From what it looks like, North, East and West, are more of a “for sure” than a “maybe”.

I also understand why people choose to die at home, it’s somewhat harder to understand why anyone with a chance to live would willingly stay in the area, since all of Gaza has been reeking of “death camp” for well over a decade.

Don’t be sorry, just don’t use downvotes to express your opinion… use your words.

If you don’t like my arguments, go ahead and propose others.

For starters, I see you referring to “case law”, which sounds like a US thing. In the EU, case decisions generally don’t shape the law, except Supreme Court decisions, and even then lawmakers can inform or reform those decisions. It’s usually more accurate to define a logical reasoning from the bare law, rather than expect decisions in one case to influence others.

What do you base your reasoning on?

Worse than that, it’s become a Palestinian vs. Jewish ethnostate competition:

Well… yes.

North = you’ll get bombed.
South = you’ll get bombed maybe.
East = you’ll get shot.
West = you’ll get shot and drown.

It’s a shitty situation, but I’d pick South. 🤷

If you still live in Northern Gaza to this day, after all that’s being going on, and all the warnings to GTFO… you better keep your cats and belongings pre-packed and ready to be several blocks away in 30 minutes, don’t even wait the 2 hours.

“Bending over backwards” is a bit excessive… but maybe “slightly reclining in their chairs”?

At least they’re doing “something”, instead of bombing out of the blue… and if it works to indemnify themselves from war crimes prosecution… yay, international law at work, right?

IANAL, but… I don’t think the law says that? My understanding is that the points are not related to each other:

• You need prior explicit consent in order to gather non-essential tracking data
• You can charge any amount for any functionality

That would mean all these combinations would be allowed:

1. Free, no tracking and no consent
2. Free, prior consent for tracking
3. Paid, no tracking and no consent
4. Paid, prior consent for tracking

If a site decides to only implement numbers 2 and 3… there wouldn’t be any conflict.

Either everyone pays, or you have the right to privacy. Otherwise, long term, the internet will become divided and inaccessible to low income households. And that’s something the EU definitely doesn’t want to happen (net neutrality)

Net neutrality doesn’t apply to services, only to carriers, who are considered more like utilities, but still aren’t required to offer a “free” tier. Services don’t need to offer an option accessible to everyone at all, they can specify whatever requirements they want (with only a few exceptions related to discrimination).

Large social media platforms… is where current legislative efforts are in. Above a certain number of users, they’re getting defined more as utilities, and subject to more requirements, but still no “free” tier.

The internet divide exists already: some households can afford 1Gbps unmetered symmetric fiber with Netflix, HBO and Disney+ and a few mobile lines with unlimited calls and 50GB/month data for 100€/month… while others can barely affford a prepaid 100MB/month mobile connection for 1€/month… but it’s fine as long as it’s a divide based on service pricing, not carrier traffic discrimination.

These people are protesting the loss of the status quo of unchecked rampant overpopulation.

There were 500 million people when that paper was made… 2 billion when the sufragettes slashed it… there are 8 billion now, and how exactly has that improved things?

Do we really want to see what 32 billion people will do to the environment?

That’s senseless violence which doesn’t accomplish anything… CEOs are easier to replace than a painting.

Wait… was Nord Stream an activist job?

Don’t sell yourself short, you’re worth more than that, I believe in you… being able to generate tracking data worth more than that.

Nobody is forcing anyone, you are free to not use the service at any time.

What they’re doing is turning it into an explicitly paid sevice, and letting you choose whether you’d rather pay in money, or in personal data.

In an ideal world, everyone would have the option to decide getting their personal data gathered, or not, in exchange for some money/crypto, with competing data gatherers offering different packages and rewards, and they could use it to subscribe to whatever services they wished.

Technically, no reason why there couldn’t be. You could even have ad bots follow you to send you targeted ads.

On Meta, you pay so they don’t use some of your data for showing you ads, while they collect tons more of data on you and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the Fediverse, you only give everyone access to all your published data for free to run whatever analysis they want on it… but at least you can choose from 1000+ different instances to pick the one that will be able to track your behavioral data.

You deleted your real Facebook account… but did you delete the anonymous shadow account…?

It’s not that Facebook hasn’t deleted the data from your real account, it’s that they keep tons of “anonymous” shadow accounts, each one of us probably has a dozen of them from different interactions with Facebook, and your new account most likely got suggestions from getting paired with those.

You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.

But feel free to give me an alternative “script” that gets similar functionality for cheaper.

It’s a -$10/month type of service, they’d have to pay me in order to use it… and they’d still be making money on the data and ads.

They set the price artificially high

Actually… it’s likely only slightly higher than what they get from ads per user, and still lower than what they get from compiling and selling all the information you agree to give them.

Users tend to severely underestimate how much their cumulative data can be sold for.

At this point, they don’t have many options, since their economy is based around using the waterways as main transport routes.

Keep in mind Russia can have a container ship delivered from China right to Moscow, and viceversa.

Russia’s best bet (around 2000-2010), was to befriend the EU, while getting rid of all their internal corruption, and start treating ex-USSR republics as proper states instead of relying on forcing puppet governments in them. Especially in Ukraine, they shouldn’t have burned their puppet government in 2014 by making it accept a worse deal than what the EU was offering, definitely not before at least having the country split in half and Crimea+Donbass secured as separate puppet countries.

By uniting Ukraine, then making an enemy out of the EU, while still allowing a ton of internal corruption, Putin has screwed Russia royally.

Russia’s only options right now are to either:

• Roll over and ask the EU, Ukraine and NATO to pretty please forgive them… which Putin would not survive (best case scenario, he’d stand before the Hague tribunal, if he got to live that long)
• Dig an even deeper hole for themselves until they go full nuclear… which Russia as a country would not survive (but maybe Putin could, in a good bunker)
• Have a civil war… which Putin might be able to flee, while whoever ended up on top could roll over and ask the EU, Ukraine and NATO to forgive them pretty please.

Speculatively:

• Spend some bucks on Iran to support Hamas going full berserk in Gaza in an attempt to shift US attention from Ukraine… (which already had Republicans ask to reduce military aid for Ukraine while increasing it for Israel)… and hope to secure some more of Donbass before those F16 make it basically impossible for Russia to do anything. Then push for an armistice with the new borders.

But it’s kind of impossible for Ukraine to willingly agree to that, highly unlikely for the EU to lift its sanctions just because, and NATO would still rather have Russia disappear as a threat completely.

The EU might agree if it included guaranteeing a safe tax-free railway corridor to China, which would on one hand still hurt Russia, but on the other they could also benefit from a railway connection to China, even if it isn’t that much better than having container ships go from China right to Moscow.

Please look again at the map for the Unified Deep Water System.

This isn’t about having a port on the Black Sea, it’s about having ships from ports in inland Russia getting unobstructed waterway access to the Black Sea, from where they can go to the Mediterranean and beyond.