I went to Austria for skying, flew to Innsbruck and two days later caught the train to go to the ski resort.
That train was basically an intercity train (which even stopped at the little town from where a pretty regular commuter could be caught to the little ski resort) … which just so happen to be coming from some city in Switzerland and would end in some city in Germany.
So I sit down in one of those places with 2x2 seats and a table in the middle. A couple of guys also seat down there and eventually we starting chatting.
It turns one of those guys was an Italian surf promoter, who had actually been to my country (Portugal) as part of surf events in Ericeira (big surf place nowadays thanks to the almost unique massive tube waves it gets at certain times in the year).
The guy did not spoke Portuguese but could speak several other languages. We ended up having a one hour or so conversation and as my German was a bit so-so (and, let’s be honest, because it just felt cool to do so), we ended up doing with in the several languages we had in common - German, Spanish, Italian, English and French - just sort of jumping from language to language as we couldn’t remember a word in one so used a different one or because the 3rd guy only spoke English and German so we had to switch to one of those when including him.
Coming from a very peripheral country in Europe - Portugal borders only Spain, and if you travel about 1000km in Spain, you get to the only other country it has a land border with, France, and then it takes another 1000km or so of France to get to the rest of Europe - the whole “absolutelly regular train that just happens to cross 3 countries” and casually chatting with somebody and using various languages when they happen to be convenient, thing was the first time I really felt a hint of what it is to just normally be European in Europe.
Yeah, I was living in the UK at the time and in that sense it feels almost as peripheral when it comes to Europe as Portugal.
Living in the UK actually made this feeling in that train in Austria more intense for me because I was actually living in an European country other than my homeland but it still didn’t feel much closer to the rest of Europe than in Portugal, though I did jump on the Eurotunnel Express once in London for a couple of days in Paris, which was nice and is definitelly beyond what can be done in Portugal (were international train connections abroad are so bad that for example Lisbon - Barcellona is at least half a day, probably more).
Then again there is a little extra distancing in the UK because English being the lingua franca of this age, Britons can seldom speak any other language, and it’s not at all the same thing when you’re somewhere to use it as it is being able to speak the same language as the locals. (Mind you, I suspect I wouldn’t get the same feeling in Eastern Europe as in that experience in Austria, simply because I cannot speak any language at all from those language branches, except for Romanian which is a Latin language so I can more easilly guess the meaning of words).
Purelly and entirely because when it comes to money with no strings attached, having X + A money (if A is a positive real number) always beats having only X money, hence why lots of people are pointing out Universities with X in the billions of $ which still ask for donations.
It’s pure unadulterated greed, trying to monetise a (not anymore deserved for most in the US) public image of Universities as places that help people have a better future.
It’s only better if you think the opportunities from higher-education should only be accessible for those with a wealthy “bank of mom and daddy” or willing to have a heavilly narrowed scope for risk-taking (such as entrepreneurship) because they start their professional lifes already with less assets than liabilities. (Its not by chance that all celebrated US entrepreneurs of this Age are the scions of at least high-middle class or wealthier parents)
If however you mean it in the Economic sense of the US being as wealthy as possible, then it’s not better: maximizing the access to opportunities is the best way to get the best people for a job doing that job quite independently of who their parents are, as that delivers the maximum productivity, and that’s especially important at the high-value-added professions which are the ones for which higher-education is usually needed - limiting access to higher education and hence high-value-added jobs on the basis of money actual goes against making the US be as wealthy as possible as only a fraction of the most competent people to do those jobs have a chance to get them. In fact the problem in the US is so bad that the country has to import foreigners on H1B visas because it can’t even train enough people for some high-value-added jobs.
All this is just the rightwing, purelly economic argument. I haven’t even touched “leftie” things such as Equality.
Well, I agreed that’s a more subtle take on the whole thing.
A hard-nosed take aiming purelly for maximization of tax take in this domain, requires finding a balance between the additional revenue that well educated people will bring to the taxman (not just directly but also indirectly as, for example, they enable other jobs to add more value) vs the money spent now by the taxman to educate them. This purelly economic take does bring considerations about “what is the future tax value of different degrees” and requires that pupil selection uses as meritocratic as possible criteria - and access to money is definitelly not and indication of merit for a degree - so that university education delivers the best people for the job at the end hence maximizing wealth production and thus tax revenue.
