willbank

Depuis tout à l'heure je me renseigne sur les idées de Karl Marx sincèrement je n'arrive pas à comprendre comment on peut être pour le capitalisme et même plus généralement être de droite

🚨🇪🇺 The European Commission is about to steal your search history in one of the largest forced data grabs in the history of the open internet, and almost nobody is talking about it. The scope is staggering: 🔴 Every query you type 🔴 Every voice and photo search 🔴 Every autocomplete you accept 🔴 Your language, your device 🔴 Your country pinned to a ~3km² grid 🔴 Every result you saw, every link you hovered 🔴 Every click and scroll 🔴 The full chronological order of your search sessions Meaning the European Union now knows your: 🔴 Health symptoms 🔴 Pregnancy 🔴 Sexual orientation 🔴 Political views 🔴 Religious beliefs 🔴 Financial distress 🔴 Legal trouble 🔴 Addictions 🔴 Affairs Under the proposed measures for DMA Article 6(11), Google would be ordered to ship the daily search behaviour of hundreds of millions of Europeans to multiple third parties through a daily API feed. Any approved "online search engine," AI chatbots included, would get five years of access. The things people only ever type when they think no one is watching. All of it now scheduled to flow daily into an open-ended list of third parties scattered across the European Union. Brussels promises "anonymisation." The reality is a thin technical veneer that has been broken in academic literature again and again for over a decade. Search behaviour is a fingerprint. Stripping a name does not change that. Mass data leaks become inevitable. Every new beneficiary is a new attack surface, and every annual audit is a year of silent exposure between checks. The 2025 Discord vendor breach already showed how fast 70,000 government IDs can leak through a single weak link. Now imagine that link holding Europe's search history. Surveillance without consent becomes the default. Hundreds of millions of EU citizens never agreed to have their queries packaged and shipped to companies they have never heard of. The legal fiction of "anonymisation" cannot manufacture consent that was never given. Behavioural search data is a goldmine for phishing, blackmail, social engineering, and corporate espionage. Foreign intelligence services get a back door without effort. They do not need to breach Google. They only need to compromise the weakest name on the beneficiary list. One insolvent startup. One compromised contractor. One approved entity quietly acquired by a hostile state. In the name of "competition," the EU is about to manufacture a permanent, distributed, daily-refreshed copy of Europe's collective search history. A surveillance dataset Brussels itself would never approve if any other government tried to build it. The public consultation closes Friday, May 1, 2026 at 23:59 CEST. The final binding decision lands July 27, 2026. After that, the door does not close again. Tag your MEPs! File a response! Make noise!

