tal

tal , vor 13 Tagen

Thru.

tal , vor 13 Tagen

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity.

tal , vor 17 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 17 Tagen)

I don't think that there is any purpose to "bringing visibility" to global warming in 2024. Effectively everyone is already aware of global warming and has been for some time.

The issue isn't awareness, but disagreement over the weight to put on policies to mitigate it. And I don't expect that doing stuff like this is going to change people's positions on that weight.

tal , vor 17 Tagen

Has any previous presidency of the Council of the European Union had an official slogan?

tal , vor 17 Tagen

They also appear, in a post two hours later, to have unveiled the official logo of the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union:

https://x.com/HungaryintheEU/status/1803066071752040941

tal , vor 17 Tagen

I'm thinking maybe a red version of one of these hats with some suitable text to be the official hat of the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union:

https://holeinthedonut.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hungary-Hortobagy-Traditional-Herdsman.jpg

https://holeinthedonut.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hungary-Hortobagy-Traditional-Herdsman.jpg

tal , vor 18 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 18 Tagen)

She noted that Austria’s agriculture minister, who hails from Nehammer’s center-right ÖVP party, had previously done exactly what she did: "Just a couple of weeks ago, [he] voted against my explicit will, for lowering environmental standards in [EU] agricultural policy."

Can someone who lives in a system with a parliamentary form of government -- which is nearly all of Europe -- explain how conflicts between ministers and prime ministers from coalitions are resolved? It's something that I really don't get.

In the US, the system is presidential. The President gets to make a call on executive policy. People can cut deals in choosing to support a candidate for president, but once he's in place, the President makes the call. There are some limited checks: departmental secretaries in the cabinet can resign rather than carry out an order, and the Senate must approve a President's nominations for a replacement. The President can dismiss a departmental secretary at will. And the President's formal directives, executive orders, are subject to judicial review, and the Supreme Court can decide that an executive order is unconstitutional. But in general, once a President is in the seat, he gets to make calls.

In parliamentary systems, control of the legislature determines control of the executive. In many electoral systems, it's uncommon for a single party to control the legislature, so it's necessary for a coalition to be formed to get control of the legislature. Those parties in coalition may have views that are significantly at odds with each other. One of the major things that is divvied up among the coalition parties are cabinet seats. Those seats control portions of the executive government. But someone becomes prime minister, and the prime minister is above all the cabinet ministers. And that prime minister is only going to belong to one of the coalition parties, usually the largest.

In parliamentary systems, there are definitely times when cabinet ministers -- who may not belong to the same party as the prime minister -- are not going to agree with the prime minister. In cases where that conflict exists, how is that resolved?

I assume that some degree of horse-trading happens at the coalition-forming time, at least for policy that can be determined at that point in time -- if Party A has a program that mandates that VAT rises 10% and Party B has a program that VAT is to be reduced 5%, I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that that is worked out at the time that the coalition is formed, and if it's impossible to come to agreement, then the coalition doesn't get formed, and the dispute between the cabinet minister and the prime minister doesn't come up.

But that can't catch all cases; not all policy decisions are going to be known at the time the coalition is being formed. Some are going to come up down the line. So for those:

Is this entirely up to the individual state, with mechanisms for resolution widely varying? Can a prime minister generally dismiss cabinet ministers? Can he generally annul their actions (as was apparently attempted here)? Who gets to decide on policy prior to the action? What happens if a cabinet minister is dismissed? Does the prime minister get to select a replacement, or the party who was granted the cabinet seat in coalition negotiations? What happens if a cabinet minister dies in office?

tal , vor 18 Tagen

Did you respond to the wrong comment? You're talking to someone who didn't say anything about this particular case or person or about Green policy or even the political system in Austria. He was explaining how Germany's cabinet system worked.

tal , vor 18 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 18 Tagen)

Do you have some kind of pointer to a summary of what concrete impacts it actually has? Like, the article here doesn't list any concrete material. I see some phrases like "20% of land and sea". Given that Hungary and Austria were apparently both reluctant and both are land-locked, I am wondering if it was "20% of land and sea", where sea can substitute for land.

Does it basically ask EU members to designate at least 20% of their territory as a sort of national park?

The EC has a section on their website on the thing, but it's...really fluffy and full of marketing material. Their factsheet on the law is...very sparse on actual facts about the law.

EDIT: This Wikipedia page seems to reference what is a superset of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal

But the targets there don't seem to match up with what is going through, like:

The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 includes the following targets:

• Protect 30% of the sea territory and 30% of land territory especially primary forests and old-growth forests.

