alphager

In airports, bars, waiting rooms: absolutely.

Germany kept 4 coal plants online in 2022 and 2023 that should have been shut down.

The concept of title insurance doesn't exist in Germany as the Notar eliminates the risk.

Usually it's combined with a parcel re-shipping scam.

It works like this: "Sell" high-priced items on eBay, use the local bank account of the mule to collect the money. The victims will trust this process because a local bank account is involved. The mule now transfers that money through irrevocable money orders into a non-extraditory country.

The victims will go after the mule, but the police will take some time, so you get 2-4 months out of a mile until he is arrested.

At the same time, you order high-priced items using stolen credit cards and have them delivered to the mule. The mule repackages them and sends them to the scammers. The shops will go after the mule.

TL/DR: they accepted sponsorship by Anduril, a weapons manufacturer and publicized that fact 3 days before the conference. The German scene is quite pacifistic and threw a fit.

Amazon in Germany has two problems in my eyes:

It's not possible to filter out the marketplace. The marketplace is full of dropshippers with highly inconsistent delivery times. There are some things I just want to buy from Amazon directly.

Chinese fire-and-forget brands crowd out real brands. Fine if you e.g. just want cheap gloves, but a terrible experience if you want more than that.

The other thing is that there's a certain product-fatigue and format fatigue in the community. There are so many releases each year that it's increasingly impossible to give the monetary and time commitment to follow 100% of MtG. It was never a cheap hobby, but the price increases and the proliferation of products really is noticeable.

The old-school entrenched playerbase is also noticing that the formats they grew up with are becoming increasingly irrelevant. In-person standard-events in local stores are increasingly harder to find (and even if an event is planned it often fails because not enough people show up). The competitive tournament scene is almost completely dead. The big money-maker for wizards is Commander and you are thus seeing more and more cards aimed at that format, even in standard-sets.

In short: the extended universe is not aimed at the old-school base and can be seen as an unnecessary money-grab at best or as an "they killed my preferred format for this?!" outrage condensation point.

You are seeing the same thing in the MCU: it's hard to follow /all/ movies and TV shows and even worse: some of the shows are not aiming at the classically young singe male audience and thus shows aimed at female teenagers are produced. Some part of the nerd community sees that as a direct attack on their identity.

Microsoft will allow you access to the PM of the product if you are big enough, but his answer will be a not-exactly-committing "in 3 years" because their roadmap is full.

No, pretty much just the manufacturer loses. Short term the operator loses, but I'm sure that the courts will award damages.

For me, this incident is a welcome argument with which I can tighten the screws on manufacturers in the next round of train buying (at minimum, they will agree to heavy contractual fines for anything like this; at best I get full source code for every train).

For too long the only priority in OT was safety (fine in the 80ies, but the second you integrate an IP stack that posture doesn't work anymore). This has been changing in the industry thanks to EU-regulation; this incident will accelerate the change.

Having money left over at the end of the budget year is a failure, as that money could have been used in a profitable projects.

If the only human motivation factor you know is monetary, I deeply pity you.