i'll never understand picky preferences about monitors... i still use an LG flatron wide that's old enough to vote... and when i slack at the apple store, it's not like i notice some life-or-death difference. a monitor is a monitor.
ok, i guess for graphic designers it might matter more?
Some old LCD displays were quite crisp. Sure, you can see individual pixels. The mouse tail has a clear zig-zag. But I find these nice on the eyes in their own way. I suspect because eyes autofocus more easily.
New super high-res displays are also nice on my eyes. The displays in between, those from the last decade or so, have been hit or miss for me.
Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.
"TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever."
to be honest, this is what enrages me. I feel like I was in a madhouse; the mass media were pushing an image of Merkel as the only adult in the room and the patron saint of liberalism.
I saw, live, how she mismanaged the Eurocrisis, turning a banking crisis into a humanitarian crisis, and how her reaction to the invasion of Crimea was meek.
but if you dared to say something about this, you were seen as a dangerous communist or worse.
I hated her flawed politics for 15 years. But now, surprisingly, I kind of miss her. not because she was good; she was terrible as i said, but the new leadership, especially in Germany, is far worse: Friedrich Merz is a zero, and von der Leyen seems utterly retarded, and i don't mean it in a mocking way, but literally: they are always choosing the worst option for Europe at every step.
dark clouds over europe... but mostly, of our own making.
> Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households)
Brussels checkmated itself trying to maintain industrial power while appeasing its anti-nuke reactionaries.
Europe cedes sovereignty with gas. (Whether it buys from America or Russia isn’t structurally relevant. Militarily the distant and rich master is obviously preferable.) The answers are solar, wind and nuclear. Germany is singularly responsible for fucking up the last, and with its Russian gas appeasement, undermining the former.
But it is necessary to do anyway? Just accept the losses and move on. Eventually solar will take over everywhere regardless of what anyone does, or doesn't. A few years of perturbations don't matter.
basically, you are right. as the other commented said, "Europe cedes sovereignty with gas" be it Russian or American. The continent should be laser focused with renewables and other forms of energy generation (also nuclear, if necessary, even if i am not too happy about it)
With LNG, it's not as bad. It is about as bad as oil imports. No dependence is created because all LNG is the same and you can just buy it from anyone on the market - unlike a pipeline that creates a mutual dependence.
We can see though that it turned out to be worse for Russia than for Europe: they haven't found another export market when Europe declined imports, only other candidate is China but knowing they are the only ones, they demanded, and got, deep discounts. Pricing of "Power of Siberia" supplies is not public and it's been claimed that given transportation costs, it actually sells gas cheaper than Russian internal prices.
a lot of LNG is actually Russian tho, using shadow fleets, and this is ridiculous and stupid. But it's what Europe need... imho, while all the investment should be on solar, wind and water - it would be better to cut the hypocrisy and to buy cheap gas from russia.
Well, the fraction of Russian LNG can't be higher than the overall fraction of Russian LNG on the world market right? Because prices for it are the same everywhere - a tanker operator can send it wherever prices are the best. It means a really small fraction. And most importantly, Russians can't threaten to cut it, because it simply means removing some of the supply from a large, uniform pool - if they do it they won't harm anyone in particular, just make LNG everywhere uniformly more expensive - and deprive themselves of money. With pipelines, they could actually imperil supply in a particular place.
Also, Russian LNG will be let go of rather soon, this is in the upcoming sanctions package.
It's not about green policies, it's about Germany getting rid of its nuclear reactors after Fukushima and getting addicted to cheap Russian gas. Now that the latter is verboten their entire industry is in shambles. This is all Merkel giving in to populists instead of listening to scientists and trying to play nice with Putin.
> Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power.
Green is likely sponsored by Putin as a way of keeping Europe away from Nuclear and any other viable alternatives to Russian gas. (proof: Former German chancellor on board with Russian energy companies.) Not investing enough in Nuclear and solar is Germany’s biggest mistake.
There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for a long time. Under the Schröder government, only two or three reactors were shut down and they were the oldest, had a meager output and weren't even profitable anymore. And the only way Russia influenced that was by mishandling Chernobyl. It's laughable to claim a country whose only high-technology export is nuclear technology is pushing others to abandon it.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I'm tired of hearing this age-old propaganda tune over and over again.
Germany had plans (before the Schroeder government laid the foundation for the whole nuclear shutdown) to build new and more nuclear reactors. After the initial buildup phase from 1970 to the late 1980s (latest in operation was Neckarwestheim 2 in 1989 not counting test reactors, only 9 years before Schroeder, not really a "long time"), most good sites had a reactor or maybe 2 or 3. The plan then was to plan for replacing the oldest ones and add a few more to existing sites, starting in the late 1990s when the first reactors start to approach an age of 30, to be replaced by their finished replacement reactor on the same site at 40 before 2010. Those plans included pebble bed reactors (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 unsuccessful due to technical problems), fast breeder reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300 unsucessful due to green opposition) and improved PWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) co-developed with France, nowadays a few have come online).
