> “I was asking him, ‘Is this all going to end up shaking out like radio?’” Snyder told me.
> In other words: a media business that mostly revolves around high-profile talking heads. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern for radio; Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, and the trio of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes (who reportedly signed a deal with Amazon worth as much as $80 million) for podcasting.
I don't know how radio is in the US, but this description of radio would be completely wrong here in France. There are tons of high-quality programming, in-depth debates by experts in various fields (you get Nobel-prize winning physicians discussing with Nobel-prize winning economists about COVID for example), series of documentaries on single topics, hilarious shows... Many of my favorite podcasts are literal radio shows that get uploaded to spotify &co.
The budget of the EU parliament? What do you mean? The budget of the parliament was about 740k€ in 2022.
Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.
Did you mean 740k EUR per person? I can't find the whole budget right now, but it costs EU parliament over 100 million just to move it back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg (which is totally pointless and is only done so that France can feel important). They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.
EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.
> They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.
Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.
EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated. Costs for translating the proceedings are very likely less than 1% of total costs for translation.
> EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated.
But only legislative text needs to have translated versions officially recognized as equivalent. The rest can be produced and published in English, and member countries can translate them as required, if necessary. It's a huge expense that exists only to placate French linguistic nationalism.
Well, Imagine your government (the EU is not far off of being one) is now handling everything in spanish, even though your country speaks english and english is your official language. Lets be generous and there are only about 10% of people not speaking spanish. Is it really ok that there are official documents, meeting notes, publications, advertisements,web sites, videos etc in spanish and only the most important ones get translated to your language?
For companies this would completely fine. For a government this is not.
Apart from that, there is right now a huge source of text that is publicly available and already translated into the same X languages, with a huge quality to boost. People have teached ML translators with that text source. Ofc this is just a side effect but these translations have made other translations and communication in the EU a bit more simple just by being such a big reference.
> EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
Yes.
But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.
Never is a big word. Every time the EU levies fines like this it's effectively the market getting smaller.
Also, there's degrees of exit. Google can exit the market and have zero presence in the EU whilst still sub-licensing tech to affiliates who pay for the privilege and resell their stuff, whilst dealing with all the local regulatory overheads. Plenty of firms use that sort of model.
It's also really not the outcome wanted by regulators. Everyone losing access to their email and information, YouTube, etc would create absolute chaos. Antitrust's job is to rein in profit, not destroy markets.
> which triggered on every single incremental payout from the mining pool I used
I can't really see how small taxes spread out over small pay-outs would be different from a large tax over the total. It's your marginal tax rate anyway.
> In other words: a media business that mostly revolves around high-profile talking heads. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern for radio; Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, and the trio of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes (who reportedly signed a deal with Amazon worth as much as $80 million) for podcasting.
I don't know how radio is in the US, but this description of radio would be completely wrong here in France. There are tons of high-quality programming, in-depth debates by experts in various fields (you get Nobel-prize winning physicians discussing with Nobel-prize winning economists about COVID for example), series of documentaries on single topics, hilarious shows... Many of my favorite podcasts are literal radio shows that get uploaded to spotify &co.