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  • 55 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•The Fediverse is at risk by the EU KIDS ACT!English
    7·
    1 day ago

    The EU’s planned KIDS Act is causing unrest in the Fediverse, the network of independent servers around Mastodon. Critics warn of age verification on every single server and foresee the end of decentralized social networks.

    My home instance is outside EU jurisdiction.

    It may be very damaging for the Fediverse, but even if the EU outright banned all ActivityPub servers, that wouldn’t force an end to the Fediverse.

    And the rest of the world?

    The Fediverse does not end at the external borders of the EU. The draft applies to providers regardless of their location as soon as they offer their service to users in the EU (Article 2) and requires them to have a legal representative in a member state (Article 24).

    You have to meet the US definition of doing business in the EU for the US legal system to enforce any EU rulings against US-based instance operators, and simply having a service accessible to EU users is not alone sufficient to meet that bar. My guess, though I’m not familiar with other legal systems, is that they likely have a similar bar. The EU itself probably uses a similar jurisdictional bar, which is why, for example, EU-based server operators are not subject to Iran’s death penalty over blasphemy just because an EU server might be accessible to an Iranian user.

    The EU might seek to compel EU-based ISPs to block EU users from having access to US-based instances, prosecute EU-based instance operators that federate with US-based instance operators, partition the network, and that might be adequate to cut off EU-based users from US-based instances, but it won’t be a worldwide ban via a legal route.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•[Opinion] The long twilight: China is entering a century of demographic declineEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    The problem isn’t the size of the country but rather - as the article also says - China’s “increasingly ethnocentric path.”

    That may also be an issue, but even if China were fully open to immigration, it’d just run into problems in being able to fill in demographic gaps via immigration due to the sheer size of the country. The world population is presently 8.3 billion. China’s population is 1.4 billion. That’s about 17% of the world’s population.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate

    China currently has a TFR of about 1.03. At that rate, each generation is less than half of the size of its parent generation.

    You’d have to have a population movement of absolutely staggering size to be able to patch that hole.

    Immigration usually happens as people move to wealthier countries, and as a result, China’s got less ability to pull immigration than do, say, the US or Europe or the like. I’m not saying that it’d be absolutely impossible, but…okay, look. I remember a while back, NPR Planet Money did an interview with some Cato economist. His model projected that if the US ran a completely unrestricted immigration system, the US would wind up with well under double its current population as a permanent increase.

    searches

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/02/21/172501563/three-ways-to-totally-transform-u-s-immigration-policy

    We have one more Idea, from Alex Nowrasteh, a self-described libertarian at the Cato Institute. Here’s his proposal, let them in, all of them, almost.

    ALEX NOWRASTEH: My dream setup would be a system whereby only criminals, suspected terrorists and those with serious communicable diseases - like, you know, drug-resistant tuberculosis - are barred from coming to the United States to live and work.

    KESTENBAUM: This, he says, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

    NOWRASTEH: The United States had a system like that from roughly 1790 to about 1882.

    KESTENBAUM: It was the law of the land for almost 100 years of American history. Open borders would be great for the economy, he says, and you wouldn’t have to worry about people risking their lives crossing the border. If you are wondering how many people would come, Nowrasteh says there are some polls, asking people around the world, would you like to move to the U.S.

    There were a lot of yeses.

    NOWRASTEH: About five to 700 million.

    KESTENBAUM: So that would more than double, triple the population.

    NOWRASTEH: That would, but, you know, you have to take a big grain of salt with that.

    KESTENBAUM: Nowrasteh figures more like 50 million and 100 million people would actually want to move here and stay. And thought that would be fine. Compared with Europe, he says, we have a relatively big and empty country. What chances do you give this passing in Congress?

    NOWRASTEH: About zero. Of, you know, the type of thing I want right now, somewhere near to zero.

    KESTENBAUM: There you have it, three proposals. By the way, when it comes to citizenship, all three economists said these workers, if they want to eventually become citizens, that’s fine. We should let them. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.

    So, even if China could pull that level of immigration in absolute numbers, which is unlikely, it’s just only going to go so far to prop up its population given the size of the Chinese population and how low its present fertility numbers are. A Chinese route to a sustainable population pretty much must involve a big change to fertility rate.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•[Opinion] The long twilight: China is entering a century of demographic declineEnglish
    61·
    3 days ago

    It’s quite a serious problem, and in China’s case, due to its size, the impact that immigration can have to mitigate it is limited.

    But…China also isn’t the only one facing demographic issues from a decreasing fertility rate. The US has long been notable for being both wealthy and maintaining a high fertility rate, which is somewhat unusual, but it’s been below replacement fertility in recent years now. It’s better off than a lot of countries, but it’s still going to have to try to grapple with it too, even if it’s not in as severe a position.

    And some countries in the West, like Germany or Italy, have been low for quite some time. Japan and South Korea have been pretty low, with South Korea in a really serious place.

    https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US-CN-DE-IT-KR-JP

    In general, social changes in past decades have led to really low fertility rates, and that leads to longer term economic problems.