The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.

And this is just State surveillance.

When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.

That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.

The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.

Surelly it’s at minimum a post about shit, so posting it here is kinda like going to a meeting of Alcholics, Anonymous only to find out it’s actually a bar where nobody knows your name.

Britain: fast regressing to the XIX century white colonialist mindset which, lets be honest, the never quite fully left

Not that Europe’s Posh Fascist nation was ever as culturally, socially and politically evolved as at least Western Europe, much less Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Certainly, having lived for around a decade each, first in The Netherlands and after in Britain, I always felt Britain was decades behind The Netherlands in terms of how they looked at and treated people.

The most classist nation in Europe only every paid lip service to the idea that inherently all people are equal and equally deserving.

Let me put things this way:

• Hands up anybody who doesn’t believe that, if they can, Health Insurance companies won’t mine the shit out of your purchase data and Car Insurance mine the shit out of your driving data to try and fine tune your risk group in their models and find out any change if your conditions that impact their bottom line (and dump you if they can if you switch to a high risk group)

Even if one’s relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a “Terrorism” for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.

Even you think you’re above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.

I’m pretty sure plenty if not most of people here pay most of their shopping with a card rather than cash, even though that shit at minimum goes into a database for ever and ever, probably shared with the authorities and in some countries just outright sold for pennies to anybody willing to pay for it.

And don’t get me started with just how many Techies jumped into Tesla’s “surveillance nightmare on wheels” - I mean, Techies were very much a large block of early adopters of Tesla cars and this was already well after the Snowden Revelations.

Further, how many people are in the habit of accessing the Internet behind a VPN?

(Personally, living in Britain - maybe the worst offender - at the time, the Snowden Revelations were what prompted me to start using a VPN regularly)

Whilst lots of people here have an actual “lets keep my digital footprint” mindset and praxis, I get the impression that most do not, and even those who bitch and moan about “surveillance” trade convenience (or, even worse, the Techie desire for “shinny new thing” thus getting shit like Alexa) for high digital visibility.

So yeah, maybe not “Yall”, but probably “Most of you”.

What “global backlash”?

If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascists Everywhere.

For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).

In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.

Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.

Yeah, I think in all countries with universal Education, at highschool level and even earlier there are classes for native speaking kids covering readind and writting in and later knowledge of things like formal grammatical structure and such for the local language, so it makes sense to distinguish classes aimed at foreigners to learn the local language from the ground up from classes aimed at local kids who already know how instinctivelly how to speak it.

So “<Local-Language> as a Second Language” is a valid name, if a bit presumptuous sounding (it makes it sound as if that’s the second most important language one speaks). In other countries I’ve more often seen “<Local-Language> for Non-Native Speakers” or similar, never calling it a second language.

One is left wandering what a manatee in a bikini was doing in a public park…

The US can change their laws to not have a global wiretap and secret backdoor warrant program, then this would be possible.

Even if they did, they can change them right back whenever they want and the thing with data is that, once it’s out there somewhere, there’s no way of knowing for sure it hasn’t been copied and archived.

Not just from recent events but from the Snowden Revelations and the decades of 4-eyes operations even before that, we’re well beyond the point of it being possible to trust US-based and US-registered companies with the data of Europeans, and ditto for those of any other of what are now the 7-eyes countries.

“The massive ceramic connector and 10 inch thick cable immediatelly make obvious that the USB-D connector has been designed from the ground up to be able to power the latest generation of Graphics Card”

Ah right.

In Portugal in general use “propaganda” is definitelly just the political stuff whilst “publicidade” is definitelly just the commercial stuff.

Mind you, maybe before those two concepts were more merged: I know that in legal terms the political stuff is explicitly called “Propaganda Política” since I’ve done paphlet distribution for a political party here during election campaigns and the rules for putting “political propaganda” in people’s mailboxes are different than for “publicidade”.

This is going to be huge when it blows!

For me the problem use to be it having gone from “Our product is great and here’s why” style of adverts to the psychological manipulation shit (image of beautiful woman seducing handsome man, queue name of perfume).

I’m fine with people trying to convince me but detest when they try to manipulate me.

However the recent tendency to relentlessly shove it in front of me ALL THE TIME does get on my nerves - it’s like getting constantly harassed by a shameless salesman with no respect for other people.

Neither “anuncios” (adverts) nor “marketing” (yeah, we use the English word) are the same as “propaganda” (its spelled the same as in English but said slightly differently)

Is what you describe a Brasilian Portuguese thing?

I literally dropped my Internet Provider which had a Net+TV+phone packet when their TV box got enshittified with Ads.

Got me a different, Internet Only, provider and made my own TV box from a Mini-PC with Linux and a wireless remote control.

Interestingly, I ended up paying 1/3 the price and getting 5x faster internet relative to the previous provider, so thanks for trying to shove adds on my face Vodaphone!

Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle elements of politics and policy - since I lived there from before the Crash until Brexit.

I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:

In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.

After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owners above all:

• Interest rates were lowered to 0%, thus protecting lenders (i.e. those with the money to lend or ownership of Banks which in the modern system can de facto create money: if you don’t believe me, read the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy” from the Bank Of England) from debt defaults, also indirectly protecting Asset Owners by avoiding asset firesales from collateral confiscated after a default thus avoiding the associate asset price falls, most notably for Land and Housing (in the UK the Housing bubble never really stopped being inflated and Land Ownership is the core of Old Wealth)
• Banks were unconditionally saved by the state taking a share in them. That Public share was then put under management of a group made up of bankers “so that the government doesn’t interfere in the market”. De facto pressure for changing from the very practices that had cause the Crash was removed and most of the people having the blame for the failures of the Crash kept their positions of privilege.
• All this was paid by most people through Austerity. Public services were cut, Social Security (aka "Benefits) were reduced, salaries stagnated. The poorer one was the worst they got hit.

By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.

This was roughly how things went for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth is anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since that “growth” told by official GDP numbers is mostly asset prices going up.

This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.

I expect the plans of the billionaires who are cozying up with Trump is exactly to end up richer via this process.

A lot of countries in Europe already have their own country-wide payment systems.

What we’re seeing now in Europe is the stage where those multiple country-specific systems become interoperable and a new international payment system appears.

Canada only needs the kind of thing which has been not just available but actually dominant for decades in countries like The Netherlands and Portugal.

At least in Europe housing is at the moment proportionally to incomes just as bad as in the US.

Totally agree on Health, though.