“I am very sceptical about this,” Dobrindt told broadcaster ZDF on Sunday after talk of a possible ban dominated German media since Friday. “I don’t believe that we can just ban the AfD. Instead we need to outgovern them.”

“In truth, this plays into the hands of the AfD and their narrative that people no longer want to engage with them politically, but only legally. And I would not want to grant the AfD that satisfaction,” Dobrindt said.

I hold Hanlon’s razor to be one of the most important tools of making sense of the world. But I simply don’t understand these Dobrindt quotes. They seem to be missing like 10 paragraphs of explanation or context. I’d truly like to at least make sense of them before I dismiss them. What does “outgovern” mean? What’s so bad about not engaging with the AfD politically?

What is it if not a landgrab? A pit Putin can throw the next generation of russians into? A blow to Putin’s pride that he refuses to accept?

A hot potatoe that an autocratic regime living on borrowed time has to keep juggling out of self-preservation.
You’re styling it as “blow to pride”, but I’m quite certain that if that catastrophic drain on Russian resources and lives just… ended tomorrow without any tangible strategic gains (like a sustained destabilization of NATO) then people would literally start dying. Not the poor expendable footsoldiers, but people in charge. Can’t have that, so gotta keep expending that infantry.

He said, addressing Russian leaders: “Don’t you have enough land? Eleven time zones and still not enough? Take care of better governing what is within your borders according to international law.”

I understand the sentiment, but I don’t like the pointless polemic. I mean, he’s the foreign minister, he very well knows that this stopped being a landgrab the moment the war wasn’t over within a week…

I don’t know but that’s what the post you were replying to stated and you just ignored it.

I do tend to ignore posts that come without references or explanations, that’s true.
But that’s beside the point I was raising - I’ll rephrase: I find it hard to believe that there is anything two Middle European kids vacationing in Hawaii could ever do to even remotely approach any sane definition of ‘working without a permit’ to warrant immediate deportation. Whether they did or didn’t actually intend to defraud the Federal Government over 20$ in beach bar tip money taxes doesn’t really factor into that argument, does it?

It seems like themselves admitted that they intended to work?

In what capacity?

It seems like a bit of a stretch to frame two teenagers wishing to go island-hopping as part of their post-graduation world trip as “intending to work” 😜

Deportation appears to be about as appropriate here as sending the SWAT team after someone who dropped a candy wrapper.

No country wants to become Libanon 2.0.

What does that mean?

I mean I 100% agree. I’m not justifying them in their perceived grievance, rather, I’m offering a mechanism in “how things come to pass”. My assessment is that if you can make the grievances minor/ absurd, you remove any leverage for the conman.

Sure! But, again, why let conmen walk around in the meantime? That seems like an entirely unnecessary and easy-to-tackle problem.

The investment in a social democracy/ social safety it ultimately what is safeguarding Europe, because it precludes the motivations/ grievances which create surface area for misinformation to operate on. Its not that it isn’t possible, it just has a much more difficult time taking hold.

The UK is a great example of this, where they seem religiously committed to austerity as the approach for addressing most issues; this gave rise to grievance politics because, well, austerity does hurt people; grievance politics gives misinformation something to operate on (its the continents fault); brexxit happens; life gets worse; misinformation gains an even further foothold because now its premise has been validated, and there is even more grievance to operate on.

Grievance is the scar tissue which misinformation operates upon. Misinformation is the bacteria which spread and cause death, but without the wound of grievance, there is nothing to do. Creates strong mechanisms for grievances to be addressed (engaged democratic processes; responsive governance).

Whatever actual or perceived grievances a person may have (even though merely being born in Europe already constitutes winning the global class lottery) - that only ever causes vulnurability. That person then turning to actively undermining democratic systems and the international community is something that only happens if some con artist uses that vulnurability to convince the person that it constitutes a solution to their problems.

Universal wealth and happiness are nice, but the immediate, separate and and more solveable issue is not continuing to give microphones and political offices to con artists. Letting folk get scammed out of their vote is just as detrimental to a healthy society as letting folk get scammed out of their life savings - if not more.

It is not trivial, the existence of you job makes that self-evident. If it was trivial companies wouldn’t need a DPO, would they? I would love to see you walk up to your employer and tell them that your job is trivial and anyone can do it…

Again, as someone who performs the job, I’m telling you: It’s trivial. Come on, don’t try to somehow ‘reason’ that away, that’s just silly. Many jobs are trivial, many jobs need to be done. Mine needs to be done because it’s mandated, not because it’s hard. And I could, in fact, walk up to my employer and tell them that it’s trivial because they would understand - both my boss and I took the same one-day course to become certified.

You might not see this yourself, but the fact that even a small company needs a DPO in order to interpret data protection regulation IS the problem! But I am sure you are not complaining… It needs to be simplified so a small company can be GDPR compliant without requiring a DPO.

