That's the EU loyalist line but look at the comments in this thread. Tons of people saying, yeah, old news, EU money is corrupt and distorting, why is this suddenly in the NYT? But notice how they're all people reporting personal experiences. They're not linking to investigative journalism. That's because journalists largely refuse to report on this kind of thing ... except in the UK where the EU is actually held to account by the press.
The EU routinely claims any criticism of itself is a lie, a myth, made up etc. But it's not the case.
The Commission actually had a huge blog dedicated to rebutting the "myths" as they put it, from the British press. But if you examine the posts you'll see many of them admit the stories were actually true. They aren't myths at all - that is itself a lie!
The attitude on display here sums up EU grant awards in a nutshell. A story about a wasteful grant to train trapeze artists in Africa (wtf) is described as "the press chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut production"! No, the press was ridiculing the EU. The rest of the answer to this "euromyth" is stating the funding did happen but it was all for a good cause so that's ok.
Or this one about agricultural grant budget going up and fraud levels being high.
The story is primarily about fraud, asking why the EU can't stop it. The Commission's response to this "euromyth" is that it's not their job to ensure the subsidies aren't gamed, which is hardly a rebuttal.
That doesn't sounds like a wasteful grant at all. Wasteful spending is spending on things like war and for profit insurance companies, things that suck the life out of the world.
Whereas circus arts and coconut production give life.
And yet Europe has massive youth unemployment throughout large regions, there is poverty, there are problems. Why are they spending money on trivialities like circus performers in Africa: a place Europeans don't live?
If you can't see why many people would be upset by forcing taxpayers to cough up money and then spending it on that, I'm not sure what to say. Resources aren't free.
Just go read stories from the UK Eurosceptic press over the decades. They've been digging up stories of EU corruption since forever. The only reason the UK is seen as "weird" by people in other EU states is because the press is ideologically loyal to the EU institutions throughout most of the world and doesn't report on or investigate this stuff. But in the UK they do (to some extent).
Even look at this story. The NYT really wanted to go digging for dirt on Orban and Hungarian society in general, Orban being famous mostly for resisting EU integration and resettlement efforts, and being notoriously unpopular in Brussels. But they found they couldn't because the EU lacks even very basic levels of openness. You aren't going to read about EU corruption from them, that's for sure - the fact that they only just noticed this says they've been turning a blind eye for years.
For instance, go look at the stories in the UK about farmers being paid to not breed pigs. I'd like to get paid to not breed pigs! I think I'd be good at it!
See my other comment on this thread about that site. Most of those "myths" are actually cases where the press told the truth and the EC just didn't like it.
I feel like this "pig" example may not be a very good one. It's clear the farmers were paid not to breed pigs for a good reason - overly low prices due to oversupply. The United States has passed similar subsidies to address our agricultural oversupply. Canada's done the same thing, quite infamously with their dairy industry.
The NYT appears to be going after Eastern European politicians here, which is surely deliberate as they tend to be conservative and against immigration, so the ideological enemies of the New York set. But it seems they got distracted along the way by the shocking discovery that the EU is opaque and corrupt. The most interesting thing about this story isn't that some Hungarian academic thinks he got fired for criticising the government (i.e. his employer) but rather, that the New York Times' Brussels correspondent has never previously investigated the EU itself.
The question of what's right and wrong is a topic for religion and theologists.
I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).
The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.
They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.
Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?
Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.
You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
This is changing because of LLVM. It is now very easy to implement AOT compilation for your programming language.
However, implementing an efficient garbage collector in an AOT compiled program is still challenging compared to an interpreter where the stack and each object is just an array of object references. With raw memory you don't know whether something is a number or a reference unless you store extra information that describes the memory layout of every single function or object.
I'd say it's actually because of Graal. LLVM is helpful for writing a compiler but only changes the difficulty by say, one or two orders of magnitude. But the difficulty of making a fully statically typed compiled language is many orders of magnitude larger than one guy hacking together an interpreter.
