The people that don’t understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on “how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time”. I wish I was joking.

If you have to say it often, it might indicate you have trouble formulating your initial advice in a way that is acceptable to people.

Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, so it helps to be empathetic about it. Packing your advice or instructions into a tactful and diplomatic approach doesn’t cost you much, but makes it much more likely for your advice to be accepted and implemented. And the recipient will usually end up being grateful for having avoided a mistake. They might even start to look for your and ask advice in the future. And if you keep doing that, he might even consider you a nice person or even a friend.

An arrogant and condescending approach will only do harm, even if you are factually right.

Id2 is the actual successor. It’s planned to be the first VW “affordable” EV with a starting price below 25000 euros when it releases in 2025. At least they now try to target the budget market, but I’d never recommend a VW. They have done so much bad quality cars since the late 90s…

You’re correct. I got caught up in explaining the overall concept. 😅

My personal interpretation is that the Chinese companies are now feeling the competitive pressure after their golden years and are scrambling to get their products on larger markets, while said market ( better affordable EV) still promises some margins.

Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.

Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.

You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.

That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.

There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.

A totally new or even just a very efficient implementation of an already existing algorithm can be gigantic if others need to build upon it.

And many licenses are verbose not because they are complicated in intent, but merely because they need extensive legalese prose to cover against many possible avenues of attack.

https://choosealicense.com/

Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.

Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.

Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².

USA have 35 inhabitants per km².

What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.

If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.

I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.

That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.

Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.

Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.

That alone sadly is not even the issue. Only when stealing from the government comes in, you can expect to actually get prosecuted.

Trying to pawn off the expenses on your company balance and committing tax fraud, then paying off people to not tell about your tax fraud, that’s what gets you.

Don’t forget Yemen. I know, it’s a measly 350 000 dead so far, which apparently rate much less than Israel-Palestine conflict losses.

I’m curious, why are you “happy it’s been done”?

I live in a country where we don’t perform this procedure out of tradition/religion, or at least not in the majority. I’m only aware of it being done for specific medical pathologies such as phimosis.

Because I kind of agree with the sentiment that performing unwarranted surgeries on someone that is unable to voice his (non-)consent is an ethical problem. Even more so with excisions, which always are drastically and usually irrevocably diminishing the body.

A lost bat might get trapped in a dark room. While they wouldn’t be bothered too much by the dark ( like everyone else, they need at least a bit of light to see using their eyes ), they could use echo sounding to figure out the room fairly well. But they still would be unable to open the door or window to escape, so still trapped or “lost”.

My attempt at an interpretation. 😅

Both variants are fully authentic. Riveted chain mail takes more material and time to produce, so was more expensive. However, it works a lot better at stopping thrusting attacks, meaning mostly arrows and bolts. As this was the main threat on many battlefields, war chain mail was mostly riveted. When expecting to fight mostly bladed enemies, such as in tourney or parade settings, butted mail was not uncommon. And once guns started to appear on the battlefield, it quickly became apparent that chain mail would not stop bullets, so the butted style got more popular again, as it served to still protect in melee combat.

As for pinching: chain mail was never supposed to be worn on bare skin anyway. At least a tunic, but usually heavier, densely padded wool clothes ( often called gambesons ) were worn underneath. This not only prevents any chafing or pinching, but more importantly it helped soften the impact of any blow a bit.

The reason politicians should have good salaries is that it should dissuade them from being attracted by bribes or other kinds of corruption. Of course, some peoples’ greed knows no bounds.

And frankly, I’d much rather see public servants rake in big money than the 0.1% “businessmen”.

The always are inter operability issues on a federal level in Germany, because of the strong level of individuality of each state. That has little to do with Windows vs Linux.

Any project that has to aggregate data on a federal level is technically challenging and accompanied by a ton of political sensitiveness. The states tend to see any attempt at standardization as an attack on their state freedoms.