inigoalonso

You’re right that European nuclear is not "independent" if that means "mined entirely inside Europe". But the dependency profile is not the same for Russian pipeline gas. Uranium is globally traded, compact, cheap to stockpile relative to the energy it contains, and available from several non-Russian suppliers (Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, Australia...). The harder choke points are conversion, enrichment, and reactor-specific fuel fabrication.

Europe does have uranium resources, for instance the Salamanca/Retortillo project, but the constraint is permitting, environmental acceptance, waste handling, and political legitimacy rather than geology. So the honest claim is not "nuclear makes Europe autarkic". It is "nuclear gives Europe a more diversifiable and stockpilable dependency than gas, provided Europe also invests in mining, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity".

As a person who believes in democracy, don't you think it should be the US Congress the one declaring war?

Nobody is saying "don't pay the developers". Some of us advocate for "pay the developers to develop free and open source software". Rent-seeking is not good for society.

How are you subdued if you become the prime minister?

The “no transaction cost” claim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Cash may feel free to the person handing over a coin, but only because the costs are hidden upstream. Someone has to produce those notes and coins, swap out designs to keep ahead of counterfeiters, move them around in armored vans, count and recount them in tills, reconcile them at the bank, and insure against theft along the way. None of that is costless.

In fact, many retailers will tell you that cash is more expensive to handle than card, because every deposit requires staff time and often explicit bank fees. Society also pays indirectly through tax evasion and black-market activity, which cash enables far more easily than digital systems.

You’re right that cash is robust in a blackout, and there’s something elegant about a technology that works offline, peer-to-peer, and without needing servers to stay up. But the idea that it has no transaction costs is not realistic.

How is providing factual information (e.g., "The full court ruling is available at https://court.rulings/case_123456.pdf", or at least "The case is number 123456.") not part of the reporter's job? No need to link to it, just provide the fact.

At least the OP excerpt focuses only on Ford’s efficiency engine: precision machining, interchangeable parts, and the moving assembly line combined with extreme production volumes to make the Model T nearly impossible to compete with on cost and reliability. But there’s a deeper lesson than just “Ford was rigid, GM was flexible.”

The real dynamic was that efficiency and scale compound improvements but also compound lock-in. The more Ford optimized his system around one product, the higher the switching cost to change anything fundamental. Every special-purpose machine tool, every supplier contract, every material flow was tuned to one car. At small scale, that’s agility. At massive scale, it’s a straitjacket.

Tesla faces a version of this trap. Its efficiency engine is vertical integration and battery/powertrain mastery. But the stronger that engine gets, the more risk that its identity collapses into “this is what we make, as efficiently as possible,” rather than “this is what the market wants, however we must adapt.” GM in the 1920s wasn’t just adding variety for fun, it was creating a systematic upgrade ladder (“a car for every purse and purpose” as Sloan said at the time) that turned consumer churn into a growth engine (allowing customers to start with basic models like Chevrolet and progressively upgrade to more luxurious brands such as Oldsmobile, Buick, or Cadillac). I agree that Tesla hasn’t yet built an equivalent mechanism to capture customers once they’ve “had enough of the Model T.”

The irony is that efficiency-driven firms almost never stumble because they stop improving; they stumble because all their improvements are local optimizations. Ford’s engineers in 1925 were still making operations faster, parts cheaper, and tolerances tighter, but all within the cage of the Model T. Tesla today is in danger of repeating this exact logic trap: world-class at batteries and drivetrains, but perhaps blind to the fact that consumer perception, design novelty, and product line evolution can erode even the strongest cost advantage.

You're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not random deviations from spelling norms.

In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or Korean.

What of those two options did Finland choose? In reality Russia shares a land border with 14 countries, 6 of which are already NATO members (of the others the second largest border is with China). And the countries they have only a maritime border with are Japan and the USA.

These penalties are essential to counterbalance the financial trade-off companies often make by deprioritising accessibility. Without serious consequences, it’s rational for executives to cut costs at the expense of inclusion. This ensures accountability at the level where those decisions are made.

