holgerschurig
That said, the Lake of Constance (shared by Switzerland, Germany and a bit of Austria) is at the deepest location 251 m deep. There is however nothing terrifying about that. And it's about twice as deep as your Portsmouth Mine.
Over here, the seas that are public for swimming are usually checked. Not just for acidic things from a mine. But in summer, when it's hot, for cyanobacters. And then they warn (e.g. on radio, in local TV news like "Hessenschau", on the web. And if there are organized beaches, then even with posters.
We have few actually dangerous ones. After a search, I only found the "Silbersee" in Bayern. That one has sulfuric fumes. And that reminded me that some vulcanic "Maar" sees in the Eifel (area next to Belgium) might be dangerous to to sulfur and CO2 since they are still a bit vulcanic active.
Ex-seas from mining companies that are still toxic are fenced off and not accessible.
Maybe if you're a US reader you don't know about the "fencing culture" difference between USA and Europe. In the USA, basically everything is behind a fence. I drove e.g. in Texas, New Mexico, Maryland: even the corn fields were behind barbed wire or other fences. This is totally not the case in Germany. Here by default things are accessible. Fields, Meadows, Forests ... by default no fences. Even if e.g. the forrest is private property. So if you, as a german, come to an area where the lake is actually fenced around, then this speaks loudly to you and your complications sensor.
Fichtel & Sachs (actually Ernst Sachs) invented the "Rücktritt" (is that back pedalling brake in english?), bike freewheeling and the combination of this, the "Torpedo Freilaufnabe". That one was so good that it was one of the first things the chinese copy-cats replicated. Copying as the highest form of attribution ...
However, the company diversified quite early, e.g. they made "Wankel" motors, one cylinder motors, hitches, shock absorbers etc. By 1980 the bike parts were just a rounding error in their accounting --- partially also due to the high amount of the car industry in Germany, where they were a supplier. And still, they bought other bike part suppliers.
To educate: socialism has nothing to with how influence the execute or legislative has. Nor has it anything to do with health insurance.
The central point of the ideology called "socialism" is that control of the state (not of private owners) over the "means of production". Like capital, land, workforce. To gain this control, socialism is keen to use force. They call it e.g. "dictatorship of the proletariat". Usually this leads to heavy oppression of the people, to some sort of police state. If you look at any real socialist country (like GDR, USSR, Yugoslavia, Cuba, North Korea) you'll always find it to some sort. Even in today's China the banks are still under government control, so "the party" has the ultimate say in everything.
You usage of "socialism" doesn't fit that at all. Perhaps you meant something that isn't fully libertarian?
My guess is the US people are badly educated these days. And thus easily influenced with false factoids coming from libertarian oligarchs like the Koch brothers.
And also it seems like they never heard about "social market economy" ... I mean, there is a spectrum between a fully socialist country like e.g. North Korea and a fully capitalist like ... actually we don't have one that is purely capitalist. Not even in the USA does the "market regulates everything".
And also I think that quite a few people never pondered about the idea that there are two words ("social" and "socialism") for a reason.
* "SBZ" -> Sowjetisch besetzte Zone -> sowjet occupied zone
* "Ost-Zone"
* "DDR"
* "Ost-Deutschland"
Almost no one spelled out "DDR" with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", since that was a lie. There was little democracy there.
People that fled from east-germany early (e.g. before the wall) usually used "SBZ "or "Zone". And it was usually meant in a derogatory sense. "DDR" was more neutral, although few people in west-germany had a neutral view on the eastern regime.
Look at radio stations. We have SWR: Süd-West Rundfunk (south west) in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. We have WDR: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (west) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. We have NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (north). In Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Hamburg (not Bremen).
... and then we have Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (middle) in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen.
And no one is in the east ...
The first sentence is true, and is what I know. The second economical leg of this sentence is new to me.
Basically, Hallstein Doctrine was what "One China" politics is. The BRD assume that is is the sole legitimate (since democratically elected) government. For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
However, Hallstein doctrine had --- to the best knowledge ... very unspecified reactions. Germany e.g. stop diplomatic relationships with Cuba. But not economical ties, I know that my father continued to smoke Havanna cigars (eeeek!). They stopped diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia ... but all the Winnetou Films were recorded there, and it even became a holiday destination for west germans. Also all payments continued, it was not an economical embargo.
