Allow people to finance the products over the entire expected lifetime.

So you want to capture regulation in the name of the banks and whatever presumably private (because markets!!!11) agency does the life expectancy rating while simultaneously letting the manufacturers off the hook warranty-wise. Got you.

Some people speculated that Britain left the EU because they believe in markets whereas many EU countries don’t.

Those people are stupid. At least in so far as “they” refers to Britons at large. If with “they” you mean certain nobs and posh folks and with “market” you mean “offshore tax havens” then you have a point.

Brexit was pushed for by Atlas network members, notably against opposition from Atlas members from anywhere else in the world, right before the EU started tightening regulations on tax havens. Coincidence? You tell me. The rest of those neoliberal fucks rather pay taxes than burn the cake they’re eating.

We will see in 20 years if the EU can stay on top of its regulations.

The EU Commission, back then in the form of the ECSC High Authority, has been doing this stuff since 1952. All European post-war prosperity is based on this kind of approach. Details differ but by and large the European economical policy is ordoliberal.

Improving markets means regulation. Rating systems as you propose them are easily influenced and gamed by companies and subject to the same information and irrationality problems that individual consumer behaviour are.

Lastly, don’t think that such EU regulations aren’t initiated by and pushed for by consumer advocate groups. The commission is not in the habit of going around, saying “where is a market segment that isn’t regulated and what pointless shit can we accost them with”. If things work fine they just plainly let things be.

Thing is: There’s always going to be chuds saying “REEEE I want a more powerful vacuum” and go with the one with the higher wattage number on the box, no matter what comparison portals say about actual performance. Those portals are nothing new, they have existed for a long time. Yet companies did get into a wattage war, and to write a bigger number on the box so that people would buy it you need to use a bigger motor and use more energy. Problem being: Noone is helped by vacuums which stick to the floor, so you also have to leak, and be loud. All that extra power, good for nothing.

There’s exactly one way out of such a market failure: Regulation. “vacuums may not use more than X watt per Y of sucking power”.

but better value should come from customer choices, not from regulations.

You mean lower value should come from misleading advertisement, incomplete information, irrational behaviour of actors, and other forms of market failure. Because that is how it works out in the real world.

Also, quoth the constitution (or well what passes as one for the EU), Article 3(3) TEU:

The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

Get out of here with Ayn Rand’s fever dreams.

It shouldn’t surpris too much given Mike Pondsmith’s general record of clairvoyance that NetWatch is a European Corp.

And, no, “Vos videmus” totally isn’t a creepy motto. Based out of London, one could almost think that it’s the London CCTV system turned sentient AI.

I don’t think citing the US supports your case. You’re talking about a country where the only time everyone is on one page, is interested in the same thing, a moment of cohesion, is the ads during superbowl. American culture may technically exist but it has close to zero depth. Regional identities are deeper, largely because immigrants clustered together, one source nation here, another one there.

It’s also not really comparable because much of that increase was due to immigration, often whole families, also I think you meant more like 30%, not 3%. Niger has a growth rate of 3.66, a median age of about 15. Fifteen. Half are younger, half older than that. Politically, it’s a complete shitshow that makes the Trump regime look sane. There’s such a thing as too much teen spirit.

And even without that it should continue to ensure visibility. So that a kid from a small village with five age peers knows that they might be the odd one out in their village, but they’re not alone. A place large enough to have a parade is large enough to have a (semi-)dedicated bar, and vice versa.

The question was put to Alice Weidel. Her answer was basically “No idea. I haven’t dealt with it yet”.

Classic fascist answer: The AfD heavily used the absence of other parties on particularly TikTok to propagandise, they would structure their parliament speeches just for soundbites on TikTok. Once spotted Die Linke started to strategically engage them also there, the other parties still don’t have coherent strategies. Individual politicians are doing things, but no proper campaign.

