Banning sexual materials is such a vague idea, and the wording of this bill is so vague, that it can be used to justify withholding funds to force schools to ban anything. A book where two characters of the same assigned gender kiss? Banned. A book where the main character expresses thoughts of gender dysphoria? Banned. A book where a male character dresses up in heels and applies makeup and dances? Banned. Meanwhile the same content but presented in a heteronormative way? Totally fine!
It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.
In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.
Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.
First, the article is sensationalist, the bill says nothing about banning books. It says the federal government will not fund any programs that promote "sexually oriented material".
We don’t teach creationism in school for the same reason we don’t teach the earth is flat: it’s a factually wrong, non-scientific idea. I don’t want someone telling my kids that the moon is made of cheese, nor do I want them lying that the earth is only 6,000 years old. That’s not censorship. That’s keeping science class scientific.
Why would there be an expectation that a public school would teach biblical nonsense? That's not censorship, it falls under a different high level principle of separating that from the state. It's also not censorship that schools don't teach pickpocketing. Stretching the word censorship doesn't make your case, it's transparently specious.
Equating both of these things is dangerous and wrong. It’s not as if these are the same things. Creationism is factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science. Pretending that the position of “we ban teaching things that are known to be wrong” and the position that “we ban teaching things that are by modern standards correct, but uncomfortable to our world view” is a large part of the problem.
> Equating both of these things is dangerous and wrong. It’s not as if these are the same things.
What's really going on is you seem so caught up in your own biases that you can't even see what you're doing.
> Creationism is factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science. Pretending that the position of “we ban teaching things that are known to be wrong”
Do you really think the reason teaching creationism in American public schools is banned is because it's "factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science?"
I kinda get the impression you may be someone who has a hard time distinguishing between your subjective view and objectivity. This controversy isn't in any way shape or form about "book bans," it's really about the political decision about whose subjective view will prevail in schools. But at least one side won't admit that, because there's power in gaslighting people and power in mischaracterizing things to hit certain buttons. Regardless of who wins, the same types of "curation" activities will occur in school libraries.
No. Not that you're making a good faith suggestion with your false dichotomy.
Just because someone doesn't want to keep their kid away from water doesn't mean they are okay with throwing them off a boat. There is a middle way, where you teach them to swim.
I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.
You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.
They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.
A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.
The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.
The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.
Eleven "super requesters" — those who raised concerns about or challenged
15 or more titles at a time — accounted for 73% of the targeted books.
They often referred to lists of books originating in other districts
or from online forums. Some had no children in the district.
In nearly 60 cases, the school district didn’t own the book
the requester sought to remove.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
I imagine if the current administration does, Europe could retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech or even doing a mass sell off of US treasuries. Europe is admittedly not in a position of strength compared to the US, but there are still a lot of levers they can pull.
The problem is that the core technology that makes ASML's tech valuable is the EUV light source which is entirely designed, developed, and manufactured by Cymer in California, which is a US company that ASML acquired in 2013. That acquisition was permitted only under strict technology sharing and export-control agreements.
I have no doubt that this administration would forcefully "take back" Cymer if the EU tried to restrict access to ASML lithography machines. They would force a sale back to US ownership, TikTok-style.
This framing gets the supply chain backwards. Cymer makes the source vessel, the part that generates tin droplets and converts them to plasma. But the laser that actually powers that process is a 17-ton, 40kW CO2 beast with 457,000 parts, built exclusively by TRUMPF in Germany. And the optics, mirrors smooth to tens of picometers that literally no one else on Earth can make, come from Carl Zeiss, also German, organized as a foundation that no foreign government can force into a sale. ASML only manufactures about 15% of an EUV machine's components. The rest comes from roughly 1200 suppliers concentrated in Germany and the Netherlands. Seizing Cymer gets you one subsystem with no laser to drive it and no optics to focus it.
The real problem with this theory is that EUV isn't a product with a capturable bottleneck. It's more like a standing wave of institutional knowledge distributed across organizations that have been co-developing at picometer tolerances for 30 years. TRUMPF's leadership described the arrangement as a "virtually merged company" with open books across all three firms. That kind of integration knowledge doesn't transfer via acquisition. China has been throwing enormous resources at this with access to published research and former ASML engineers, and their prototype still isn’t expected to produce working chips until 2028-2030. Saying the US could grab Cymer and start producing EUV machines is like seizing a transmission plant and calling yourself a car manufacturer.
Yes, we all know that ASML is a multi-national effort, with critical technology components provided by several countries. The point is that the EUV light source is one of the critical technology components and it has not been replicated anywhere else (so far, see xLight founded by Dept. of Energy engineers and funded by the US gov).
It's a bargaining chip that this administration will undoubtedly use to make sure that US access to ASML lithography machines remains undisturbed.
You're missing the point. Nobody will take back anything since that hurts everyone, but if the US wanted they could license EUV tech to Nikon or Canon and give ASML a huge PITA of refreshed competition.
Similar to TRUMPF lasers and Zeiss optics, other companies from US and Japan like Coherent and Canon could have a crack at replicating the laser and mirrors given enough IP and resources if the US really wanted to decouple from ASML, since they're still man made objects, not magic things given by gods.
US is the richest country in the world and the second biggest manufacturer after China. Do you think the country that built the SR-72 and other sci-fi shit wouldn't be able to make a EUV lithography machine in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
>other companies from US and Japan like Coherent and Canon could have a crack at replicating the laser and mirrors given enough IP and resources if the US really wanted to decouple from ASML, since they're still man made objects, not magic things given by gods.
this exact same logic applies the other way, though... unless Cymer is selling magic objects given by gods?
>Do you think the country that built the SR-72 and other sci-fi shit wouldn't be able to make a EUV lithography machine in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
do you think that ASML (or TRUMPF or whatever non-US entity) would be unable to make the EUV light source in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
I agree with you, but that was my point exactly. No party holds all the cards to dictate the rules of the game like people bullish on ASML thought that they're somehow untouchable. They're untouchable because the US allows them to be because they play ball with the US admin and push back against rules they don't like from the Dutch government.
It's a gentlemen's agreement that will be held together by mutually assured destruction if one party tries to decouple completely.
The general decoupling from US tech you see has started after the general enshitification of major IT services from FFANG, not exclusively due to Trump, and not exclusively to US, Spotify is also seeing a lot of backlash.
>do you think that ASML (or TRUMPF or whatever non-US entity) would be unable to make the EUV light source in house if they were to treat it like a Manhattan project instead of a side hustle?