...whereas the law that went through uses "20%".

EDIT: Okay, that's definitely a superset of what was planned for the law, because the page does reference the targets that were actually taken being 20%.

tal , vor 18 Tagen (Bearbeitet vor 18 Tagen)

Hmm.

So, okay. Apple/Valve/Google/GoG/etc run digital storefronts. I believe that the industry standard today is a 30% cut for the vendor.

So one option is what the vendors would like to do, which is that all purchases should go through them.

Apple is probably a special case, because Apple both owns the platform and doesn't allow for alternate app stores. If you want to sell software to iOS users, you must go through Apple.

Google also owns a platform. Google does permit for alternate app stores, but doesn't default to adding any. In practice, I suspect that the defaults are very powerful -- only a small percentage of users will probably add a non-default app store -- but people who do want to can add alternate app stores.

Then you've got Valve and GoG. They don't own any platforms (well, okay, I guess Valve does in the form of the Steam Boxes and the Steam Deck, but they're a small portion of the actual consumers using the digital store; doesn't really work the same way). Basically, the bulk of people using these needed to "opt in". In the case of Windows users, I guess the default is the Microsoft Store, which I've no familiarity with. Steam is packaged in Debian and I assume most Linux distros, but not installed by default on any distro that I'm aware of.

I don't know what policies for non-Apple platforms are on in-app purchases, whether the digital storefront needs to get a cut. I suspect that at least for Steam, they likely do, just because Bethesda sells credits for their in-app purchases on Steam, but I haven't read up on that. I dunno about this "steering" stuff. I know that Valve has cut deals to let other people "link" purchases on other stores to Steam, but I don't think that they're obliged to do that -- they're doing it because they think that it's worthwhile to miss out on some sales revenue if they can help build the userbase that they can put a store in front of.

So there are varying levels of ways in which the vendor is privileged by the platform to which they are selling software, from "nearly guaranteed a monopoly on selling for that platform" to "no benefit at all".

But all of them rely on a commission from the software that's being sold through them.

I'm onboard with the idea of them getting a percentage take. I dunno if 30% is the right number -- my own gut feeling is that that's high -- but they're legitimately providing services. And for at least Steam and GoG, they're competing against each other (and I guess Microsoft Store, for some platforms), so that's even in the presence of competition.

Another option is to have no constraint on a cut for in-app sales (or "steering", which I think is probably functionally pretty similar). That is, have app stores obligated to permit listings even if apps direct someone to use another purchasing method, and allow that method to not let the app stores have a cut.

The problem with this route is that the end game would, to me, seem to be that publishers simply do a $0 "demo" listing to market their product on a digital store, and then have someone "pay to purchase" full game content in-game or via another payment mechanism. The app store operator isn't going to get any cut then. Like, that's not really a viable route for them.

Hmm.

I think that a viable solution should have the following characteristics:

• If someone's buying the product through the app store, then the app store vendor should be able to get a percentage take of that revenue. That's basically how brick-and-mortar retail works. The publisher shouldn't be able to just route around the app store's payment mechanism to avoid that. It's not clear to me that what the EU presently is asking for is compatible with that.

• The app store should not be able to have a monopoly on a platform. I don't think that there's any justifiable business case for letting companies set up that kind of vertical monopoly. While Apple doesn't lose money on phones, console vendors do lose money on hardware and run a market that they have a monopoly over, so this constraint would break their existing business model. I'm okay with breaking that, though I can see maybe phasing it out over a generation, since they made their existing investments based on the expectation that they could do so.

• I'd like buying from one app store not to force a user to be unable to use that purchase with services from another app store in the future. Maybe one way to deal with this would be to mandate that app store permit "transfers" of ownership, but be permitted to charge a percentage fee for that transfer. Like, if I buy something from GoG, then Valve has to let me transfer that purchase to Steam. That still lets app stores compete on and pay for things like services (e.g. Valve provides Proton and Steam Input and stuff like that), and lets them compete on price, but doesn't let them lock a user in permanently just because they bought a product on that service. It also has some other nice perks, like dealing with app stores that go out-of-business -- and while no big ones have gone under, that is going to happen in the future at some point.

tal , vor 18 Tagen

For Apple and Alphabet, this lawsuit does not seem to be addressing the no other app stores argument, but the fact that they promote their own apps and services over competitors.

