Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.

What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

Don’t forget Yemen. I know, it’s a measly 350 000 dead so far, which apparently rate much less than Israel-Palestine conflict losses.

It was unusual in how far south it was visible in many regions of the world. It’s been roughly 50 years since the last time that happened. Obviously the subjective impact depends a lot on where you live. Some see it every year, others only will get the chance when the Sun explodes and strips away our magnetosphere entirely. Which hopefully will not become a centennial event.

Maybe we should turn this idea around? I know tons of healthy rich old people that have nothing better to do than bicker and complain, how about we force them to do a free full year of community service? Why is their time and energy considered more valuable than the youths’?

And maybe it would humble those wealthy nepo pieces of shit, and likely resolve the social issues that people complain about.

Currently, just barely under half of Germany’s population is overweight.

That’s only ten percent less than the USA, which sits at 57%.

And yes, it causes massive health problems, staining the healthcare system.

You can disable camera shaking and some post process features such as motion blur, then it’s no different from any other shooter game in terms of motion patterns.

That is so utterly wrong. It all depends on the cause of death. Especially sudden traumatic deaths, such as choking or drowning, where the rest of the body was little impaired, have crazy high recovery chances if immediate and persistent CPR is applied.

And even on chronically I’ll patients, e.g. the commonly thought of cholesterol caused infarction and subsequent heart attack has a good chance to recover. Modern medicine is amazing!

But in most cases, you simply won’t know in the moment why somebody dies. And does it matter? You can make assumptions, but you could be totally wrong. So leave that part to the EMTs and doctors. Your job as a human in that moment is to give someone the best chance they will get to experience more life.

In all cases the chances of survival and recovery sink with literally every second, which is why it can be so frustrating to see people too scared or cynical to even try. What are you afraid of? You can’t make em any more dead. And I truly hope anyone would be willing to “waste” the time and effort to at least try if I suddenly died. Even if your CPR is too weak, too strong ( yes, also possible, albeit very rare), too slow or too fast: the by far worst CPR is the one not given at all.

And I can promise you this: you will never regret having attempted to do CPR, even if there is no resuscitation.

If my post came across as a comparison, it was not meant to. Of course the average scale and intensity would be higher in occupied territories.

I just wanted to highlight that a vast majority of Germans have both the knowledge of the terror their ancestors committed due to the schools’ focus on keeping every new generation well educated on it, while combining it with the traumas their own family or communities experienced.

This combines into a fairly strong anti fascist society.

Yes, we have neo nazis and all other flavors of right wing extremists, but they have much less real power than some international media reporting might make you think. Exactly because the majority of society is sensitive to this and does rise against it in numbers.

Even before the current wave, there never was a right wing demonstration or rally that wasn’t accompanied by a liberal counter rally with at least a hundred times their number. And even then those weren’t left wing extremists or other political radicals in the majority. Most of these types of rallies have a large number of very boring participants, people that are close to apolitical otherwise.

Regarding AfD: remember it’s not an openly fascist party, unlike the previously existing NPD, which is now forbidden. AfD claims to be a neo conservative party, a bit further right than the big CDU ( which is center-right). And the AfD keeps dancing on this line, in some areas actively pushing out people as soon as their fascist activities become known and turning themselves, while simultaneously following a slightly tamer route. It’s a dangerous and effective way of moving the goal posts of public discourse, especially with no other party effectively engaging their topics. The AfD group revraled to participate in the current nasty discussions is not even a hundred people. I’m confident you’ll find a couple dozen idiots of their scale in every larger city of this world.

But every time they slip up like this in Germany, they experience massive setbacks.

It’s still important to recognize their danger and work against them, but Germany is far from lost to their twisted ideology. But media does like to be sensationalistic, even when it has good intentions.

A US comparison might be how the tea party developed as an offspring of the Republicans, and how they subsequently shifted the entire political landscape, despite them actually only bring a rather small group. So many unthinkable policies that nobody would have even considered worth a discussion are now on the table for actual legislative processes.

Almost all Germans have bad family experiences from that time as well.

Either you lost someone due to Nazi terror, or you lost someone who was being a Nazi.

I expect neither is an experience that anyone would cherish to relive.

Yes, there’s much more.

But it’s hard to explain without spoiling things, as is typical for Kojima games. His games often feature unique and bold new gameplay, have a strong focus on character storytelling ( almost movie-like), all embedded in worlds that share many similarities with our own, but have bizarre twists to them.

In terms of gameplay, it has elements of survival, crafting, stealth, fighting/shooting, and navigation.

I consider Kojima games pieces of art. Not everyone will enjoy them, sure, but it’s worth having at least attempted to interact with them, purely to experience their hard to forget uniqueness. Those that find the gameplay enjoyable often rank it as a game of the decade in terms of memorability.

Don’t forget legit slavery. You literally can catch humans as if they were pals. And then force them to work or fight for you. Or even butcher them…

And getting rid of the unfair preferential terms is good for the EU as a whole, because it will reduce resentment in all other current and potential future member nations.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely believe Brexit hurt everyone in Europe and I can’t wait to welcome UK back into the Union, but make it on equal terms. It’s a very small silver lining to the whole fiasco. I just hope it doesn’t take too long for UK to find a leader string enough to say “I think we made a mistake, we should reapply”. Make a new referendum while the populace still realizes the connection between Brexit and the current misery before some populist schmuck finds a new scapegoat.

I do. I do not understand why this tiny delivery bears mentioning compared to all the other, much larger deliveries.

And I want to highlight how little all the billions of aid will mean if the West now just stops delivering, simply because the public is bored of the war. War is expensive, but sometimes there’s no alternative. And cynical at it may be, supporting a proxy to fight for you on their ground is still hell of a lot cheaper than your own people dying on your soil.

250 artillery shells, wow. That’s gonna last a whole three days.

The audacity! Margot would never stoop to such lowly deception!

Choosing your real name as a nickname kind defeats the purpose though. 🤔

Almost all western leaders have condemned Israel blocking vital supplies and the forced indiscriminate expulsion of civilians from north Gaza, as far as I know. Just like they condemn the atrocities of indiscriminate murder and kidnapping of civilians committed by Hamas. International aid is still being sent to Palestine, except where Israel blocks it. And the international community rightfully complains that this blockade is not in accordance with humanitarian laws and applies diplomatic pressure to get it through.

“The West” is neither accepting Israels logic blindly, nor does it excuse Hamas transgressions. But it mostly does it with words for fear of escalation. This also applies to nearby Arabian countries, by the way. Egypt refuses to accept Palestinian refugees for fear of Hamas establishing a base in Egypt Sinai and firing rockets from there, which would risk a much larger conflict. Nobody except Hamas, Hisbollah and Iran - and Russia, because it distracts from Ukraine - wants the conflict to escalate.

Compared to currently having to replace the entire phone when the battery dies?