's a feature of social economic status not ethnicity. Before we had the Moroccan gangs in Amsterdam we had the local Mafia which was just as bad.
I do think immigrants without a permit should be evicted but the problem is that many countries like Morocco refuse to take them back.
And yes I live in a major EU city. The drug problem isn't as bad as you describe. And it's more a result of police budget cutting than immigration.
> On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
No one - the EU gets its money from force: taxes on citizens and fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
> Seems like we agree: you don't need to advertise when you can force money out of people through VAT and rent-seek your citizens as customers.
Not really. Like, the EU only has the powers given to it by national governments, 1% of VAT is probably too low tbh as there's a bunch of stuff that would be better solved at EU level. The politics around that are pretty tricky though.
"[Bits of] the universe observing itself" is indisputably true. And we know (as far as we can tell) that maintaining our component atoms within a certain kind of dynamic pattern is a prerequisite for what we experience as life and consciousness. Nothing metaphysical just stubborn fact.
Rather surprising then that we have the Commonwealth of 56 member states, most of which were former territories of the British Empire from which the Commonwealth developed. They are connected through their use of the English language and cultural and historical ties. Doubtless these countries have appalling memories of the evils perpetrated by the Brits. And yet they even accept Charles III as the head of the Commonwealth. Also amazing that in most colonies independence was achieved without a shot being fired.
Unbelievable eh? Maybe it's a case of Stockholm Syndrome.
On the other hand it could have been worse. We should remember that for almost every colonized people, the alternative to British Jurisdiction was not unmolested progress towards modernity but conquest by someone else, the French, the Germans,the Turks, the Russians,the Japanese and worst of all, the Belgians.
