Of course, Europe couldn't care less - they never had a real startup industry in the first place.
There is healthcare in America[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
[1] Doesn't actually need a source
Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem.
I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...
> The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.
> Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.
While the UK was counting
> The study, by housing charity Shelter, found that 307,000, or one in every 200, people are now either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.
Temporary accommodation includes bed&breakfast, staying with friends, emergency shelters. There are about 5000 people sleeping rough in the UK at the moment in a population of about 60million.
And then look at the countries who have worse homelessness than the US.
Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Indonesia, China, Haiti, Venezuela, India, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Ukraine.
The important consequence of this is that it puts EU startups on more equal footing than in the past. Most EU countries already had fairly solid privacy regulations, some more, some less, but certainly more than the US (generalization, but that's the trend). If you were a company from a different jurisdiction, you could mostly skirt those regulations (up to a point) because they weren't enforced in most cases. Not so much if the regulation is from your home country.
With GDPR, actual EU startups now play by the same rules as non-EU companies who do business in the EU. If a US startup wants to be international, they'll have to compete with EU startups on a more level playing field now.
I can easily say that if I had to choose between a US service and an EU one, from now on the answer is almost always the EU one.
What gives EU the right to legislate in those jurisdictions? What non-privacy laws will EU enact in non-EU countries?
> If a US startup wants to be international
Well I have no intention of being international now, but I still have to play by EU's rules on the possibility that I might ever want to do business there.
So what? Communism turned feudal Russia into a world superpower in less than 2 decades. Do the ends justify the means?
While I, in agreement with OC/OP, see it as a threat to the entire industry.
BTW I'm not in the US not in a country where GDPR is effective. But I CRAVE that my country implement the same measures or better. Unfortunately that's unlikely.
Finally, it's a threat to the bad part of the industry. And then there are those who exaggerate the situation while they are not really affected by the regulation. But the hysteria will diminish and hopefully most of the bad actors wil either change their business or just go out of the industry, searching for other places to exploit (which hopefully they will not find).
And that is the reason companies like Oracle and other will still make big $$ - why? Because you cannot "break things and sell ads" and do "delete=1" when you are developing RDMBS.
And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]"
So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)