I agree that the EU stuff here seems not to be aimed at that, but I'm thinking through what makes the current situation for iOS problematic, and to me, that seems like it's a big part of it (and maybe addressing that would be more important than changing policy associated with a store). Like, the current situation on iOS, as I understand it, is that:

• Apple doesn't let other app stores than their own offer apps for iOS.

• Apple sets a 30% take of all revenue in their app store.

• Apple disallows in-app purchases without that 30% cut.

• Apple doesn't allow apps to direct someone to some other mechanism for feature activation or similar that bypasses that 30% cut.

When you combine all of those, Apple's got a pretty potent monopoly over iOS users, and is leveraging that pretty hard. Like, once you're in the iOS ecosystem, you're basically totally locked in: Apple has no competition.

But the point then becomes, where do you make changes to address that? I am not sure that the EU is aiming at the right spot, because I suspect that if app vendors are simply allowed to direct people to another activation route, that you'll wind up, down the line, with $0 "demo" apps and then all sales taking place outside Apple's app store. That's also problematic.

That's why I was suggesting, instead of disallowing app stores from preventing app vendors from directing people to alternate payment routes, that it's better to disallow app stores from having a monopoly on a platform and mandate that app stores permit "transfers", but permit for a fee to be charged for those. Like, if I want to buy an app from an alternate app store and then transfer that purchase to my app purchase from Apple's app store, I can...but Apple can charge a fee for that transfer. That makes for a competitive app store environment, and avoids both the monopoly situation that exists today and the "store full of $0 apps" scenario.

Selling the iPhone gets you IOS with the apple appstore. If you want another appstore you shouldn’t be looking for the iPhone.

Ehhh. The problem with this is that it's incredibly expensive to create a mobile phone ecosystem. Like, there are basically two options today: Google and Apple, with some fringe providers out there with far smaller ecosystems. Yes, there's a choice...but the choice is basically between Google or Apple, and whichever you choose is locking you into one of those. Yeah, okay, Google is less-restrictive than Apple today, but if they can do what Apple does and chooses to do so, then you're basically looking at Monopoly A or Monopoly B.

Like, I think that being a platform provider is basically a case where being a natural monopoly arises. Yes, no one platform provider may control the whole phone market, but each essentially can control their platform.

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production. In that case, it is very probable that a company (monopoly) or minimal number of companies (oligopoly) will form, providing all or most relevant products and/or services. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating large economies of scale about the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services, electricity, telecommunications, mail, etc.[1] Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of market failure as early as the 19th century; John Stuart Mill advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good.

Most of Apple's costs are fixed -- the engineering work to do an OS or hardware is the same no matter how many users you have. But the revenue is variable, depends on how many users you have. That makes it really hard to unseat an incumbent, because you have to come in from a position of no revenue.

Every iOS user has a lot of lock-in -- not just due to familiarity with the OS's UI, but due to all the money they've spent on the platform. It's not easy to walk in with a new platform and get those users.

If a platform vendor is also allowed to control retail sales for that platform, then it permits for vertical monopolies: you can use dominance in one area to extend to dominance downstream and upstream. Like, Apple is off doing CPUs and controlling sales of products for their platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration

A monopoly produced through vertical integration is called a vertical monopoly

Apple has used the vertical integration strategy for 35 years and is one of the most successful companies in the technology industry. Apple centered its business strategy on its own development of integrated hardware, software, and latterly services. They design most of their products in-house, and do not allow their hardware and operating system to be licensed out, which allows the company to apply its company vision to its products.

Large companies such as Apple are more likely than smaller companies to employ vertical integration, as they have more resources to manage each stage of production (e.g. major expansion and funding). Implementing a vertically integrated strategy has helped Apple become a leading platform company; integrating their software (through APIs for third-party application developers) with their own hardware, across all the devices and services they offer.

Vertical integration allows Apple to control production from beginning to end. Other companies may follow the Apple model, but may not see success for some time, both due to the cost of entering the market and taking on the currently successful incumbent, but also by innovating their products to make them more appealing in the marketplace than the current incumbent. Vertical integration requires a company to focus not only on its core business, but also on several difficult areas such as sourcing materials and manufacturing partners, distribution, and finally selling the product.