The EU(Germany, Spain and France) can't unite to build a next gen fighter jet together, can't decide how to tackle illegal mass migration, can't decide a sane energy policy that isn't hypocritical or anti-industry, or on a single direction on defeating Russia. A EUV Manhattan project is the least of their issues right now which moves the balance of power in the US court for the moment until EU members figure out how to work together.
> can't decide how to tackle illegal mass migration
the mass migration caused by american wars in the middle east you mean?
Also, frontex seems to be working fine so far.
>on a single direction on defeating Russia
unlike the US, which has stopped all military aid to ukraine in 2025, and seems to be favouring russia more and more.
Lets not forget, europe is increasing its military en masse mainly because on one hand you have the russian flattening ukraine, and on other hand you have the US demanding greenland.
>the mass migration caused by american wars in the middle east you mean?
Nobody forced the EU to open its borders. It's their job to defend their borders from intruders, foreign especially military aged males with no visa, instead of acting as a global charity with their taxpayers' money then wonder why the far right is booming and arrest them for hate speech.
>unlike the US, which has stopped all military aid to ukraine in 2025
This is news to me that doesn't math what Google returns. Care to back that up?
>and on other hand you have the US demanding greenland
That's bad indeed on the US, but EU can't even defend Ukraine from Russia, a broke-ass country, do you think they would have gone to war with the US over Greenland? The US can do this because the EE can't do anything.
EU does not have Open Borders anymore than Trump has open borders in US.
And good luck with fighting all of NATO in a conventional war. According to Trump US is such losers they even lost in Afghanistan against the Talibans. And now you wanna fight rest of NATO (that has more soldiers than US).
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet and in 1999 joined a consortium, including Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.
for everything inside the EU, i highly doubt it is.
For extraterritioral trade. The EU is large enough to trade with other countries in euros instead of dollars.
> I imagine if the current administration does, Europe could retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech […]
There is a bit of M.A.D. scenario: a bunch of components in ASML machines (like EUV light generation?) come from US companies. Also, the two main chip CAD software vendors (duopoly) are in the US.
I can’t imagine how any country would think the US is trustworthy enough to be the place where everyone stores their data. If companies cannot comply with data sovereignty laws then they shouldn’t exist at all. Personally, even as a US citizen, I’m hoping tech companies in Europe and Asia become independent enough to no longer be beholden to US interests. It’s clear that the era where any one country has global hegemony should end.
I do not trust anyone with my data. This is just my preference but every year I move further and further away from using the internet for anything other than making comments on this site and watching a few vloggers. In a few years I will not have more than 3 to 5 logins on anything and those will be value add and must be within driving distance. All critical services I use will require walking into a building in person.
If I could find a reputable construction company to build my underground home I would be a true troglodyte.
I looked at many of those. Plenty of people are indeed upgrading silos. I looked at the cost to repair and overhaul these facilities but it would be just a little more to do it right on my property with high performance high pressure concrete and do it right in a place outside of the nuclear sponge. Only challenge is getting the right people up here but I will not give up on the idea.
I somewhat agree but if I get contractors they will likely be coming from one or two states away. If the fecal matter is splattering the fan it is unlikely they will make it this far. I will also have the design reviewed by multiple third parties to identify security weaknesses and have those addressed as part of the contracts. And then of course there will be party poppers long before they get close.
This is all just fantasy of course as I have not yet found a highly rated company within a few states that have vast experience with upper-end UHPC 60K PSI which has to be done right the first time and I need to get the designs baked first addressing all the "Errm Achtuwallly" memes.
Other comments talk about society collapsing. I am totally fine with that. I will set up a copy of HN and make silly comments on it then as admin give myself points and reply using alternate accounts. Then I will start some contrarian arguments and then ragebait the contrarian personality. Another personality will step in and calm everything down. Then 48 hours later another alt will make a totally unrelated comment and just after that there will be spam for bitcoin in Uganda. All of this powered by the Sun and my farts. Some poor bastard will happen across this site on internet over CB radio.
Yes, everyone who works on the bunker will know about it; and all these billionaires are trying to build their survivalist camps but dont actually consider any of the easily/practically broken parts of society they implicitly rely on.
Realistically, society we know it won't survive if it dwindles to beneath a couple of millions.
yeah but also realistically if you have the money you don't build a bunker, you build a pseudo military installation, and ex military is where you find your "handymen" to take care of "housekeeping." of course, your ex military pals should be consulted regarding real estate because even here its location location location.
It seems to me that major US cloud companies are using politics to try to get more value from non-US data, which I believe will push the EU (and others) to accelerate the move to their own alternatives. This is another move that seems to sacrifice longer-term trust (and profits) to boost near-term profits.
Same. I don't trust the US as much as the rest of the world does not trust them. They want control with little to offer for it. My data and compute is safer offshore at this time.
Major US tech businesses are making money with analytics/ads though, so they would never roll out end-to-end encryption in a serious way. At least outside the US, a lot of E2E-encrypted services are popping up (Proton, Zeitkapsl, etc.).
I don't trust the small number of E2E US services at all. E.g., some of the companies that were/are in PRISM seem to have very convenient 'accidental' backdoors. E.g. WhatsApp doing backups on Google Drive without encryption by default on Android or Apple doing iCloud backups of iMessage that are not E2E encrypted unless you enable ADP. And even if you are wise enough to enable E2E in both cases, most people that you communicate with don't, because they use the defaults, so it's game over anyway.
There were four other countries in Five Eyes, and right now the UK and Australia have laws on the books that are ostensibly worse than the Cloud Act in the US if you're a foreign company with data hosted in those countries. That includes me, an American, who uses the Australian email service Fastmail.
In the EU, we have been fighting a bitter battle against Chat Control X.Y for some time now.
That won't change until Ursula von der Leyen goes. Her nickname in Germany (since 2009) is Zensursula, because she attempted to build a pan-German firewall.
She failed in Germany, but she may yet succeed in the entire EU.
This. When I look at why my life sucks and is on hard difficulty mode, it's not because I use US tech instead of EU tech. Most people and companies have bigger economic challenges right now trying to keep the lights on, than data sovereignty and domestic alternatives. My company just had a 3rd round of layoffs and its wasn't due to lack of EU SW.
The lack of data sovereignty does have large geopolitical consequences though. Without data sovereignty of EU government services and businesses, the US can blackmail EU continuously or even worse, in the case of e.g. a conflict over Greenland, cause chaos by turning off access to US tech. So for the EU, tech sovereignty is a matter of life and death.
Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism. So if we can bring down their sales Tesla-style, I'm all in for it.
>Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism.
Not true. The reason my Col is off the charts, salary low and housing unaffordable is due to EU central bank printing too much money leaving us holding the bags, government's zoning laws making housing expensive and them importing millions of immigrants despite record unemployment numbers to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing. None of this is done by US tech bros, it's all done by EU rulers and elites.
US tech bros is an orthogonal issue that distracts from the core issues.
The quantity theory of money is trivially shown to be nonsense just by considering what happens to savings (i.e. nothing). You need to up your analysis if you want to truly understand.
It is possible that curves are not linear. That is, it is possible that doing 1 of a thing is good, while doing 1000000 of a thing is bad. Your argument is the same as "you say you need water to survive? But what happens if you're trapped in a giant fish tank with no air pocket?" It is not a good argument.
You're absolutely right - human sentiment is always linear. If somebody likes eating pizza, they love being forcefed pizza 24/7 until their stomach explodes.
You've made accusations but have not brought arguments to support that my take on EU leaders and elites being the ones fucking us, our CoL and purchasing power, is wrong.
And savings absolutely did eventually get obliterated by excessive Covid money printing, what are you on about?
I've not made any accusations, nor do I think that the elites are not to blame. I said that "money printing" is not the problem here. The reason it's not the problem is because the quantity of money simply reflects savings. By focussing on "money printing", you're missing the actual problems. Arguably, that's the point, since the elite tend to do well when money is considered a scarce commodity.
Sure, spending might cause inflationary effects, but that's orthogonal to quantity (flows not stocks), but then economics is the science of confusing stocks with flows.
I can’t imagine such a thing either, but here in Europe plenty of organisations continue planning on increasing their reliance and lock-in on American tech corps.
It's public sector organisations and entities that are adopting more lock-in. We get the occasional news showing the opposite in NH, but there's also a big counter-movement.
I mean the other options are China and Europe but honestly it's probably way safer as a EU/European citizen to have your data in the USA vs Europe.
The last thing I want is Europe in control of any of my data they just fundamentally don't think privacy from the government should exist. Pair that with the frankly appalling lack of free speech I wouldn't want to risk it.
Safer to have my data in the country that tries to manufacture a casus belli against my country than in my country? Safer to have my data in a country where I have no influence on what the legislature has to say on the handling of my data? Safer to have my data in a country with almost no privacy protection laws? Are we living in the same europe?
You are free to put your data whereever you want. But from a national security perspective, it is critical that Europe can run vital, public services on software and infrastructure under their own control
Didn't the US jail a guy for making a joke about Charlie Kirk? Didn't Don Lemon get arrested for protesting? How about the US government making it illegal to monitor ICE's activity?
As a Canadian, I can't think of anyone getting arrested for comments they made online, unless they are truly hate/violence/threats which would get anyone arrested in similar countries such as the US.
Just this week there was a white nationalist group protesting in Hamilton, and no one was arrested.
Europe is also not a country, it is a continent with many countries having different laws surrounding free speech.
Context on the first one, she wasn't jailed for the post itself. She pleaded guilty (against her own legal advice apparently) to the crime of inciting racial hatred which carries a prison sentence.
There were other people also arrested at the time who did not plead guilty to this and were not charged.
Also she did call for a hotel filled with migrants to be set on fire while people were actively trying to do just that.
So you folks think just because it's internet we should be able to insult and call for racial action? Maybe you think in real life that should be acceptable too?
I support free speech through any media, including all noncommercial speech not including:
- defamation (with extra lenience for speech about public figures)
- evidence of child sex abuse
- incitement to imminent lawless action likely to cause disorder
Even those few exceptions are dangerous to liberty. Certainly anything else is too easily twisted into political censorship.
For example, under the guise of fighting "hate speech", the EU has already used the DSA to censor disfavored political speech like, "I think that LGBTI ideology, gender ideology, transgender ideology are a big threat to Slovakia, just like corruption"[0].
And yes, people obviously have the right to insult their politicians. It's honestly perplexing to encounter someone defending an early morning house raid because the guy called a politician a "professional moron". Are you actually Robert Habeck??
Even here on HN insulting other posters gets you banned. Same in many US media. There's quite a discrepancy between what people claim and the reality on the field, why you think? Yes I'm aware I'm shifting focus from Europe to the US, but you know, who should cast the first stone...
Private companies should have the freedom to ban/censor whatever content on their platforms they want. I’d prefer if they don’t, but we shouldn’t force governments to prevent companies from creating their own rules about how people can use their own software
Governments however should not interfere with citizen’s freedom of speech - there should be no fines/arrests for insulting politicians. Otherwise those governments are actually authoritarian and repressive.
Allowing private companies to do anything they want, when there are only a few large private companies, makes them a shadow state. Europe is much more willing to restrict companies from becoming shadow states. If they make a law that says bank transfers must be used for large payments (or if that becomes de facto true) they also make a law that says banks must give accounts to everyone.
It's 100% acceptable in real life that the whole concept of free speech. Seriously you can say shit like that all day every day in the USA and the cops probably won't even bother you.
Probably here lies the entire chasm between the US and Europe. In Europe insulting people on the street is not considered acceptable, also spreading neonazi propaganda and everything - ACLU or not (btw ACLU is also an US thing). So the US will jump at the idea of containing someone who publishes threats and insults, while the European will, well, try to contain them. I'm an European and call that respect for your co citizens, something not understandable for the US. Maybe that's also why social-democracy is here so well established, because we believe in a community, while the US advocates the person against everybody else. Just thinking loud.
So will Americans, and North Koreans. What is freedom of speech? Is it the right to say absolutely anything, anywhere, any time, because you don't have that in America.
> Meanwhile a US citizen was jailed for a meme quoting Trump after Kirk death.
And that was wrong, too. Also newsworthy because it is so unusual.
> First link
I think it's probably legal under US jurisprudence, but fine, you can have that one. How about the guy who got raided for calling Robert Habeck a "professional moron"? Or the 170 other people raided in Germany for their online speech?
Germany – Robert Habeck insult raids (2024–2025): Multiple citizens faced police raids, investigations, fines, or suspended sentences (jail risk if violated) for online posts calling Green politician Robert Habeck derogatory names like "idiot" or "moron," or sharing mocking memes, under Section 188 enhancing penalties for insulting politicians.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
Germany – Friedrich Merz "Pinocchio" case (2025–2026): A pensioner faced criminal investigation (potential fine or jail under Section 188) for a Facebook post calling Chancellor Friedrich Merz "Pinocchio," prosecuted as an insult likely to impair a politician's public duties.
https://www.facebook.com/60minutes/posts/dozens-of-police-te...
