@pluralistic @gbargoud @randahl @singlepenny well, in the French case, they were literally in bed with the president...

I hope you're right, but they have been in the lobbying game for a very long time (Beaumarchais, 1777) and even though entertainment is an economically marginal industry (at one point the Telcos made more from 2 weeks' SMS revenue than Hollywood did in an entire year), the star power means it is also the tail that wags the dog.

The fossil fuel lobby has managed to gut the EU 2035 ICE car ban, by the way, even though that guarantees the eventual death of the European car industry. Also, Germany shut down nuclear plants to restart coal-fired ones, so I wouldn't declare victory on that front just yet.

@gbargoud @randahl @singlepenny @pluralistic that is naive. The Europeans also have their own copyright lobbies, which are if anything even more rabid than US ones.

Just one example: France has a levy on all storage devices, funneled directly into the pockets of copyright collection agency SACEM. Thus the SD card in your digicam or the database drives in your hospital are taxed to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's wife Carla Bruni or Taylor Swift (with a hefty commission taken by the self-dealing scum at SACEM, of course).

@bsdphk he worked for PacBell marketing ISDN in San Francisco, their office was across the street from mine, but he’d left a long time ago by then.

I’d been to a book signing of his circa 2001 at Stacey’s Books in SF (RIP), and was given a 30 minute rant about how white men are a much put-upon, despised, discriminated against minority. I stopped buying his books at that point.

@dangillmor There is a very good movie about what happens when capitalists appease Nazis, "The Damned" by Visconti, with an absolutely stellar cast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_(1969_film)

@cstross more importantly, safety critical, a number of people have burned alive in Teslas because their door controls became inoperative and they did not know where the emergency manual release latch is.

Also, China just banned recessed door handles like Tesla's. They may help aerodynamics a tiny bit, but once again a safety hazard.