It’s reviewed poorly because it just came out and is missing a lot of features (read DLCs) and bug fixes the previous civs already have. That and there is no British civ yet (unless they’ve added them recently-ish).
Didn’t play much of Humankind, but from what I’ve heard, it was a great concept, but it lacked a lot of polish and got a little overhyped when it came out as the ‘Civilization killer’.
It’s not about ‘Google’ vs ‘the other search engines’. It’s about transparency. You’ve probably read some news about how AI crawlers have been destroying infrastrucure and half the time does NOT declare themselves as crawlers in their UA.
Can confirm that nealy 90% (read hundreds of thousands) of daily visits to several of my websites are made by crawlers from datacenters and I HATE not knowing whose who. Because when I don’t know, I block and report. Website owners already have enough between AI, Page Rankings, and Research Agencies who all exploit free infra for their own business.
Do I make exceptions for Search Engine crawlers? Yeah, I do. I’ve seen Google, Bing, and Mojeek, but weirdly enough, never Brave. Now I know why. And frankly, if they can’t be bothered to be transparent about their crawlings, then I won’t be bothered to make exceptions for them. They’re freeloading just as much as the rest. If they act like shady chinese crawlers, then they have no right to go pikachu face when they’re treated like one.
I assume the malicious part is that it phones home without permission, likely tracking users without their consent or informing them.
EU Commission and Council are indeed not elected directly, but the Parliement who propose and vote laws is. The way it works is similar to a parlementary republic (where coalitions of parties that includes >50% of MEPs make a governement together).
It’s as democratic as democratic gets on that scale.