chki

> If you had invested in the German or Russian markets decades ago, you wouldn't have made much gains at all.

Is that actually true? I just tried to find out what would have happened if you invested in the German DAX 30 years ago and apparently you would have had an 800% return on investment, approximately 7.5% annualized. Seems pretty good to me.

The headline is misleading. These are not rules, there is no legislation. It was a resolution by the national governments. Without the EU commission there will be no European law on this topic. That being said the letter by ProtonMail et al. is still appropriate, the reporting is just inaccurate.

No this is not unequal justice, it is a completely normal process in the German criminal court system. The market manipulation case will probably not matter at all, it might even be a sign that the fraud case is very strong.

Highly misleading. Winterkorn has been accused of two crimes (market manipulation and fraud). In Germany if you are guilty of several crimes the sentences do not simply get added on top of each other, instead there is a "Gesamtstrafe" (One punishment for all crimes committed). That's why they discontinued the case on these charges because they are far less important than the fraud charges and won't change the outcome in a significant way.

Conflict resolution mechanisms in the WTO are a very sensible solution to trade disputes, if parties actually adhere to the rulings and do not sabotage the decision making bodies.

This will depend on your specific jurisdiction but just to give you an example of the law in Germany (which I expect to be similar in other places, especially in Europe where a EU-regulation was created on the basis of the German law):

Terms of services ("Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen" (AGB)) are pre-formulated clauses that one party introduces into the contract without giving the other party the possibility to object to or at least negotiate these clauses.

The ToS are part of your legal contract with the other party, regardless of whether you read them. One example of ToS could also be the house rules in your local gym, which possibly weren't even handed out to you but instead they are up on a wall somewhere near the front desk. The important thing is that you need to have the _possibility_ to read them (if you are blind they will need to make sure there is a workaround). Depending on the circumstances the obligation to make sure that you are aware of the ToS can be more strict.

The important caveat to using terms of services as a company is a strict content control. § 307-309 of the german civil law define certain things that you cannot possibly put in your ToS. And if a company still does it, a Court will not try to interpret the rule in a favorable way for them, they will strike it out completely. (no "geltungserhaltende Reduktion")

Examples of content control include that when buying something it is impossible to sign away (some of) your rights as a consumer for a faulty product. But there are also some "catch-all" clauses in there that will check whether parts of the ToS placed an unfair burden on you as a consumer.

ToS can also be void if they are unclearly written.

Edit: Signing with "I do not agree" is an interesting approach and sometimes these "hacks" can actually work in Court. That being said, it would probably not hold up. Pressing on "accept" is not somehow invalid just because you said so somewhere else.

Off topic but an interesting example of a similar hack is this case of a man changing a pre formulated contract with his bank which they send to him first and then signed it when he had send it back to him. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/08/14/man-who-outwitted-...

I think the argument is that if we stopped all our CO2 emissions right now we would comply with the 1.5 C target in 2050 but would "only" break it in 2100. Since stopping all our emissions is not even close to what's happening (actually CO2 emissions are rising right now) that's not a viable model. So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.

The IPCC predictions on climate change and sea level rise are pretty accurate (albeit sometimes conservative).

Just look at this graph comparing the predictions from 1990 to the actual observations: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

With my layman understanding this is correct in principle but according to the linked paper in the article the climate target of 1.5 C will already be surpassed in the year 2100 – even without any further CO2 emissions.

And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.

I mean that's just straight-up asking for the purpose of life: You can't possibly give a rational logical answer. It's (quite beautifully in my opinion) one of those questions that everybody can only answer for themselves.

The anxiety we are talking about here is exactly the kind of anxiety you _don't_ want. If there was no vaccine in the short/midterm future people would probably (and somewhat rationally) assume that everybody (or rather 60%) will get the disease at some point, which would mean that the reward for behaving cautiously now is a lot worse (at least on an individual level, it would still be necessary not to overwhelm hospitals or to protect certain high-risk-groups).

You might be inducing a "so-what" mentality where people don't want to refrain from going to bars and restaurants just to not catch a virus that's going to get them at some point.

which is also very remarkable. If I had a painting worth 340.000 $ with me, I would not leave it out of my sight, much less forget about it.

It's not recommended for me in my country (Germany) to take the seasonal flu shot, because I'm not over 60. I suppose it might be similar in other countries.

Sure that's possible and you are well within your rights to choose this path of action.