The nice thing about GraalVM and modern gradual typing techniques is you can actually start by writing an interpreter, fully dynamic, no type system at all. Graal turns the interpreter into JIT compiled code on the fly, you can even create a standalone (no JVM) AOT compiled binary containing your language runtime, all with one command. Then as your language evolves you can add interpreter hints to gain extra performance, but, it's totally pay-as-you-go. There are no walls of effort facing you: you do a little work to get a little benefit, and a lot more to get to V8 type speeds. You can also introduce a type system gradually these days, as CoffeeScript/TypeScript or Groovy style languages do, again incrementally as your language evolves and gains usage.
Also with Graal you get the world's best GCs for free, plus access (if you want it) to the JDK class libraries for things like files/sockets/time&date handling. Oh, and language interop with other languages for free, no complex FFIs. It's pretty neat.
That said, are there lots of programmers itching to write dynamically typed scripting languages these days? Probably not. Languages like Kotlin deliver most of the benefits with very few of the downsides.
NB: The Scottish independence referendum did not allow the rest of the UK to vote. It was considered a matter for the Scots alone.
Arguably this wasn't fair. Splitting a country in two affects everyone, so why couldn't everyone vote? But if the rest of the country could vote then there'd not have been even a tiny hope the SNP would have accepted the results. In fact, they did not accept that they lost anyway, even when voting was restricted to Scotland. But it's easy to understand why the referendum was designed the way it was.
Ironically it might be that these days the rest of the UK would kick Scotland out, if they were given a vote. It's not necessarily true that everyone cares about the Union.
Spain will cease to exist anyway given the trajectory of the EU. I don't know why anyone in Spain seems to care about Catalonian independence. They seem to want to immediately turn around and (re)join the EU, which is rapidly taking over more and more areas of governmental policy. EU forbids different regions from being more "competitive" than others (see their demands to the UK) and implements large wealth transfers from richer to poorer areas, so, the rest of Spain would end up being subsidised by Catalonia still.
If you care about Spain existing you should be campaigning for Spain to leave the EU, rather than being distracted by whether Catalonia does or does not possess whatever trivialities the EU leaves behind to member states as it grows.
> I don't know why anyone in Spain seems to care about Catalonian independence.
I never cared, but I do care about the image they are projecting of my country (specially as someone living abroad). Moreover, they are doing great getting the worse of everyone.
I never liked nationalism (including Spanish nationalism) and now it's worse than ever. And I do not like anti-riot police, and I do not want my government to close web sites, and I do not like to see Barcelona burning, and I do not like the hate I see in the eyes of the independentists when they talk about Spain, neither I like the hate I see in the eyes of some people when they talk about the Catalan independentists or even about Catalonia. And I think I could accept all this if it was for a good reason, but I think it is just stupid nonsense (did we learn nothing from Brexit?). We should be moving forward towards some kind of United States of Europe, and worrying about doing something with all these people from Africa who keep coming here, not about breaking apart and stupid flags. I get many questions from friends from all over the world, and I do not know how to answer them, I just feel shame. That's why I care. If tomorrow the Spanish state disappears and we just become one big European country, I would not mind at all.
By the way, you are right about what would happen if an independent Catalonia joint the EU. As a wealthy region, they would have to pay. However, why would the EU allow to join a wealthy country who just decided to break their own laws in order to not subsidize poorer regions?
If tomorrow the Spanish state disappears and we just become one big European country, I would not mind at all.
I have unfortunate news for you.
People hating larger governmental forces that control them isn't something weirdly unique to Spain or European nations. It is a part of the universal human condition.
If all existing European nations were abolished and merged into a new EU "country", guess what? The "nationalists" would hate the EU instead. This already happens in fact. Why do you think Brexit won? It won because so many people really don't like the EU and the way it works. The entire British population was threatened by its own government with ruination and told anyone who voted Leave was thick and racist, and Leave still won. Imagine how much bigger the result would have been if the government hadn't relied on such aggressive tactics.