There are two numbers that should be sitting on every UK policymaker's desk this year. They are not. The first is £9.18 trillion. The total value of UK housing stock. The second is 70%. The share of UK workers in occupations the IMF classifies as exposed to AI. Higher than the US. Higher than the advanced-economy average. Both numbers are real. Both come from serious published research. Neither is talking to the other. Start with what UK housing actually is. Not bricks. Not land. Not planning permission. At the margin, UK housing is priced by what the next buyer can borrow. Mortgages clear at 4 to 4.5 times salary. Which means housing is a leveraged bet on British wages. Now look at what those wages are. 81% of UK GDP is services. 83% of UK employment is services. Law. Finance. Consulting. Admin. Media. Tech. Middle management. These aren't side categories. They are the British economy. They are also the roles with the highest AI exposure. Goldman Sachs ranks them at the top: legal, financial analysis, operations, content production. The IMF puts 70% of UK workers in AI-exposed occupations, against around 60% in the US. Why is the UK so exposed? Because we deindustrialised faster and further than any G7 peer, and replaced factories with knowledge work. The UK has seen the steepest manufacturing decline of any G7 economy since 1970. Every policy decision for forty years pushed labour into exactly the categories now in the crosshairs. Then we concentrated it geographically. London and the South East hold over 40% of UK housing value on just 26% of the housing stock. Same regions. Same workers. Same wages. Same exposure. The financial concentration mirrors the labour concentration almost perfectly. Then we leveraged it. UK household debt: around £2 trillion. Of which mortgages: over £1.6 trillion. Debt-to-income ratio: 117.5%. Lloyds alone has a £317 billion mortgage book. The British banking system is a direct bet on services wages staying intact. Now run the scenario. If AI compresses services wages 10% over a decade, it is not a 10% fall in house prices. It's larger, and it's at the margin, because leveraged buyers drop out first and the comparables reset downward. That's how housing markets actually clear. And the UK has no hedge. The US has manufacturing reshoring, CHIPS Act money, energy abundance, resource extraction. Blue-collar wages rising as white-collar gets squeezed. The UK has none of it. We deindustrialised, layered the economy onto services, and financed £9 trillion of housing against wages that are now the most AI-exposed in the G7. The rebuttal is that AI boosts productivity. The OECD expects UK productivity growth of 0.4 to 1.2 percentage points a year from AI. Second only to the US in the G7. But mortgages don't clear on aggregates. They clear on individual incomes. And the aggregate hides who captures the gains. The IMF's own recent research finds AI-era wage gains concentrating at the high-skill and low-skill ends of the labour market. Middle-skilled workers don't share in them proportionately. Middle-skilled knowledge workers are the exact population whose mortgages clear the UK housing market. The blast radius goes well beyond house prices. Buy-to-let yields break. Pension funds' bank equity revalues. The council tax base erodes. Treasury receipts soften. Bank capital gets stress-tested against a shock no model has priced. Every major UK asset class is, in some form, long services wages. And yet the silence is total. Politicians can't say it. The median voter is a homeowner. Banks can't say it. Capital requirements. Pension trustees can't say it. Members' retirements depend on the number. The Treasury can't say it. Its own fiscal projections assume rising property-linked receipts forever. The silence is structural, not accidental. Britain didn't just bet the economy on services. We bet the balance sheet of every household on services wages surviving the most disruptive labour technology in a century. Nobody chose that trade explicitly. But every mortgage written in the last twenty years locked it in. The numbers in this post aren't mine. They come from the IMF, OECD, ONS, Savills, the Bank of England, NIESR, and the UK government's own January 2026 AI labour market assessment. Most came from Whitehall. Nobody in Whitehall is connecting them.

⚡️The von der Leyen quote is one of the most revealing things a European leader has said in the last decade and almost nobody is going to process it correctly. “The cheapest energy is the one you don’t use.” That is a sentence spoken by a person presiding over civilizational decline who has decided to reframe the decline as virtue. It’s not a policy statement. It’s a theological position. The energy crisis isn’t a problem to be solved by producing more energy. It’s an opportunity for Europeans to need less. To want less. To consume less. To live smaller lives in smaller apartments heated to lower temperatures with less travel and less activity and less economic output. The scarcity isn’t a failure. It’s the goal. This is the thing Americans and everyone outside of Europe cannot fully grasp about where European elite thinking has landed. They genuinely believe that reducing European energy consumption is morally good regardless of the economic consequences, because European consumption is tied to European environmental guilt which is tied to European colonial guilt which is tied to a broader belief that European civilization has been net negative for the world and should shrink. The energy crisis gives them political cover to implement policies that would otherwise be unpopular. Now they can say circumstances force the reduction when the reduction was always the plan. Von der Leyen is not an aberration. She represents the consensus view among the European political class. Macron believes this. Scholz believes this. The entire EU Commission believes this. They don’t say it this directly usually because it polls badly, but every major policy they implement is consistent with this worldview. Degrowth is not a fringe academic position in European politics. It’s the operating framework at the top. The American version of this framing would be “the cheapest energy is the one we produce ourselves at scale.” That’s what actually reduces cost and increases resilience. Building more nuclear, extracting more gas, expanding the grid, investing in new production. The European version is the opposite. Don’t build anything. Don’t extract anything. Don’t produce anything. Just use less. And when citizens can’t heat their homes or fly for work, frame it as virtue. This is why Europe can’t recover from the current trajectory. The recovery would require a complete reversal of the ideological framework that produced the decline, and that framework is held most strongly by exactly the people who have the power to change it. They’re not going to reverse it because they don’t see the trajectory as a problem. They see it as necessary and good.