by tete | 2025-11-20 09:31:32+00:00
Given that they were largely ignored anyways, who cares? Laws have become almost meaningless, in a world where power lies within companies and not governments or the public, which anyways has been trained to either act against their own interest or disillusioned enough to largely don't care.

The only space where there's still laws from people is in the social media world, where the outcome are laws that don't change the life of anything but make you feel good. Eg. minorities, women, etc. still have low income, bad life outlook, etc., but hey now you need to clearly state that the programmer job is also for women and trans people. Assholes can be assholes as long as they use the right pronoun, whole industries thriving on lowering the baseline (delivery, etc.) of what humane treatment at a workplace is celebrate and pinkwashing. Everyone is "happy".

Also on the ecological side. Laws that that would change something fail, but everything that can be exploited in terms of taxation passes - seriously look at summaries on voting on directives. It's completely split at this line, and all the "liberals" celebrate how great they are for driving essentially tax funded electric cars.

It's no surprise that companies reacted by making the most obnoxious cookie banners instead of removing the need to having those in first place (fun fact: you do NOT need those for cookies at all). Whenever you read a "We care about your privacy" that is an outright lie. If they even remotely did there would be no need to have such banners. Even for much of the more shady stuff you don't need to. And still most companies don't even adhere to the GDPR. They just have a meeting do pick some pieces and forget about it.

Democracies sadly have become a real farce. I think the world has over-optimized for it, companies have "min-maxed" for the current set of laws and now well intended laws are effectively meaningless, cause smart people came up with nice hacks to not really have to care about it. It's just like a video game, where people realize that your skill set is nice, but you can just max out DPS and bring along a tank, where you realize and realize that the debuff on your armor doesn't matter if it doesn't hit you and where the penalty on item costs is meaningless because you don't know where to put your money anyways.

And honestly, finding such strategies to optimize for "just not breaking the law" or getting around it entirely is extremely fun, compared to all the boring work at a job.

What people used to call "honest work" just doesn't work outside of very localized and small scale setting, and even there it's hard. To compare with video games again, it's like all the "soloing is possible" and yeah sure, sometimes it works, but if the big guys decide to crush you they will. So best to join up with them which is exactly what is happening.

We also see that in other laws. Monopolies are forbidden? Well either keep at least one competitor alive (iOS vs Android, AMD and Intel, etc.) or make a cartel, even a completely passive one where you just do "market analysis" to have a similar price. If your competitor raises prices, it is your job to adapt your prices to increase profits. If your competitors use cheaper materials, etc. it's the same. You never ever need to interact with your competitors.

Working together in one way or another is what made humans really productive, it works well for companies, yet somehow there is that believe that magically this won't happen and instead it's all fierce competition, which is ridiculous when the biggest threat to large successful companies is literally the market changing. So they just take safe bets and buy all the smaller largely already working products and call it innovation on their side.

It's a good, smart, reasonable strategy. But it's also very obviously not as intended.

The thing is that big surprise, it's the same for privacy protection laws. Companies don't care about your privacy at all and most people are in fact ordered to store data just to have it. They make sure it's annoying so both to make you accept them and to complain about the law. It's a real farce to think that somehow people, governments, etc. think that companies (at large) are nice and just want you, the world and everyone to be good and happy. It is baffling that people really believe that and somehow always think their favorite brand is magically different, because they met a nice lad working there in marketing.