Worse still, people who think they aren't "nationalist" would also be filled with hate, but towards imaginary external enemies instead. Go listen to the people who run the EU. Listen to people like Juncker, Verhofstadt and Merkel. They can't stop talking about the EU empire and the threats posed by "China, Russia and the United States". The USA is rather different to China but to the new Europeans, it's just another foreign enemy.
The way to stop people hating on each other is to help them resolve their differences amicably. Lots of votes, lots of tiny nation-states or even city states, and yes lots of borders, ideally of the smartest possible type to ensure they're hardly noticeable. In the end, forcing everyone to comply with one small group's set of preferences will always create big tensions. The solution is thus not fewer countries, but more.
That's an interesting point of view I cannot say I disagree with. I do not see big fundamental differences between many small countries working together with those smart borders you mention or some kind of big federal estate that gives a large autonomy to its members, but you are right that what you propose may work better in practice.
Either way, my point was that the reason I care is not the unity of Spain. You said you did not understand why anyone would care and I said why I do. You do not have to agree with me.
> And I think I could accept all this if it was for a good reason, but I think it is just stupid nonsense (did we learn nothing from Brexit?).
It's not for you to decide that. If a majority of people in a region (yes, still to be conclusively shown for Catalonia) wish to have independence and their own self-government then they should have it. Otherwise you are promoting tyranny. You're like the husband who tells his wife that she is wrong for wanting a divorce because he's still happy with the marriage. Actually, the principle of indissoluble marriage has a lot in common with Section 2 of the Preliminary Title in the Spanish Constitution:
> The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation
Both principles of indissoluble unity - both in marriage and in the constitution of a state - are expressions of tyranny.
When I say "this", I do not talk about the independence of Catalonia. I refer to everything I wrote in the previous paragraph that you have ignored to instead talk about divorces (a bad analogy, by the way).
They have created a problem that is directly affecting me, and only for their own benefit. And I am the tyrant here?
I strongly disagree with your bleak view of the EU. Membership is actually one of Spain's biggest strengths, as are other alliances, like NATO.
Of course, there is a tradeoff here, members loose a degree of independence, and there are serious problems with the design of the Euro, laid bare by the financial crisis.
But one should also compare the current situation with the alternative, which would be european nations facing US, Russia and China on their own. Their bargainaing power and influence would be severely reduced, as the UK is about to find out.
I see this current trend against international alliances as part of the larger wave of populism and nationalism in the wake of the financial crisis, where people are looking for whom to blame, and the real culprits (crony capitalism) are too happy by the distraction: career polititians, and the rest of the world in the US (how else to explain Trump?), the EU in the UK, the West in Russia, and, more to the point, Spain in Catalonia.
Much of this talk of the EU being against its members' interests is Kremlin propaganda, given that much of Russia's weakness lies in the strength of western alliances, so it is in their interest to weaken or break them.
Russia has a GDP smaller than Italy's. It's a threat only in the minds of a very particular segment of society that seeks to blame it anytime they lose an argument. "Kremlin propaganda" isn't responsible for Trump or Brexit and may well not exist at all, as every attempt to reveal it keeps disappearing into puffs of smoke. What exists are arguments Euro-federalists keep losing for reasons they can't understand, so they seek to blame shadowy conspiracies that are always just out of reach of proof.
This is visible in your own post! My view of the EU is neither bleak nor non-bleak. It's a simple factual statement of what the EU is and what it's becoming, as stated very clearly and repeatedly by the people who run it. The goal of the EU is to merge countries together.
Do you believe the EU is not a federalist project? That its goal is not to become a new country? How do you explain the ever growing power of the Commission, the new Army, the flag, the laws that make disrespecting the flag illegal, the continual push for ever more integration, the explicit talking points you repeat here that the EU must "unite" to "face US, Russia and China"?
The end state is not to lose a "degree" of independence, as you put it. It's to lose all independence completely. That is the end result of ever closer union, as the treaties word it, and that goal can be seen in the actions of the EU every day. It's not standing still. It's unifying armies, tax rules, trying to create new immigration law and so on, often without adjusting the treaties because they know that would trigger automatic referendums in some countries that they are guaranteed to lose.
