Basically, EMP but directed.

When the EU changed the rules of VAT on imports so that everything imported by consumers was charged VAT no matter the price paid and set up a system where foreign sellers could themselves charge the VAT on payment and then send it to the appropriate EU nation (otherwise ALL of their consignements would get stuck at customs waiting for the buyer to pay VAT) AliExpress immediatelly implemented the necessary elements and became part of that system even though they’re a Chinese company.

The point being that if the EU authorities want to, they can put the responsability for proving compliance on the entities selling those products to European customers (along with stiff penalties if they try to rig the system) and everything else just gets stuck at the border untill the proper paperwork (nowadays it would be digital documents) gets provided.

There’s already a system in place that any foreign company which wants to export to the EU must follow to certify their products (this is how they get the CE mark, using the services of TÜV Rheinland for example) so the most straightforward approach would involve the likes of AliExpress themselves having to check compliance and digitally provide the necessary documentation (or, more likely, the reference code for that documentation at a central database) to keep the stuff sold through them from being stuck on customs and risk be kicked out of the system if they let non-compliant products thorough (and all their shit then gets stuck at customs).

The point being that the whole part of the system were stuff getting imported by importers and consumers alike goes through customs is already in place, it’s just that they’re not stopping and examining everything, but they can (at the cost of every consumer order out there getting stuck in customs for months) and the last time the EU said that it was exactly what they would do if foreign sellers didn’t withold VAT at the source and send it to the EU, everybody complied, so that can probably be used for things like Regulatory Compliance (which itself also has a whole system of certification in place that’s used for products to get the CE mark that does the compliance validation part, so it’s a question of connecting both things)

Then the law should go after the intermediaries (i.e. Amazon, Wish, AliExpress) who are making available those products in Europe.

(And you can be sure even the likes of AliExpress will comply: when the EU enacted a “Everything imported by consumers now has VAT” rule with a “Foreign sellers can register in an EU system were they charge the country-appropriate VAT at the time of sale and send the VAT themselves to that EU country” they immediatly adopted that system to avoid having everything they sold stopped at the border and held until VAT was paid)

No companies care unless the end effects can be traced back to them and it blows up in a massive Public Relations nightmare that seriously damages their brand: just look at what happens under the US’ regulatory environment which doesn’t follow the Precautionary Principle.

Shit that directly and quickly kills or visibly hursts people: sure they care because it quickly spreads that their products are dangerous.

Shit that causes problems years later which are pretty much impossible to trace back to a specific product: they couldn’t give a rats arse.

Sociopathy (literally “I don’t care who gets harmed as long as I make money and get away with it”) in company management is far from a Chinese-specific thing.

Not being able to rely on companies caring unless it directly damages their bottom line is why Strong Regulations are needed and Neoliberalism (with it’s Deregulation mantra) has resulted on enshittification of just about everything.

Well, the “magical” Steam config was that stuff others pointed out that you need to in Steam actually under Settings -> Compatibility enable use of Steam Play with Proton for all titles since that’s not enabled by default.

I had quite a lot of the same frustration because, although I was never a sysadmin (more like a senior dev who has done a lot of software systems development and design for software systems where the back and middle tier are running on Linux servers, which involved amongst other things managing development servers), I was used to the Linux structure of a decade and more ago (i.e. runtime levels and the old style commands for things like network info) and the whole SystemD stuff and this whole raft of new fashionable command line info and admin tools that replaced the old (and perfectly fine) ones was quite frustrating to get to grips with.

That said, I’ve persevered and have by now been using Linux on my gaming rig for 8 months with very few problems and a pretty high success rate at running games (most of which require no tweaking) not just Steam games but also GOG games using Lutris as launcher.

That said, I only figured out the “magical” Steam config settings to get most games to run on Linux when I was desperately googling how to do it.

Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.