Germany – Ricarda Lang insult investigation (2024–2025): A citizen was investigated (potential fine/jail) for an online post calling politician Ricarda Lang "fat," charged as criminal insult under Section 185 protecting officials from derogatory remarks.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
Robert Habeck was NOT arrested, he and his friends were investigated in the broader case of neo-nazi propaganda which they were spreading as well. Unless you consider neo-nazi freedom of speech, of course.
The Pinocchio case meant exactly one official letter sent to that guy, lol "arrests". The investigation was dropped and everybody criticized the investigation.
Ricarda Lang case was a request to the well-known network Gab to identify who insulted the politician, because in Germany insults are a crime. Maybe in the US insulting is a popular free speech pastime, but this is not US. Gab refused to identify the person and that was that.
So, again, I can see when we are spreading lies to support some ideology, but they are just that: lies.
Re the other cases: in a good democracy, insulting politicians should not be a crime and there should be no investigations for someone insulting a politician.
That is your POV. I fear that democracy erodes when there's insults, belittling, ... instead of exchange of arguments and the contest of ideas. Because at some point insults turn into ugly actions. Whether it's Charlie Kirk or Melissa Hortman.
There is a reason the founding fathers put freedom of speech as the first amendment
Insults should absolutely be protected speech.
In countries that make insulting politicians illegal, all a politician has to do to become a dictator is say that speech criticizing them/their behavior is insulting and therefore illegal
Would you like if Trump arrested anybody who insulted him?
I mean that's why it's called free speech. Probably the most famous case the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) fought for was to make sure Nazi's could hold a rally and march through Skokie, Illinois, USA an area famous for being predominantly Jewish.
> Multiple citizens faced police raids, investigations, fines, or suspended sentences (jail risk if violated) for online posts calling Green politician Robert Habeck derogatory names like "idiot" or "moron," or sharing mocking memes [...]
The police raids were done because of the posted Nazi images, NOT because of the Habeck insults.
I'd be more worried about the data being stolen and resold even faster than elsewhere tbh. staying out of the way of the ccp as a random guy on the other end of the world should be doable.
> Or the US where even the mainstream media can challenge the president?
The same US that was banning reporters from the press secretary's office (this isn't even new to Trump, Clinton also tried to pull the same shit back in the day)? The one where people were denied their entry visas because of memes of JD Vance? Where the white house has an official list of "Media Offenders"[0]?
Also we can't really ignore the US actively turning extremely hostile and talking about annexing territory belonging to its ex-allies when discussing things like this. That by itself makes the case pretty obvious for anyone, because why would you do business with a nation led by a sub-zero IQ petulant dementia patient that actively threatens annexation?
> Europe...where they throw people in jail for social media posts?
People in some EU Countries (Because "Europe" is a continent that encompasses many different countries with different laws and regulations, including EU and non-EU ones with very different laws and regulations. Denmark and Hungary could not be further from one another in pretty much every regard, for example) have been arrested for posts on social media, but who has actually been jailed for this? Where does this claim even come from, is it just a weird hope from USA-ians so they can portray "Europe" as some sort of free speech hell where you can't say anything without big brother knocking on the door?
To be abundantly clear I don't support people even getting arrested for the dumb shit they say online, but no one's going to prison because of this (that I'm aware of anyway).
Here in the Netherlands, the favorite pass time of most people was shitting on Rutte when he was PM, not to mention Geert and the absolute clown show that his cabinet was. The King and royal family in general gets shit all the time from every side of the political spectrum. Nobody has even been arrested here (as far as I know anyways, could be wrong) for that kind of speech. Notice how I'm not quivering in fear of talking shit about my government?
There's a reason the acronym TACO exists - every time Trump goes after the really deep money the backlash forces him to change his tune. If only the tariffs disproportionately affected the rich then we would have been done with them within a week - instead the most effected individuals and companies just got carve outs.
> I’m hoping tech companies in Europe and Asia become independent enough to no longer be beholden to US interests
What tech companies?
At the end of the day, it's all about capital and IP.
American domiciled VCs and companies can outinvest just about any other competitor, and much of the core IP for vast swathes of critical next-gen technologies (high NA EUV, Foundation Models, Quantum Computing) is in the US, but American companies are fine transferring technology abroad (often with American government backing [3][4]) and moving jobs abroad.
China has a similar ecosystem but prefers to invest domestically and for IP to remain within China.
Meanwhile Japan, Taiwan, and Korea continue to back the US no matter what due to tensions with China and North Korea along with existing fixed asset investments in the US.
When companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and others are able to invest tens of billions of dollars in India [0], Poland [1], Israel [2], Portugal [5], Ireland [6], and others it makes them more open to collaborate with American capital and IP instead of dealing with alternatives who cannot deploy similar amounts of capital and transfer IP.
The US bullying other countries to follow its interests has also existed before a year ago. People are just waking up to the idea that it's going to get worse and not better.
Again, obviously. Tariffs were an economic precision instrument and the threat of them a form of soft power. Now they’re a bully’s spiked club. Which is the implication of my original comment had you applied some good faith and reading comprehension.
>American domiciled VCs and companies can outinvest just about any other competitor,
Because every investor in the world put their money in the US. They knew the best companies and people would centralize around that hub.
When the US is a rogue, isolated idiocracy -- already true, but the world takes time to adapt to this new reality -- how much of that money do you think will flow to the US?
Much of the capital is US originated and domiciled.
American public pension funds alone hold $6 Trillion in AUM [0] and American endowment funds hold a little under $1 Trillion in AUM [1], and tend to be the LPs for most VC funds as most institutional investors follow the Yale Investment Model.
>Much of the capital is US originated and domiciled.
Neither of your citations has any relevance to this at all. That endowments and pensions funds have money...what is your point? Ah, the old HN "look I've provided citations so upvote me, even if they don't support my contention".
Canadians alone hold almost $4 trillion dollars in US securities. Because the US was the centre of the capital universe. Just like we saw it as the centre of the media and music universe. Americans mistook the free world basically anointing the US into some confused notion that it was actually some earned accomplishment.
It's to highlight the depth of capital within the US.
When we in the VC/PE space raise a fund, we are investing other people's money. Most of that money is of American origin and American domiciled.
