mqus

It does make local alternatives(without shipping) or shipping over land via rail more competitive.

As another commenter said, we don't get enough leap seconds for it to have a noticeable effect in real life. The solar sync (in this time scale) is really only relevant for space science and they probably need a better time than "adjusting in discrete 1-second-steps" anyways and are much more limited in scope.

"[inside] the course of a commercial activity" "Commercial activity is understood as providing goods in a business related context."

secondary self-promotion, donations and ads are imho not "providing goods in a business-related context". Paid consultancy and selling tutorials might be though, But I assume that judges will rule on that if it comes to it and I assume that they will set some monetary boundary to which this still counts as "outside the course of commercial activity".

In Europe. the greens are only talking about it, but no concrete law was proposed or even planned afaik. But VW did talk about no longer selling ICE cars in 2035 [1]. But as always, 2030 is long ways off and there is probably a lot of marketing in it, let's see how it plays out.

[1] https://carthrust.com/2021/06/28/vw-says-no-to-ice-powered-c...

This is also the point that stands out to me the most. This is hypocritical and pretty close to negligent, if they set such high standards for other companies they investigate but can't own up to it themselves.

I can only hope this is a singular case or else the argument "yeah we collect your data but we also keep it safe!" falls pretty quickly.

To be precise, the value of money sinks. The value of bread to everyone involved stays the same.

Said differently: the price of everything rises, not the value.

And another nitpick: by definition the average/median price rises, not the price of everything (afair).

Since bitcoin itself is a currency though, I'm not sure how inflation really applies across currencies (since there are "prices" both ways).

why not tackle both?

But doesn't this have the same overflow issue, e.g. if R is a large positive number and L is a large negative one?

It's federation. You also wouldn't expect every citizen to get an @europarl.europa.eu e-mail-adress. The platform is decentralised by design, so just by joining, the EU is contributing to "providing a platform" imho.

Additional to my other complaint: see here for a mainstream medium in germany (imho it should not be as popular as it is) reporting on "Ukraine reportedly attacking Kachovka dam": https://www.bild.de/news/2022/news/russland-krieg-gegen-ukra... . But since you did not define EU policy or "supporting Russia" I'm not sure if that covers your wants. Btw It took 2 minutes to find that article, there are surely more.

"not publishing anything that go counter to key EU policies" is now the same as "Mainstream media do not support russia"?

I think that media very often call out bullshit takes of the government, EU or national. But being against russia just isn't a bullshit take. That said, Media do cover also when Ukraine does things wrong, but those things are just not as common. You can't report 50/50% when the situation is 99/1%.

> Companies that scaled up quickly in earlier days of the internet tend to treat their customers like trash.

Well, it is just much cheaper to optimize for the 90% Case (Everything works just fine, nothing unusual is happening) than aiming for covering 100% of cases. Ofc this is more of a general business rule imho than just startups(=scaling fast), but when you grow fast, you also need to prioritize much more.

But in the more general sense it seems to me, that this is also the reason that government spending is quite a bit higher than if a company would do the same, because governments should be (and mostly are) aiming for 100% and not the most convenient subgroup of the population.

Their weird content/metadata detection is also what turns me off. Even just having a sane 'files' view with an arbitrary depth would be fine, bit it just does not work. They don't scan metadata like id3 tags. At least this is how I remember my impression when I tried it a year ago.

Maybe this is the way to contact google in case of issues! /s

you know, "IoT Solution" is not at all specific. For good guidance, you need to give a few more details, like where will this "solution" run (on the "thing" side or on the server side, on a smart hub, etc?). What goals do you have? how should this thing look, architecture wise?

Another tip: change the port of your ssh server. This makes connecting a small bit more tedious(create a .ssh/config file on your clients!) But in exchange you gain much less people trying to hack your machine. This should not be your only security measure though, since its still findable for some people willing to put in the effort (or targeted attacks).

> I think that is unlikely, and I think it is likely we will see Google change the illegal licensing.

