jrnvs

They can’t be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased in price).

I doubt it. The current system is a local optimum. Better local optimums already exist elsewhere.

In The Netherlands, direct online payments using debit cards are very common. These are secure payments, verified through a bank’s mobile banking app or internet banking with 2FA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL

This means there is no risk for the seller that a payment gets reversed. There is fraud, but it centers mostly on social engineering people to authorise payments for others, or to mail their debit card to “the bank” for “recycling”.

Cost per payment: about 30 cents.

Meanwhile, in other countries, credit cards are the common online payment option. Security? A number on the front of the card and a “secret” second number on the back of the card.

Cost: 1.5-3.5% of payment.

Better security is possible, but it’s hard to move from a local optimum when you’re locked into a certain ecosystem.

The credit card no-security scheme works because everyone gets reimbursed for fraud. It comes at the cost of retailers handing a few percent of every transaction to intermediaries, instead of just a few pennies.

Burn biomass (plants) in a power plant to generate electricity, then store the carbon dioxide in empty gas fields. This is called BECCS, Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage [0].

Unfortunately, carbon capture and storage is not economical (yet). Let's hope it will be soon, with EU CO2 prices already reaching 50 euros / ton this week [1]. If I understand this International Energy Agency report[2] correctly, many forms of carbon capture become economical if these price levels subsist in the EU (and other economic blocs impose similar prices on their industry).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-carbon-price-tops... [2] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expen...

Here's an interview with the photo operator, in Dutch: https://nos.nl/artikel/2377417-fotofinish-operator-amstel-go...

Interviewer: Is it possible that the photo was taken a wee bit before the black line? Photo operator: I doubt it... I doubt it because we really took a good look if it's all been set up correctly.

I was in the same situation and just made sure to always pay an amount in euro that would definitely be too much in Swedish Crowns once converted. Better to pay 1% extra than to lose much more paying ridiculous conversion costs to my bank.

It helps because words describing a profession, a person or something animate are usually male/female. The same goes in Dutch, where "de" refers to male/female and "het" to neutrum.

There are several rules of thumbs which can help foreigners to correctly guess the article in both Swedish and Dutch. Of couse, they'll only be an accurate guess at best, but they can give you a headstart as a novice learner.

How come this is legal in the US? It’s extremely unfair toward other businesses that are too small to coerce the government to make a tax exemption for their individual business. To me, it seems to create inequality before the law.

I don’t think the officials handing out the tax breaks have bad intentions, but the system itself seems corrupt.

But why do you let the students grade the course after they've already gotten a grade? That's insane. In my university, you'd get a paper for the teacher and course review after handing in the final exam. This means you can comment on the quality of the exam, but you don't know your grade yet.

It should come from adding value and thereby growing the economy, which is then reflected in an increase in the money supply.

Great, so you made $50k because your $200k house is now worth $250k - a 25% increase. You now have a family and bigger income and are looking at a bigger house priced $500k. You are really glad that you “made” $50k on your old house.

But wait, if the new house is in the same neighbourhood, it’s price increase was probably also close to 25%. If prices had stayed the same, it would be worth $400k today.

So you just gained $50k on your old house but are paying $100k more on the new one.

This is only beneficial if you move from a large house in a popular area to a smaller house in a less popular area.

If you have kids, they might inherit the wealth gained from your housing “investment” - after splitting with their siblings and after taxes of course. Sounds good, until you realise that they will have to spend it all - and put in extra - on housing because of the price increases.

In a world where housing prices stay the same, or become slightly cheaper year by year, everyone is better of. The prices of common utilities such as food and clothing have gone down spectacularly in the last decades while quality has gone up. No one would rather live in a world where these had instead become more expensive. It’s time we start thinking about housing in the same way.

I’m Dutch too. This technique was mentioned in the book I read to prepare for the theoretical part of the drivers license exam. I never saw anyone use it in practice.

Don't forget that car companies plan years ahead. Setting an end-date like this brings the subject on the table of the car companies' board rooms.

Correct. Source: I'm Dutch. Related article: https://www.rnw.org/archive/amsterdam-tourists-mad-about-tru...