Clearly higher-education for everybody for free would not be tax-optimal but that doesn’t mean that not-universal higher-education with money as the main criteria to filter access to those limited places is better. Certainly the current method in the US of restricted access through ridiculously high fees and a statistically meaningless schollarship mechanism (outside sports schollarships it’s minimal and training athletes is seldom justifiable by economics) to pull it a little bit away from the pure monetary filtering criteria, is also far from delivering economically optimal results and hence a higher return.
Somehow other countries manage to have a huge fraction of the population have access to higher education for pretty modest or even no fees whilst still having a higher per-capita income than the US and require importing far fewer, if any, degree-holding immigrants to generate that higher per-capita wealth, so that would indicate that what’s done in the US now is not at all optimal.
It’s valid to look at higher education as something that consumes resources hence cannot be available with no restrictions whatsoever, but if there is indeed limited access and your objective is the best possible return for the country’s economy or even just the taxman, managing the scarcity that comes from the existence of a limit on the provision of it via a pure pricing mechanism won’t deliver the best economic return for the country or even the taxman because theirs is a strategic interest that goes far beyond maximizing the revenue of universities, which is the only thing that higher university fees optimize.
There might be an optimal fee point for the taxman and the economy, which is not zero, but exceeding it reduces the future returns for both because it makes increasing numbers of people who are “the best for the job” in those high value added domains requiring such a degree to not take the degree, so less competent people end up doing the job hence less wealth gets produced and taxed.
They can apply for membership just like any other non-member and will be alowed in if they comply with with all the rules (which they don’t) and if and only if all other members agree (all existing members have a veto right on taking in a new member).
If they start now and assuming they solved their Rule Of Law issues (all those anti-human rights measures and legislation will have to go, I’m afraid) and adopt the euro, it will take maybe 20 year or so as long as they give up Gibraltar so that Spain does not veto their membership approval.
It gets even better: the high cost of essentials - especially housing - in relation to salaries makes said young people refrain from having as many kids as they would otherwise have (basically 1 or none instead of 2 or 3) meaning the problem is going to get worse.
It is however point-to-point plus doesn’t go over a public network and the routers of “random” 3rd parties (as IP does not necessarily route your packets always via the same path, and NNTP - the e-mail protocol - is even worse).
Faxing is probably is inherently more private simply because generally there is just 1 company controlling the entire network it travels through (i.e. the phone landline network), though I would hardly call it secure.
Properly encrypted e-mail is more secure with regards to the contents but it leaks metadata (that there was a message of a certain size from a certain sender to a certain receiver at acertain time) to a lot more 3rd parties than a fax would.
Yeah, you’re right - it’s SMTP not NNTP. Considering that back in the day I used to telnet to port 25 of my uni’s server to send e-mails portraying as one of my teachers to take the piss of my friends and hence knew at least some of the protocol, I must be getting old to confuse the acronyms.
But yeah, the main point is not the network being “public” (in the sense that anybody can access it) it’s that - as I explained but you seemed to have missed - the intermediate hops for an e-mail travelling on the internet can be owned by just about anybody and, worse, not necessarilly in your country working under local laws - routing will often send things around in quite unexpected tours on a physical sense depending on network topology - whilst the nodes the fax data travels on a phone network are generally owned by just 1 company or 2 (the latter in countries with multiple landline providers if you send it from a phone in one to the phone in another, as the network topology is much simpler and all providers connect to each other directly).
If your data goes over at most only 2 networks owned by very specific companies it is inherently safer from eavesdropping that if it goes over an unknown number of networks owned by an unknow number of companies. This is not the same as saying it’s “safe” - it’s just one relative to the other, rather than an endorsment of faxing.
Also there are usually laws around eavesdropping on phone calls, from the old days, whilst it’s the Wild West out there when it comes to those operating intermediate nodes eavesdropping on e-mails.
Frankly, if you can’t send the data encrypted, then faxing is probably safer from a privacy point of view (it would take a crooked telecoms operator risking their license, a Court Order or physical access to eavesdrop on it), but if encrypted e-mail is safer at least content-wise, though as I pointed out plain e-mail with unencrypted headers leaks meta data even if the contents is encrypted.
