Are you sure you’re outside the bubble? Because the taxi industry could have done with some improvement, but it didn’t “desperately” need “disruption”. People got from a to b just fine, and drivers got paid.
The only thing that desperately needs disruption is the destructive influence SV has on societies that were doing just fine before its “disruption”.
Don't know where you've been getting taxis, but they were literally one of the worst services anywhere I've ever been to. Prague: ton of documented defrauding of customers, taxi drivers making little money otherwise, fights over stations, literally mafia stuff. London: You know how everyone is lovely and polite, say in restaurants? Not so in London taxis, you'd hardly get a hello, drivers would always purposefully drive you as long as possible to make the most amount of money, etc etc
It was heavily unionized and the only people winning were at the top of unions, everyone else was losing. Yes, it desparately needed disruption.
London is one of the last cities I would complain about taxis in—and one city where I don’t use Uber. (Not that I use a lot of cabs because the transit system is good.)
You call out activists, but this strategy of hate and othering is mostly used by esteblished political groups and religions.
They just don't have to be as aggressively vocal about it, because they already yield enough power and influence to use a more moderate tone of voice. But what they actually do is equally hateful and vitriolic.
False. I call out a specific subset of activists, and provide functional, factual/behavior-based criteria for identifying the subset. Furthermore, the criteria are independent from any particular political position or ideology.
this strategy of hate and othering is mostly used by esteblished political groups and religions.
Such "strategies of hate and othering" lead to bad and problematic behavior. The psychology involved has been foundational in the all the greatest crimes against humanity in history. The embrace of hate and othering by a group in its ideology and internally accepted conduct lead to cognitive distortions that make problematic behaviors far more likely. It doesn't matter the cause such things are done for. It's the psychology and behavior itself which are foundational problems.
So, you're saying that everyone does the same things, but activists have to do it louder? I'm sorry, but the embrace of hate is a problem, no matter what cause it's supposedly done "for" and no matter what name it goes under. That's a truth of human history and the human condition that MLK and Gandhi knew well, and which large swathes of online "activism" vocally denies and even argues against it applying to them.
I know what you're talking about, but I don't see much of that in this particular report. There's no "because socialism" here and it would be utterly ridiculous considering that "socialist European welfare state" correlates positively with "rich".
We can't discount valid criticism just because we suspect it may be motivated by the wrong political agenda. We have to ask if it's true.
Admittedly, the report doesn't make it easy to do that because it doesn't explain how exactly they calculate these rankings, and some of the sideswipes against privacy concerns are clearly misplaced and irrelevant.
But I think there can be very little doubt that Europe's digital economy is lagging badly behind the US and arguably falling further behind. If we don't wake up before the digital revolution eats Europe's auto industry and in the process ruins high tech equipment makers and robotics, we are on a trajectory to become a third world economy.
Yes the "digital evolution index" does sound a nebulous rag-tag list of stuff that the sponsors MasterCard and DataCash would like govermnets to implement or remove for them.
A complex issue no doubt - but I can't stand opinions dressed as "sciencey" research.
I've noticed that "bad news" about Europe as a rule pop up ahead of a weakening dollar. Just an observation. It's just these "news" are getting more and more ludicrous over time.
It's not just the US doing it. I always read newspapers from both sides of the pond and it was especially entertaining during the big financial crisis. Many European publications acted as if the US is collapsing but Europe will be largely unaffected and American ones anticipated swift recovery for the US and deep EU crisis. Even newspapers that you wouldn't normally associate with nationalistic sentiments (like the New York Times) engaged in some serious fear-mongering.
People also respond to these kinds of messages. I visited the US this August, when the euro crisis was often making the news. Several people were seriously and non-sarcastically concerned with my capacity for paying for my own lunch or hotel. They were very surprised when I told them that the euro is worth more or less the same as always in relation to the dollar.
If you bury your head in sand that's exactly what you'll think. Try getting out of Europe more often and see what the rest of the world achieves in a year and then you'll come to the same conclusion. Even in case of already advanced countries like Japan, in certain sectors, they are years if not decades ahead of Europe.
As the op said, there is no "Europe" and talking about it as if there's a single entity is, to European ears, quite ignorant. Practically the only thing Italy has in common with Poland has in common with France has in common with Holland is that they're all very generally liberal democracies. Otherwise, on the spectra of backwater-to-scifi, honest-to-corrupt, socialist-to-capitalist, religious-to-secular, nationalist-to-egalitarian, dynamic-to-sclerotic, authoritarian-to-permissive, you will find everything in every permutation, somewhere.
I get that the US is big and diverse and dynamic. But the EU is far bigger (population wise) and far more culturally / economically / politically diverse.
Whether you agree with it or not, calling the German demands "asset stripping" is sheer propaganda.
The privatisation of these government properties is EU policy Greece signed up for long before the crisis, and like so many other policies and agreements simply refused to carry out.
So which policy is this? You try to make it sound as if this is common policy in the EU.
Holding the amount generated from privatisation in trust at the ECB - that is unique to the Schauble proposal Greek situation. To call Schauble's proposal as anything other than asset stripping is propaganda too. It seems we are on opposite sides of a propaganda war.
Under this as yet unnamed policy: Have all countries signed up to privatise government properties? Have any complied?
In the article many people are reported to say Greece didn't have 50bn of assets to privatise. It's quite ridiculous of you to suggest that a) this is normal, b) everyone else had already done it.
The worst thing to come out of "hipsterism" is the dilution of the term hipster to be utterly meaningless, and frequently used describe any person that one dislikes for any reason.
The word "super" is just a word. People have been using it for a long time.
Are you sure you’re outside the bubble? Because the taxi industry could have done with some improvement, but it didn’t “desperately” need “disruption”. People got from a to b just fine, and drivers got paid.
The only thing that desperately needs disruption is the destructive influence SV has on societies that were doing just fine before its “disruption”.