According to another comment, they even already changed their practices in response, a few years ago

Well, Imagine your government (the EU is not far off of being one) is now handling everything in spanish, even though your country speaks english and english is your official language. Lets be generous and there are only about 10% of people not speaking spanish. Is it really ok that there are official documents, meeting notes, publications, advertisements,web sites, videos etc in spanish and only the most important ones get translated to your language?

For companies this would completely fine. For a government this is not.

Apart from that, there is right now a huge source of text that is publicly available and already translated into the same X languages, with a huge quality to boost. People have teached ML translators with that text source. Ofc this is just a side effect but these translations have made other translations and communication in the EU a bit more simple just by being such a big reference.

I would think the same and can only assume that apple is not as much of a monopoly as google/android in the EU. I think Vestager &co also wanted to have a solid case (as evidenced in the appeal losses right now) and the apple one was more difficult to establish? I don't know.

yeah, let the logged-in user re-pair (pun not entirely intended) their swapped-out components and log it somewhere for future technicians. Apple can also go an extra step to register stolen components to also show that once it is inserted into another devices. ofc there then needs to be some core to pair with but apple will figure it out.

> You can’t run a company on that kind of deep mistrust.

Trust has to be earned in some ways (but you can expect some base-level). But I want to argue on another point: as an exec, you can use this kind of writing to also get commitment from the team, to balance things out. But ofc for that there needs to be a fair discussion of priorities and once you have that, there is usually no reason to contractify the outcome.

>Solar panels need to be replaced after 30 years max, but most probably will be replaced much earlier because the operators want to pocket the improved efficiency of newer panels. Reactors will need maintenance but it is normal to keep them running much longer. Also, what about the human labor? To maintain such large solar array you'd need hundreds of people. A modern nuclear powerplant with 5+ reactors is maintained by few dozens of people.

To just pick at one of your "statistics": E.g. Flamanville, a reactor plant with 2 reactors (and 1 being built) employed 670 people (not a "few dozens")[1]. I would argue the solar panels are the ones needing much less people. The ones I know don't need any kind of big servicing. But in those sizes this is pure speculation from my side.

> To replace just a single nuclear reactor you need so many solar panels that the deaths caused by the transportation will be significant - accidents, pollution + you have to count the damaged roads that need to be replaced - again pollution and accidents. And high-voltage electricity is not exactly safe - you would need so much electrical work that there simply must be a lot of death from accidents too, on this scale we're getting into the area where it's statistics and not really something to simply prevent.

Electronics-wise I don't see why there is so much more (and more dangerous) work involved in wiring up solar panels compared to constructing a nuclear plant. But I don't have statistics on that. I also wanted to know if your "deaths caused by the transportation will be significant" makes any sense. For that I tried to estimate the kind of size a solar park would have be to replace a reactor plant, e.g. Flamanville. Flamanville produces 14TWh per year. I took [2] as a reference(2.14km², 117GWh) and it came out to 256km² of area to produce the same amount of energy per year with solar in the flat part of germany. Storage is missing there. This is a huge amount of space, but also nothing that will produce "significant accidents" on its own. Constructing reactors and transporting fuel rods and nuclear waste is also a huge act with tons of material involved.

> It will never be possible to phase out fossil fuels in transport and industrial uses without nuclear power - solar just doesn't scale this much, it's perfect for individual houses but you just can't power thousands of large container ships with it, nor blast furnaces etc - and definitely not the uncountable amount of trucks and cars on roads.

Maybe direct batteries are not a solution for transport and industrial uses. But green h2 would be. This then has the fortunate aspect that it can be produced anywhere and independent of the need, e.g. in the Sahara and only when the sun shines. In that way solar can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power. Regarding cars and regular power use (btw germany covers ~40% of its energy with renewables already, taking this times two or three is not an issue of "scale"), lets just take the solar example from above and try to do 150% of germany's current power needs in full solar and see where that gets us. Germany needed 624 TWh in its peak year (2007, [3]), lets be generous and say we need 1000TWh in the future. This comes down to 18300 km². Germany has an area of 358000km². So our (very generous) solar capacity would need about an area of 5%. How much is 5%? According to [4], citys and streets (etc.) sum up to 14.5%, Agriculture has about 50%, Forests 30%. Since we can "simply" put the panels on top of the first category and don't have to replace existing areas most of the time, this looks pretty feasible to me, even with exaggerated demands in napkin calculations. So maybe it does not scale well, but it does scale.