I moved to Linux on my gaming rid (this last time around, as I’ve had it as dual boot on and off since the 90s, but this time I moved to it for good after confirming that gaming works way better in it than ever before) when I had a GTX1050 Ti, and I had no problems ¹

Updated it to an RTX3050 and still no problems ²

Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front, plus I’m sticking with X and staying the hell away from Wayland on NVIDIA hardware since there are a lot more problems for NVIDIA hardware with Wayland than X.

Currently on driver 565.77

I reckon a lot of people with NVIDIA driver problems in Linux are trying to run it with Wayland rather than X or going for the Open Source drivers rather than the binary ones.

¹ Actually I do have a single problem: when graphics mode starts, often all I get is a black screen and I have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again to solve it. I guess it’s something to do with the HDMI side of things.

² I have exactly the same problem with the new graphics board.

The Economist are about as pure Neoliberal as it gets, whilst Trump and his minions are Fascists which is an ideology were the State sits above Money in the hierarchy of power (though, unlike in Democracy, the State under Fascism is not controlled by citizens), which is exactly the reverse order of what Neoliberals defend, so they’re enemies.

What they both agree, however, is that the common people with their vote should not control the highest power in the land.

So I’m still suspicious those words were kinda tongue in cheek.

It’s to do with the proportion of one’s income that goes into purchases and the proportion of one’s income that goes into savings (which generally ends up as investments):

• Poor, working class and lower middle class people’s income after paying rent or mortgage goes 100% into purchases, so a sales tax hits 100% of their income (after rent/mortgage). These people generally have no savings or just about enough to face a small unexpected event such as a fridge or washing machine breaking.
• For the rest of the middle class, the proportion of their income that goes into purchases gets lower and lower the higher their income gets and, of course, what’s left goes into savings, the last part not being taxed via sales tax (plus when it does end up getting spent, it often ends up in things like Property which is not taxed by sales tax).
• The rich will easily save 90% or more of their income, plus they can make sure their purchases happen where the sales tax won’t hit them (say, they’ll buy their yachts in places with no sales tax), so only a small proportion of their income is hit by a sales tax.

Absolutely, the more income people have the more they spend, but spending doesn’t grow at the same rate as income and beyond a certain point people just naturally end up earning so much that they don’t spend it all or even most of it.

In percentage terms, the poor and working class are the worst hit by sales taxes because, after paying rent and mortgage 100% of their income ends spent purchasing essential goods hence hit by sales tax, whilst the rich are the least hit by sales tax because their income is so vast that they spend only a tiny amount of it on things covered by sales tax.

Whilst in absolute, dollar terms it’s not the poor that pay the most in sales tax per person, they’re hit the hardest because sales taxes hits all of their income (after rent/mortgage) hence hurts them more, plus that income was already not sufficient to live well enough the first place and sales tax just makes it worse.

FYI, Spain’s dictatorship lasted for another 2 years after the one in Portugal fell.

Also in my experience both Spain and Portugal tend to be tought of as Southern Europe, even though geographically they are indeed to the West of almost all of Europe (Iceland is further to the West, whilst the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain are at around the same longitude)

Immigrants are getting deported for those wrong views, though, so… yeah.

Ah, good old Germany and their good old ways…

Well, 13h in with now being 5:30 PM in most of Europe and judging by the number of upvotes and downvotes on your post (13 to nil), I would like to think that your expectations on unwillingness to admit to Racism in Europe by lemmie crowd that frequents c/Europe, have not been proven.

I hope so, because in a decade of subscribing to that magazine I’ve often seen variants of the “worker rights are bad for the Economy” pitch in their articles and they were dead serious about it.

The Economist is a very Neoliberal British magazine (I should know, I had a subscription for almost a decade) and as such they have the vices of both:

• The magical thinking of Neoliberals, were the solution for the social and economic problems caused by deregulation is even more deregulation.
• The almost universal practice amongst the British Press and Political class of claiming everywhere is a shithole compared to Britain, especially Europe (and by that they mean Continental Europe).

