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by lenerdenator 458 days ago
I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.

Like, we're impacting communications now.

5 comments

This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.
this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest.

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est

Wow, I try to come up with an exaggerated hypothetical and it turns out to be a real example. We live in a ridiculous world.
> We live in a ridiculous world.

Let The Market™ decide on access to drinking water:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization

Look up artisanal oil refining.
That's why I haven't taken life so seriously and been as uptight about things in recent years; because life sure as hell doesn't take us serious lol
I need to try out this line on my manager in stand-up later today.
Yes, that'll get you right.
Your hypothetical involved Coca-Cola directing the service cutoff. It doesn't sound like that was real.
We live in societies where private corporations are
Late-stage capitalism - the future is now.
That’s not literally the same thing, it was a protest over them for not “connect wells of their property to the public service supply network.”

Which isn’t something I’d want random companies to be doing, and a figurative drop in the bucket.

It's the same aquifer though, right?
If the factory had simply shut down without hooking up their infrastructure, the area still would have had the exact same short term issues.

The issue was arguably a lack of wells in an extreme situation, not a lack of water in the aquifer.

Aquifers are not infinite in capacity, so it's a valid point.
One drop in an empty bucket is infinitely more water.
> One drop in an empty bucket is infinitely more water.

No multiply 0 by infinity and you don’t get one drop, ie 1/0 is undefined.

Further it wasn’t an empty bucket.

In this case, as bucket content aproaches 0 drops, 1 drop becomes infinitely more, at least in calculus.

Limits in calculus: "When a real function can be expressed as a fraction whose denominator tends to zero, the output of the function becomes arbitrarily large, and is said to "tend to infinity" For example, the reciprocal function, f ( x ) = 1/x tends to infinity as x tends to 0.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero

Are you in an alternate dimension where Snow Crash literally happened?!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

This type of crazy shit makes me love Canada even more
Its one of the reasons why I am a market based socialist.

The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation.

The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to allow suitable profit and growth.

The final tier is the new and not-required level. This is the new stuff, the crazy tech. Low/no laws, let everyone in this realm go crazy and experiment. The skies the limit.

But water? This is beyond the pale. And revolutions have gone on for this before.

I might've got a bad translation, but :

> the parastatal Water and Drainage Services of Monterrey

Isn't that already the state owning the water supply?

> This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem.

This isn't limited to just one company. The problem is how copyright has been abused and over-prioritized until it's become a threat to people's freedoms, to art, and to progress.

Copyright needs to be reined in so that no matter what the company is or what product they're pushing innocent people won't be negatively impacted just so that the industry can squeeze more profit from people while refusing to adapt.

But why does the company have too much power?

Because there's a lot of money at stake surrounding soccer in Europe.

> But why does the company have too much power?

Because they pay the lawmakers to give them this power.

So then why hasn’t Europe made a viable competitor to Cloudflare yet…?
Cloudflare isn't the company with too much power in the above scenario: La Liga is. CF isn't turning off access because they want to, it's because La Liga convinced a court that Cloudflare is promoting "piracy" with the various websites they host (some of which, constituting less than a rounding error of the overall sites they host, may host pirated soccer streams), and convinced a court to have Cloudflare blocked.
Technically LaLiga is only allowed to sue because the gov created aggressive IP/piracy rules, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_Sinde

They were given those powers in court over Cloudflare via the Spanish government, with some help via a pressure campaign by US gov to protect US copyright globally.

That said, Cloudflare absolutely has too much power. Centralizing the internet makes it fragile and maximizes the collateral damage caused by draconian copyright enforcement.
If there was a viable competitor, then it wouldn’t matter so much if it was blocked or not…
The same IP rules would apply to anybody hosting any site that could have the pirated streams...
That's a bad thing in this case. I don't want website blocking to be easier.
What makes you think the competitor wouldn't simply be blocked as well?
Because their policies, behavior, etc., likely wouldn’t be 100% identical.
Must be a lack of regulations and compliance procedures giving potential entrepreneurs the legal framework to work within.
the problem here isn't football. It's rampant censoreship and net blocks in the EU. (same problem different methods in other EU countries. In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)
I travel a lot in the EU and the Internet is a total shambles. Blocked stuff everywhere. Right down to VPNs not even working.
You're best off just running a socks proxy to aws.
I’ve taken to just carrying a book with me and reading it instead.
>>In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)

Can you give some examples so we can see what harmless political satire you have in mind?