You do see some large players like in Canada and Europe, but even they are not similar in size to American pension funds and endowments, let alone other American institutional investors.
Edit: Can't reply
> these will often end up being national level and will look individually much smaller than the ones from the US, purely because the US has more people.
Absolutely! And that's what makes it so difficult for Europe to decouple from the US or China.
Most attempts at EU federalization are undermined by national level politicans as the keys to hard power (defense, foreign policy, FDI attraction) remain under the purview of individual European states, becuase push comes to shove, an American employer or fund can threaten to leave and that country's entire political apparatus will work to appease us at the expense of Brussels.
This is how Meta and Amazon have been able to neuter the GDPR thanks to Ireland [0] and Luxembourg [1] respectively.
Even India got the FTA with the EU by using the carrot on France [2] and Italy [3] and the stick on Germany [4].
Europe is in a very tough position because the incentives of a politician who wants to build their career in Brussels is different from one who wants to build their career in Berlin, Bucharest, or Bratislava.
> You do see some large players like in Canada and Europe, but even they are not similar in size to American pension funds and endowments, let alone other American institutional investors.
Look, I haven't dug into this, but if one wants a fair comparison, then you need to account for the size of an economy. If 330mn people need pensions, then you'll obviously see much larger pension funds. If 400mn people across 27 countries want pensions, these will often end up being national level and will look individually much smaller than the ones from the US, purely because the US has more people.
> Unfortunately most European countries don't pension funds. It's a pity...
Many Europeans prefer bank deposits to investment in markets, that's true. I assure you though, there are lots and lots of pension funds in Europe, as well as many, many insurance companies who represent similar capital profiles.
This reads like wishful thinking from a butthurt European. I am not a fan of many of Trump's policies and I think ex-US investor sentiment has definitely soured. But it's not like the USA is now DPRK.
> how much of that money do you think will flow to the US?
If there's one thing you can be sure of about aggregate investor behavior, it's that investors seek good risk-adjusted returns regardless of any moral or political objections.
So long as capital flows remain unimpeded, property rights are respected, and US companies have good expected future returns, investors' money will continue to flow in to the US.
> This. Companies like Nvidia, Google et-al and investors, don't care about and won't leave the US over morals, they'll go and stay where the money is good as long as it lasts. Trying to lecture them about morals from the EU won't change this. Otherwise they wouldn't be using slave labor in Congo and sweatshop labor in China.
Nobody will leave over morals (well except possibly the Norweigan sovereign wealth fund), but it's worth noting that for non-dollar investors, the US markets have basically been flat since the start of 2025, because the dollar has declined.
It's entirely possible that the US no longer takes in more global capital, if this continues. It's very unlikely that all the foreign investors will leave quicker, but it's much more likely that they'll leave as they sell their investments over time.
If investors leave, where will they go though? Most of EU economy isn't doing amazing right now either, with the economies of France and Germany being propped up on life support by government spending, and there's more political turmoil at the horizon. Asia?
Large European pension funds are rapidly decreasing (as rapid as a pension fund can without causing too much panic, devaluing remaining assets). E.g. some large pension funds have removed 1/4th of their investments in the US in less than a year. That is pretty unheard of.
>some large pension funds have removed 1/4th of their investments in the US in less than a year.
I saw the news about the danish fund dropping some of their US investment and on closer inspection, in absolute terms it was a drop in the bucket. Mostly an optics maneuvre.
Again, non dollar investors are flat since start of 2025. This isn't just politicisation (although that's part of it), it's that other markets are doing better than the US for now.
This will be a slow process, but the direction seems pretty clear (I fully expect to see a major economy introduce capital controls within the next twenty years).
> it's that other markets are doing better than the US for now.
Which? US currently has a rocky status due to Trump's interference, but Trump will pass while the likes of EU and Japan won't be able to fix their structural issues of low birthrates, crazy high debt welfare speeding, etc.
> Which? US currently has a rocky status due to Trump's interference
In non-dollar terms, the US markets have been flat since 2025 (so basically since "liberation day").
> fix their structural issues of low birthrates,
This is a problem basically everywhere. It's definitely worse in Europe than in the US, but the US is on the same trajectory (modulo immigration).
> crazy high debt welfare speeding
Where exactly are you talking about? The US government has been spending more than it takes in for the past decade at least, mostly on entitlements (i.e. welfare spending).
A single Dutch pension fund that was much larger (ABP, IIRC one or two orders of magnitude) retracted 1/4th (10 billion). But they only found out after journalists checked out a year report. Most pension funds just don't talk about it, because (1) they do not want the value of their assets drop too much as long as they haven't moved them; and (2) they do not want to draw the ire of the Trump administration in the meanwhile.
> the economies of France and Germany being propped up on life support by government spending
The US government is running (and has been for at least a decade now) a substantial deficit, which is basically propping up the economy with government support.
> there's more political turmoil at the horizon
Again, look to your own house. Even if you ignore all the Trump noise, the attempted politicisation of the Fed is very dangerous for the US economy.
> Asia?
Asia & Europe. It's beyond absurd that the US stock markets have 65% of total value, and was never going to last forever. All this craziness from the government is just speeding up something that was always going to happen.
>Even if you ignore all the Trump noise, the attempted politicisation of the Fed is very dangerous for the US economy.
Yes, but Trump is a passing issue that will eventually go away, and won't be able to fuck with tarries and the economy anymore just so his friends can do insider trading.
>Asia & Europe.
why do you think so? Japan's economy has no great future prospects, and neither EU's with many German bankruptcies and companies relocating abroad. Chinese companies and workers outside of the largest metro areas have bad time too.
> why do you think so? Japan's economy has no great future prospects, and neither EU's with many German bankruptcies and companies relocating abroad. Chinese companies and workers outside of the largest metro areas have bad time too.
I think Europe has a bunch of issues, mostly downstream of energy prices. It's basically all the low value added manufacturing (fertiliser etc) that is leaving. This is a real problem which needs to be fixed (the energy costs, that is). At least we're not trying to kill green energy.
Look man, I think the US will be ~fine, but a situation where the US markets account for 65% of world equity value is not going to last forever, and I think it will become apparent as this changes how much else needs to change to benefit the American people.
I'm from Europe and have no idea what "democrat" is. Do you mean the US party? I didn't know they publish in Europe. Do you maybe mean everything not-MAGA? Now that's quite a blanket statement then, applying I'd say to 90% of Europeans - I'd be scared if 90% of the continent sees you like DPRK (hint: no, they don't). So please, either explain, or just cut back on useless sensationalistic metaphors.