In the case of Egypt it could be seen like that. When Egypt accepted the state-hood of east-germany, then West-Germany broke it's diplomatic ties AND stopped its economical aid. I'm not aware of it stopping buying oil from Egypt, thought.
Fan fact: there is also two inverses of the Hallstein doctrine. The first one is the Ulbricht Doctrine. That doctrine mandated that socialist countries mustn't normalize their diplimatic ties to west-germany until it recognized east-germany.
And the second inverse is that other countries only saw west-germany as the legal succession of the 3rd Reich and even the german empire. So it was West-Germany had hat to fulfill contracts of that time. Except for the reparations. The USSR took (or stole) more stuff from East Germany than the western allied forces took from West Germany. About 30% of the industrial infrastructure was removed, e.g. 11800 km of railway tracks. And even after they stopped removing the infrastructure itself, they still demanded a percentage of the production.
Socialism is a political ideology centered (it's really at it's core!) the idea of "means of production must be in the hands of the people". In reality the "means of production" (capital, land, workforce) was in the hands of a small undemocratic elected ruling caste. But the core idea still prevails. In socialism banks were seized (capital), land was seized from the farmers and Kolchoses or LPGs (agricultural production cooperatives) were formed by force. Companies were seized and Kombinate" were formed. The underlying idea of all of this force is the "dictatorship of the proletariat", their way to tell themselves that cruelty and excessive physical and psychological force is okay, almost a must.
Right to repair has nothing to do with seizing capital, land, or pressing the workforce into mismanaged cooperatives.
Another central idea of socialism is the thinking of castes, err classes. Most notably the worker classes. That describes the situation in GB around the industrial revolution. But today? Won't fit in most countries.
Right to repair has nothing to do with working class. A professor (the "intelectual class") would also be able to repair his stuff.
The AI will be a cruel as humans.
Just yesterday news and TV was full of what happened at 9/11, something that was truly horrible.
I'm from Germany, and why 3 to 4 generations ago happened here was truly horrible.
All was done by extremists, thought.
But... just the other day I read https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikanische_Besetzung_Haitis about the US occupation of Haiti. And that was done by a government that claimed to be not extremist and even democratic. Way more people died there than even in 9/11. And it had almost all the things happening as they happened in the 3rd Reich: Racism, looking down at others, concentration camps, torture, forced labor till death, killing family members (what we call "Sippenhaft"). Something between 3500 and 15000 people were killed by US troops. That's still low compared to what 3rd Reich Germany did ... but quantity is not the issue when we talk about traits, quality is.
So the same "human traits" made US troops do cruel things as they made Germany extremists do cruel things. So we must conclude that they aren't all good. And therefore not all desirable.
Fun thing: this is known since a loooooong time. About 2000 years ago a religious leader (that gets way more followers in the US than in Germany) said "There is no good one, not even one".
And even today people act like humanity is inherently good. No, it isn't. If we were, then anarchism or communism would actually work and really give some kind of paradise on earth.
Human traits are bad training material.
For example, in Germany we used to have a bank card, "EC Karte", it is now called "Girocard".
So, if you are a shop and accept Girocard, you pay 0.2% of the transaction plus a fix 0.05 - 0.10 €.
And in Germany virtually everyone has a Girocard, it's part of getting a bank account. The cards are free to the customers.
So assume you're a small Café with 8000€ per months, 70% via Girocard and 30% via credit cards. Then you'd pay ~ 17€ per month for Girocard, but 95€ if you use "blended sum" - a contract with a payment provider to accept all cards. But you don't have bureaucracy. With you do an extra contract with a credit card only provider it's still 41€ for just the 30% of your monthly business.
That creates the effect that in Germany lots of shops don't accept credit cards. The market speaks.
I know that other countries also have payment methods, e.g. Netherland or China. It's just the US banking system that is decades behind what is possible.
They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface.
And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.
Other map projections (we have hundreds!) compromise on other things to improve on others. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections
So yes, we definitely NEED compromise and not some strongman that says, due to limited knowledge "it is how it is, forever".