Certainly not all EU Governments are elected. In The Netherlands, for example, you vote for Parliament. Parliamentary leaders then seek an agreement and propose a cabinet, which is formally instated by the King. When you cast your vote, you don't know who will be in government, nor do you have any say in it.

I'm a proponent of this system, just wanted to point out that governments are not necessarily elected. I think the same holds in many other EU countries, e.g., Belgium and Germany.

New countries joining the EU are obliged to adopt the euro once they meet the economic requirements. Only some of the pre-euro members have negotiated an opt-out.

Also note that the article doesn’t claim the euro as essential feature for every country’s EU membership, it just says it’s essential for Estonia.

Some greenhouse farmers use geothermal energy, but this is far from a common energy source. It's been suggested that this might be our way to get off of natural gas, though. (After small earthquakes in the province of Groningen, the extraction of gas has been greatly reduced. Seemingly of less concern politically in NL, gas isn't sustainable.)

> DDG "The Web is an error condition" and you'll find a far-too-true-to-be-good rant on that topic.

Actually, when I DDG this phrase, the only result is your comment in this thread.

Re. 1: Actually, there is an effect. There are even two effects: medium-value customers spend more, while high-value consumers spend less. Unfortunately for King, these two effects balance out in this specific case.

For other businesses, the gains from the revenue increase in some groups may trump the gains from the losses in other groups, or the other way around. Your mileage may vary.

This is pretty much what happens in Scandinavian countries. E.g. in Sweden, parents each get three months of paternal leave. An additional part of the paternal leave can be divided between parents as they see fit. https://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/

Richard Stallman wrote the GNU GPL. Eben Moglen assisted in writing version 3.

Isn't that just horrible? A secure messaging service that requires a google account for installation.

In Germany your arguably "lower" income comes with healthcare, unemployment insurance and pension rights, which probably makes up for the difference.

It would be nice to see a summary of the projects and their effects after finishing the quiz. By that time, I had already forgotten about some and wondered what the answers were.

You mean like an electric car which you can only "buy" with a rental contract for the batteries? One which comes with DRM that allows the manufacturer to remotely stop you from charging your car as they see fit? [1]

Or perhaps the smartphone you "bought", which tracks everywhere you go and doesn't allow you to install your own software.

As proprietary software with DRM invades deeper into our daily lives by becoming part of all the appliances and tools we use, we will no longer have the freedom to use "our" products as we see fit.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-co...

I had to think of Fred Dibnah's steam car. https://youtu.be/XvjHxXl8KYI?t=4m2s

It's certainly not a watertight solution against targeted surveillance, but why wouldn't it be effective against mass surveillance?

If someone were to open all these one-time links (and manage to fill in the captcha's automatically), people would start to notice very soon when the intended recipients complain and the Own-Mailbox interface shows that the email-URLs were opened by some dodgy IP address.

There are several options, ranging from making the link one-time only to requiring a captcha or password.

From TFA: ➜Can you explain more in details how Private Link Message (PLM) works? Private Link Message (PLM) allows you to send and receive messages from people who don't use GPG.

In order to send a message you can send a secret HTTPS link to your correspondent. It will look like https://test.nospy.co/n3FVgtFwR2cp839nX6dkQGzGjF38bJ5VwiX86u... .

The link is temporary: once clicked by your correspondent it is too late to spy, the link does not work anymore.

You can also, optionaly, setup an expiration date for the link. If your correspondent did not access the message before this date, it is too late to read.

The link is filtered by a question. Depending on the level of surveillance you think you are in, the question can be a simple captcha to avoid bots, a secret question that your correspondent can answer but not the NSA, or a request for a password previously exchanged with your correspondent, or no question at all.

Your correspondent will have a web interface to answer your message privately. You can also activate a permanent HTTPS interface for anyone to send you a message privately at any time.

In practice a simple captcha will allow you to be safe from mass surveillance, since only targeted surveillance can be done by human beings. On top of that any spy will be detected, and have his IP address revealed. On our test, no PLM has ever been spyed even with no question at all.

Except when your house burns down or floods.

Here's an article describing how to find out what someone is watching on Google Maps by analyzing the encrypted traffic. http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-goo...