Yeah, those were the “good old days” before the openning of the Internet to the broader public when most protocols were all naive and innocent, with zero security consciousness, and SMTP servers didn’t even require a username:password pair from clients to send e-mails with specific From fields.
Mind you, it’s still possible to connect to most SMTP servers using the unencrypted protocol - as it sits on a different port than the stuff using TLS so can be enabled alongside the encrypted protocols - though it’s highly inadvisable to use the plain text protocols (the reason for which, by the way, goes back to my point about how IP can route packets through who-knows-were, so unencrypted stuff - most dangerously your password to access your e-mail - can be more easilly eavesdroped), but at least even the non-encrypted stuff nowadays requires a username and password.
As for your “point” about local law well, if you live in a coubtry next to those guys faxes will not go via there, ever, e-mails might very well go via there and end up in the modern equivalent of those tapes. Interestingly enough on this, when Snowden revelatiosn came out it was discovered that the UK surveillance apparatus (which is way more abusive than even the US) was eavesdropping on their side of the submarine cables that crossed the Atlantic from their coast and thus managed to eavesdrop on a significant proportion of the internet communications to and from all of Europe.
Do you genuinelly think a surveillance society would refrain from watching people’s Internet use but not refrain from doing so for their phone landlines?!
Because that makes no sense at all, especially considering that in earlier days it was actually easier to record Internet usage (less data and already in digital format) than phone lines, though nowadays data storage, processing power and even speech-to-text engines make eavesdropping on phone lines easier.
In fact even supposedly Democratic nations have been caugh doing mass surveillance of people’s Internet use (that’s what the Snowden revelations were all about) - because there were no clear laws on that - all the while phone line surveillance does have clear laws, dating from way back, that require a Court Mandate for it to be lawfully done: it was and is legally easier to do mass surveilance on the Internet even in supposedly Rule Of Law Democratic nations that phone line surveillance.
like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
Because for every person like you that jumps through hops to get a new deal there are lots of people who just passivelly let the renewal happen under inferior conditions that they could have got if they tried.
That’s also why they put stupid hindrances in your way: such things cause many people to give up and just go along with a suboptimal renewal, ergo they make more money from acting thus than they lose from clients who say “enough is enough” and drop them (notice how you did not drop them - they lost nothing from giving you the run around and could’ve gained if you had given up and renewed with the shit conditions: it’s pretty much a can’t-loose situation for them)
I lived in then UK for over a decade and one thing that stood out when I moved from the The Netherlands to the UK (already more than 15 years ago) and from the UK to Portugal is how much more the larger consumer-facing companies in the UK did the most that they could to take advantage of people’s mistakes or laziness than in those other countries - I remember a particularly sleazy gym membership contract from Virgin were per-contract (I always read those things) the only way to cancel it before the yearly auto-renewal was to contact them during a specific week before renewal (2 weeks before end of contract if I remember it correctly), not before nor after.
Over the whole time I was there, a handful of the most outrageous abuses when it came to consumer contracts were plugged (the one I remember the best was the creation of a rental deposit insurance to stop tenants from losing their deposits at the end of the rental agreement, as before that landlords would often just keep it all for no reason and then the only option the tenant had was take it to Court) but the whole posture of taking advantage of costumer laziness and normal mistakes (auch as, forgetting a date for canceling and auto-renewal) was widespread in the UK compared to other countries I lived in.
As it so happens, people themselves were also to blame: I remember how amazed the rental agency guy was that I actually read the Rental Agreement and even demanded corrections before I signed anything - “Nobody reads these”, he said - when even at the massive daily rate I was paid back then for my work it was still worth it to spend the 1 or 2 hours reading a contract were I was assuming a commiment of at least £15k (at the time a “reasonable” London rent for a year).
Me in your position would’ve just said “fuck this”, cancelled SKY and gone without (and I have done it for some things were I felt the other side had abused my trust, such as closing my account with my first bank in the UK the one and only time I was charged an overdraft fee), mainly because my early adult years happenned mostly in The Netherlands so I have their style of demanding consumer rather than the more passive and willing to overlook these things style common it the UK.
I disagree on your expectations for improvement, though agree on the rest.
