no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money, they just hit another one without care whether actual laws were violated. the amount they take has no correlation to what has been blamed, only to how much the companies can afford to pay without threatening to leave the country.
the 'Guardia di Finanza' has a long standing tradition of trying to extort money without regards to actual laws. its not long ago that they told all companies 'if you pay X% more than your tax report says you own then we won't destroy your company'. more recently they went after the Agnelli family trying to extort money without having an actual case.
its not the rule of law, its simply Might makes Right or modern robber knights...
> no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money
Since you apparently know, how large would a 100M EUR injection into the Italian budget for 2026 actually be, relatively to the other things?
You're saying they're doing this because they need money, but wouldn't changing the tax rates be more effective at this? 100M feels like a piss in the ocean, when you talk about a country's budget, but since you seem to imply Italy is doing this survive, would be nice to know what ratio this fine represents of their budget, which I'm guessing you have in front of you already?
So yeah, whoever talks about these fines as a strategy for fixing the budget knows nothing about the actual budget of a G7 state, these fines are completely immaterial to Italian fiscal policy.
For perspective, that's roughly equivalent to someone with a €50,000 annual income finding €7 on the street and someone claiming they're doing it "to survive."
> fines on American companies bigger than revenue from your entire tech industry?
1. As someone already mentioned, taxes != revenue
2. On top of that, "public internet companies" != "entire tech industry"
3. On top of that, tax evasion and creative accounting by "public internet companies" companies is well known, documented, and is subject to additional fines (not as often or as much as they deserve)
4. On top of that "announce these new fines monthly like clockwork" speaks volumes about the state of the "public internet companies" and there continuous disregard for the law.
The relevant comparison is fines vs. actual budget, not fines vs. some cherry-picked industry segment.
EU general government spending (across 27 nations) in 2023 was around €8.4 trillion. €3.8B in fines is 0.045% of that, again, completely immaterial.
It's the EU way. The only area where they produce world-leading innovation is regulatory regimes, so gotta use it to hit up American tech companies like an ATM.
Oh please. "The law" is a Kafkaesque patchwork that delegates authority to local officials and has enough complexity and wiggle room to make anything possible. We're not talking about a speed limit sign here. Show me the [company], I'll show you the crime.
I've been assured by people in this thread and others that, for example, if you "don't spy on users", you don't need cookie banners, and yet official EU sites have them.
Yeah, maybe that floats the people's boat wherever you live, but in other countries where people's health and well-being go above corporate interests, it is not common for companies to break the law.
> for example, if you "don't spy on users", you don't need cookie banners, and yet official EU sites have them.
Which is true, and you can understand that yourself by not relying on others, but reading the regulation yourself. It's actually pretty simple, and I think even someone who don't like regulations would be able to get through it if you apply yourself.
And yeah, even official EU sites could avoid it if they'd chose to not use tracking cookies. Not sure what the gotcha is supposed to be here? There is no inconsistency here.
This, I think, is the real answer why this is happening. The motivation behind these huge fines on large U.S. tech companies by EU countries is actually "we need revenue", not "we must protect our users". I would expect this to become another source of strain between the EU and the US as the EU economy continues to atrophy. Especially so if the U.S. economy weakens, too.
European companies are fined all the time as well, you just don't see the news about it, there definitely no ill-intent vs american companies as you are trying to imply
I think that this way of thinking is a little reductive. Every sport depends on certain intelligence metrics, and the brain is ultimately the operator behind all movement. The intelligence required to read a defense and solve a complex math problem may be different, but being good at either require intelligence.
A professional athlete in team based sports, at any given moment, is parsing a ton of data and responsing with quick reflexes and intuition to their changing environment. For example, quarterbacks in the NFL are reading a defense, parsing coverage, and making split second decisions after the play begins to develop.
A soccer goalkeeper is ensuring precise geometry to stay in an optimal position to make a stop, ensuring they are creating a triangle between the ball and the goalposts to optimize their position relative to the possible shooter.
Ontop of all of the in-game aspects, there is intelligence required to train to optimal levels, and hand waving this away as the coaches responsibility is not based in reality. Professional athletes have to stay very mentally focused in their training off the field to achieve their on the field results.
A lot of people judge professional athletes intelligence based on their communications with reporters and on field interviews, but public speaking ability and intelligence are not necessarily correlated. Your smartest engineer is probably not great at making keynote speeches, and likewise would be particularly terrible if they were making them after exerting extreme effort (like athletes do in post game interviews) or while they are pumped with adrenaline with an elevated heart rate (conditions sideline interviews tend to take place in).