Another major success of Apple's, is the forward integration with their retail stores, allowing them to sell their products directly to customers (helping customers to buy and use Apple's products and services), additionally helping them to control the prices of their products, and thus to maintain high-profit margins when they do.[20] Apple is also known as one of the world's leading "orchestrators" as they exert control over the entire value chain, but do not do everything in-house (e.g. assembly of iPhones by manufacturing partner Foxconn).[21]

Like, that's a huge vertical monopoly. Monopolies lead to market failure. If you're Apple, that's just peachy. But if you're a consumer, that's awful. And if you're a market regulator, avoiding market failure, whether due to monopoly or another factor, is one of the major reasons for your existence.

tal , vor 18 Tagen

I still feel you are not forced to buy apple, so therefore the idea of an IOS monopoly does not hold water because every apple user has the choice of android which has alternative app stores.

Well, today. But let's say that we say "it's okay for a platform provider to not allow alternate app stores". Then, let's say that users do what I expect you'd want them to do -- choose Android as the "less walled garden" option, so they have access to alternate app stores. What happens if Google waits until they're well and entrenched, down the line, and then does what Apple's doing today? I mean, you're picking them based on what they're doing today. That doesn't mean that Google has any contractual obligation to provide you with the option of alternative app stores.

I guess maybe a market regulator could say "well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it".

Another issue is that my guess is that a number of people don't understand the future costs of their purchasing decisions. I suspect that a lot of people buying their first iPhone don't really have a handle on the specific policies (or potential future policies) of their platform vendor and its economic implications. I mean, yeah, I'm willing to place a certain onus of individual responsibility on people, but I bet that the typical person just doesn't have the information to make that call at the time that they're making it. Like, if I'm buying a particular Android phone, purchasing one doesn't lock me into that vendor down the line. I can say "I was unhappy with my experience with a Samsung phone" and get a phone from some other vendor next time I buy a phone There's pretty limite lock-in there, just to whatever phone-specific configuration the phone vendor sets up. But my platform decision has a very large amount of lock-in to that platform.

Alternatively, another work around which concedes to both of our points is allowing iPhones and android devices to run other os’, meaning a new company does not need to have the hardware and existing apple users can switch if they want.

That does help, in that it breaks the hardware-software vertical monopoly. But my bet is that being even an OS provider is something of a natural monopoly as well -- think of how sticky Microsoft's presence was on the desktop. So being able to extend one's presence as an OS provider to controlling retail for that platform is a pretty significant way to extend a vertical monopoly.

If an iOS user can run Android on their iPhone, yeah, they don't have to buy a new device...but they lose out on their iPhone app library, which along with UI familiarity is I think where the real barrier to switching is.

tal , vor 16 Tagen

Some companies have started using cryptocurrency to make payments to China, specifically the stablecoin Tether, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar, reports Bloomberg.

You can't just announce that you have a new currency that is pegged to a currency. You can peg one currency to another, but only by expending resources to keep the values together, regardless of other relative demand for each.

Even if you have a lot of resources, it's not always possible to maintain a peg.

How does this work?

kagis

https://www.investopedia.com/tethers-ability-to-maintain-dollar-peg-constrained-says-s-and-p-8414907

Tether (USDT), the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, may be "constrained" in its ability to maintain its peg to the U.S. dollar, S&P Global Ratings said Tuesday, citing concerns about its reserve transparency and risk appetite, among other issues.1

The ratings agency gave an asset assessment score of 4 out of 5, with a 1 being the best possible score.

"Our asset assessment of 4 (constrained) reflects a lack of information on entities that are custodians, counterparties, or bank account providers of USDT's reserves," says the report.

So, What's Bothering S&P Global About Tether?

Now, Tether discloses details about its reserves every quarter and the ratings agency analyzed the latest data where it found some concerns.

First, the S&P assessment points out that much of Tether's reserves are held in "low-risk assets" like short-term U.S. treasuries. Even in those cases, Tether does not offer information about "custodians, counterparties, or bank account providers of the assets." 

Tether's reserves also include double-digit and opaque exposure to riskier assets.

"The riskier assets making up 15% of the collateralization ratio comprise corporate bonds, precious metals, bitcoin, secured loans, and other investments," the report adds. "Given the type of assets and limited transparency on their composition, such as their denomination and the borrowers of the secured loans, there is potential exposure to credit, market, currency, and interest risks that cannot be quantified."

The report also points to the lack of a regulatory framework, limitations on primary redeemability, and lack of asset segregation as other shortcomings of the stablecoin.