There are lots of markets with natural barriers to entry were there isn’t any realistic chance for a new competitor to arrise and even if one did thanks to, say, some new technology, they’ll almost certainly only “disrupt” until they became well established and then do the same as all the rest because that maximizes profitability (just look at Uber a decade ago and look at Uber now).
Then there are lots of markets were crooked politcians (which nowadys seems to be most of the ones in the mainstream parties) make sure there are artificial barriers to entry so that well-connected companies are protected from competition - pretty much any market were an operating license is required, such as Banking and Mobile works like that - and that too means no costumer-friendly competitors will arrise in such markets, ever, because the gatekeeping which is in the hands of said crooked politians stops them before they even start, and said political gatekeepers couldn’t care less about consumer-friendliness of market participants and they’ll only change their ways if forced to politically and that’s not going to happen in countries with voting systems designed to maintain a political duopoly such as the US were the politicians rarelly fear losing their positions, especially on complex hard to explain things like how consumers suffer from them “maintaing high artifical market barriers to entry”
In the old days, before neoliberalism got entrenched, you might have such natural or artificial monopoly or cartel markets occupied by a Public company, which due to the lack of competition quickly grew inneficient (in my professional experience the same happens in Private companies in such a situation, by the way), though cheap, and on which there was often political pressure to improve. Now you have them occupied by Private companies who are driven solely by profit-seeking, so it’s still shit (because they cut costs) only it’s also expensive for customers rather than cheap (because they try to squeeze costumers with high prices) and suffers zero political pressure because the politicians hide behind the “It’s a Free Market” to refuse to regulate whilst secretly waiting for their Non-executive board memberships as rewards for being “friends of business” - a wonderful example of all this are Railways in the UK.
I woukd say it’s even worse than that: Free Market only works if humans behaved in a certain way (the so called homo economicus) which has long be disproven by Behavioural Economics and in Markets with low barriers to entry (i.e. teddy bears or soap, not railways or internet service provision) and even then it can’t deal will systemic problems (basically any Negative Externality such as Polution or Greenhouse Gas emissions, or over consumption of share resources - a.k.a. Tragedy of the Commons - such as with overfishing or in depletion of mineral resources).
People have been fed by politicians and think-tanks with shaddy funding an oversimplified theory that sounds amazing if you do not at all dig into the details, whilst not actually working in reality, not even close, but of course you’re never be told that by the people who win the most from the system built on top of this theory.
(It’s actually funny how this is the Capitalist mirror of Communism: beautiful high-level theory, never worked and can’t work in practice - because people are as they are, the physical world is as it is and human systems work as they work - and the people whose priviledges come from the system created to implement said theories will never ever tell you they don’t work and never will even after a half a century experiment: in fact they’ll just tell you it’s only not working as expected because it has not been done with enough “purity” and hence we need to double-down to make it work)
It makes some sense that the story writter of a story-heavy game would never play the game as a game, for fun, same as a book author not reading his or her own books for the pleasure of it.
Or to put things another way, they’ve already “consumed” the story in the game before ever playing the game.
As it so happens I’m making my own game, which is not story heavy, so I hope I’ll actually be able to enjoy it myself, but I can see how at the end of making a game you’ve just seen too much of it in too much detail from too many angles to actually be able to enjoy it yourself as just a game unless, maybe, a lot of it is somewhat unpredictable even for the author (i.e. stuff with lots of procedural generation or where what happens comes from the complex interaction of various game mechanics and user choices, which is what I’m aiming for in my own game)
Now, if only the same regulatory mindset was applied to industries which are strong inside the EU (like Communications, Finance and Auto) as applied to other industries.
Notice how you can’t simply buy your car anywhere in the EU and be able to use it in any other EU country when you live there (so, no single market) as you’re forced to register it locally and pay full tax (again, since it was already paid elsewhere), or how for many things still now in the XXI century you can’t just use a bank account from anywhere in the EU locally (mainly taxes/social-security requiring local accounts, as well as local payment systems which are not open to non-local banks) or the non-existent single market in mobile comms due to government granted mobile comms monopolies or ready-made cartel situations due to per-nation “radio spectrum” licensing and no regulation forcing open-access or a similar mechanism.
And don’t get me started on the complete total joke which was the handling of the Diesel Emissions Scandal, itself a product of a weak regulatory situation that had been put in place due to lobbying of countries like France, Germany and the UK (back when it was still a member).