And all of this does not take into account that solar is not the only option. Power from wind is a great way to mix since wind is strong mostly when there is no/less sun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templin_Solar_Park (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpark_Templin_%E2%80%93_Gr... has the energy statistics regarding GWh in 2017)

[3] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/energie/stromverbrauch (german, but the graph should be readable)

[4] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/flaeche-boden-land-oeko... (also german)

I agree with you that there is too little investment in infrastructure in germany. But maglev was researched extensively and then we decided against it.

> the prices and shedules are an international meme.

Regarding prices: those are actually very reasonable prices for High-speed-trains. Look up tickets on TGV or Shinkansen. ICE tickets are starting at 20 euros. Regional rail is indeed worse but we're arguing about high-speed rail vs maglev. And Maglev is so much more expensive to build, I simply can't see how that would lead to better prices (or schedules/being on time for that matter, which mostly depend on the bad infrastructure and are "just" made worse by the fact that other trains run there)

> Transrapid is also more wheelchair accessible because it is level with the platform and the cabin is much wider.

Sure, ICE trains are bad for accessibility. But that is not due to the tracks they run on but rather due to accessibility not being a priority when designing the trains. Regional trains show that it can be done without bigger problems

> Also remember that stupid solar roadways idea?

The one that failed everywhere they tried?

> Guess where that actually works, in between the transrapid rails. By covering the center of the pylons in solar a route from bremen to hamburg would produce enough energy to replace 1 1/2 coal power plants.

Or you could place them literally anywhere else, there is no shortage of space to put solar panels in.

But to end on a more friendly note: Maglevs are indeed a bit cheaper to service and the fast accelleration is really helpful for those relatively short distances between city centers in some regions. But as was stated in another comment: try building a new line which actually goes from main station to main station. You're going to need space (or tunnels) in city centers and the space between and this will be expensive and tedious. 40 years ago this might have been easier but even then we wouldn't have had a network from the start.

So you would rather have built completely new tracks, stations and other infrastrusture, which can only be used with in-system trainsets and will most likely be completely incompatible with anything running on other european rails for decades? No possibility of dual-use with older sleeper trains, regional trains or freight trains?

I would argue the decision was not as bad as you make it out to be.

This depends on the renderer/render settings. e.g. https://openstreetmap.de/karte/ always shows the german names alongside, if available. But those are set by the site owner, not the user (those are not vector tiles after all)

I didn't know that site, thanks! But I have to note that those stations are missing pretty basic and crucial information like platform numbers. I probably won't be using those maps anytime soon.

data-wise this could be possible. I know at least in Germany, there is also data in OSM about each line and which tracks they are using.

Well in my bubble, people were pissed that German/EU regulators did so little in the VW case and were glad that at least the US did something there.

Of course there was some monetary incentive behind it (Hoping that you could get some money out of the case for your VW, too) but generally there really wasn't any "The US just wants to get money from german car makers" sentiment.

I can't imagine that masks alone were the reason. I use them for two 1h commutes per day and I simply can't understand how they are such an issue. It is a bit annoying but you get used to it. Even longer distances like three hours are easily manageable.

I would understand tough, if they would switch to the car because of increased risk of catching the virus.

I'm pretty sure this price is before taxes (and maybe more payments) and german taxes are pretty heavy, ca. 30% of the consumer price is taxes and stuff, ~25% go to the network operator and only ~45% are power generation[1](~the prices in the visualization). So you have to roughly double that to get consumer €/kWh (ofc daily prices are a bit different than a contract over a whole year).

[1, german sadly] https://strom-report.de/strompreise/strompreis-zusammensetzu...