>I'd be scared if 90% of the continent sees you like DPRK
Sees me? I'm European, and am speaking to how I see other Europeans see the US, which comes from the local media which is heavily anti-US as it twists and omits facts to maintain a constant anti-Trump narrative no matter the facts since people lap it up without doing any due diligence or research online.
Remember the BBC famously clipped Trump's speech to make it seem like he said something he didn't actually say on Jan 6.
It's funny how the BBC makes one mishap (I agree that it was bad) and we hear about it for months. At the same time Fox and others are spewing constant disinformation. Similarly, watch MSNBC for a day and you'll learn that most European media are a gold standard for journalism in comparison.
If the comment is not sarcasm (I can't tell reliably anymore), there's a movie called Idiocracy. I think the word comes from the movie, or at least its wide adoption was heavily influenced by it (because someone somewhere probably coined the word before the movie was made).
> What tech companies? At the end of the day, it's all about capital and IP.
It's not just about capital and IP. It's now about a halo of related things, like everyone using US payment networks - if the US unbanks you, even banks in your own country can't do business with you[1]. Or everyone using a US-based messaging platform (WhatsApp) because its been subsidised by a BigTech to cost $0, whereas text messages are still not free...
Capital may be important, but in the end, what matters is to actually do the work. Stuff is created by labor, and capital just directs it where to go. In the past that would mean all the relevant labor travelled from Europe to Silicon Valley or NYC, but it doesn't mean that when they're not travelling because they would be randomly arrested at the border. So there is now a lot more tech labor in Europe and that means Europe will build more tech. It worked for China.
If you're not in the EU, what even is the impact on you that was caused by GDPR? You're essentially not affected by it unless you run a business, which now you need to take greater care of the personal data you store. Is that what's annoying you or what?
The EU is to blame for cookie banners on basically every website on the internet.
I wish the US had something similar, and that there was more enforcement of disallowing "accept all" buttons without an equivalent "reject all" option. I also recognize that websites don't need the banner if they aren't trying to track me, but lets not pretend there aren't annoying consequences.
Companies could just reduce the amount of tracking data they're trying to harvest - then they wouldn't need a banner. If you're annoyed then be mad at the company - not the law trying to offer you some way to protect your data.
It is like blaming government for policy to make cigarette packaging unappealling.
Every company wants to spy on you using cookies and sell you data or target ads. cookies banners are warnings to protect your data from these greedy companies.
> I also recognize that websites don't need the banner if they aren't trying to track me
And I recognize that there is a non-trivial cost to knowing if you need the banner or not, and people are likely to ask their web designer/dev "Hey, where's the cookie banner?" and then pay for the subsequent cost of implementing that because it's cheaper than expensive lawyers.
> The EU is to blame for cookie banners on basically every website on the internet.
Yeah, just like it's the EU's fault sometimes that the police cuts of roads when a drunk driver collides with another car, it can impossibly be the fault of the driver themselves.
Maybe try to point the blame in the direction of the ones that are A) showing you the banners in the first place and B) refuses to remove them and instead decide to inconvenience you
You know, like we do with every other single thing.
Besides, GDPR has nothing to do with those cookie banners, you're yet another example of people not understanding how any of these things work, yet find it valuable somehow to point blame in some direction, even if they don't understand the fundamental reasons things are the way they are.
I'm sure you also think EU is the same as Europe, as that tends to also be a common misconception among the people who don't understand the cookies banners or GDPR.
If you want to be pedantic, the companies who track us across the internet with all of these third party tracking cookies on every website are the enemy here, not informed disclosure and consent.
I want to be pedantic. It's not the company making my browser store/serve cookies, the browser is doing that itself. If you really care, you can turn that off or wipe after session. And third-party cookies in particular are already globally disabled in Firefox and Safari because they're almost useless besides tracking, but Chrome still has them.
Yes, the EU passed the ePrivacy directive in 2002. It was terribly broken (didn't actually address the problem it meant to), and resulted in malicious compliance of "cookie banners".
The EU then learned from these mistakes and passed the GDPR in 2016. The GDPR is quite on point - it directly addresses the problem, preempts the foreseeable ways which companies could sidestep such regulation, and didn't succumb to lobbyists looking to install backdoors.
The US could learn a thing or two from the EU regarding legislation.
> The EU is to blame for cookie banners on basically every website on the internet.
This is the most low-rent complaint imaginable and it boggles my mind how I keep seeing it made straight-faced. One time I literally timed how long it took me to dismiss a EU cookie banner, it was about 350ms and only needs to be done once per site. All this outrage is over 350ms and I cannot take it seriously.
I think the general vibe I get from some Americans is that they're OK with some abuse, as long as you don't tell them about it or do it to your face, and they would rather have some abuse than none but having to make their own choices. Of course, small subsection of people, but plenty of HN commentators make that exact case over and over whenever the discussions about cookie banners come up.
Because the law probably should have mandated functionality-only cookies until I disclaim my right to privacy,
such as when creating an account, or doing anything to provide consent besides loading the domain.
Instead, we normalized breaking the site by covering 80% of it so the standard user clicks the first thing that brings the site back: Accept (giving me the 80 advertiser tracking cookies!!1!)
So every article on some site I try to read doesn't throw a full-page modal, sometimes with a delay. At least reader mode will sometimes ignore those banners.
First, cookie banners are associated with a totally different legislation, not GDPR, and they began appearing long before GDPR existed.
Second, the EU is not to blame for cookie banners. Companies doing tracking via cookies are to blame. They always have the option to not have a cookie banner--just don't do the things that require cookie banners. They deliberately choose to do these things, and then people complain about the banners.
In California, where everything can give you cancer, do people consider that a failure of the companies putting the notices on everything, or a failure of government?
That's a failure of government because the law mandates the notice in so many places that it becomes pointless noise.
Cookie banners are not analogous. It's easy to make a web site that doesn't need cookie banners. It's actually easier to make a site that doesn't need them than to make one that does. Adding in the tracking that requires banner takes effort. But companies prefer to put in that effort and annoy their users so they can have that tracking. That's 100% on them, not on the government.
> But companies prefer to put in that effort and annoy their users so they can have that tracking.
This is making the assumption that the company has already paid the significant legal fees to see if they need the banner or not. Or ignoring the companies that think it is easier to add the banner than pay a law firm to review it's data usage.