The push for a pro-consumer single market is most welcome were it happens, shame that it mainly doesn’t happen in domains were there are dominant companies based in the EU.
The EU looks good in comparison with the US in large extent due to the latter’s disgraceful political and hence regulatory environment, but we’re nowhere near the point of deserving a pat on the back.
I used to play LAN Quake at Uni before 3D graphics accelerating boards (and before that things like Pacman and Manic Miner on a ZX Spectrum and before that arcade games) and I ain’t a boomer.
Let me start by saying I’m a “floor guy” at a small town hardware store. I am in training to be a manager but not one yet. I do a bunch of stuff around the store. Which leaves me busy a lot of the time....
No, you’re not an asshole, the other person is the asshole by de facto demanding you to do their work (when people get all pissy if you say “no” for something they “asked” you for, they weren’t really asking).
If you want to preemptivelly remove or reduce the risk of others accusing you in some way of “meaness” (such “asking” and the “meaness” accusation on refusal being quite a common strategy of people who were far too spoiled as kids and never really grew up - they do it because the “oh, look at poor little me” worked when they were kids to reverse adults’ “no” responses), provide some kind of “yes” under conditions and a time frame entirelly defined by you, something like “I would love to help you but I’m really busy at the moment with higher priority work. If I get the time I’ll come around and help you with that”. From this point either go down the line of “never having the time” (i.e. you don’t do it and have no intention of doing it, and if confronted just provide vague “I couldn’t get around to doing it” or just “I forgot and now it’s too late” reasons that can’t really be disproven by the other person) and they’ll eventually give up on asking you that (being pissy about people being too busy with more important work doesn’t really work as well as being pissy about an outright “no”), or you go down the line of “helping others help themselves” (i.e. you do some of the work as long as they’re right there also doing the work with you or take them to the right person to ask for help if there is one and wait with them while they ask and next time around when they come to you, ask them “have you asked person X already”).
Personally the way I solved my own “not wanting to be seen as not nice” way back when I started working was a mix of prioritization (i.e. “I’ll help you when I have the time”, and I genuinelly meant it but in practice I rarelly had the time) and helping people help themselves (i.e. “I’ll explain you how you do it while you do it yourself” and afterwards for subsequent requests just asked “have you tried already what I taught you last time?” and not help until they did which usually resulted in them solving the problem themselves) though this was in software development and people came to me to solve the kind of problems that had to do figuring something out, diagnosing a problem or implementing a certain kind of functionality, so I could do the whole “teach them whilst they do it themselves” thing.
Even better, the EU Parliament is elected by Proportional Vote, so it’s one of the most democratic institutions in the World, even beating most national parliaments in Europe (most of which have some kind of electoral circles system that gives more representatives per-vote to large parties than smaller parties).
I used to be a lot more pro direct Democracy until I went through the whole Brexit thing whilst living in Britain.
One look at the polls over there right now on the question “Is Britain better outside the EU” compared to what it was back at the time of the vote, should answer just how well informed the voting decision of a large percentage of people was back when they did cast their vote.
Looking around after that, I started noticing how most people will not abstain when they fell they’re not well informed enough to make a decision but instead tend to feel they have to make a choice even though they’re ill-informed (or worse, have no clue they’re ill-informed), plus if there is one thing the Leave Vote in Britain showed me is that ill-informed voters are way easier to push to make a certain choice purelly with appeal-to-emotion and other manipulative non-rational “arguments” than the well informed.
Representative Democracy has massive problems, but at least those people do it as their work (so do have the time to dive into issues and have easier access to experts), and I suspect that most of the problems of it can be solved or ameliorated by improving the process of selecting representatives and maximizing the independence of the Judiciary Pillar of Democracy (you see the worse kind of stuff in places with Justice Systems which aren’t independent or are weak, and/or voting systems mathematically rigged to promote a Power Duopoly by giving more representatives to larger parties).
I got mine originally from TV, as in my country everything is subtitled, so that means I ended up with an americanized accent (it isn’t really an “american” accent because there is no such things as an american accents but rather several).
It was of course poluted by my own native language (portuguese, from Lisbon) accent.
Then I went and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade so my accent started adding dutch “effects” (like a “yes” that sounds more like “ya”, similar to the dutch “ja”).
