ArkVark

And now we have the War on COVID.

Europe generates a lot of content, but owns none of the platforms. Lower commissions on those stores would translate directly to higher profits and investment by those content creators, which would be taxed directly and indirectly.

COVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria.

If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.

Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.

Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.

I think the inevitable move here is for the EU to enact a maximum % commission for platforms above $1b revenue, at something like 20%. Maybe for sales from that region or for developers in that region.

Unfortunately the EU is going the opposite way - increasing VAT and digital taxes, which are passed straight onto developers.

IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.

In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.

I struggle to see anything Fascist about Donald Trump. I'm significantly more concerned about the role of BLM, woke politics, and the rise of Leftist racism, which is basically part and parcel of modern Democrats.

The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.

The EU is not a great place for innovation, period. Here are the major problems:

1. No common language

2. Incredibly high taxes, particularly sales taxes

3. Unfinished transition out of Communism in many Eastern Countries

4. Preference for cheap illegal labor instead of automation

This could be solved by:

1. Formalising an 'EU English' language so that schools teaching it can open up around the continent and families can move from one country to another without having to pay for extortionate international schools

2. Eliminate payroll taxes, limit sales taxes to a maximum of 10%. Deport all illegal immigrants (who are huge burdens on the State and society) and raise pension ages to 70 in order to save money. Limit bachelor degrees to the top 20% of the population and Master's degrees to the top 10%, to encourage people into the workforce earlier in life. Raise taxes on land and pollution.

3. Limit EU funding for countries like Bulgaria that have not transitioned to modern Democracy or Bureaucracy.

4. Withdraw from the UN convention on refugees, deport all illegal immigrants, pay and help North African countries to guard their own coastlines, and replace migrants with robots and automation.

This will immensely boost the living standards of the average European, but hurt bureaucrats and old-money.

The simplest explanation for Madrid is that it locked down too early, and herd immunity (which seems to occur at about 20-25%, based on Antibody testing of New York and Sweden) was never reached.

Lockdown also seems to increase the threshold for herd immunity and increase deaths, by dramatically changing the demographics of who is infected. Without lockdown, the youngest and most mobile people are likely to be infected - with minimal/zero deaths since COVID mortality is incredibly age dependent.

Under lockdown, those people are at home and intermingling with family. The only 'social' activity is shopping for food, leading to an unnatural mingling of old and young.

I live in Ukraine which has masks and little else against COVID. In shopping centers particularly in the evenings there are essentially zero old people - they fear for their lives, as they should.

The most effective policy we could have adopted was 6AM-10AM public transport and shopping for the aged only, and everyone else from then on. Segregate the elderly population into the mornings and let the masses in in the afternoon. This might have required shifting school and work to later hours in the day for three months, which seems a minor inconvenience.