I'm trying to be charitable but I really don't understand your line of reasoning. To me it seems like their hand is being forced by the UK Government. They don't want to introduce a backdoor for global users by complying so they are simply disabling the feature for users in the UK. If the feature does not exist then there is no need to comply. That seems... reasonable?
The blame squarely lies with the government in the UK and that is correctly where it seems like most of the anger is being directed.
The UK government is not a dictatorship. Bad policies like this should be pushed back against by both corporations and individuals or things will get worse. Easier said than done, I know, but Apple instantly rolling over is not a good sign for a company supposedly big on privacy.
It is the nature of the UK Parliamentary system, that when the party in power has a large majority, it is essentially an elective dictatorship. Then 5 years later we may get a different dictator.
This is a well known issue with the system. There are few checks and balances, it rather depends upon honourable behaviour by the participants.
That honourable behaviour ceased to be practiced from around 2000 onwards, and so things have been deteriorating.
paying up front when offered an interest free loan, especially in a high interest rate environment is not really rational though. i have excellent credit but klarna doesn't offer its services to me, i suspect because they expect i will make the payments on time and become unprofitable.
I suspect that whatever transaction Klarna did not offer its services to you during was an outlier.
Klarna is paid by the merchant when you select them as a payment method. They definitely want people with excellent credit, because people with excellent credit are low-risk.
While Herb uses modest language when describing his project, my take is that's because it's a huge effort that might fail, but it does not indicate lack of ambition. If anything, I think this is hugely ambitious. The work in the standards committee provides the necessary infrastructure to make this feasible in the first place. On his Github he lists the changes that went into C++ over the last years that enable this prototype.
It's pretty clever really, and dare I say, it seems feasible. This essentially creates syntax bubbles inside the language where there are different defaults, and then transpiles those bubbles to regular C++ while copying the rest verbatim. See this https://godbolt.org/z/nPPMYM3Yj as an example how array accesses are transpiled to do bounds checking.
i think to expect a multi-billion dollar organisation to make consequential decisions like this based on anything other than cold calculation is naive at best and enormously stupid at the very worst.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.
consider that the goal of facebook is not to build a 'good product for the world'. facebook exists to 1) keep your attention 2) extract as much data as it can 3) make inferences where necessary/possible 4) sell targeted ads.
facebook is an ad business. to that end, they do try to improve the user experience wherever necessary to advance the goals stated above, but that's it.
one piece of advice for anyone about to read war and peace: the number of chracters are vast and you'll find that the names used to refer to each can often change with no warning. different names can be used interchangeably, even in the same piece of dialogue. it can get very confusing. best to have a map of character names before you start.
> As a market, it's not worth the risk until it's worth the legal advice.
i think that is a calculation only op can make. the european union covers over 400 million people. making some early design decisions in what data you collect, how you store it, for a lot of people is an acceptable cost to open up to such a large quantity of people.
in fact, it think advising a founder that is bootstrapping their business that the only "reasonable" course of action is to exclude large swathes of the developed world is frankly, misguided.
> making some early design decisions in what data you collect, how you store it
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. "How you store it" very well may include "on any cloud server owned by a US company," including AWS, Google, and Azure. That's a pretty big issue for a solo founder with no legal advice beyond GDPR wishcasting on HN.
The blame squarely lies with the government in the UK and that is correctly where it seems like most of the anger is being directed.