And after that I lived for over a decade in England, so my accent moved a lot towards the English RP accent. In fact I can either do my lazy accent (which is the mix of accents I have) or pull it towards a pretty decent English RP accent if needed for clarity.
By this point I can actually do several English Language accents, though mostly only enough to deceive foreigners rather than locals - so, say, a Scottish accent that will deceive Americans but Brits can spot it as not really being any of the various Scottish accents - including the accents of foreign language speakers in English (i.e. how a french or italian will sounds speaking english or even the full-force portuguese accent when speaking english, which I don’t naturally have anymore).
That said, IMHO it is very hard for somebody who grew up in a foreign country speaking a foreign language to fine tune their accent so that it sounds perfect to the ears of a local, and this is valid for all languages, not just English.
English is one of the official languages in India.
Even if only 1/10 of Indians grew up speaking it alongside Hindi or one of the other official languages (it’s a pretty big and varied country), it still adds up to 140 million people, so the previous poster has a valid point.
JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling. “Listen,” said Dr. Marwan Abu Sada as fighting raged around Shifa Hospital.
That’s why concluded that the Israeli leadership at the moment are full-blown Fascists: their treatment of people who they see as “not us” as subhuman and the style and intensity of their propaganda entirelly anchored on blaming the victim and them providing a variety of unverifiable excuses for their own killings which are even inconsistent amongst each other (often the excuses for different bombings have inconsistent criteria, which means they’re to a large extent arbitrary or the excuses are being made up after the fact and hence false) are quite the throwback to quite a style of Fascism which is almost a century old and manage to exceed just about everybody since WWII.
Even Russia in its invasion of Ukraine did not get this close to the historical worse kinds of Fascism, probably because the Russians are nowhere as racist towards Ukranians as Israelis are towards Arabs, especially Palestinians.
Yeah, I mean there are people in the Israeli Government calling all Palestinians (not just Hamas) “animals”, others who say that Palestinians won’t be allowed to get back to Northern Gaza and there’s even a member of that Government who seriously suggested Israel should nuke Gaza.
And then, of course, there is the long track record of Israel doing things like murdering journalists and killing Palestinian kids throwing rocks at their armored diggers, especially under governments with these same people in them.
People who have a track record of murdering journalists and children, bombing hospitals full of those they see as “animals” which they want to see dead or out of Gaza, and then providing to the World some unverifiable excuse that blames somebody else and doesn’t even pass the sniff test when it comes to proportionality in the use of force is hardly out of character, especially because History has various examples of people who think like that going full on mass-murderer in similar ways.
The whole point of unlocking the bootloader on a Xiaomi phone is to replace the shit Xiaomi ROM with something better, at which point you don’t care about updates for the Xiaomi one anymore.
Also considering the huge barriers they put to try and dissuade people from unlocking the bootloader on their phones - the “have the phone register itself in our system and then wait 168h (1 week) before you can unlock the bootloader” is especially entertaining - I don’t think there are that many people out there unlocking the bootloader on their Xiaomi phone just for fun.
Ah, yes, 4-star generals in Procurement retiring to gold-plated consulting gigs in the very companies from which they ordered $1000 paper clips and congressional members using insider info from some congressional comission or other they’re in for trading on their portfolios is all fine, it’s paying for sex that’s the real problem with holders of high level official positions in America.
You send it to the queue and let the load-balancer decide which server picks it up and handles it as a transaction.
(That’s from server-side software development and it would be talking about some kind of message with a comand or data being sent to a system with multiple computers handling such messages, typical in high-performance stuff that has to deal with hundreds of thousands of such requests per minute)
Seeing other people lose it, one after the other at unpredictable times, is what would really screw up the ones who still had it.
Humans are really bad at dealing with expected events which come at unpredictable times, both bad things and good things - the former can induce constant fear and anxiety and is apparently used in torture, whilst the later (for example the receiving of “premiums” at random intervals) can induce gambling addiction.
(I wasn’t clear before that it’s after a random period different per individual. Sorry to any would be torturer).
Remember how many senior managers from automakers went to jail for the rigging of diesel car emissions during regulatory tests and which is estimated to have caused and still cause tens of thousands of additionl deaths in Europe due to the additional polution?
That would be that magical number that when multiplied by any other number yields itself as result: zero.