This is not the first time Tether's reserves have received attention. In 2021, Tether was a subject of enforcement actions by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and New York Attorney General for improper information about the reserves backing the stablecoin.23

That sounds like it doesn't. Like, someone might be willing to sell you this at a fixed rate, but if those backing reserves become exhausted, there's no guarantee that you don't wind up in a situation where you can't get dollars back.

tal , vor 21 Tagen

The agreement means that Hungary has dropped for now its opposition to Ukraine's graduation to EU membership.

I bet that there is gonna be one almighty argument about Hungarian-speakers in Ukraine down the line, though.

tal , vor 23 Tagen

Well, espionage has a long history, and generally wasn't treated as cause for war. I don't think that China's aim here was to destroy Dutch infrastructure -- I mean, okay, maybe to set things up to do so in an actual war -- but rather to do espionage against the Netherlands at large scale.

Also, governments generally don't disclose -- in the near term -- that online activity was done by them. And a random group of people in Russia doing something that is indistinguishable from the Kremlin do it has potential to start wars.

Also, possible for one government to pretend to be another.

Lastly, I think that there's just an enforcement problem associated with stopping cyberattacks by trying to figure out the responsible party is and slugging them hard enough to try to deter it. Like, I think that a better route would be just making computers and networks more secure. We aren't there today, that's for sure. But, we improve, too. I mean, in the late '90s, I remember pretty much all computer protocols being unencrypted plaintext. I can imagine us having computer systems and practices that are more-resistant to attack.

tal , vor 25 Tagen

Wow, another map where the old GDR borders are easily visible.

https://lemmy.today/post/11881508

Germany: Largest party in 2024 EU elections vs 1947 west/east Germany division

I think that the real issue here is that Walter Model did an effective job of halting Operation Market Garden.

That was pre-Yalta, and my guess is that if it had succeeded, the occupation lines probably would have been further east.

tal , vor 27 Tagen

Compatibility aside, I'd say that .tar.pxz aka .tpxz is probably my vote.

LZMA is probably what I'd want to use. xz and 7zip use that. It's a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it's faster to decompress than bzip2.

pixz permits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that's desirable.

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

It also can use .tar as its container format, which is desirable; that's everywhere.

The major drawback to .tar is that it doesn't support indexed access, so extracting a single file isn't fast, but .tar.pxz does.

tal , vor 29 Tagen

But a BBC project to investigate the content promoted by social media algorithms has found - alongside funny montages - young people on TikTok are being exposed to misleading and divisive content.

I'm not gonna say that TikTok isn't worse than the average here, but that seems like a kind of unrealistic bar. Find me social media that doesn't do this.

I could see some kind of quantitative statement here being meaningful. Like, say they fact-checked content that N people saw, and had some kind of metric for divisiveness. You could maybe compare TikTok to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or whatever. But you aren't gonna get a "zero" for your metric on the other social media networks.

In fact, I'd go even further and say that most major traditional, not even social media, has a fair bit of misleading and divisive content.

tal , vor einem Monat (Bearbeitet vor einem Monat)

Well, they're the largest countries in the EU (well, aside from Italy). The chances of that being a coincidence seems unlikely.

EDIT: Oh, the quote says three "big" countries. Could be others, just not as large.

tal , vor einem Monat (Bearbeitet vor einem Monat)

Wasn't I just reading articles about how awful drought was afflicting Germany?

What are the watersheds in the affected area?

Looks like the water that falls in Munich ultimately winds up in the Danube.

The water that falls in Stuttgart ultimately winds up in the Rhine.

kagis

https://www.icpdr.org/tasks-topics/topics/droughts/severe-droughts-danube-river-basin

Severe Droughts in the Danube River Basin

18 August 2022

As the climate crisis worsens, severe droughts devastate European landscapes. According to the data published by the European Drought Observatory, more than 60% of land in the European Union and United Kingdom – an area nearly the same size as India (!) – is now affected by drought conditions. The Danube River Basin and the Danube itself have been affected by serious droughts in the past, e.g., in 2003, 2015, and now again one of the most feared natural phenomenon has gripped much of the Danube River Basin.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62519683

Drought hits Germany's Rhine River: 'We have 30cm of water left'

12 August 2022

As Europe lives through a long, hot summer, one of the continent's major rivers is getting drier - posing major problems for the people and businesses that rely on it.

It's not unusual for water levels to drop here but, Captain Kimpel says, it's happening more frequently. "We used to have a lot of floods. Now we have a lot of low waters."

