This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.
There are lots of excuses for Europe's lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it's a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they're the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn't give it to them, you'll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.
Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that's because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We're now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.
If fossil fuels hadn't come along, it's possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we've gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don't want to see an "age of the dinosaurs" climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.
The recent success of the European far right is precisely because they've revised their image to get rid of the freakshow aspects. The days when you could dismiss these people just by calling them "absolute freaks" are over.
It's pretty sad to see Vox's decline into gutter clickbait media. I guess it was inevitable once Klein and Yglesias left, and their mediocre minions took over.
Half of this article's word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn't care about these games and doesn't know much about them. I guess it's good to show contempt for your audience...
Italy's far-right government has taken the honorable step of reinstating UNRWA funding, yet the UK and US are still sending thoughts and prayers (or maybe not even those).
For the US to invade Saudi Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located, would have turned the entire Muslim world against it for generations. It would have been Afghanistan+Iraq times a hundred.
Thanks for the information! It's pretty distressing that the EU, in its zeal to do the right thing, seems to be protecting the big AI companies from FOSS competition.
From the FT story about this, it appears the Israeli far right is going to respond with more repression:
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, on Wednesday wrote to Netanyahu, demanding “punitive steps” be against the Palestinian Authority in response to the European decisions and other Palestinian moves on the international stage, including seeking action against the Jewish state by the ICC.
Smotrich called for a series of measures including a major expansion of Jewish settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, the establishment of a new settlement for every country that recognises Palestinian statehood, and the freezing of Israeli tax transfers to the PA.
Any word on the final legislation's treatment of free and open source models? At the drafting stage, there were warnings that the requirements would basically shut out FOSS projects, thereby entrenching proprietary models from tech giants. Later on, there was talk about possibly adding carve-outs to protect FOSS, but I couldn't find the details.
This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.
There are lots of excuses for Europe's lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it's a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they're the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn't give it to them, you'll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.