Andy Grote comes to mind. Someone tweeted "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy") at him. Got his house searched and everything for that.

Issue here being the fact that insulting someone is a criminial offense (hope that's the correct english terminology) in Germany.

https://theweek.com/news/world-news/954635/willygate-german-...

e:/ Whether this is actual satire or not is up for debate i guess, but this was in my opinion way overblown

> "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy")

Sure, it's something like that, but it's more like "thou beest such a willy". ;D

What kind of "harmless political satire"? Where can I find more about this?
"Pimmelgate", Stefan Niehoff raid are two examples of hilariously disproportionate law enforcement response for minimal offense.
those are the better k own examples. But its pretty common. Friend of mine got raided for posting a meme that contained a swastika in negative context.
Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.
I know the current situation isn't the most optimal but barely working is an extreme hyperbole.
You're replying to a thread where people lose internet connectivity when a bunch of men are kicking a ball around a field.
This has nothing to do with ipv4/ipv6 and the "ridiculous hacks" we do to keep ipv4 going. Those work just fine. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
If we want to use the internet as a communication network then we need peer-to-peer connectivity. We can't get than on IPv4. Resilience is pointless if everyone needs to connect to the same (few) middlemen before they can establish any kind of connection to a peer. It's no better than the old telephone system that needed an exclusive physical link between correspondents.

We almost had this in the early 2000s, but then we regressed. People were excited about meshnets, when was the last time someone mentioned those? Too many people have forgotten and now many have been raised in this current form of the Internet thinking it's the only way. We need to think bigger. We need to push for IPv6 and basic internet connectivity (meaning ability to connect to any peer in the world) as a human right. Otherwise we build our lives around something that can be taken away on a whim over something as silly as grown men kicking a bladder around a field.

The internet attack resilience isn't meant to keep a single node online. It is to keep a communication network active even if parts are destroyed. That part works.
Who cares about a single node? You shouldn't need a node in the middle for two parties to communicate. That's the point.
There seems to be a problem starting new companies in the EU. It's hard to imagine the EU developing alternatives that people would want to use in such an environment.
The problem is not in starting a company. It's in the 20 to 100 million investment if needed: those do not exist here.

You'll get up to 10 million investment from whatever bank + state arrangement no problem. But when you want to scale up you're fucked if it requires money. So no "let's get 1 billion users and then think about milking them" way to do business, you have to be profitable a lot earlier. And you better not require too much R&D.

So why have European capital markets remained so inefficient for so long? I've heard a lot of facile explanations about risk averse culture but I'm not convinced that really explains anything. Culture becomes quite malleable when people have an opportunity to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power.
You say resilient to attack, yet it's also the opposite where it is very very easy for someone to attack someone to the point of removing their online presence. People will DDOS a site for the lulz. People will do it to cause problems for some perceived slight. Some will do it to hurt a competitor. It costs them pretty much nothing to have it happen. For those on the receiving end, it could be devastating. Their only affordable option is to use one of the megaCorp providers.

So it's a "this is why we can't have nice things" more than anything else. The assholes always ruin things in the end. So instead of some idealistic dream of a world, we get this shithole dystopian reality.

La Liga is the problem in this scenario
it s not such a massive thing as it used to

but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things

People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans.

When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.

Surely you're talking about a District Attorney deciding that an individual needs to be charged prima facie and saying he "will find a crime" right?
I expect that's not what they were talking about, but I bet what you are talking about can happen just about anywhere.
I'm sure it could and it's wrong everywhere.
District Attorneys everywhere charge first and then prove the crime afterwards, right?
Well typically a case is referred to them by law enforcement or a criminal complaint, then they review the evidence and decide whether or not to go to trial.

It's much rarer for a DA to say they want to find crimes a particular person committed and then direct others to go find evidence for whatever they can find evidence for.

Which DA went after a particular person without referral by law enforcement or a criminal complaint? If this was really such a breach of ethics, surely it would be trivial for the political party in question to first make a criminal complaint? It's not obvious to me that the complaint/referral matters much?
I don't know how much of this tribalism is confined to the stadium. Personal experience makes me feel like there is a big overlap between Ultras and actual nationalists, but I'd like to see a study.
> When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.

I mean, FIFA is corrupt as hell and there's been plenty of documented cases of other social ills caused by European soccer fandom, but okay.