Finally, the EU is not an alliance. Alliances are agreements between separate entities to support each other within some precisely defined scope, like military defence in case of invasion. The EU is something more: a movement to merge the separate entities together completely in all conceivable areas, until there's nothing left to be allied anymore because they're the same thing. Rejection of the EU is not a rejection of alliances, it's the opposite - it's a preference for alliances.
The EU is absolutely happy to interfere with internal matters when it suits them, to a huge degree. Look at how they have been treating Poland and its reforms of its court system. Or look at how the EU is trade sanctioning Switzerland due to a dispute over Swiss internal working regulations.
The Commission is all about "European values" and how they're going to impose penalties when a country is doing something unaligned with their own agenda. But their agenda is to destroy all European nations and merge them all into one super-nation controlled by itself. As part of that they desperately want people to feel patriotism and nationalism towards their new nation called Europe, not existing countries. See how disrespecting the EU flag is now illegal in some countries.
From their perspective Catalonian independence = more countries = harder to unite Europe. Therefore it's fine to crush the resistance. "European values" have mysteriously gone missing.
I would've thought more countries = easier to unite Europe. Each country has more of an incentive to be united and less of an ability to separated if there's many small independent countries.
Someone wants to have a European Civil Code, and they say "but I already know the rules to trade with 30 million people". When you cut up the countries, they say "but if I want to trade with someone an hour's drive away, the rules are different - it's better to unify".
There's more boundaries where rules change, so there's more motivation to smoothe them out.
There's less power for each individual government, because their voice is 1 in 60 instead of 1 in 28. You'll quickly come to an understanding that the rules of European decision making have to be standard federal rules, rather than some compromise between federal and international rules.
The motivation for European integrationists is absolutely and solely for Catalonia and other places to become direct members of Europe.
I think nationalism and its more “accepting form” patriotism so far, in history, had a net negative impact. I am reffering at relations between states.
I also think that we have a wide range of problems which cannot be solved at national level.
So why it is bad if EU wants to have less of that?
One of the initial premises of EU was to facilitate cooperation between states which were at war for lenghty periods of time. And by facilitating collaboration the making them feel more “together”.
This is complicated, but let's say that the EU's arguments are all basically arguments for empires and they are happy to say so. Look at the recent speech by Verhofstadt where he praised empires and said Europe must become one. But that's nonsense. Literally all the bloodshed and horrors Europe went through in the 20th century were caused by attempts to unite it into a single empire. The bizarre lesson some people see in this is to keep trying.
Also, don't for one second think the EU is against nationalism or patriotism. They desperately chase both. Why do you think the EU has a national anthem? Why do it's supporters say things like, "we Europeans". The entire EU project is a project to craft a new form of loyalty to the state and a self-sense of tribal belonging. Those who don't think this new nation, with its so called "European values", is better than their current nations ... well, they're treated with contempt.
Finally, there are no problems to which the solution is empires. The world has more countries than ever, yet is also richer and healthier than ever. This correlation and trend can easily continue for long time.
> Literally all the bloodshed and horrors Europe went through in the 20th century were caused by attempts to unite it into a single empire. The bizarre lesson some people see in this is to keep trying
Here is a response to this from [0]:
> Within the zone of integration, there has been no conflict since 1945, making it the longest period of peace on the western European mainland since Pax Romana
So from this there are two possible conclusions:
1) Either empires are good for peace
Or
2) EU is not an empire and it is not trying to be
Regarding:
> Finally, there are no problems to which the solution is empires
First: there are problems which cannot be solved by each state. See global warming for example
Second: The collaboration between countries is not mandatory to be an empire as form.
Firstly, yes, empires can be good for peace in some ways. The Roman Empire had Pax Romana. But the Soviet Union was also internally fairly peaceful, at least as much if not much more than the Roman Empire. Oddly enough, lots of people didn't want to be a part of either empire. There are downsides to empires that outweigh enforced "peace".
