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c00lio

389 karma · joined May 16, 2023

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c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
No, that isn't a relevant risk. German car companies are mostly export-oriented. Of course the home market is mostly theirs, but if Germany were to lag behind on EV viability, foreign sales can still be sufficient to create a viable EV business. It would never have been a hard transition anyways, EV production would have been slowly built up while ICE production were ramped down accordingly, just as sales figures guide.
c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
Only as long as China isn't yet in a position to dictate zero import duties. I guess they soon will be.
c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
German industry is also very lazy with any kind of R&D and even minimal risk-taking, to the point of requiring research subsidies to look into anything new. German car makers started looking into EVs and hydrogen powered cars 30 years ago, but only because of the government paying them to do so, consistently and repeatedly. When the money dried up because the programs ended, research stopped. A few years later, Tesla ate their lunch and half their dinner, because the car industry just wasn't interested if it wasn't subsidized.

The overall level of subsidy-dependence in the economy is so large that no new undertaking will be done without a corresponding subsidy of some kind. Where an American might look for venture capital, a European (and especially a German) will look for a government subsidy program. Any industry that doesn't look for and mold itself along those subsidies will be leaving money on the table, therefore becoming uncompetitive. That means that all our industry will always be shaped by political programs and will always lag years behind the rest of the world.

The chain will always be:

foreign company does new thing X -> X looks good -> EU/German politician envies X -> subsidies for X -> EU/German industry does X in the exact size and amount of the subsidies.

And of course each of those arrows will be a year or more.

c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
That too.

German car makers got lazy with research and development. In addition, they were hesitant to give up their investment in ICE production, risk staff reductions, and corresponding political and strike problems. This lead to most of the knowledge around EVs being developed and patented elsewhere, especially battery knowledge is firmly in Chinese hands.

At the same time the grandparent is also right, China wisely required knowledge transfers (in the form of forced joint ventures) in exchange for production and sales licenses. German car makers stupidly and greedily agreed, providing the Chinese with valuable knowledge about all the other parts of a car.

Both those mistakes now mean that Chinese companies have all the necessary patents and knowledge, as well as experience, for building EVs. Whereas German car makers will need to buy, license and beg for parts in China.

Not to mention that production in China will of course always be cheaper, and bureaucracy easier in the relevant circumstances.

c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
Producing industry in Germany is a dead man walking. Chemical industry is seeking a quick exit due to extreme gas and energy prices, as is all smelting and metal processing. They are keeping appearances for now, in the hopes of a big "green" bailout, e.g. by subsidizing electricity from 30ct/kWh down to 5ct/kWh and a few billions of free money for "doing something with hydrogen". But that will at best delay the closure of existing works.
c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
Maybe not outright exiting the EU. But maybe exiting the Eurozone and removing some other problematic economic straightjackets like overly large tax-financed subsidies.
c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
I guess the reasons are more than just the interest rates. Interest rates kill off longer-term investments like building homes.

But there was also a rather steep hike in (mostly greed-caused) inflation of everyday goods and energy prices, official overall rate was slightly above 10%, but for foodstuffs it went above 20% inflation. At the same time, wages didn't keep up, raises were below 10%, often below 5%. Inflation-corrected disposable income went down roughly 10%. So consumers also have less money to spend on their day-to-day needs and of course reallocated all the spending on "extras" (like luxury items, organic foods, leisure), to the basics (energy and less expensive basic nutrition). Which can be seen e.g. at energy providers raking in the profits while e.g. gastronomy is in a bad place.

c00lio··on Germany Falls into Recession
In Germany it is common to have a fixed rate for 10 years or so. Sometimes you get only 5 years fixed, sometimes 15. After that, you either accept the new rate on the existing contract, or refinance somewhere else (if cheaper with the new rate and fees).

There are mortgages with yearly adjustments, but those are rare afaik.

c00lio··on Microsoft enables booting PCs directly into cloud PCs
Not to mention the frequent cloud outages, even when your workplace has perfect internet connectivity.
c00lio··on Microsoft enables booting PCs directly into cloud PCs
Already exists in some way: https://techbase.kde.org/KDE_PIM/Akonadi Store your home directory remotely, have a remote MariaDB/PostgreSQL holding the index and it does exactly what you describe.

However, that is not the standard configuration of course.

c00lio··on Microsoft enables booting PCs directly into cloud PCs
They reinvented thin clients. Expensive ones, with an extra Windows license needed I suppose. How revolutionary...
c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
Well then, can I use it to make cheese? How is the fat content, can I skim it for cream, maybe make some butter? Can I make Sourmilk? Yoghurt? Can I at least foam it up for Cappucino?

