> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
Thats pretty telling that on the search's / ad placement on the web where it matters, OAI has had no impact or its muted and offset by continued market power / increased demand for Google's ad-space on the web.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
There are equivalents in several European countries. The problem is that these networks are national and not European, let alone global.
National banking players did not want to give up their turf. The European Union had to twist their arms to get them to agree to SEPA transfers, instant transfers, etc.
If banking players cannot agree, then regulation (or the threat of regulation) must be used.
CB actually have higher security standards than visa.
I once worked at a company doing payment card personalization (its the company who turn blank smart cards into finalized cards on behalf of banks. They print the customers names, emboss the account number, and program the chip and the magstrip)
Every year they had comprehensive security audits from Visa, Mastercard and Groupe Carte Bleue.
One guy there told me that they did the Groupe Carte Bleue audit first, because its the toughest. If they passed it they were sure to pass the others.
The most obvious difference being that unlike China or India, Europe (or the EU) is not a single country. This doesn't make things impossible but certainly complicates them.
Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical. They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.
> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical
VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.
Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.
European countries each have their system. But they do not interoperate. You can't pay with blik in Germany, you can't pay with German debit card in Poland.
It’s not really a secret that Singapore uses ethnicity based quotas when granting PR and citizenship to maintain their demographic composition.
Or be like Malaysia. They don't even bother to keep it a secret to maintain Malay governing power and unfair advantage.
Cheaper gas only for Muslim citizens, not Chinese/Indian citizens. A company must hire Malay Muslim no matter what. Plenty of other rules that favor an ethnicity.
I saw a post once from a white guy with a wife and two kids (I think also white) who was confused why he was having so much trouble getting Singaporean PR despite contributing so much to the economy.
Like bro... you are the wrong race, it's that simple, shouldn't be too hard to understand.
I'm not making a moral judgement on whether that's correct or not but it's just how it works
A filipino friend of mine moved to Australia after being denied PR in SG, mainly due his race.
As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
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