Again, I don’t know what you think the workload entails, but if you want more specifics I can tell you that my position as a DPO takes up less than 5% of my time and most of that falls to preparing the yearly internal employee training course and the rest is basically automated. It’s not some kind of full time profession unless you have a gigantic corporation or literally run a legal business offering external DPO services. Compare it to the position of something like a medical first responder, if that exists where you live.

In fact, I’m going to do you a solid now and break down the certification course: If you handle personal data, write down where it is and who does what with it. Don’t ask for personal data that you don’t need to perform your function, don’t share personal data with third parties, delete all personal data the moment you don’t need it any more. There, GDRP-compliance for the vast majority of businesses in just one paragraph.
It truly is very, very trivial - as is the whole GDPR main text, for that matter. It’s well structured and uses simple wording.

This problem is recognized in the report from the EU commission linked in the article, which is why they are acting.

Ah yes, the Draghi report. “Europe must invest twice as much as it did rebuilding after World War II, allow more tech and telecoms companies to merge and take drastic measures on defense spending”
If you’ll have another look at the article, that’s part of the massive industry lobbying effort that they’re referring to.

The fact that small startups cannot even take off because they cannot afford to hiring the bureaucrats required to interpret and be compliant with regulation is a massive problem and one of the reasons Europe’s economy is stagnating. It is not about exploiting personal data, it is about the cost of bureaucracy killing European startups in their infancy.

I don’t know how else to put this, but this is just not a real problem. I’m reluctant to outright call it a fiction, because there might always be information that I’m missing, but as someone who has worked in the field for about 3 years now I’ve never come across internal or external reports of businesses who could not afford GDPR compliance. Again, that would be silly, that’s like complaining about building code because you have to spend a pittance on fire extinguishers.

That’s a funny way of saying liberals

What do you mean? By the looks of it the original point was about deregulated free market capitalism, not about individual freedoms in general.

That would be pretty neat, yeah.

but because of GDPR we still have to rely on printing papers, and sending them to other clinics via post or fax

I don’t know who told you this but that is certainly not mandated by GDPR. Could you elaborate on the situation?

All my patients expect me to have ready up on their medical history, and know what medications they take, so that I am up to date about what they need. But in order to do that, I first have to ask for their permission, and THEN open their journal. It has to be the other way around - that you can actively block healthcare personnel from reading your journal if you for some reason don’t want them to.

That is also not mandated by GDPR. I don’t know who you DPO is, but at some point of the communication chain there must be a misunderstanding.

have you ever had to deal with GDPR? It is a nightmare and I am certain American big tech is secretly celebrating it, because it kills any European startup alternatives, because they cannot afford to employ enough people to be compliant with the law and if they try to do it with existing personnel they don’t have enough time left over to actually run their business

Am DPO. What do you mean? GDPR is trivial to deal with and you do not need to employ additional personnel beyond a DPO. They don’t even have to do it full time.

There are certain few business models that explicitly rely on exploiting personal data, but them being slowed down is very much the intention.

Less inequality and better education are really the only solution.

People reach for extremism when they feel let down by the existing system.

Whatever actual or perceived grievances a person may have (even though merely being born in Germany already constitutes winning the global class lottery) - that only ever causes vulnurability.
That person then turning to actively undermining democratic systems and the international community is something that only happens if some con artist used that vulnurability to convince the person that it constitutes a solution to their problems.

Equality and education are great. Letting con artists run around freely is a completely separate issue. Letting folk get scammed out of their life savings is just as detrimental to a healthy society as letting folk get scammed out of their vote.

That’s about 40 years too long.

I feel like this might need a bit more context.

A number of European states have updated their travel advice for the U.S. since the Trump Administration came to power.

Be careful with the terminology here. I’m not familiar with the the specific background in Norway, but at least where I live there are legal differences between official foreign ministry “travel warnings” and “travel advice” and you’re using both terms.
Whether it’s one or the other here can determine whether your travel agent has to fully reimburse you for your 5000€ vacation ticket or not, for example (if I remember correctly).

I wish I’d had to do it.

You can go and volunteer for the reserve right now. You’ll get a mini basic training and everything.

“We can’t just sit back and watch as the world around us becomes more insecure,”

I imagine GlaDOS’ introduction scene in Portal 2, only it’s not GlaDOS towering over Chell but Merz admonishing some hapless 17-year old: “Okay. Look. We both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret.”

“I’d like the variant without a SIM card please.”
Don’t buy features you don’t want.

Well yes, that’s what I was saying. Are you saying a VW vendor will not only sell me a car without any non-mandated communication modules but also give me a better price for it because it amounts to the car having fewer features? That’s actually good news.