mertbio

Unless you offer them a promotion ;)

Right now I’m reading Biological War. Before this one I finished reading:

- The Left Hand of Darkness

- The Nerd Reich

- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

I don’t know why we see Omarchy almost every day on the front page. Do people really want to use a distro from a white supremacist?

The video referenced in the article contains nothing new; those things have existed for nearly two decades. People simply create similar videos to boost engagement and it seems they're quite successful at it.

It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.

Since when do people in Silicon Valley work for a mission?

There is cash back. When I bought my contract, I got 250€ + 90€ cash back in total after paying the first invoice.

That doesn't change the fact that the prices didn't change for the companies therefore OP's argument about this hurt the companies doesn't have any basis.

I'm a consumer in Germany, and I pay 250€ for 1.200 kWh (my yearly consumption). I don't know anyone who is paying those high prices mentioned in the articles. There are many electricity providers in Germany, and that creates competition; therefore, you get a lot of cash back by switching providers.

The electricity prices for the industry are around the same since 2014: https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre...

How can a country be democratic with only two parties?

Expect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.

They also constantly criticise Germany and its nuclear power plant closures, linking almost every negative news story about the country to this issue. It seems they’re completely unaware of the potential consequences of operating a nuclear power plant.

It is going to be quite interesting when Apple introduces Mac Studio with M5 Ultra chip and 1.5TB RAM.

I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com).

If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.

The sentiment seems to be that this is unique to Germany but is there any country that can rival China in manufacturing?

Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.

I’m working on improving the apps I developed for iOS by adding new features and fixing the bugs: https://fruitfulapps.com/

Not sure how visible by the people in the US but a lot of companies and governments in Europe are working on many projects to decouple from the American companies for the critical infrastructure.

Visa and Mastercard were mentioned in the article but I would also add PayPal into the list.

I’ve known Hendrik for years, and he is one of the most talented developers I’ve ever met. I’m confident this project will become successful very quickly. Beyond the project itself, what fascinates me most is how he single-handedly developed it by leveraging agentic coding.

The thing about ARR numbers is that in most cases they didn't really recur, especially for an 8-month-old company. Also, I don't really care about these numbers anymore unless they share how much they spent on marketing.

> Where does the German government get money? From German industry.

This is not true. Two biggest income source for the government is sales tax and income tax.

https://www.bundeshaushalt.de/DE/Bundeshaushalt-digital/bund...

Germany doesn’t compete in cheap manufacturing, they compete in highly precise manufacturing. There are bunch of things that are only manufactured in Germany. You don’t hear those companies that much because they are not public but they are well known by the people who work in specific industries. When you combine them, they are way bigger than the German companies you hear everyday which are laying off people or closing factories.

For some reason, every time Europe is mentioned, there is always a comment about how Europe is struggling but when you look at the quality of life, happiness or life expectancy, all those numbers are higher than the US. People should stop obsessing with GDP.

Yet.

"Morgan Stanley Research estimates the U.S. currency could lose another 10% by the end of 2026.": https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

The US dollar lost ~10% of its value this year. It is expected to lose another 10%. Which stability are we talking about?

Also, here you can see the change in the foreign exchange reserves by currency: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/116488/global-official-forei...

US Dollars: 71% -> 58% Chinese Yuan: 0 -> 2%

> who would actually trust China in any way shape or form as an alternative?

Most of the Asian countries (except South Korea, Japan and Taiwan) and African countries. They’re already getting tons of investments and loans from China.