It's like 'Hey, I make T-shirts. I want to sell them to anyone who visits my website. Do I need a cookie banner? I don't know. I do collect personal information to facilitate the transaction. I do retain the information for refund purposes. I do log IP addresses. Is this covered without a banner? Am I 'safer' to just make a banner saying we are saving their data and using it? I can't afford a lawyer to review everything we do, but I can afford a developer to make a banner like they did on other sites. Even if they implement it incorrectly, I think it's worth the cost to have the banner because I probably won't be liable if I attempted to follow the law. And maybe I'm wrong there because again, I have no idea what the letter of the law requires. I just make t-shirts and want to sell them.'
Tossing up a banner doesn't really help. You're required to allow users to opt out of anything that's not essential to the service being requested by the user. So regardless of whether you're going to have a banner or not, you have to identify what's essential. And once you've done that, you could stop there and not have anything non-essential.
It’s not the legal risk, it’s the desire to track users. How often have you seen a cookie banner that says “we only set cookies when it’s essential to the site’s functionality so there’s nothing for you to opt out of”?
If the EU announced that non-EU entities aren't subject to GDPR, I think that would substantially defuse and perhaps entirely eliminate the conflict. Their current guidance is precisely the opposite (https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/): "the GDPR applies to you even if you’re not in the EU". They even have a details page to make sure it's 100% clear (https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/): if you're a Colorado company with more than 250 employees, selling mainly to other Colorado businesses, the GDPR applies to you in full and the EU claims the authority to levy fines against you for violations.
I don't understand your response. As I said, the EU's position is that it doesn't matter whether you "just leave", because the GDPR still applies to companies who are not located in the EU and do not do business in the EU.
I get why people find this hard to believe, because it is kind of a crazy rule, but I repeat once again that this does not matter. Even if you have never sold a single product to an EU resident, and never plan to do so, the EU says as my original comment detailed that you are subject to the GDPR the instant an EU resident provides you with personal data.
(And of course, it's also the case that "selling to an EU resident" is substantially broader than "doing business in the EU" - EU residents do often travel to foreign countries and provide personal data to stores they transact with while there.)
American laws also have universal jurisdiction (for example, the Bill of Rights doesn't say, "unless you are located outside the US"). Most countries do not explicitly recognize that their laws do not have universal jurisdiction.
In practice, it is easy to pick out the situations in which there is "practical" universal jurisdiction, vs "theoretical" universal jurisdiction.
A Colorado company selling locally in Colorado falls in the "theoretical" bucket.
> (for example, the Bill of Rights doesn't say, "unless you are located outside the US").
The Bill of Rights is a set of constraints on the US government, so even to the extent it applies to the government when acting outside of its borders [0], it isn’t an imposition of US law on the territory of other countries, but a limit on such imposition.
[0] And it doesn't fully, see, e.g., Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), subsequently limited somewhat with the core holding retained in Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008).
1. GDPR applies to EU residents in the EU. The protection does not apply to EU residents going on trips to the US.
2. Based on the examples they've presented, there is a SUPER clean solution to your concerns. Geo-blocking. Problem solved, bye bye GDPR. But don't go crying for EU citizen money, can't have it both ways.
Just read the examples they present, they're fairly well written.
When you talk about liability, where is that relative to? Liability means that a court will order you to pay money. Which court are you worried about? US courts won't order you to pay anything, and European courts can't take away your money if your money's in the US. Businesses break laws in other countries all the time, and nothing happens to them. Remember when Russia charged Google with a quadrillion dollar fine and nothing happened?
> But the GDPR does not apply to occasional instances. Rather, regulators look for other clues to determine whether the organization set out to offer goods and services to people in the EU. To do so, they’ll look for things like whether, for example, a Canadian company created ads in German or included pricing in euros on its website. In other words, if your company is not in the EU but you cater to EU customers, then you should strive to be GDPR compliant.
2. As a general rule Europeans are MUCH less lawsuit addicted than Americans. Plus the way the GDPR works is that generally complaints are filed with a government agency that investigates.
Don't worry, China is coming out pretty far ahead so I'm sure we'll still be in a unipolar world when this is all over, and you can sleep safe at night. I imagine you didn't know.
At least the US has the benefit of not really having a core ethnic class.
(To stem off the haters, the US has a "massive problem with racism" exactly because we have such a mixed society. Most monoracial places are obscenely and shamelessly racist, but never has a chance to arise)
The Chinese are clearly doing some "rebalancing" lately. Some would even say that "rebalancing" is not a strong enough word. "De-linking" is a word a lot of those people are more comfortable with using to describe what we're seeing.
You can't really have a unipolar power if that power simply "takes all their marbles and goes home" so to speak.
I think we need to really do some strategic planning around scenarios where China or Europe simply withdraws from the rest of the world. Or decides they only need subsaharan Africa for instance.
Or, the nightmare scenario; where China, Europe, and subsaharan Africa actually figure out that together they don't really need anything from the rest of us.
> Don't worry, China is coming out pretty far ahead so I'm sure we'll still be in a unipolar world when this is all over, and you can sleep safe at night. I imagine you didn't know.
assuming the hegemon is benevolent. if the hegemon isnt, you have nowhere to run. welcome to the labor camp, please leave your belongings here, the showers are to the right.
saying unipolar is better is like saying absolute monarchy is better. sure it is, as long as the good king is alive.
The money is not coming out of the billionaires’ pockets. Tariffs are ultimately a tax on American consumers and small businesses. Large businesses owned by billionaires just increased prices. Now, if the government is forced to repay tariffs, then they will be refunded to the companies. Consumers and small businesses who were forced to close will get no benefit. In the end, whether the tariffs are kept or the tariffs are struck down, the consumer gets screwed and the billionaires get richer.
Whenever I bring up the idea of taxing the rich via unrealized gains, people oppose it by saying it’ll hurt investment. The reality is that years of huge stock market returns haven’t made life easier for the vast majority of people who actually do the work that makes companies successful. At least in the US, wages haven’t kept up with housing, healthcare, or basic costs, and I’m sure European workers face these kinds of problems too. At some point, it’s fair to ask why protecting unlimited tax-free growth for the top 0.1% should matter more than the financial stability of the workers actually doing the hard work to drive that growth. If the Netherlands finds that people avoid taxes by investing into real estate rentals, then maybe there should be laws covering those loopholes too.
But if the alternative becomes more real estate investment than we already have won't that be even worse?
