I think this comment is, while factual, slightly misleading. Only around 16% of people "living off the government" are public servants, from which over 50% are for essential services like education health or public safety.
Over 50% of those "living off the government" are pensioners, so mostly coming from a pool of people who already worked (and most of them in the private sector), and paid their share in taxes. In spain, the private sector makes 70% of the active workforce, while the public sector around 13%, self employed 13%, and unemployed 10%.
I know Spain (and Europe) have quite a lot of structural problems, but I fail to see how having so many pensioners has anything to do with AI regulations.
They might not explicitly, but you have the right to take any data you have or they might have on you of any service, no matter if you have an account or not: aka right of access. I don’t know if it has been used this way, but it might be a possibility.
Calling out anthropomorphization of corporations when related to morality or politics while attributing rationality or self-interest is a contradiction.
Corporations have no self-interest or do not think. Corporations are human artifacts composed of human beings that have specific rules applied to them in the great game in our societies, and tend to behave accordingly. This behavior have patterns that we as humans recognize unsurprisingly as human, because they are composed by humans. A corporation is a as rational as a group of humans can be.
Corporations do not always "act" in their self interest, and we can (and in my opinion should) expect moral obligations from them as we do with humans.
The parent mentioned not what alphabet does, but where it gets (most) of its revenue from. Google is making phones, but not really making a lot of money from them. So the question is, what is the future of alphabet?
For a few months my wife had a baking job that required her getting up at 4. I’d get up with her and start to work after breakfast. I’d have the days work before 9:00 standup. More time for sport and cooking. Think it was a healthier lifestyle in total. Social life was impossible though, we couldn’t manage to stay awake long enough to meet up with friends. And impossible to maintain once she switched to another shift.
I think this post is just ignoring some of the realities that a lot of people have gone through. In many places you weren't allowed to leave your home at all. In spain, only one adult member of your household was allowed to go outside for basic necessities, without leaving your neighborhood, for 3 months. For about another 3 months you were limited to certain times and areas, which made having social distancing for walking/running practically impossible. Couple that with the fact that in some cities people live crammed in small rooms in shared apartments, the access for healthy movement for a lot of people was greatly impacted.
What about older people who couldn't even have their daily walks for several months? Should they be squatting in their tiny apartments holding water bottles instead? I'm sure there are plenty of people who can work out at home, but I believe there are plenty of people who can't, or at least is a lot harder, for a variety of reasons.
We have been trying to reverse engineer Roman cement for quite some time. There are quite a few things that past civilizations did that are impressive by today’s standards and then lost to time.
I think the point is that even though it is called a phone, it is actually a portable super computer, and in many cases the only one people have. We can’t pretend it is only a device we use to call other people, it is the gateway to our digital lives. From banking, access to government services, to connecting to our loved ones and leisure.