As I have noted in the original post, I was specifically addressing large public. That is why I included the following phrase:

"In fact, to untrained eye, a good upscaler will typically look almost as good or just as good as source material."

Then basically what you have is a chicken or egg problem. No powers to EU until it's even more democratic. And EU will stay powerful and less democratic as a result with no real motivation to democratize because they will never be democratic enough for naysayers.

And mind you, in most European countries, laws that have any real chance to go through are proposed by Governments. In many cases any MP can propose laws, but their chance of going to through is typically extremely slim to none. Europe needs practical solutions, not hypothetical possibilities that will never have any real meaning.

At the same time, smaller states are far easier to pressure in undemocratic ways from outside and in the age of superpowers, no single European state can survive pressure from US or China and would have serious issues handling pressure from Russia. You would basically be sawing the branch you're sitting on.

I suspect that your point of view is "common" mainly in UK, which is a notable outlier in EU when it comes to this issue. Most people I've met across Europe are certainly wary of EU's undemocratic tendencies, but generally don't even know how their own country's political system actually works, much less EU. The only practical difference to these people is that EU seems more remote.

You two really don't understand what I was talking about, do you?

Laws work retroactively, promising consequences for actions. They provide little to no proactive protection, and in general require for the target criminal action to be less valuable to criminal than cumulative risk of getting caught and punishment.

And after you get beyond certain level of wealth, potential gains go high enough that consequences become largely irrelevant. As a result, super-rich are forced to get private protection because law is no longer protecting them.

Then there's the issue of becoming attractive target for other crime such as complex fraud that would not be cost effective against average person due to much lower potential gains.

What you two are talking about is rich pushing the law to help them get richer. That is a completely separate issue from issues I mention.

This is not "theoretically possible" but a reality. I've actually conducted tests about ten years ago on early MPEG-4 compression (specifically divx and xvid compression artefacts in relation to usability) as a part of lab excercise. We brought in around 50 volunteers for screenings iirc. Basically random students we grabbed from hallways and promised them a free lunch if they gave us a few hours of their time. They were told that we were testing something else, I think it was something about "acting quality in relation to your general interest" or some similar bullshit.

We had them watch three short movies. All three were either original MPEG-2 DVD, DIVX at high quality and original resolution (notable artefacts, DIVX was in early stage back then and generally pretty good and churning out macroblocking and other artefacts even on high bandwish) and DIVX at low quality and half resolution (massive compression artefacts around edges, heavy "washout" loss of detail).

Around 2/3 couldn't tell the difference between massively artefacted XVID re-encoded to half the original resolution and original MPEG-2 DVD on a large TV. Almost no one could tell the difference between original and high quality XVID. And that's young people from technical university with much better eyesight and interest in technology than average public.

Our conclusion was pretty much in line with similar blind tests. Overwhelming majority of people will not spot a difference unless they're specifically looking for it. That is why broadcasters get away with massive overcompression of streams and a lot of content HD broadcasters show is upscaled. Most people never notice. You need a trained eye and to know to look for problems to spot those things.

Ah yes, the "they should do better" fallacy. Also known as "victim blaming".

Fact is, those people don't get a choice. They are barely surviving, and they are facing men who hoarded resources to procure weapons and other tools that help them to stay in power.

Regardless, I don't think this is going to lead anywhere. You are utterly convinced that poverty is a choice, even though you yourself state points that tell you that it is not. With that amount of doublethink, argument is quite impossible without proper third party moderator.

I guess when you get hit by "capitalism is great because regulations prevent it from doing too much damage" when we are discussing problems with distribution in the world where top 1% control about half of world's total wealth while billions live in abject misery, followed by ad hominem attack, there's really not much else to be said.

Election of who?

Right. You are here, suggesting that corruption exists in a vacuum rather than as a result of our resource distribution system creating overwhelming motivator for those in leadership position to become corrupt in order to grab more resources?

I'm not even sure what "marxist" means here. Pretty much every single economist in the world subscribes to the same notion. The only thing they disagree with one another is what is the better alternative that would serve both needs and desires of imperfect human beings while keeping their vices in check. Are they all marxist in your opinion?

Someone will one day post you the obvious "can condoms protect you from" post where they will list things like hand wounds in boxing.

But that will not be today :D

No, we disagree on the amount of pressure parliament can put on commission simply by declaring that it will not pass certain piece of legislation. Example: Patent directive.

On your second point, you clearly admitted earlier that you support democratization. Now you are saying you're against it, because treaty wasn't perfect.

That leads me to conclude that you either don't quite understand what you're talking about, or you're a young/inexperienced/idealist who genuinely believed that progress should instantly reach its goal and that any half way progress is a bad thing.

That is one of the risks of "keeping the money".

Other risks include but are not limited to:

1. People taking your family hostage and demanding random.
2. Attacks on your personally, either from family members or fraudsters who will act like such after your death to get your money.
3. Attacks by competition to reduce value of your holdings or take them over (i.e. large corporation owning farms around you).

And many others.

Many forget that legislation works as a set of consequences for one's actions, and when one's actions are so lucrative that potential gain easily outweighs legislative risks, you are going to be in danger. That is why things like criminal law doesn't really help the ultra rich and very rich and they must have their own personal security detail.

Then we disagree on the interpretation of amount of power that MEPs have, while we agree that in general, Lisbon treaty change direction wasn't just a good thing - it was a necessity.

I do agree that I would prefer parliament to have even more power than it currently holds. In my opinion. right now European Council and European Commission are still too powerful and European Parliament is too weak. But powers devolved to the Parliament were quite significant, and among other things allow for more significant pressure on the other two branches of power by Parliament.

Large ship doesn't turn fast, but the direction is a correct one, which is my argument. You started yours by claiming that Lisbon treaty was not what people wanted. Right now, you appear to at least understand that it in large part was a massive improvement over what we had and was indeed going in the direction that people wanted. It is far from perfect, but it is objectively BETTER than what we had before.

And there we have it - an open admission that you do not understand how languages work.

I rest my case.

They are funny to you because you do not have any kind of comprehension how different life for very rich is. Your life is struggle for resources to survive.

Their life is the exact opposite - struggle to keep what they have from people like you who are hungry and want a part of their resource pile. A good example of difference is just how little real protection legal system offers them in practical terms - it's always going to be more beneficial to break the law to get the resources. That is why ultra-rich have to have their own protection from such people and cannot count on law and police in a way that people without enough resources to make them a worthwhile target for such an effort can.

And while from average person's perspective that may look like a paranoia, to these people the worries are very much warranted.

The sad part is that while fighting over wealth has been a necessity for survival when we had to breed a lot and resources were limited, we don't have to any more. We have means to control breeding speed and can easily sustain people we have on the planet today in very decent living conditions if we had a proper distribution system.

But we do not. Our wealth distribution system is derived directly from our resource-limited past where struggle for resources was a key to survival. Attempts to rebuild it resulted in massive suppression from systems using the old distribution system who understood that all it takes is one such new system becoming functional to destroy them.