Contrary to some of opinions here where the easiest thing is to criticize Trump and his administration, I will give a different point of view:
Many of us European citizens love the Trump administration and we envy Americans for the big step you've given against the globalist tyranny.
The EU is totally controlled by them and we are literally living in a dictatorship (in Spain with the dictator Pedro Sánchez is one of the worst). The EU is implementing laws for full control of its citizens, censoring all the contrary opinions. Freedom is almost non-existent anymore. And the worst part is the forced Islamization of Europe they're creating. This with the sole purpose of riding us of our culture and identity. People without identity are people with nothing to fight for, people easily enslaved.
You Americans wake up! Trump is the best thing that's ever happened to you.
I totally agree with this comment. You put my thoughts into words.
Unfortunately that kind of cheap comments (Economics is the lies told by some middle class assholes with a degree and/or credential that get paid just enough by upper class assholes to trick low class rubes.) are quite common over the internet and mainstream media. Just enough to keep people not thinking about it and everything is a lie by the elite and we can do nothing about it.
I have to say something good about billable hour: it made me value my time more.
I used to work as a freelancer in tech, so I had to bill my time. I was billing my time at 50€/hour. Out of work, when I was doing something I liked, I didn´t think of the price of my time, but when I had to do something I didn´t like I thought "would I do this if I was payed 50€/hour?" Depending on the answer, I would try to leverage that.
Since then I try to make the most of my time. Not only my personal time alone, but also I think about who I spend my time with. Apart from my parents, my wife and my daughters (which is always a very valuable time) I try to spend my time only with people who provides value to my life, and I try to avoid people who don´t.
One example: 2 months ago my father died. We used to spend time together, less than I would have liked when I think of it now, but back then I was not that aware of it. I remember we would go work on the fields growing vegetables, collecting olives and trimming the trees. I remember one day that I was a bit tired when we were setting up a new land and trimming some very old, mostly useless, olive trees, so I asked my father (in a rude way):
- "why are we doing this? why are we wasting so much time and doing so much effort just to clean some old trees that will hardly provide enough olives to make a few olive oil litres?
His answer was so clear, emotional and bonding that still hurts me today. He answered:
- What? Who cares about the trees? The important thing is the time that we are spending together.
I would have never thought that now, I would pay several thousands just to spend a single more hour with him.
Learning about billable hours was a revolution for me. It changed how I looked at everything. It's such a simple concept, dollars per hour of work or $/h. Then I started maximizing the dollars and minimizing the hours worked.
Time is the most precious thing to me now. I want to spend it enjoying my life and the people I love. I selected my job for the highest $/h ratio rather than highest salary.
If you have a guy being paid $100/hour to upload some CSV files and clean their header names and rename them, it is very easy to see just how much you can save by automating that task.
When personnel are salaried, it is easier to forget that their time costs money. Double so for overtime. When salary includes OT, there is no short term reason to have your staff work efficiently. Just have them work another hour - the marginal cost is free!
I am personally quite worried. The thing that worries me most is that our government (at least in Spain) would do anything in order to keep their power and maintain their high salaries at the expense of our lives. That involves increasing and creating more taxes everyday.
So it´s like living in the Titanic. Everybody knows it´s sinking and the government is just stealing from us (the passengers) in order to buy nicer lifeboats just for them, and paying the musicians (media, labor unions, allied parties...) to keep citizens still and quiet.
We are under an autocracy disguised as a "people´s party" that is bleeding us dry while many families are just drowning because of the high cost of living and unemployment.
I can't really understand how a post by El País can make it to hacker news. El país is a disinformation newspaper full of manipulation and indoctrination controlled by governments. At least this is the case in Spain, do reading this newspaper is just killing your brain
EU is a hidden and well thought dictatorship, disguised as a democracy with values where everybody who complains and says otherwise is marked as an enemy. An autocracy full of useless burocrats who live out of citizens taxes
EU is becoming more like an authoritarian state. They put constraints on companies but allow governments to have full control and surveillance over their citizens. It's so hopocrit
I don't see how it's hypocritical to give democratically elected governments different possibilities that random private companies.
It's government's job to put constraints on companies, stopping them from becoming the absolute assholes they become if they have no limitations. That does not make them authoritarian.
Sure. On the other hand you can usually chose which companies to interact with. When it comes to governments the relationship is not optional. Your government usually have more ways to affekt your life than most private companies has (like no fly lists).
A few years ago the true extent of the Swedish program for tracking left wing sympathisers became known. It ran from the sixties up until 1998. For example, if your car was seen outside of a left wing publication you could end up on a list somewhere. That caused you to be automatically excluded from 5-10% of all jobs without you never finding out about it until 20-30 years afterwards. Imagine wanting to become a police officer, a pilot or and engineer and never understanding that the reason you didn't get an interview was because you had parked in the wrong spot one day years before. Or that your sister briefly dated a left wing journalist at some point.
The tyranny of majority is a real threat. Power should be "shared" (or under contention). Companies just want to take your cash, governments can take your freedom.
We live in a society with money is inherently connected to the freedoms you have, and companies want to draw you in so that you have to use their product. Basically every job that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree nowadays requires you to have a cellphone to communicate with them. So if you don’t have a cellphone (so realistically being under the control of Apple or Google) and you don’t have the qualifications to get a college degree, you can’t get a job.
You're saying governments shouldn't have the ability to govern its people, or inquire as to how global scale companies impact their citizens? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
"... allow government to have full control and surveillance over their citizens."
This is hyperbole.
This suggestion is the logical next step of the part of GDPR where it says that citizens should be able to understand how automated decisions are made about theme and their data. This is about transparency for citizens, not governments dictating how algorithms should work.