This is exactly why the EU's Digital Markets Act exists. And why it needs teeth. Google disabling Nextcloud's all-files access on Android, while quietly letting its own apps and big corporate players keep it, isn't about "security". It's about control. Nextcloud is a European, privacy-first alternative built on open standards and that can be fully aligned with GDPR requirements. Blocking its core functionality while favouring your own services is a textbook abuse of platform power. Android was supposed to be open, but moves like this show it (at least the Play Services verison) is just another walled garden. If the EU is serious about digital sovereignty and fair competition, this is the kind of behaviour that must be stopped. Otherwise, no European tech, no matter how compliant, open, or user-friendly, stands a chance.

Morocco might (again).

I met her briefly in 2014 through common friends in Berlin, and then saw her live in some early (before midnight) session in a semi empty small club in Kreuzberg. Some other friend and I then tried our luck at Berghain. We didn't make it. The San Francisco group did. Fun times nonetheless.

You should definitely check out Tropy: https://tropy.org/

It's open-source, so no worries about a company shutting it down, and it handles a lot of the stuff you're asking for. It’s designed for organizing and managing research photos, but it has features that fit archival needs pretty well.

Open and future-proof: Metadata is stored in JSON-LD, so even if Tropy disappears, your data isn’t locked up. It doesn’t modify your files either, so your originals are safe.

Flexible metadata: You can assign custom dates (even imprecise ones like "circa 1920" or a date range) and add other metadata fields to fit your needs. It’s not tied to EXIF or file timestamps, which is a big plus.

Related files: Tropy lets you group multiple images (e.g., front and back of a photo or parts of a large scanned image) into a single "item." Relationships are preserved, and you can see them all in the same context.

Search and organization: It’s way better than just dumping files into a folder. You get tags, categories, and a solid search interface to make your archive usable.

I was there the week before, I was with a group of students on our way to the Niagara Falls and we stopped there for a snack. All I remember is that there seemed to be very little preparations made at the time, and that it was mostly a bunch of old hippies selling handmade sculptures made out of Coca-Cola cans. We later saw the pictures of the aftermath in the local papers and TV. Quite unreal. It was my first trip to the Americas and that visit plus getting to watch The Phantom Menace before it was released back at home were the cultural highlights of the trip (spent mostly upstate NY).

I like that scenario. But wouldn't AI just explode the verbosity of patents instead? The value of the humans' word count might go down, so they write less (less billable hours), but what they right is what is fed to the AI to generate a verbose patent, so there the patent is more valuable. This is assuming the value of a patent is in its chances to (a) be granted (it is not missing any relevant background or caveat), (b) stop competitors (it is hard to make sure it is not infringed), and (c) be upheld if challenged (it is complete and correct). This is where society needs to step up and legislate so these new tools are not abused and the value to society takes precedence, so patents are concise and help make inventions known and understood.

> Any halfway-competent engineering manager knows she should spend more of her time with her top people, because anything she can do to improve their performance is that much more impactful for the business.

I guess the point is that to improve their performance the best managers can do is "get out of their way", not "spend more of her time" with them.

Probably more than 1/5.

The point is to convince the people driving ICE cars that the chargers exist.

Why can't the journals share reviewers? Once the reviews are in, the editors decide if they want the paper in their journal, and if more than one does, the authors get to pick. Obviously it would be a bit more complicated with revisions, etc. but it would be an improvement over the current system.

Tom Scott mentioned this on his video from yesterday: How they saved the holes in Swiss cheese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evV05QeSjAw

Antennas get warm. Cats like it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/10/starlink-...

My experience in the States, staying at a hotel 100m away from a restaurant and not being able to reach it by foot, says otherwise...

True. They also have smaller economies and are arguably less responsible for Russia's strengthening. They are also less vulnerable in case of military escalation.

A Lamborghini can be exchanged for a Toyota plus some extra change. I don't think you will find many people to do the opposite exchange.

People injured by being reckless take away medical resources from those that are injured by no fault of their own.

I think the title references its annual revenue.

Counting pixels in that image it seems like both the ascend and descend took exactly 5 seconds each. So that's about 2.16 km/h or 1.34 mph.

Thanks for the response, it is a very interesting approach, it sounds more practical than the typical MBSE way of building top down SysML diagrams and adding simulation models afterwards. Are your models liked to other product data in a PLM system or similar for traceability? I'm researching adjacent issues around the flexibility of product platforms and the integration of new technologies in later product variants and model-based approaches to decision making in that regard are fascinating.

Do you have anything publicly available to read about this project? Or any background on what inspired you?