Also, the UN voted to use this map for itself and suggested (!) that others should use it. It never said that everyone has to use that map. It actually said that this voting is "non-binding".
The key term some people never learned in school is "direct democracy" vs. "indirect democracy".
Even many clubs, e.g. in Germany the ADAC, have systems where people vote for an assembly (or, in politics: a parliament). And then the assembly vote fot ehri CO (or, in politics, for their chancellor). Now, it can happen that this chancellor together with 26 other head of states is a member of the Europen Council (EUCO, one of the 7 bodies of the EU, what btw most people all the time intermingle). And that this EUCO now votes on their president.
In your logic, this presidency of the EUCO is then null and void. Because not directly elected by citizens of the EU.
In my logic, I realize that this position is removed from the people, but it still done by a democratic process. A multi-stage process, but still democratic. And that it still has some bearing.
Asking for the whole world population having an election on e.g. the UN Secretary General --- under the implication that only this would give representation --- is bogus.
It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.
The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.
I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!
Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".
Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.
Fun fact: few countries in europe are even a federation. So I guess the poster was exceptionally uninformed.
And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).
But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:
AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.
Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.
Source so far: https://strom-report.com/strompreis-zusammensetzung/
Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.
So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.
So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.
Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur
The economically biggest european nation, Germany, has a health system where the federal government spent almost no money on health care. We have insurances, lots of them. Some of them for-profit, some of them non-profit. So employers and employees finance the vast majority.
(Truth be told: a good amount of hospitals are in the hand of municipalities, countries or universities. So governmental funding also arrives there. But that is not at federal level, e.g. universities are financed by the 16 states.)
That you guys confuse a mandatory insurance system always with federal funded is beyond me. Perhaps you equalize --- without proof --- federal funded with bad?
In the fictive story, it is the year 2000. Some get the job to write a software to manipulate vote computers. Later, the same programmer was asked to manipulate also voting computers in Germany. This time, he tries to resist. They create a joke-party for the re-erification of the Monarchy and manipulate the vote computers so that this joke-party gets the majority. And that works. But no one believes him that the computers were manipulated and he really gets to be the new king of Germany.
That's all very fictive ... it's just that in the text you have lots of footnotes giving reference to ACTUAL problem with US voting devices ...
Also: in Germany the Chaos Computer Club once demonstrated that they could run chess on an already "certified to be safe for election" voting computer. That brought the end to these devices ... so now Germany is back to a state where your Aunt Mary can sit down with the paper ballot sheets, can recount and can inform herself that everything was right. Without the need of a CS degree, without knowledge about IT security, hacking, etc. Which is IMHO a general win to the democracy. Lay people must be able to verify results!
Maybe, or maybe not. The thing is, that "mistake" isn't something that is generally valid. For example, the enshittification of Google Search through the last 15 years seems to be a mistake --- but perhaps not from the money-making point of view of Google Shareholders. Likewise the enshittification of reddit --- we nerdy users see it as a mistake. But for them this intended enshittification probably increased revenue.
It's the money, always the money! PR-speak like "customer satisfaction is our highest goal" is, like most PR-speak, a blatant lie.
And so it can very well be the case that for coders the frontier models get worse, but they get better for other applications --- and that all of this is just driven by "how can we capitalize the most out of it", not satisfaction levels of programmers.
We have tons of political decisions to do in every country where the answer is not totally clear. Often it's a preference. Should we tax the rich? Or take from the middle class? Should Belgium support an army, or creches? Things like that.
IMHO nuclear energy usage is in a similar ball park. It has real risks, and real benefits. And so, if you see one that thinks the risks are more important than the benefits, there is ZERO need to use inflammatory speech.
BTW; I also tend to be an opponent. Many reasons:
- Germany still doesn't have an answer to the permanent storage of the waist
- with existing reactor types the worst imaginable accident is really, really bad. Especially for a densely populated country like mine
- nuclear power is quite expensive. The electric power prices at the customers are only so low because there are open and hidden subsidies in place (e.g. no atomic power plant in Germany has to pay full insurance. Or they don't need to pay for the 20000+ year long storage --- that's all "socialized", e.g. the tax payers pay for it
- nuclear power needs at the end reliably cooling. Look at the rivers --- in Germany we had to stop nuclear power plants, because the summer drough was so intense that not enough cooling water was available. That happened several times in France, too.
