RandomThoughts3

You can easily book at big chains in the US as a foreigner despite having no credit score whatsoever so I don’t think that’s it. I guess it’s probably just that a having credit card and an id card ensure that they won’t have trouble charging you if they need to. The possibility alone is probably enough to deter most people who could be tempted to commit petty things like stealing towels.

Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.

The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.

> in contrast to the US, there is absolutely nothing that limits the illegitimate power grab of the EU.

I am happy to inform you that the EU actually works according to treaties which basically cover every point of a constitution and has a full set of courts of law ensuring the parliament and the European executive respect said treaties and allowing European citizens to defend their interests in case of overreach.

> European aristocrats just decided

I am happy to inform you that the European Union has a democratically elected parliament voting its laws and that the head of commission is appointed by democratically elected heads of states and commissioners are confirmed by said parliament.

If you still need help with any other basic fact about the European Union don’t hesitate to ask.

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be

As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.

It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.

The letter is the problem. The US companies are sick and completely refused to take the necessary steps to reduce their costs out of sheer hubris.

That’s Stellantis issue. American car manufacturers are irredeemable. It was a far better companies before the merger. Tavares was right. He was cutting costs which shouldn’t exist - Chrysler is an extremely ineffective company compared to PSA - and is investment strategy in electric was great. I was so happy when Tavares started talking about losing the dead weight and selling Chrysler. It’s a shame the board didn’t go with him and that he was sabotaged by the frankly incompetent management in the North American branch. The company now has an utterly stupid strategy.

Anyway, the issue in China is the GAC had control of the JV, a terrible idea of Fiat Chrysler which the company will now have to deal with. I’m still sour PSA had to merge these idiots.

> The only thing I see is that manufacturers prefer an ip stack because it's "easier" to develop for.

It is easier to develop on an ip stack.

You have great tooling and great libraries out of the box because pretty much everything uses ip nowadays.

Plus, at least part of the controllers people use for their smart home will use ip anyway. A non ip network will need a bridge.

> How is that possible when thread use an ipv6 stack over 802.15.4 while zigbee use a simpler stack also over 802.15.4?

Easy, zigbee doesn't use a simpler stack. Using the same physical layer protocol doesn't tell you anything about the rest of the stack.

It's actually pretty simple. 6LoWPAN which is what Thread uses is more efficient than the Zigbee network protocol. Packets are smaller and the routing is better. It's not particularly surprising to be honest because Thread was designed by people who knew Zigbee really well and were aiming for an improvement.

> its not just the text book definition of "borrow money at a low interest rate and invest at a higher interest rate"

That’s absolutely not the textbook definition of arbitrage.

Arbitrage is buy something somewhere at a price and resell it in a different market at a higher price. It’s just price arbitration hence the name.

There are no other kind of arbitrage implied when people talk about arbitrage. That’s what the word means.

> Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade.

This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.

This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.

That only going to a less integrated union. That doesn’t solve the issue of inner members wanting to go faster towards union and being hampered by countries which shouldn’t even be members like Hungary.

It’s a very clever idea.

I could see it becoming very useful if on device LLM becomes a thing. That might allow storing a lot of original sources for not much additional data. We might be able to get an on device chat bot sending you to a copy of Wikipedia/reference material all stored on device and working fully offline.

[flagged]

> And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.

So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.

> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable

It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.

Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.

The UK complained at length about the EU for decades including educated people so much so that they decided to leave and are now out.

Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.

I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.

How exactly did the EU punish Britain?

Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.

The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.

> Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country.

Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.

> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)

Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.

Germany is lobbying all the time for stupid rules to please minority members of their home coalitions (see them trying to torpedo nuclear as a carbon free source on energy in all the European law related to clean energy to appease Die Grünen for exemple) and have realigned themselves strongly with the US since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Since Von Der Leyden appointment, the commission has been favouring them a lot.

The main issue is that the EPP is basically in service of Germany and France lost a lot of influence when most of their deputies joined Renew, a party which is less well integrated in the European Parliament apparatus. That and France failures to even start tackling the structural reforms it needs obviously.

It’s pretty obvious than enlargement went too fast and is an utter failure. It was mostly pushed by the UK which wanted to weaken the union as a political entity as much as possible.

It’s even more true with the euro zone where some members are directly harmed by the high exchange rate.

It would make a lot of sense to go back to a smaller more integrated union with the countries which want it and leave the ones which only want the single market be part of a less integrated union.

Then again, considering Germany and France disagree about pretty much everything at the moment, I doubt it would go very far.

> The commissioners are appointed by their party

Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).

I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.

The council, composed of representatives of governments elected in their own state, nominates the commission and proposes laws which are then voted by the parliament where deputies who have been directly elected by European sit. The parliament also confirms the commission.

Care to explain how any of that is undemocratic?

Wasn’t that mostly a UK thing? I don’t think I have heard fishing rights mentioned since Brexit.

Greenland isn’t a Danish protectorate. It’s an autonomous territory which is to say an autonomous administrative region of Danemark. Greenland very much is part of Danemark and its inhabitants are Danish citizen. Nothing to do with a protectorate.

[flagged]

> No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient

There is significantly more politics involved in how the CPP is run than you think and people complain more than you seem to believe. It’s far from an open democracy but it’s not North Korea either.

They use Swift BIC and an account number at the branch because that’s already there and there is one thing American banks hate even more than communism it’s change and having to spend any kind of money to modernise.

The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.

The upper class doesn’t need dress code. They know they are the upper class. Dress codes are for petit bourgeois and the upper middle class who try to pretend but everyone knows they are actually middle class.

The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.

Magnus left the competitive scene on his own terms years ago when he forfeited the world championship.

He is shareholders of chess.com since they bought out Play Magnus. He is not losing it. He has competing economic interests to FIDE and very little interest into being cooperative with them more than is strictly necessary.

> He's not a regular participant, Magnus is almost an institution of his own.

He is also very much no in agreement with FIDE (a tradition for chess champions - see Fischer, Kasparov). And to be honest FIDE is on FIFA level when it comes to being dodgy as an organisation so it’s hardly surprising.

The stained glasses these are supposed to replace are from 1850. They are also approved by the French Catholic Church.

The actual discussion in France is about the legitimacy of replacing intact windows even if pretty much everyone agree that the Viollet-le-Duc ones are completely uninteresting. No one is actually against the new glasses per se if it would have been a non story if they were put in place in place of destroyed glasses.