EDIT: That was 2022. What about 2021?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

In July 2021, several European countries were affected by severe floods. Some were catastrophic, causing deaths and widespread damage. The floods started in the United Kingdom as flash floods causing some property damage and inconvenience. Later floods affected several river basins across Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.[8] At least 243 people died in the floods, including 196 in Germany,[9] 43 in Belgium,[2] two in Romania,[3] one in Italy[4] and one in Austria.[5]

And that was the Rhine.

How about 2023?

https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/29/floods-in-europe-hungary-netherlands-and-lithuania-brace-themselves

High water levels in the Rhine and its tributaries have led to flooding this week in Germany and the Netherlands amid a spell of wet weather.

Rivers have been continuing to surge after several storms hit Germany in quick succession, leaving rainwater building up on already waterlogged landscapes.

I feel like there isn't a lot of middle room between "too much rain" and "too little rain" here.

tal , vor einem Monat (Bearbeitet vor einem Monat)

Even so, a quarter-century does seem like an exceptionally long time.

When was the last time that France did a state visit to us in the US?

kagis

https://media.franceintheus.org/statevisit/

State Visit by President and Mrs. Macron (Nov. 30 – Dec. 2, 2022)

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden host President Emmanuel Macron and Mrs. Brigitte Macron of France for a State Visit to the United States, including a state dinner, on December 1, 2022.

This is the first State Visit of the Biden-Harris Administration. It underscores the deep and enduring relationship between the United States and France–the oldest allies–that is founded on our shared democratic values, economic ties, and defense and security cooperation. The leaders discuss together our continued close partnership on shared global challenges and areas of bilateral interest.

Like, a year and a half ago.

How about the UK?

kagis

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/uk-welcomes-frances-macron-for-spectacular-state-visit/1882189

UK welcomes France's Macron for spectacular state visit

Macron was visiting to mark 80th anniversary of de Gaulle’s famous wartime speech broadcast by BBC in 1940

That was four years ago.

If you'd have asked me prior to me looking these up or hearing that it'd been 24 years since the last, l'd have guessed that it'd have been within the past five years, especially given that Scholz entered during that timeframe.

I guess COVID-19 maybe discouraged travel, was sort of an exceptional period for the past few years. And then Merkel was in office for quite a long time, 16 years, so maybe France didn't see a need to do a second visit with her.

EDIT: Actually, wait. If it was 24 years, it's that there would have been no state visit ever under Merkel. The last would have been to Gerhard Schroeder, shortly before she entered office. Maybe it was that Merkel just didn't want to do state visits.

tal , vor einem Monat

I guess he could be trying to intentionally play a spoiler role. Like, he'd have to want Labour policy changes, believe that Labour adopting those changes wouldn't make Labour lose in the general election, and believe that he could split off enough votes to cause Labour to lose so that it has to give him those concessions if it wants him not to run.

tal , vor einem Monat

Russian border guards have removed navigation buoys from the Estonian side of a river separating the two countries, the Baltic nation said on Thursday, adding that it would seek an explanation as well as a return of the equipment.

Setting aside the broader border dispute issue and just focusing on boat navigation, I'd also point out that Russia is jamming GPS, which probably doesn't help navigating the thing.

tal , vor einem Monat

They've been doing it in the UL for some time. Note that their SMRs there are relatively-large, getting up towards conventional reactors in size -- they're putting more emphasis on the "modular" and less on the "small".

tal , vor einem Monat

Vauxhall owner

For those of us not familiar with Vauxhall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellantis

Stellantis N.V. is a multinational automotive manufacturing corporation formed from the merger in 2021 of the Italian–American conglomerate Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and the French PSA Group.[12][13][14]

Stellantis designs, manufactures, and sells automobiles bearing its 14 brands: Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall.

tal , vor einem Monat

checks lemmyverse.net's community search

Yup.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=writing

!writingprompts

looks

Well, one person is trying hard to get it going and keeps constantly posting prompts, but nobody is actually filling them in. I feel kind of bad for that guy.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

Usually shortages show up when prices can't adjust freely. Are charging prices capped?

I mean, if you could do something where the price would reflect demand in a given area, I bet you'd have people installing more. Maybe auction off reserved charging timeslots or something ("app, find and reserve for me the closest charging station with a rate of no more than X"), if that isn't already done.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

The core idea is to keep the – for Germany profitable – EU internal market while cutting away most cohesion projects.

So. Being Norway.

I believe that was basically what Nigel Farage campaigned on when going for Brexit.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

If China's population decides to migrate to Luxembourg, there's going to be problems.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

Solskyi was accused of illegally seizing land worth more than $7m (£5.6m) when he was the head of a major farming company and a member of parliament.

