Aside, this is why I’m skeptical of the skepticism of the “Great Man” theory of history. Most people scoffing at it have no idea the individual impact that great men and women have on the world. You can both recognize that we all stand on the shoulders of giants and that such giants do exist as individuals (more often than not). Where the giants are collaborative efforts it often takes only minimal digging before you find there’s one person at the core of that group’s effort.
I mean that author is JG Ballard, he’s a legend with many classic works. There’s like at least two or three dozen articles, short story collections and novels of his that are worth reading. He’s one of the top dystopian fiction writers of all time.
Random aside: there’s a restaurant in San Diego on the SAN flight path with a split flap display over the bar. Every time a flight passes over it updates to show flight number and departure airport. It’s quite neat.
Aside: I’m not sure how many people realize how big DJ events are in VRChat, especially amongst furries. The virtual furry con Furality is coming up for example and the dances there are huge, thousands of simultaneous attendees. Worlds for events will have full DMX lighting control and sophisticated audio setups.
DJs will often do live mixing as well, it’s not just pressing play on pre-recorded sets, while wearing their VR gear. Recently an event was fully synchronized between an RL version and VR version, complete with integrated lighting setup (the same DMX signals were controlling both RL event space and VR world lighting simultaneously).
Every weekend there’s dozens of huge rave/DJ events going on 24 hours a day mostly be EU and US organizers, although Japan goes hard too (their virtual cons are mind-boggling huge and have major corporate sponsors).
It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began.
You're alluding to some second order effects which are real but also able to be dealt with, and have been.
Montgomery Ward thought it was "too big to fail" and too powerful to regulate.
So, what happened?
If the US government wants to, and it has in the past, it just takes your business at gunpoint.
4 soldiers walked into the ultra-conservative owners office and made him leave. Two of them picked up his arms and legs, took him outside, and deposited him on the sidewalk.
> a major U.S. CEO being physically evicted from his own company by armed troops became one of the most famous news photos of the home-front war
Yet there is no evidence of this happening in any industry or area where PE has become the dominant player. Why not? What you’re saying is nice economic theory but it’s clearly not happening.
Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary? They didn’t claim to have discovered perpetual motion or something you can’t prove or disprove yourself, just shared a historical fact you can easily just check up on if you choose not to believe them.
>Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary?
FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.
it is not easy with a quick search to ascertain the subtleties of the CLOUD Act.
the example case on wikipedia entails a US citizen storing data with Microsoft, a US company, data that Microsoft offshored from the US. So in that case, the US Courts and politicians seem on pretty firm ground to consider that data to be "obtainable" by court order; it wouldn't make sense for American vendors to to create a privacy "double Dutch sandwich" as is done with corporate income tax loopholes. Letting the law go that far would not be a threat to "Europe".
Now if Europeans were committing crimes in the US without being in the US themselves (let's say organized crime trafficking to the US or operating phone scams) that raises more interesting questions about jurisdictions, but that discussion is only productive with good knowledge of what US-European cooperation is already in place or considered "within the pale" due to shared mutual concerns
According to wikpedia, "the CLOUD Act asserts that U.S. data and communication companies must provide stored data for a customer or subscriber on any server they own and operate when requested by warrant, but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."
It could "scare" Europeans to read that, but an important keyword is "requested by a warrant": to be scared by it, you'd need to know that US Courts are issuing warrants for Europeans who are not committing crimes in the US, which I doubt. Europeans committing crimes I already touched on.
wikipedia continues, It also provides an alternative and expedited route to MLATs through "executive agreements"; the executive branch is given the ability to enter into bi-lateral agreements with foreign countries to provide requested data related to its citizens in a streamlined manner, as long as the Attorney General, with concurrence of the Secretary of State, agree that the foreign country has sufficient protections in place to restrict access to data related to United States citizens.[8][9] The first such agreement was with the United Kingdom.[10] There is a FAQ appended to the white paper published by the U.S. Department of Justice.
This aspect of the CLOUD act should not specifically scare Europeans, they should rather be scared of their own governments cooperating in such schemes. For Europeans to want the US not to have the CLOUD act to protect them from their own governments is rational, but not something that can be discussed, it would melt European brains to say anything positive about the US.
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