All of this is to say, professional athletes arent all meat heads like most computer programmers and bookworms tend to believe. Your judgement that they aren't smart is probably based off of your bias and you are likely overweighting your analysis on a few notable dumb athletes against the crop.
Also, to top it all off, every sport is different, so you can't lump professional athletes into a single bucket.
If you took Google of 2006, and used that iteration of the pagerank algorithm, you’d probably not get most of the SEO spam that’s so prevalent in Google results today.
That's specifically for AI generated content, but there are other indicators like how many affiliate links are on the page and how many other users have downvoted the site in their results. The other aspect is network effect, in that everyone tunes their sites to rank highly on Google. That's presumably less effective on other indices?
Can you please think through what would happen a bit further? What you say here is a first order analysis on a very short time scale. It does not capture the end state of such a change. The acceptable transition period for a change depends on the severity of the problem the change is targeting, and in this case here the problem is quite severe, so our acceptable transition period should at least be measured in half decades, not weeks.
The harsh reality is that the world as it is depends on what amounts to slave labor, and that is priced into (or out of, rather) the goods that are imported. The mental and economic gymnastics involved in justifying it or pretending otherwise are just window dressing.
no surprise given the high taxes, extreme energy prices, massive bureaucracy, ridiculous regulations, work-hating employees and extremely business-hostile culture
A lot of people seem to be pushing some weird "anti-environmental" when the simple reality is that all energy costs
I cannot understate the impact of Russian Energy being cut off. Right now we're paying roughly twice as much than we used to for compressed natural gas brought via tanker ships from the us. I genuinely believe that the war in Ukraine is mostly about energy dependence on Russia and Ukraine losing its transfer fees through their old pipelines
> I cannot understate the impact of Russian Energy being cut off.
It's an interesting fact that Western Germany imported Russian gas since the early 1960s, throughout the cold war and in complete opposition to US interests. German Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_deutschen_Gasve...
It's just one piece of the puzzle. The cost for Co2 certificates is a more major reason. Starting 2027, hedge funds can buy these certificates which will be the nail in the coffin. It's basically Bitcoin on steroids with the difference that people buy Bitcoin out of free will, while the industry is forced to buy these certificates which get more scarce over time.
Anyone can already buy those certificates - but as its an artificial market where rules can be changed politically it's actually way more resistant to such things than regular markets, so if those hedge funds feel like they want to lose some billions they can certainly do that. There is a large enough stockpile of certificates + leeway when to submit them that any short term market squeeze will just be dealt with politically.
This argument, namely that politics can lower the price (by emitting extra certificates) when it gets too high, contradicts the whole reason for the mechanism in the first place: They claim a free market can find the right price better than politicians. But then they interfer anyway?
The price will rise much larger than a dumb, fixed increase-schedule would. Because the "market" wants it's profit.
It's the loss of Germany's last nuclear plants in 2023[1]. For a country supposedly aiming for net zero the shutdown of their nuclear infrastructure was a huge "own goal". Really sad to see.
> Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground.
> The Ark system is sized to lift an acre by a foot each day.
this sounds like science fiction, it would need to uniformly lift between 18.500 and 370.000 cubic meter of soil/rock by 30cm a day.
300.000 m³ soil/rock would weigh something like 600.000 tonnes and would require ~1.8 GJ to lift by one foot even with zero loss and discounting all other factors apart from lifting the mass.
1.8GJ is pretty much exactly 500kWh? That's not awful in terms of energy, although intuitively I suspect that the real-world energy used would be at least an order of magnitude higher than the gravitational potential energy gain.
I've once been in that situation with Ryanair: I booked through some reseller, not knowing that they'd make all bookings using some omnibus Ryanair account they would not share the password for (so mobile app use was out), and only emailed me the boarding pass PDF. But I didn't have a printer...
The airport business center did have one, with a moderate 50 cent per page fee – except if that page contains a boarding pass, in which case it was 8 Euro.
I would've photoshopped the barcode onto a Covid certificate and then ask to print it...
Isn't barcode on the PDF good enough anyway, to be scanned by a machine (either biological or electronic)? Obviously it's Scamair, so they could've imposed dumb rules like "we need the physical paper"
Yup, that's it. They explicitly weren't allowing scanning off of a screen, as far as I remember. (The code on the screen might be fraudulent, after all – can't do that on paper!)
reply