Investing in the stock market at least in principle is investing in businesses that use that money to increase productivity. We should discourage investment in vehicles that do not optimize for productivity (real estate, bitcoin, metals and similar).
Selling your investment to pay taxes for unrealized gains forces more liquidity and movement in the market and might have a huge impact on preventing bubbles forming.
You are somehow romanticizing the hard workers who build the real economy. No one works hard anymore. Within EU it's all about real estate and leveraging it to buy even more real estate, and then a small studio for short term rental on top of it.
Even if what you’re saying is true, this just goes to show how badly we need to rein in the ultra-wealthy by taxing their unrealized gains. Like I’ve pointed out elsewhere in the comments, letting billionaires (some of whom will soon be trillionaires) get away with having tax-free spending power disenfranchises the many people who labor for a living. The very fact you so casually say “their media outlets” just goes to show how their concentrated wealth threatens the public discourse. As a society, we can’t allow people to use their wealth to influence government and civilization as a whole without at the very least being able to tax said wealth. The solution to taxing the rich isn’t to downplay the issue for electoral convenience. It is to educate and build a grassroots movement that can oppose the power of concentrated media ownership. The very points you make kind of undermine any principled opposition to taxing unrealized gains.
You're aiming at two different targets, one being tax policy and the other being media ownership. What I'm saying is, let's fix the latter, then the former.
Otherwise there's no way to put the issue in front of the people for discussion.
Many ultra-wealthy individuals borrow against their holdings to avoid having to sell their assets and therefore paying taxes. They shouldn’t be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. Relying on “realization” for taxation stops being reasonable when access to cash is basically the same as income. If anything, not taxing unrealized gains essentially punishes people who labor for income and unfairly favors people who use asset appreciation as a form of income.
These are very volatile assets, so maybe it shouldn’t be possible to take credits against them unless one realizes the gains or pays taxes for them.
This is also one of the reasons why financial crisis go out of hand so quickly, because once the value of an asset goes down, these credits become worthless as well, but rich people bought real assets with those credits, so the crisis just keep expanding to other sectors.
My guess is that the very rich can instead figure out a way to avoid it mostly, but I like the idea of taxing ridiculously high wealth, even if it is difficult.
However, a tax an unrealized gains would seem to greatly reduce or maybe kill the chance for the poor or middle class to use investments to save enough to retire early. That seems very unfair. I do not understand why such a tax should apply to anyone not well into the upper middle class range of wealth.
And trying to make clever calculated bets on individual stocks now has risk of having to sell everything and still not having enough to pay the taxes, if they were assessed during a temporary spike in price. Even holding an index fund during a market crash could mean ending up with nothing because of the tax on fictional gains.
Ultra-wealthy individuals aren't holding that much directly. That's what family offices or similar constructs are for.
I work in a family office. The owner is worth around 700 millions. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have more than a house and a car to his name, on paper.
well if thats the practice you find problematic, why not tax that
how would fluctuation in stock prices be handled?
if stocks go down , do you get a refund ?
this seems like a paperwork and fraud riddled method to achive a very minor impact on very few people who could be taxed directly when they access actual cash
I refuse to indulge in the false fantasy that a household where each parent(s) works multiple minimum wage jobs is “lazy” for not preparing homemade lunches for their children. Also, in the US, many lower-income households are in “food deserts”, where there is a lack of grocery stores selling fresh food and a preponderance of convenience stores selling processed foods. In a country where the top 1% of households possess a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 50% of households only possess 2.5%, poverty, malnourishment, and undereducation are choices made for the poor by the rich ruling class.
USA is the richest country in the world, people there, even the ones at the bottom of the work ladder, have access to riches that for most of the people on the planet are only dreams. You have no idea what it is to be poor or to live next to actual poverty (even I have no idea, and I live in a country that's poorer, and that when I was younger much poorer than the USA).
94% of adult Americans drive a car. Anyone there can go to a store that sells vegetables and raw meat, buy it, and prepare a proper meal that's cheaper than some deep-fried, frozen processed crap.
Enough with the performative virtue signaling. It's all so tiresome. Nobody in the USA goes hungry unless they really choose too at every single step in their lives.
Please explain to me how advocating for material policies for the poor, funded by taxes that come out of my pocket, is "performative virtue signaling." Does this phrase just mean "any kindness whatsoever" at this point?
The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort.
Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.
Good news. I also donate an enormous amount of money to the poor personally, with a goal of donating 100% of my net income in the not too distant future. Is that virtue signaling too?
Can someone explain why disallowing Gatekeeper bypass via Homebrew is related to macOS disallowing unsigned ARM64 binaries to run? My understanding is that `—no-quarantine` just removes the `com.apple.quarantine` attribute from a downloaded application. If the application is unsigned then removing the attribute wouldn’t allow it to run anyways. There’s no way to disable the signature check because it’s a kernel level check. However, macOS will accept an adhoc signature. Because of this, to me it seems like Gatekeeper bypass and unsigned software are orthogonal topics. No matter if I remove the Gatekeeper signature or not, unsigned code still won’t run unless I add an adhoc signature. On the other hand, if I distribute software with an adhoc signature, macOS wouldn’t prevent someone else from running it as long as they remove the quarantine attribute. Am I missing something?
The only thing signaling Gatekeeper to do the deep checks and also to block execution is the presence of that file attribute. When GK was first introduced in Tiger that’s literally all it consisted of; a warning/reminder that “hey slack jawed user, you downloaded this executable from the internet, be sure you trust it!” and once they said OK, the attribute was cleared and you’re not gonna get bothered again.
The AMFI checks happen on every execution of any executable. Xprotect is also running execution based checks on first run and randomly later on to check for signatures of known malware. Gatekeeper is the umbrella term for all of this on the Mac, but its still kicked off, to the user at least, as that prompt “hey champ you downloaded this from the internet and the developer didn’t want to upload this binary to Apple for scans, move it to your trash”.
Long story short, if you remove the quarantine bit, you can run whatever the fuck you want so long as Xprotect doesn’t detect anything in its YARA rules files.
1. Does this mean it’s a little disingenuous for the Homebrew maintainers to claim that this change has anything to do with app signing, given that they reference the impossibility of unsigned applications in the issue?
2. Does this mean that if a developer self-signs their app but doesn’t notarize it that it will meet Homebrew’s criteria of “passing Gatekeeper checks”?
1. Yes. (Either that or they know something we don't about Apple's future plans.)
2. No, as Gatekeeper checks both for a valid signature from an Apple Developer Program certificate as well as notarization.
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