If per the actual actions of these politicians (not their words, talk is cheap and their words are often unrelated to their actions) even the lifes of europeans are less important than the continued prosperity of those “oh so important” top managers in the auto industry, you can hardly expect they would treat Climate as anywhere as important as the profitability of the auto industry.
I my experience - having lived there and elsewhere in Europe - The Netherlands is invariably at the upper end of these things, even if the Dutch complain it’s still not good enough (I would even say the country’s “well above average” condition is probably because of that).
You should see the status of things in my native, car obcessed country of Portugal: all talkie-talkie yet a complete total disgrace for the rest. As for Renewables, the regulatory and legal framework has been designed to reward a few politically well connected companies (corruption over here is widespread, mainly at the higher levels and paid with the usual non-executive board memberships for “friendly” politicians and such), so personal solar generation is incredibly rare in this, one of the sunniest countries in Europe, because if you feed excess power to the grid you get at best 1/4 of what you pay for consuming it from the grid, and almost all of Renewables are big installations that no individual could ever have and hence are owned mainly by said politically well connected companies: hydrodams and large wind generators.
It doesn’t help that most people’s Ecological awareness is such a complete total joke that even for those who believe themselves as ecologically-minded ends at the point were they’re faced with, say, walking to take their kids to a school less than 1km away instead of going by car.
For all its problems (no country is perfect), The Netherlands if comparativelly a frigging paradise in this and a number of other domains.
In my experience living in Hilversum (between Amsterdam and Utrecht) they’re great for covering that last “last mile” between a person’s home and mass public transport like the train and often do the same on the other side (between train and work place).
Given the massive (massive, MASSIVE) bicycle parking areas near the larger train stations, I would say that at least when it comes to trains the infrastructure is designed purposefully so that people can live further way from train stations and still get to the station quickly without requiring a car, since if they do require a car, in my experience, not just in The Netherlands, people often end up just taking the car all the way to their destination and skip the train altogether.
However, I can see how such a design that assumes bicycles are used like that, would be problematic for people who don’t use bicycles like that, since it will have fewer buses feeding the train station than if bicyles weren’t expected to cover most of those flows.
It’s one of those things that “everybody does it” so only those who have lived elsewhere were the car culture is different tend to notice it.
As for politicians, just 2 days ago the Prime Minister resigned because he’s offically a suspect in some shenennigans involving “green hydrogen” (plus licensing for lithium mines and a massive data center project) which also caught somebody he has described as his “best friend” in the past, a senior member of the PM’s office (who is an ex-junior minister that lost his post in a smaller scandal involving an energy company a few years ago) and another minister.
Things haven’t been this entertaining over here in ages.
The user interface looks and feels like it was designed by the 17-year-old “gifted” nephew of the CTO as a gig to make a little money before going to Uni.
Blowing up millions per years because you couldn’t be arsed to hire a senior UX/UI expert and a proper experience team to make that website is the very definition of stupid.
Makes me think of the old saying (so applicable in IT, and I say this as also a mea culpa for what I do sometimes) that “When all you have is a big bloody hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Palestine should extend to its internationally recognized borders as anything else is just an unsustainable non-nation, and thus nothing more than theatre and rewarding the Israeli fascists who have doing the “colonising” all these years and their fascist parties in government who right now are activelly commiting Genocide.
Further, Israel should be under Economic Sanctions from the EU until it complies.
This “international protectorate in Gaza” is just bullshit diplomatic cover for the genocidal actions of Israel - akin to “kill as many as you want and we’ll calm down the rebelious feeling of the survivors in there afterwards” - that just endorses the status quo built by the Israeli fascists (thus rewarding them) and no doubt comes from the usual inept (or worse) politicians over there like Ursula van der Lyen who has never held a post were she didn’t screw things up, in Germany or abroad.
This shit is like the Americans spewing their bollocks about “humanitarian pauses” whilst their government calls anybody critical of Israel “an anti-semite”, parking 2 aircraft carriers in the region to “support Israel” and working on approval of a couple more billions for that country while it purposefully bombs civilians, only at least the leaders of the United States Of America aren’t anywhere as stupid as wanting to put their own countrymen on the ground to sanitize the fast growing bloody pile of bones Israel has been raising in Palestine.