But – excuse me for putting this bluntly – it is obviously very selfish. If everybody calculated their risk like you do, the result would be that the pandemic drags on for a few years, a lot of preventable deaths happen + probably a terrible economic downturn. You have the choice to sacrifice a little bit (meaning a tiny chance of vaccine complications) of your own health for the greater good – or you can slack of others doing it for you. Because that's what's going to happen, most people voting "yes" on this thread are making the same calculation you are but deciding to sacrifice a little bit of their own health.

As far as I can tell this is currently unknown, it has not been studied.

My complete layman understanding would be that it should at least somewhat prevent the spreading because replication has to be limited if a vaccine works and replication is also an important part of giving the disease to others? If less cells are infected you can't cough out the virus as much? But the exact timeline is important here, obviously. Again, complete layman, I know basically nothing about this.

The Volkswagen scandal was only indirectly about CO2 emissions. Volkswagen cheated regarding their NOX emissions in Diesel cars which are not relevant to climate change but potentially dangerous to those living near streets or in big cities.

My underlying understanding was that the soon to be deleted videos are in fact misinformation, that's why I understood this to be a slippery slope type of argument. Of course if one assumes that the President is actually correct this could be construed in another way. (But I'm definitely not going to argue with people who believe in these stolen-election allegations here, some divides are too deep to overcome in an online forum)

The "slippery slope" argument doesn't work in this case (as for usual). Youtube already removes certain types of content and it already removes certain types of political content. This is necessary to monetize the platform in a meaningful way.

Sure, the flu _might_ theoretically have a long-term positive influence. However it might just as well have a long-term negative influence. Viral infections are known to have negative long-term consequences sometimes.

It's an Internet running Gag, if the quality of something produced by a technical product is bad, you might say: "Was this filmed/calculated/etc with a potato?"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reco...

Because sometimes it's not about who's "good" and who's "evil". I found this story interesting and helpful because it did what it set out to do from the beginning: Answer the question of how to get what you feel is yours in a small contractual dispute without going to court by providing a small insignificant practical example. I don't really care who is right or wrong, I don't even know who Patrick McKenzie is.

That's a good point, also described in the book Sapiens by Harari: In a way Religion, currency and contract law (and many other things) are all "made up". They have institutions (priests, central banks, lawyers) with magic words (amen, price stability, due diligence) and a certain combination of magic words creates a new reality out of thin air. Think about how weird it is to "sign" an important contract and thereby changing you own future or the future of your company irrevocably.

While I'm definitely not a fan of crypto currency and wouldn't seriously consider investing a single Euro into this mess, it's certainly misguided to simply laugh at it being "not real", because a lot of important things are. Obviously the gp makes some other important points.

There might be some error in the randomization process that caused consecutive balls to be drawn.

Doing that would mean acting in bad faith (obviously) but also breaking WTO Rules, i.e. international law, which can come with a big price tag if your caught (potentially unlikely in such a scenario and depends on the WTO being accepted by the US, which is also not very likely). That is on top of being sued by Boeing in Court for wrongfully denying the recertification. So I'm not sure whether that would really be a consideration.

>avoiding hanging pieces, placing your pieces so that the opponent cannot pin them

So maybe I don't understand your mathematical shorthand correctly but those things are definitely not widely regarded to be a part of strategy.

Edit: and if they were we would no longer be in disagreement. So apparently our different views simply come from different definitions.

>> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.

>I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. [...]

I would disagree. At a rating level below 1300 (where all beginners start) I'm pretty sure that openings don't matter at all and strategy is not very important. Magnus Carlsen, the World Champion, has even suggested that by being only good at tactics you can get to a 2000 ELO rating. If your opponent can look two moves further ahead you will almost always loose. This is also the reason why small children are able to beat seasoned chess amateurs playing at a club level. The children definitely have a limited understanding of the strategy and they don't know a lot of opening theory. But they will outplay you in the middle game.

I was simply asking a question because this sentence

>the third testing phase, which normally takes multiple years, hasn't started yet

is apparently not correct. Only trying to enhance my knowledge of vaccine testing phases, I don't want to fight you and I'm not downvoting you.

What do you mean by "third testing phase"? I think that phase III of the clinical trials is actually happening right now and is where these positive results come from.

As a YouTube Premium user I will be supporting them through this tough time.

Might be embedded YouTube Videos not working in a lot of cases. The correlation is there but the numbers are at least two magnitudes lower on those other services.