You’re correct. I got caught up in explaining the overall concept. 😅
My personal interpretation is that the Chinese companies are now feeling the competitive pressure after their golden years and are scrambling to get their products on larger markets, while said market ( better affordable EV) still promises some margins.
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.
Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.
And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.
You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².
Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.
That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.
There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.
A totally new or even just a very efficient implementation of an already existing algorithm can be gigantic if others need to build upon it.
And many licenses are verbose not because they are complicated in intent, but merely because they need extensive legalese prose to cover against many possible avenues of attack.
Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.
Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.
Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².
USA have 35 inhabitants per km².
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.
Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.
If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.
I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.
That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.
Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.
Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.
That alone sadly is not even the issue. Only when stealing from the government comes in, you can expect to actually get prosecuted.
Trying to pawn off the expenses on your company balance and committing tax fraud, then paying off people to not tell about your tax fraud, that’s what gets you.
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.
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.
I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.
There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.
Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.
Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.
Can’t use it for gaming, just like all the others except plasma 6, because no HDR. And plasma 6 didn’t have custom per-display dpi scaling last I checked, so using 3440x1440 next to a 4k is super annoying. Plus shitty Nvidia support. Linux still just isn’t there yet for high end gaming. 🤷♂️
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.
Id2 is the actual successor. It’s planned to be the first VW “affordable” EV with a starting price below 25000 euros when it releases in 2025. At least they now try to target the budget market, but I’d never recommend a VW. They have done so much bad quality cars since the late 90s…