It’s disgusting to watch this kind of sleazy diplomatic provision of covering to the genocidal fascists in Israel - invariably accepting of the very reshaping of Palestine that those fascists have imposed by violent means over the years and against UN resolutions and activelly refusing the possibility of sanctions against these specific genociders, quite a contrast to what was (deservedly) done with Russia after it invaded Ukraine.
True, a system whose only imperative is personal upside maximization with no consideration for anybody else is morally agnostic if you put aside the moral dimensions of having no consideration for anybody else whilst acting for personal upside maximization.
Same as murder being morally agnostic if you put aside the moral dimensions of killing another human being.
Consider the possibility that you’re confusing familiarity, common use in your environment and even normalization of something with it actually being devoid of a moral component: just because people around you got used to act in some way without questioning such way of acting doesn’t mean it’s morally agnostic: after all, slavery too used to be normal.
Dates with the year stored as two digits only (say, 1995 was stored as “95”), which worked fine for things like comparisons (for example: “is the year in entry A before or after the year in entry B?”) which were just done by numerical comparison (i.e. 98 > 95 hence a date with a year ending in 98 is after a date with the year ending in 95), until 2000 were the year being store would become “00” and all those assumptions that you could compare those stored years as numbers would break, as would as all the maths being done on two digits (i.e. a loan taken in 1995 would in 1998 be on its 98 - 95 = 3rd year with that system, but in 2000 it would be on its 98 - 00 = - 98th - so negative - year which would further break the maths downstream with interesting results like the computer telling the bank it would have to give money to the lender to close the loan).
Ultimatelly a lot of work was done (I myself worked in some of that stuff) and very few important things blew up or started producing erroneous numbers when the year 2000 came.
It's cheaper is what it is (lemmy.world)
What is your best story when you were in a foreign country? (kbin.social)
It can be anything: Scary, funny, confusing or embarrassing. What happened that stands out most in your mind?
*Cries in Debt* (lemmy.zip)
Cop28 president says there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels (www.theguardian.com)
UK should rejoin EU to ‘fix’ Brexit, says Ursula von der Leyen (www.telegraph.co.uk)
It's all downhill from here (lemmy.zip)
Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of. (startrek.website)
Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
The Witcher author says he's never played the games that cemented his fame: "I have no time for this, and it's not entertainment for me" (www.gamesradar.com)
this technology suffers from high latency (lemmy.ml)
IPoAC
God Damn! (feddit.uk)
Apologies for the meme. Just felt like so god damn European today.
Sweden denies Polish official's claim its preschools have "masturbation rooms" (notesfrompoland.com)
Zoomer anon has brainrot (discuss.tchncs.de)
Am i the a**hole for telling my coworkers no?
Let me start by saying I’m a “floor guy” at a small town hardware store. I am in training to be a manager but not one yet. I do a bunch of stuff around the store. Which leaves me busy a lot of the time....
Privacy Win: EU Parliament Decides That Your Private Messages Must Not Be Scanned! (tuta.com)
You can choose normal, fancy, or wildcard. (startrek.website)
Hospitals have special protection under the rules of war. Why are they in the crosshairs in Gaza? (apnews.com)
JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling. “Listen,” said Dr. Marwan Abu Sada as fighting raged around Shifa Hospital.
USA: Court rules automakers can record and intercept owner text messages (therecord.media)
Xiaomi won't give Android updates if you unlock your bootloader (9to5google.com)
cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/3017869 (!xiaomi)
DOJ announces arrests in ‘high-end brothel network’ used by elected officials, military officers and others (www.cnn.com)
what are some phrases that you use in your hobby or work that would make no sense to outsiders?
Free trial has expired (lemmy.world)
Sure buddy just take as many spots as you need (lemmy.world)
EU poised to water down new car pollution rules after industry lobbying (www.theguardian.com)
Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable (kotaku.com)
Neither Hamas nor Israel should rule Gaza in future, EU says (euobserver.com)
archive.ph/9pzUe
A staggering 80% of American households are financially worse off than they were before COVID-19 (finance.yahoo.com)
Give and take (startrek.website)
Donald Trump's colossal admission during trial (www.newsweek.com)
Legal analysts say Trump admitted that the intent in financial representations he made was to convince lenders to loan him money.
The problem solver [workchronicles] (startrek.website)