Because the whole point is to stop poor people from driving and lining up the pockets of the car manufacturers.

Not when you will buy the phone on credit which many people interpret as getting it for free.

Or those god-forsaken monthly payment plans that exclusively exist to get people who don't know how to budget racking up more debt

0% financing on Apple card, 3-8% annual inflation the last 4 years, you'd be dumb not to take it

The people monthly payment plans target are not able to afford the thing because they bought 30 other things on monthly payment plans in the past year and can't keep track of all the monthly payments they're owing until it's too late. That's the intent and why they're so popular now. It's why DoorDash is getting in on the action, so people will buy a Taco Bell delivery with a tempting price tag of only $4 at the time of purchase, multiple times a week for months until you owe hundreds of dollars.

Regardless of who they target, I'm taking free financing any day of the week. It's like credit cards which I've received huge value from, and I've never carried a balance in over 30 years of use.

They are offering 0% when treasuries are yielding 4%, of course I’m going to take it.

Like many other things, these services work well _if you already have the money and don’t actually need it_

A payment plan for a phone makes perfect sense if the phone is capital equipment that makes you money.

> There wasn't even an attempt to sell this to the public.

EU policy about everything in a nutshell. We are not consulted or taken into account about absolutely anything. What would we even do about it?

Should everybody who works at Google and Meta be progressive?

You don't have to be progressive to be not "okay with this".

Europe has ceded development of all tech to China and the US, I don’t see why AI should be any different.

And Europe is now waking up to that. The people have access to YouTube and caught up on what's been going in European industries. Entering a multi polar world they are at least now informed.

Edit: related, France had many of these commissions to report on the dismantling of it's industrial fabric: https://youtu.be/1OH5PqO_O1Q

Because it did doesn't mean it still wants to.

When you talk about China, you may have confused development with production.

It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere.

But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.

The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.

The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.

I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.

The EU is mostly a hotspot for leisure, tourism, food, fashion.

A lot of people enjoy living there, meaning there is necessarily some local talent that doesn't get captured by the global markets.

"a political class that aligns with business interests" - or is it the other way around, more recently? - Big tech firms bowing to Trump and all that.

China, Japan and USA all have their chip machines, just ASML is making the most advanced ones.

What's the "easy fix"? Mass deportations?

Stopping immigration in its tracks is the first step. If anything it doesn’t stop increasing. Then we can talk about the next steps.

Congratulations! now you have a island at the wrong end of a population boom.

All of your former productive workers are now retired, and the rest are expected to pay for the retirees and aging infrastructure.

Now, is growing by a million a year a good way to build long term? no.

Is depopulation going to make the country better? also no.

Immigrants aren't the problem here, They're not the one scaring away buisness, not building homes, not changing the law to make needed changes.

The people who are to blame are the commentariat and the rest of the "political calss" who refuse to accept blame or change.

Investment is the easy fix, but it's easier to blame immigrants than do that.

This should be an article, not a video. You have a video which is practically all text. wtf!!

Believe it or not, most movies, television, videos begin with a text script.

You might not know, but: Audiobooks are extremely popular, even though printed versions exist...

A YouTube video can be easily and effectively monetized to support the creator’s development efforts. A text blog post cannot.

way to exclude people with reading disabilities /s

Inappropriate use of force, search and seizure and racial profiling is disrespecting the US laws and regulations.

What’s happening today is that megacorps are bringing in people illegally to dump the salaries of the locals and for some reason the left, which should fight for the working rights of the locals, is siding with the revenue of the billionaires.