Which kinda isn’t a new phenomenon e.g. the SPD had tons of newspapers back in the days and pretty much sold all of them. Some kept their edge (e.g. the Hamburger MoPo, not to be confused with the Berlin Morgenpost), but most washed out to standard liberal press gray. CDU, FDP? Exists by grace of the Springer press, they’re on the short end of the lever. Greens, well, the taz exists but who reads the taz. The MoPo works because despite being far from gutter press, it’s still a tabloid: You gotta have those sportsball results. A paper to read in the metro, talk about in a bar and leave at a construction site, not a coffee house.

That’s still not a graph of Japan.

More importantly, you’re not looking at the derivative, that is, the growth rate:

The growth has very much peaked, the last large countries are currently undergoing demographic transition (from having many kids, few survive, over having many kids, many survive (growth spike), to hawing few kids, of which pretty much all survive), e.g. Nigeria will be done by 2100. And societal collapse because people either can’t do anything but care for the elderly, or social cohesion is failing because the elderly aren’t cared for, does not depend on absolute numbers, it depends on the raw growth rate, because young people from 1900 aren’t going to care for the elderly in 2100. And the growth rate it depends on is the local one how many Nigerians do you think fancy caring for Chinese elderly.

Oh and those projections above are with a moderate estimation of future fertility, that is, when the average country turns out like France. Not if the average country turns out like Japan or Korea.

Also, just to make this clear: There’s nothing wrong with the population shrinking again. Or growing, the earth is far from its carrying capacity if we’re doing it right. The trouble is shrinking too quickly, or for that matter growing too quickly. We should pine for two kids per woman, ±0.5, thereabouts: Don’t veer too far off replacement levels. And all that can be done by proper social policy, parental leave, good schools, work/life/family balance, sex ed, etc.

“fear of decline”

You’re not making an argument, there. You’re showing a graph that’s misleading because it starts at fucking 10000 BCE. Look at a graph of Japan if you want to talk about Japan, and of the current generations not prehistory.

it’s about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years.

Ah, yes, because having a machine that can churn out pottery like noone’s business helps a lot with elderly and palliative care.

There is absolutely a limit how few kids a society can have before it collapses. Where that is is currently not particularly clear because the situation is unprecedented, but that there is a limit is crystal clear. 10 young people caring for 100 bed-ridden elderly and one kid, how long is that going to last, even if you automate everything else?

I won’t try to convince you because you seem to be hanging onto a narrative in face of being given a thorough study of what you’re interested in.

Ask how many Berliners are worried about Swabians taking over the city and you’ll hear a similar answer, including the “stranger in their own city” part. You’d also be surprised how much friction there is between people with Turkish background and fresh Arab arrivals.

Or, differently put: You can’t just pick out a random signifier, such as “Muslim”, and expect the numbers to tell you much. In particular because you’ll hear the answer “yeah let’s not invite any more Muslims” from many Muslims. Those being Turks saying “we don’t want Arabs and their clan structures here, don’t want Germany to become bumfuck Anatolia”.

It’s also important to distinguish anti-immigration vs. anti-immigrant sentiment. Especially in the East with its overall low percentage of foreigners (which, yet, grew much faster than it ever did in the west so people had less time to get used to it), it’s often “we don’t want more” in unison with “we really like Hasan he’s the only one raising the village’s flag on Sunday, the only place where you can go, and he makes really good food”.

Lastly, you don’t have to do your own analysis, here. You jumped from “feels like a stranger in their own country when seeing a Turkish marriage”, which is an a priori, subjective, judgement, to “is racist”. That’s not how things work, people are perfectly capable of feeling one way at one time and then say “well that was one time and I’m happy for the couple”. What you’re looking for are the numbers for (geschlossenes) rechtsextremes Weltbild ((closed) right-extreme worldview) as well as measurements of various forms of gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit (group-focussed enmity).