That's actually less-bad than I expected from the title in that the issue was from before he was agricultural minister. I mean, like, it's still a concern for him to hold the seat if he was involved in a some form of corruption prior, but it also isn't a case of him exploiting the ministerial position itself.

tal , vor 2 Monaten (Bearbeitet vor 2 Monaten)

Okay, so what's this involve?

"They were warned cutting-edge research could be targeted by states to boost their own militaries and economies."

That seems like just part of how academia works today. People publish their work pretty openly. It's not locked up in a silo. Other people can see what they're doing and make use of it. Reputation depends on openly publishing work. If you don't want academia to work like that, I think that's going to involve some considerable rejiggering of the system. Or if it's just certain sensitive areas, move people in some areas to be classified, or to work at private labs, or something like that. I don't know how-readily universities are going to be able to deal with it.

"Former head of the National Cyber Security Centre Ciaran Martin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme security services were concerned about university staff being targeted in a bid to influence research"

I'm fuzzy on the concern. How does one influence research? To alter what is being researched? To try to sway findings?

"...as well as intellectual property theft through cyber attacks..."

That I can see, though I'd think that all organizations might be subject to it. I don't even know if academia is the most-prone to it or the most at-risk. A quote from The Cuckoo's Egg:

Our computers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory weren't especially secure, but we
were required to keep outsiders away from them and make an effort to prevent their
misuse. We weren't worried about someone hurting our computers, we just wanted to
keep our funding agency, the Department of Energy, off our backs. If they wanted
our computers painted green, then we'd order paintbrushes.

But to make visiting scientists happy, we had several computer accounts for
guests. With an account name of "guest" and a password of "guest," anyone could use
the system to solve their problems, as long as they didn't use more than a few
dollars of computing time. A hacker would have an easy time breaking into that
account—it was wide open. This would hardly be much of a break-in, with time
limited to one minute. But from that account, you could look around the system,
read any public files, and see who was logged in. We felt the minor security risk
was well worth the convenience.

Mulling over the situation, I kept doubting that a hacker was fooling around in
my system. Nobody's interested in particle physics. Hell, most of our scientists
would be delighted if anyone would read their papers. There's nothing special here
to tempt a hacker—no snazzy supercomputer, no sexy trade secrets, no classified
data. Indeed, the best part of working at Lawrence Berkeley Labs was the open,
academic atmosphere.

Fifty miles away, Lawrence Livermore Labs did classified work, developing
nuclear bombs and Star Wars projects. Now, that might be a target for some hacker
to break into. But with no connections to the outside, Livermore's computers can't
be dialed into. Their classified data's protected by brute force: isolation.
If someone did break into our system, what could they accomplish? They could
read any public files. Most of our scientists set their data this way, so their
collaborators can read it. Some of the systems software was public as well.
Though we call this data public, an outsider shouldn't wander through it. Some
of it's proprietary or copyrighted, like our software libraries and word processing
programs. Other databases aren't for everyone's consumption—lists of our
employees' addresses and incomplete reports on work in progress. Still, these
hardly qualify as sensitive material, and it's a long way from classified.

"and partnerships being abused."

Yeah, that seems like a valid concern. I remember listening to some podcast talking about concerns about genetic data that researchers on some US project had access to being used for other purposes by people they were collaborating with.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

EU citizens are not doing well when it comes to financial literacy. Nearly half lack an understanding of basic financial concepts, including inflation.

I can believe that.

On the other hand, I kind of suspect that one might see similar results here in the US, not to mention in other places.

tal , vor 2 Monaten (Bearbeitet vor 2 Monaten)

any average person knows this

I would venture to suggest that perhaps Eurobarometer polls might be more-representative of the population than your circle of friends and family.

I remember the first time I saw a poll as to the percentage of people here in the US that believed in ghosts and was very surprised. If you'd asked me prior to seeing poll data, I'd have guessed that the number would be below 1%.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/28/do-ghosts-exist-41-percent-americans-say-yes/8580577002/

This year's results showed a slight drop in Americans who say ghosts are real. In 2019, 4 in 10 Americans believed in ghosts, and more than 46% agreed that supernatural beings exist. In this year's survey, about 41% of adults said they believe in ghosts.