- these days, the electric power companies of Germany don't want to build nuclear power plants. In "Manager Magazin" --- not your usual leftist or eco magacine --- they layed out that this is economically infeasible.
- most countries don't have uran mines. My own one used to have, but that is depleted. Interestingly, the russian atom sector owns a lot of the uran infrastructure worldwide, even when abroad (e.g. they own things in Australia or Canada). We just learned the hard way that depending on Russia --- or USA with their toll war --- is an extremely bad idea
I know that for some of these problems there are theoretical answers. E.g. since about 20 years there is the idea to use breeder reactors to convert highly radioactive material with a long half-life into something with a shorter half-life time. But ... they didn't materialize. And Germany's tryout of a breeder was so expensive (both building and operation cost) that the project was terminated.
Personally, I like the idea of renewable energy. We get the energy for free, we don't have to pay Russia (gas, oil, uran). Or the USA (LNG). Or some wahabitic islamistic scheichs (Saudi-Arabia). And if the billions of euro that we invested into nuclear reasearch would go to long-term storage (like iron-oxyde-powder batteries, reflow batteries etc) than we would have something that is cheaper to build, cheaper to operate, has little risk to the neighbourhood AND doesn't funnel money into the hand of reckless power hungry leaders.
So, and now call me "anti-nuclear crowd". Or refute me at an intellectual level, maybe I can learn a thing!
Oh: and if we don't "overregulate" then we have perhaps another Chernobyl. That happened exactly because the regulation AND the execution of the regulation was too lax.
I use an editor-construction kit named "Emacs" to build my own Editor, and IDE, and git porcelain, and organizer, and wiki. And many things more.
IDE with e.g. LSP integration, rustix and many other programmer-related modes and enhancements like tree-sitter. Git porcelain with magit. Organizer with Org-Mode. Wiki with denote.
It works by giving you points and achievements. And as you progress, the achievement give you popups with links to interesing OSM-data-using size. Or to add one more category to the things you can complete.
We also have cards for the places we live, e.g. I have the "full" map (not just streets) of Hessen, one of the 16 federal states. And that is only 485 MB. If that would be too much for me, I could also only download the governmental areas of Darmstadt, Gießen or Kassel (roughtly southern Hessen, middle Hessen, northern Hessen). But that is, in the OsmAnd case, also the case for California. You can download all of it, or or several of 16 parts.
Also: you can't compare OpenStreetMap with the detail of this old CD-ROM or printed maps. It contains WAY more data. Are you old enough to know the times where you bought a city plan if you visited some city? Well, this OsmAnd/CoMaps data set has a very details city map of all cities. And of all villages. And of about any dwelling. In OsmAnd, you cans search for almost everything, even esoteric things. Example: if you search for "Kneipp treading pool" you find them. And usually they are nice picknick areas, too. Try that with a printed map.
I personally experience you "EVERY MONTH" issue. My map of "Hessen" was last downloaded half a year ago --- I do this manually, and only every so often. OsmAnd allows that.
And if I would experience it ... I'd rather care. We have high speed DSL and glass fiber with 1000 MB/s in Germany, so 2 MB is almost nothing these days.
Still I would not recommend OsmAnd to everyone, e.g. not to "Aunt Mary". It has a clunkier, more techy UI. It isn't for everyone.
I even want local notes. Once I walked around with SCEE or Streetcomplete ... and I added a note. And then the note was public on OpenStreetMap. I meant it as a note to me, so that I later could fix the thing at my desktop computer with JOSM --- which is, for some things, way better than doing it on-the-walk with a smartphone, no mouse, no real keyboard.
Also workaround for 1: In OsmAND you can define your POIs, they are then stored in on the devices. And then you can use things like SyncThing to share them.
Unfortunately, the vehicles sending C-ITS send them not from very high (like planes) or with considerable transmit power (like ham radio operations). And also in challenging areas. So an C-ITS receiver (e.g. based on a ESP32-C5) has a rather short receiving range.
So for a truly open traffic map we'd need millions of receivers!