The reason why nobody wanted to build them was green opposition. This started before Chernobyl, for example in opposing the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackersdorf_reprocessing_plant and blocking the refueling operations of existing plants. The green party never got past 10%, but mostly because the parties in government accepted their demands out of fear of strengthening them, because they needed them for a coalition, or because after Chernobyl saying anything positive about nuclear became political suicide. Misinformation was rampant, any German PWR was equated to a Chernobyl in waiting. Experts disagreed and were ignored by media and politicians, shouted down by the greens as industry minions wanting to poison us all.
The reactors shut down under Schroeder were quite profitable, but getting old enough that they would have been switched off soon anyways. Nuclear reactors become more and more profitable over time, because most of the cost is in the initial construction and the financing. After the building is paid off, running cost is quite low, fuel cost is negligible compared to personnel for example. But at some point, repairs, downtime and necessary improvements make it too costly after all. That's when the originally intended replacement should have started, but this was stopped by the Schroeder goverment and the Greens.
And while I don't know whether the Russian influence on and financing of green movements is true or not, it is logical. Russia never had any chance to export its nuclear technology to western countries. Western nuclear power plants were, at least since the 80s, safer and better. The only thing the west could have bought (and actually does still buy) from Russia is uranium. But that is by far a smaller export for Russia than oil and gas. And there are uranium reserves in many western countries, Canada, Australia, the US, Germany and the Czech republic do have large deposits that are only partially exploited, and many other (third-world) countries do have uranium mines and do export (which is why the west is buying there, it's just cheaper). So uranium isn't really a reliable or big business for Russia. Oil and Gas, however, are. And since oil and gas are high-volume goods, imports are far less flexible than uranium imports. Basically, if you want it cheap, you need a pipeline, which is the perfect leash for the Russians to hold. And lo and behold, Schroeder, while making plans to shut down all German nuclear power plants over time, planned to increase gas imports from Russia, which was upheld during the later Merkel years. Schroeder was, after his term, rewarded for this with a position at Russia's state gas producer Gazprom. So it would be in Russia's interest to reduce nuclear power use in Europe and get Europe dependent on their gas.
Btw. the meaning of "green" has changed. Back in the Schroeder days and before, green was largely pro-environment and anti-nuke. But CO₂ emissions and global warming weren't a huge topic. Open-pit coal mining and coal plants were opposed on grounds of landscape destruction, resettlement and pollution. But CO₂ was never the big topic that it is nowadays. Therefore, back in those days, even for the Greens, "clean" gas power plants were a viable replacement.
1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].
2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.
So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.
Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.
These novel ingredients keep getting banned for negative health issues like causing cancer, new variants keep getting introduced to the public, the new variants keep getting banned doe being harmful, repeat ad infinitum.
The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.
So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering.
Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.
The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.
Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.
High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.
Their idea is to point out curing agents, flavor enhancers and similar stuff you would not need if using fresh food made from high quality ingredients - basically if you see food with these ingredients, chances are high that corners were cut along the path for whatever reason.
And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.
sure, it's all nature. and then wonder why you get 50% of the population morbidly obese...
you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.
The population is obese because they eat too many calories and they will not stop. Arbitrarily banning foods because they are not "normal" doesn't prevent this. Butter is OK, cream is OK, sugar is OK. When sugar takes a slightly different form it's "not normal" so banning it will make everyone thin again.
Is it any more evidence for ultra processing being the problem than the last N food panics? Obesity was high when the story was "high fat foods are the problem" too.
Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especially when you combine this with a carbohydrate/sugar rich diet. The EU has a worsening diet. Japan eats more carbs than America. What’s the difference? They naturally walk much more as part of their daily routine because their governments invest in communities rather than stealing tax money to launder to military contractors.
Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
Big difference in carbs like sugar and say bread, though. Certainly not an expert on Japanese diet, but I don't think they consume a lot of sugar. Their deserts are famously rather savoury.
(And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)
most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits
the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons
i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arrested for walking on sidewalk, taken to local police station and told yes this is for your own safety, you are free to go but do not walk around here
It is the case that we've structured things like suburbs around avoiding something that frightens much of American society, but it isn't violent crime.
> most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits
It’s not an America only problem, we are similarly affected. So is every other country on earth.
In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.
But the reasons can be very different. East Europe had severe food shortages until the fall of communism. The result? People eating too much after the fall of communism, which become a cultural thing ("you don't have huge meals => you are poor / is like during communism"). Add to that car ownership ("public transport => only poor use it") and you get what happened probably in USA due more to lobbying and industry.
One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)
You don't only need the account, you need a phone that is locked down with hardware components and cryptographic keys that attest it hasn't been modified "unauthorizedly". Where the authority is not the device "owner" but Google, Apple, and the manufacturer
The account would be easy enough with fake data and a 10€ prepaid one-time-use phone number. Finding an exploit in Android such that you can turn off Google's tracking but not trigger their "you modified your device" scans (that are to be tied to your government identity verification continuing to work) is a game I'm not looking forward to playing.
this discussion about taste and ai is annoying. the world was conformist even before ai. most web design before 2023 was conformist, most pop music was boring, most writing was cliché, corporate speak was already retarded. ai didn't invent banality: we had plenty of it before.
why everybody is just repeating safe things, instead of expressing themselves... ai is not en explanation. we should have interrogated ourselves about the whys this happens. complaining about AI is, again, missing the point.
ok, i guess for graphic designers it might matter more?