Try this study. (There’s an “English summary” link there, full version is only available in German. The FES is a foundation independent of, but associated with the SPD (SocDems, at least on their good days))

You can be deported, even as a EU citizen, for being a threat to public safety. That can be as low bar as being homeless without a job, “go back home, apply for welfare there”. Neither being homeless nor unemployed is a crime but member states don’t want foreign citizens homeless and unemployed on their streets, nor pick up the bill, so they deport you.

There’s still charges of sorts but they’re not criminal, they’re administrative. You can still appeal to courts but it’s going to be administrative, not criminal, proceedings.

I’d say it’s a bit iffy to go the administrative route when criminal charges are already up in the air, and act on the administrative charges before the criminal ones are though but ultimately I think the courts will have an eye on that. Criminal proceedings take a long time because they’re quite detailed when it comes to establishing the degree of guilt which influences degree of punishment and stuff, all this is irrelevant here the administration just has to show that the verdict will be guilty, not get into the weeds of “a bit guilty” or “really guilty”. Also, that the crime actually concerns public safety they’d have a hard time arguing that for, say, fare evasion.

Not Germany, but Berlin, as in the state. And so far they only tried to, or at least I haven’t yet anything to the contrary. It’s up to the courts, the Berlin state government will have to demonstrate that those people are a danger to public safety, push come to shove not just before Berlin’s administrative courts (which are saner than its administration) but also federal and then European ones.

That’s three devices. There’s two connections between them, and they go “RAM<->CPU<->SSD”. The first <-> is the DRAM Phy, the second <-> is 1-4 PCIe lanes. Neither of them are a bus. There is no third connection.

Since building a coalotion is always about compromisses the conservative Party gets a lot of hate for making huge compromisses and not follow their agenda.

That’s a narrative straight out of the right wing of the right wing of the CDU. If you actually cross-check the stances of CDU voters and people like Merz you’d quickly find that voters don’t really have an issue with rape in marriage being a thing you can go to prison for. And that people like Günther draw in far more votes than people like Merz. And more than, for that matter, Söder.

It was you who was talking about “bus paths” and “traversing CPU>RAM>SSD”. There’s neither buses connected up to any of those things nor does the data ever flow like that, it always flows via the CPU.

So… what’s wrong about my characterisation of computer hardware? Do you have any issue with the claim that RAM doesn’t talk directly to the SSD, but via the CPU? If yes, please show me the traces on the motherboard which enable that. About the importance of latency to CPU-type computations?

Or do you want to tell me how it’s absolutely unsuspicious to bang out a press release in tech and talk about “speed”, not distinguishing between bandwidth and latency? Where’s the fucking numbers. There’s no judging the tech without numbers and them not being forward with those numbers means they’re talking to investors, not techies.

PCIe 5.0 x16 can match DDR5’s bandwidth, that’s not the issue, the question is latency. The only reason OSs cache disk contents in memory is because SSD latency is something like at least 30x slower, the data ends up in the CPU either way RAM can’t talk directly to the SSD, modern mainboards are very centralised and it’s all point-to-point connection, the only bus you’ll find will be talking i2c. Temperature sensors and stuff.

And I think it’s rather suspicious that none of those articles are talking about latency. Without that being at least in the ballpark of DDR5 all this is is an alternative to NAND which is of course also a nice thing but not a game changer.

All German providers had it shut down by 2021, Denmark by 2023, so best explanation that I have is that some 4G stuff got reported as 3G by your phone, the terminology isn’t unified and in particular there’s a “maximum bandwidth” definition around which your phone might’ve used, not everything that’s 4G from a technical POV is actually fast enough to fulfil that definition.

2G hardware indeed doesn’t cost the telecoms anything 4G/5G hardware can do 2G just fine, but there’s opportunity costs in the form of underused frequency spectrum. The airwaves aren’t cables, we can’t just run a second one to double the total available bandwidth.

3G shut off some years ago. It’s 2G which is still around mostly for emergency purposes, slated to shut down 2028-2030. Companies really don’t like wasting frequency bands on old standards but you can’t just cut off e.g. car and elevator emergency phones.