linule

Saw a journalist whining about “dependency on China” because they sell infrastructure for renewables.. you can’t make this up

Yeah, it is indeed external influence which somewhat competes with democracy. What’s really bad is the reaching of consensus within the government via mostly trust in designated experts, instead of the voters individually studying the topic.

Ok makes sense, we then have basically indirect influence of the majority via trust in smaller groups of designated specialists.

Ok and they still need majority vote.. often, at least? In which case there seem to be a lot of politicians who are just misinformed (if the lobbying has negative consequences), which doesn’t relate to lobbying specifically but their general decision making.

So mostly not a consequence specifically of lobbying, if the majority votes due to actual conviction. Rather of disinformation/laziness, which will affect non-lobby initiated proposals too.

The part with the smaller committees sounds anti-democratic. The later is a different problem (politicians being misinformed/lazy is not specific to lobbying)

So the lobbying is, in each particular instance, of potentially 100+ people (in the case of EU parliament 300 or so +), likely across parties? That seems difficult to organize, at first sight.

But why do individual politicians or groups have the power to get these things through? Is it not subjected to a majority vote or something?

The reality of the situation is more or less clear, but it helps to understand how things are supposed to work. They make their case and then what? does the audience decide on its own? Otherwise it seems difficult to buy the entire.. voting majority?

That “ready” is just typical political advertising speech. Could have been worded more carefully, but it’s forgivable. As long as the git repo and website correctly identify it as a demo/prototype, it seems fine to me. E.g. not using the security enclave is totally fine for a demo. It doesn’t affect the general protocol design. There’s a lot of hostility both to these initiatives as well as to the EU (often by different actors, there’s e.g other countries pushing for less privacy respecting mechanisms), so the clever criticism tends towards nitpicking. There’s actually merit in releasing such an ambitious project as open source and so early, which even with the nitpicking and negativity, is a good thing.

What’s the official stage of it? was it already intended to be released? If not it might be less of an issue.

Anyway it’s good that it’s open source. At the very least it encourages public discussion and in this case noticing the flaws.

Why is this specific to games? Seems to apply to any software?