Not under capitalism, sure. But traditionally gift economies worked exactly because people understood that gifts also imbue a burden of responsibility. Not necessarily in repayment but to honor the gift and pay the good deed forward instead of simply enriching yourself.
Given the incredible number of chickens that are processed every single minute across the world, this shouldn't be surprising but it's easy to see why you might be surprised if you never considered where all the stuff that isn't meat goes.
I found it pretty surprising. It would not have surprised me at all if we made fake plastic feathers and burned or buried even more real ones because it works out fractionally 'cheaper' to make new then collect and wash/treat the old.
Honestly, I’d still be surprised to learn feathers in America are produced from American poultry. Far more likely the local ones get burned and everything for sale is shipped across the ocean because cheaper.
"Poultry litter can be used as a feedstuff... There are currently no federal or Missouri regulations governing the use of poultry litter as a feedstuff"
It’s also because real feathers are similarly durable as plastic feathers would be. Plants are very cheap to grow as well, but plastic plants are nevertheless a thing.
Yes, they sell for the aesthetic. I have real plants but some friends have fake ones and honestly at a distance without scrutiny they look just as good. Hell, certain real plants look and feel plasticky themselves due to how they're composed, especially vinous plants.
You must believe that US companies are trying to enter and stay in hostile markets out of the sheer kindness of their hearts. Have you considered that not being present in the second biggest market by GDP may actually be a massive liability by creating a massive opportunity for competitors that will be far better adapted to stricter regulatory conditions? You could just as well advise US car manufacturers to stick to building cars like the Cybertruck and ignore markets that consider it unsafe.
The US is in the middle of a recession if you exclude the AI bubble. Even if you include the AI bubble it's barely avoiding stagflation. I'm not sure "growth and innovation" accurately serves as a contrast between the US and EU tech companies right now.
Big cookie banner. Wait. What's that. It's not a modal? And a big "Accept only essential cookies" button with the same visual weight as the "Accept all cookies" button? Surely everybody does it this way because it's literally what EU law requires - surely nobody would try to trick people into clicking "accept all" by hiding the alternative behind multiple layers of opaque options and checkboxes.
Technical cookies... functional cookies... boring - most of these are just for handling logins and preferences. Ooh, analytics! But what's Europa Analytics? Let's check: https://european-union.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en
Oh, they are not only opt-in, they even respect DNT headers. And they're masking the IP addresses before processing them further. Damn, they must really want that data just as bad as "everybody else".
They say they remove information from the collected data. They aren't very explicit about what information they remove or not. They also seem to be feeding the data they collect right into the affiliated data broker company.
There are two different markets for this kind of complex data:
- Aggregate (demographic) data is useful for targeting, not just regular ads but also in-person outreach or even just identifying areas with a high density of potential customers; you can also use these insights to then categorize people in your own data set (e.g. when onboarding a new user you might cross-reference their details and find out they're high value just based on the "non-personal" data from the data broker that matches their profile).
- Specific (personal) data is useful for companies like insurances to flag you for risks you wouldn't otherwise have to disclose or they might not be able to request disclosure of; because direct transfer of personal data is the most likely kind to run into privacy law issues this is now often obfuscated by feeding it into AI models (i.e. the AI learns to match the collected data at the data broker to the input data it receives from the data broker's customer but there is never an explicit connection between the two data sets so the data broker can claim it is anonymized/aggregated when in practice it's still granular enough for the AI model to be able to categorize you based on seemingly spurious associations).
Note that the fist case overlaps with the second because "aggregate" usually still means that when looking at a new dataset (i.e. data collected from one person) you can say with some confidence which pile of aggregated data it fits in even if that pile doesn't contain an exact match due to anonymization/pseudonymization. Also note that this means there isn't really any feasible way to "aggregate" data in such a way it can no longer be argued to be subject to the data subject rights of the GDPR unless the data is fully isolated (e.g. total number of monthly visitors of an entire website by year).
It would have been no less suprising to me had it been a US company but it certainly fits the cultural stereotype of callousness that particular country has been openly displaying in recent years.
This might be a case of app permissions just being poorly delineated. E.g. I've seen Android apps require "location data" access just because they want to connect over bluetooth or manage WiFi or something (not entirely sure which one it was specifically) because that is actually the same permission and the wording in the permission modal is misleading.
A big problem is also that you can pretty much only grant permission for one specific site or all sites and this very much depends on which of those two options the extension uses.
For example there's no need for the "inject custom JS or CSS into websites" extensions to need permission to read and write data on every single website you visit. If you only want to use them to make a few specific sites more accessible to you that doesn't mean you're okay with them touching your online banking. Especially when most of these already let you define specific URLs or patterns each rule/script should apply to.
I understand that there are still vectors for data exfiltration when the same extension has permissions on two different sites and that "code injection as a service" is inherently risky (although cross-origin policies can already lock this down somewhat) but in 2025 I'd hope we could have a more granular permission model for browser extensions that actually supports sandboxing.
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