Have you ever seen the presentations by Boston Dynamics and the like? The biggest contracts for just about every robotics company probably come from the military. It probably won’t be long before war looks like it does in Terminator 2 - let’s just hope Skynet takes a while to show up, given all the AI stuff governments are already using for their military campaigns…
Unfortunately, the German federal government also wants to implement this nationwide - those wretched traitors to the people.
LobbyControl is a German organization based in Berlin. However, I don’t think the petition I linked to above requires German citizenship. So you can sign it too. Unfortunately, I’m afraid LobbyControl doesn’t have a multilingual website.
In this regard, please see this LobbyControl appeal, as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) -another EU regulation designed to protect citizens from the power of tech giants - is currently not being enforced the way it should be enforced: Strengthening Europe’s shield against the power of Big Tech (in German)
Google, Meta, Apple & Co. are abusing their power. To stop them, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) must be consistently enforced. That’s why you should sign the appeal for an effective DMA now! With the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU has established important rules to protect us, from which we will all benefit. Yet the European Commission is delaying the enforcement of these rules. As long as corporations like Google face no consequences for violating the DMA, the law remains ineffective. Anyone who takes our democracy seriously enforces laws—even against Big Tech.
In that case, the orange mob boss has nothing to worry about…
Lately, I’ve been wondering more and more often what it would take for the American people to oust this regime from office.
Yes, it is unfortunately becoming increasingly clear that even in the EU, billionaires and their companies are above the law. The legal situation should be clear here and there should be consequences - but there apparently aren’t any.
Unfortunately, this applies not only to Twitter, but to most US tech giants in particular, to meta, for example. I have already stopped counting the massive violations of the GDPR that meta and others are constantly committing, because nothing happens anyway. If anything, the fines are so low that violating the law brings these companies far more revenue than it costs them.
So unfortunately, the same major issue that brought the US to the brink of a straight up dictatorship also applies in Europe: even the most blatant violations of the law have no serious consequences for the richest of the rich – and that is why billionaires are becoming more and more powerful.
The situation may be better in the EU for now than in the US, whose legal system obviously no longer even maintains the appearance of fairness, but even in the EU, the enforcement of the law is miles away from anything that could even remotely be called justice.
The reason seems to me to be the same as in the US: concentration of power in a tiny billionaire class that asserts its influence through corruption.
I think that if things continue like this, and I see no indicators that they will not, it will not be long before even the appearance of justice is abandoned in the EU as well.
Edit: Here is an example of how this is possible - it’s just plain old corruption, but in the highest ranks of our institutions: From Meta to the EU Parliament: Former chief lobbyist negotiates data protection (German article)
Aura Salla was Meta’s chief lobbyist in Brussels for many years. Her task: to convince politicians to weaken EU digital rules such as data protection in order to generate even higher profits with Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms.
I think it’s fair to say that pretty much all the dystopian visions of the future from literature and films have now become reality. Brave new world…
The thing about licenses is that they only work if they can be defended in court. In the US system in particular, it is simply impossible for a private individual to do so (even multi-billion-dollar corporations with their highly paid lawyers seem to be powerless against artificially inflated AI giants such as OpenAI).
Therefore, it must be assumed that even restrictive licenses will simply be disregarded.
I just installed Ubuntu on my mom’s laptop. I also considered Mint, but Ubuntu seems to me to be the distribution with the least risk of any major issues.
Either way, the point was to finally get away from Windows, especially since my mom doesn’t use any applications for which there isn’t a reliable Linux alternative anyway.
Donations to LibreOffice and so on have also been transferred - in the amount of the license costs for Windows 11 and MS Office for now.
The U.S. system as it has always been.