Slate Star Codex had an article a while back about the remarkable impact of social bubbles. It was really talking about how people isolate themselves into "political bubbles" of Democrats and Republicans, and how people in each camp should be more tolerant of each other. But I think that one can generalize the mathematical side of what the article was talking about, that one can have a social circle that is statistically insanely not-representative of the population as a whole, because of tendency of people with similar viewpoints to cluster.

A quote from the article:

There are cer­tain the­o­ries of dark mat­ter where it barely in­ter­acts with the reg­u­lar world at all, such that we could have a dark mat­ter planet ex­actly co-​incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark mat­ter peo­ple are walk­ing all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark mat­ter city, maybe a few me­ters away from me a dark mat­ter blog­ger is writ­ing on his dark mat­ter com­puter about how weird it would be if there was a light mat­ter per­son he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about con­ser­v­a­tives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-​matter con­ser­v­a­tives who go around com­plain­ing about Big Gov­ern­ment and oc­ca­sion­ally vot­ing for Rom­ney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take cre­ation­ists. Ac­cord­ing to Gallup polls, about 46% of Amer­i­cans are cre­ation­ists. Not just in the sense of be­liev­ing God helped guide evo­lu­tion. I mean they think evo­lu­tion is a vile athe­ist lie and God cre­ated hu­mans ex­actly as they exist right now. That’s half the coun­try.

And I don’t have a sin­gle one of those peo­ple in my so­cial cir­cle. It’s not be­cause I’m de­lib­er­ately avoid­ing them; I’m pretty live-​and-let-live po­lit­i­cally, I wouldn’t os­tra­cize some­one just for some weird be­liefs. And yet, even though I prob­a­bly know about a hun­dred fifty peo­ple, I am pretty con­fi­dent that not one of them is cre­ation­ist. Odds of this hap­pen­ing by chance? 1⁄2^150 = 1⁄10^45 = ap­prox­i­mately the chance of pick­ing a par­tic­u­lar atom if you are ran­domly se­lect­ing among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty per­cent of Amer­i­cans want to ban gay mar­riage. I think if I re­ally stretch it, maybe ten of my top hun­dred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less as­tro­nom­i­cally un­likely; the odds are a mere one to one hun­dred quin­til­lion against.

Peo­ple like to talk about so­cial bub­bles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hun­dred quin­til­lion. The only metaphor that seems re­ally ap­pro­pri­ate is the bizarre dark mat­ter world.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

I mean, E2E encryption is gonna make life harder for police than its been since we standardized on poorly-secured electronic communication devices. The FBI isn't too keen on it either.

There's probably going to be a cost in terms of criminality, but I think that it's one worth paying.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

"These specific obligations include submitting risk assessment reports to the Commission, putting in place mitigation measures to address systemic risks linked to the provision of their services," it said in a statement.

I feel like systemic risks from lack of pornography from said platforms until a replacement can show up are rather limited.

This isn't quite Gazprom here.

tal , vor 2 Monaten

It's a beer event. Like really a beer event.

https://oktoberfest.guide/tents

Weinzelt - translates as "wine tent". This tent offers a selection of more than 15 wines, as well as Weißbier.

They're doing it wrong!

tal , vor 3 Monaten

The aggressor is invading and Europe is acting like they’re not at war, again.

The Phoney War wasn't so much countries pretending that they weren't at war as it was countries preparing for war. The Axis had started arming themselves sooner; the Allies wanted to have enough time to build up.

tal , vor 3 Monaten

Between this and the Moscow theater hostage crisis...and I guess the Bataclan attacks in France...people seem to target theaters in other countries.

But the US seems much more concerned about sporting events being targeted in the US. I don't hear about security restrictions on theaters.

I guess a sporting event can have a lot more people, and if televised might be higher visibility. But I'd think that any vulnerability would persist across national boundaries.

tal , vor 3 Monaten

Czechens

Chechens. Chechnya is in Russia. Czechia is in the EU.

tal , vor 3 Monaten

If I had to make a guess, whoever was involved didn't expect to come out alive.

And it targeted the general public, not the government.

I'd guess Islamic stuff is more likely than upset veterans.

But I suppose that if it's part of a larger group, that someone will probably claim responsibility.

tal , vor 8 Monaten

I think that this is kinda a standard French security theater thing, as France has done it repeatedly before. Some terrorist kills some people in France, French government deploys a bunch of soldiers to visibly stand around in public places, public is satisfied that something is being done.

The real stuff that France is doing to deal with terrorism is going to be on the intelligence side. Can't really see that, though, so to the public, looks like the government is just standing around doing nothing, which I imagine is annoying to the government.