So yeah, of course for them America sliding into Fascism isn’t the fault of the explosion of inequality and total freezing of Social Mobility there, which was the direct consequence of 4 decades of Neoliberalism and the destruction or defanging of all powers in the land (including Unions and the State) except for the Power Of Money, and of course Europe is “problematic” because they haven’t destroyed enough Unions, Worker Rights and other non-Money powers and workers are still entitled to things like a month of vacations, retiring before they’re dead and time for activities other than sleeping and working (oh, the horror!).

These guys have basically the ideology of the Democrat Party leadership, but only on Economics and with a British twist, possibly even harder Neoliberal (so, even more Rightwing, though towards Oligarchy rather than Fascism), and they certainly see it as their mission to “make opinion” (not Journalism) so their stories are almost invariably spined in some way to sell their ideology.

I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can’t really use the system of one country in another country.

The only country in Europe which I know for sure doesn’t have its own local payments system is the UK, though it would not surprise me if there are others.

What’s really needed is some sort of pan-european payments system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World. The closest we have to it at the moment in the EU is that you can do normal (so called SEPA, if I remember it correctly) bank transfers to any account at any bank in the EU, all for the same cost (generally free) independently of it being in the same country or across borders, and quite a number of retailers all over Europe do accept payment via bank transfer, but that’s not an actual payment system, it’s a bank transfer system that you sometimes can use to pay an online order from a retailer.

As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment has to go via Visa (Mastercard isn’t really common in Portugal)

The EU is not a country.

Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are Neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US - even the ones with a Health Insurance based system have way more rules and consumer protections around it - and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than in the in US.

Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.

In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US’ method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, and more broadly with consumers having way more rights all across the EU than they have in the US (were it massively depends on the State) and with stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.

I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it’s very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it’s Social Democrat when it comes to consumer rights and protections, especially for things like food, though even there it’s sort of somewhere between lax and strict in regulatory terms. I suspect this is due to different countries caring more about different domains and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific domain getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level so it ends up reflected into very different political spins for different trade domains.

How to give it a go:

• Get a 256GB SSD and install it on your computer alongside the existing drives.
• Install a gaming-oriented Linux distro such as Pop!OS, Bazzite, SteamOS or similar, on that drive (don’t let it touch any other drive - those things generally have an install mode were you just tell it “install in this drive” which will ignore all other drives)
• Unless your machine is 10 years old or older, during boot you can press a key (generally F8) and the BIOS will pop-up a boot menu that lets you choose which OS you want start booting (do it again at a later date if you want to change it back). If your machine is old you might actually have to go into the BIOS and change the boot EFI (or if even older, boot drive) it boots from in the boot section of the BIOS.
• Use launchers such as Steam and a Lutris since they come with per-game install scripts that make sure Proton/Wine is properly configured, so that for most game you don’t have to do any tweaking at all for them to run - it’s just install and launch. In my experience you still have to tweak about 1 game in every 10.
• If it all works fine and you’re satisfied with it, get a bigger SSD and install it alongside the rest. Make one big partition in it and mount you home directory there (at this point you will have to go down to the CLI to copy over your home directory). You’ll need this drive because of all the space you’ll be using for games, especially modern ones and launchers like Steam and Lutris will install the games in your home directory so having that in it’s own partition is the easiest way to add storage space for games.

As long as you give a dedicated drive to Linux and (if on an old machine before EFI) do not let it install a boot sector anywhere else but that drive, the risk exposure is limited to having spent 20 or 30 bucks on a 256GB SSD and then it turns out Linux is still not good enough for you.

When NOT to do it:

• If you don’t know what a BIOS is or that you can press a key at the start of boot to get into it.
• If you don’t know how to install a new drive on your machine (or even what kind of drive format it takes) and don’t have somebody who can do it for you.
• If you don’t actually have the free slot for the new drive (for example, notebooks generally only have 2 slots, sometimes only 1).