For most of those things that aren't milk, the answer is "no". So they aren't milk alternatives, are they?

c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
Misleading packaging has forbidden for ages. Didn't really work out since companies will always try to game the system, binding up resources in endless court battles around the definition of "misleading" and "what font size is legally conspicuous enough yet will still be overlooked by the customer". Therefore the next step was to make very clear and very simple rules around "what is misleading?". One of them is something like "milk is the secretion from the udder of mamalians, nothing else".
c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
Yes, and one of the standards is (unsurprisingly) not using misleading terminology such as "milk" for non-milk products. Just label it as "white oat drink" and you are fine...
c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
For "makes your coffee white" there is already the established product name "coffee whitener". What's wrong with using that one instead of mislabeling it as a dairy product?
c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
Well, I'd be fooled by "nut cheese". I'd expect cheese with nuts in it...
c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
> Describing something as vegan cheese or plant based cheese, you know exactly what it is

No, you don't. One example is "pizza cheese". Before the big EU dairy-product-naming crackdown, there were brands of "pizza cheese" that were actually plant fat with aromatics and binder/emulsifier. In the cheese section, without any obvious labeling that "cheese" didn't really mean "cheese".

c00lio··on UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels
Trademarks protect the market position of one particular company. Similarly, protected origin designations and protected product names reserve words for any producer of "the original, proper" thing. Thereby protecting not only the producers' interests but also the consumer, because misleading labeling and advertising is prevented.

If you'd allow stuff like "milk alternative", you'd quickly get "<huge>MILK</huge><tiny color=unreadable>alternative</tiny>".

c00lio··on The end of the accounting search
GUI software for professional use takes the same amount of care to develop. I've been involved in data entry applications used for call center agents, cashiers and industrial control. A lot of care is taken about tab-order, keyboard shortcuts, proper use of F-keys, readability of everything, color-coding related functions and stability of known workflows. The advantage that GUI brings to the table is that a novice or one-time-user can make progress by just using the mouse as always. But e.g. with tooltips, a mirrored F-key toolbar (think Norton/Total/Midnight Commander), always on hotkey hints, learning a more efficient workflow is made possible.
c00lio··on Toaster: Pure CSS 3D Editor
Very impressive (even if not the whole editor is CSS as I'd thought).
c00lio··on qb-escape – QuickBooks to GnuCash migration scripts
There was taxbird for filing (there is another application with the same name that does something different, you want(ed) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxbird ). But that has been killed by the tax authorities: They shut down the interface used there, so nowadays only proprietary applications exist.

But from experience, don't bother with any software, German taxes are sufficiently weird that only the most trivial cases will really work out, even if you pay lots of money for it. Get a tax accountant. It isn't just putting numbers into forms, it is more the problem of structuring your life around possible tax savings. Software won't help with that.

If you only ever need filing and putting numbers into forms, you can file your taxes on the official website: https://www.elster.de . You'd need a login anyways to authorize your tax accountant or enable your software to submit its data.

c00lio··on Toaster: Pure CSS 3D Editor
How is that pure CSS? Doesn't show anything with Javascript disabled.
c00lio··on The Absurdity Of Stacks
Sometimes. Guard pages are not always used, depending on your OS or C compiler for example, and on how large your address space might be. Especially 32bit applications are quite limited in that regard. Embedded always lags behind a few decades. Commercial applications are often used long beyond their due-by-date, and vendors never seem to care about that stuff anyways.

If there is only one or a few guard pages, you can sometimes still get your exploit to work by "jumping over" the guard page with a sufficiently large stack allocation that isn't used. But that is admittedly rare.

c00lio··on The Absurdity Of Stacks
Stack-Heap-Collisions are a thing. Many language runtimes do not check for stack collisions and break in interesting ways if one lets a recursion run too deep. Heap size and running out of heap is far easier to handle gracefully. And all of this isn't ancient history, it is still a problem nowadays, so advice like in the original article can be dangerous...
c00lio··on Students are increasingly refusing to go to school
While outright shootings might be rare, bullying by fellow students and teachers is common. Shootings might just be the straw that breaks the camels back.
c00lio··on Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?
Took up journaling a few years ago, because I was miserable.

Struggled to do it regularly, frequency dropped off. Less frequent entries meant longer entries, because I tried to keep up with what was happening. Later on I just journaled at important (read: unhappy, difficult) events. Even that dropped off. During all this, journaling just made me more miserable, because I couldn't even do that minor unimportant thing properly.

So from my experience, don't. Just another thing to worry and despair about.

YMMV, of course.

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