Secondly:
EU is not an empire and it is not trying to be
I think you missed a possibility: the EU is not an empire yet but is trying to be, and this is already causing various kinds of conflict. The fact that it's not creating World War 3 is no excuse: the Soviets didn't cause World War 3 either but not many people think the USSR was a good thing.
For an empire to dominate people it must have at least two things. One, a large number of people physically within that population who are loyal to the regime. Two, military strength to swiftly put down any rebellions and ensure the loyalists remain in power.
The EU has the first in abundance, as the horrible situation in the UK is showing. People were given a vote. The British establishment are refusing to implement it, as they're more loyal to the EU than to their own voters. This is no surprise because the same pattern is observed throughout Europe, where the EU creates a constant series of constitutional crises. Democracy is being crushed throughout the continent without a shot being fired due to the massive weight of regime loyalists already in positions of power.
The EU doesn't yet have the second. But it wants it very, very badly and has identified an EU army which reports directly to the Commission as its new top priority. Why does the EU need an army when NATO exists and works? Nobody can quite explain that. But let's face it: people keep voting in anti-EU politicians throughout Europe and if current trends continue, eventually one of these power struggles will be lost by the loyalists. The only way the EU could then keep control is by suppressing anti-EU citizens through force. If the local police won't do it, an EU army will be ready to step in and enforce Commission policy. It's hardly going to be useful for major conflict anytime soon given its size and newness, but as a form of ultra-loyal police it won't be half bad.
I'm personally planning based on the belief that the EU will be a new USSR-style empire before I reach retirement, complete with ability to put down insurrections, a large propaganda apparatus and ideological loyalty of at least 100 million people. I expect to die of old age with it firmly in control of most of Europe.
Finally:
Second: The collaboration between countries is not mandatory to be an empire as form.
I completely agree, so why are we building one? The useful work the EU does could be better done by a constellation of standards bodies and independent political alliances. The politics of unity and Europeanism that comes with it is unnecessary and dangerous.
I know. That's my point. The EU very much much wants them to be and had imposed trade sanctions on its financial sector as part of applying pressure during a treaty "renegotiation".
But Bell Labs is remembered for things like the transistor, which had huge impact.
There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtuous, for research funding to be disconnected from application.
Bell Labs funded the transistor and not radio astronomy because apart from making cool TV documentaries, radio astronomy isn't actually useful for much. If we knew how to travel faster than light and explore the universe it'd be extremely useful, but we don't, so learning things about what a remote corner of the galaxy looked like a few billion years ago is easily argued to be a rather absurd waste of limited research dollars.
It's exactly what this op-ed in the Scientific American is talking about: a research field optimised to produce papers independent of any concrete economic utility function. In a world where such things get funded, what exactly should scientists be measured by? They can't be measured by market success because nobody cares or has any use for their output: their work is pure academic navel/star-gazing. So they pretty much have to be measured by volume of output or respect of their peers, both of which are closed and circular systems of measurement.
In my view the right fix for the science crisis is not to pay scientists to research whatever the hell they like with no success measurement at all: that really is directly equivalent to just firing them all and putting them on social security (or "UBI" as HNers like to call it). The right thing to do would probably be to just slash academic funding dramatically and reduce corporation taxes so corporate research can be given more funding. The net result would still be a drop in the amount of science done, but as Bayer's study makes clear, "not enough science" is not the world's problem right now.
Thanks for the reply. Yes indeed, Bell was famous for its many discoveries and applications. It was also famous (among science and engineering pros of its time) for granting its employees lots of time to spend on their own projects. Why they dropped-the-ball on Jansky's find is probably complicated.
The person that did lead the way to the (now enormous) field of radio astronomy was Grote Reber. He had a BSEE degree. It was his life-long passion, in his free time, at his own expense, and he had to struggle to get anyone to pay attention. He personally discovered Cygnus A in 1939 (and lots more). But he didn't get the physics Nobel in 1974. Instructive story:.
