A mesh surface is not automatically longer lasting. Quite the contrary, actually:

Mesh is “less material per surface”. This means more stress is put on the strands than for a full cover upholstery.

Mesh is open, which over time means that dirt and grime will start gathering in the cushion beneath the mesh. This can end up pretty nasty over the years of heavy usage.

In the end, it’s always about proper materials: good quality foam exists and are used by some, but obviously it’s usually more expensive. Same for the surface material: there’s super cheap PVC leather that will start flaking off in weeks, and there’s high quality PVC leather that will last a decade. Or just go for real leather if you got the money. All of the closed surfaces have the advantage of being incredibly easy to clean and maintain: simply wipe them with a wet towel. For real leather, only a tiny bit of extra care is needed ( waxing ).

Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it’s fair to call them that.

Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.

*rogue Roguelike

Though rougelike certainly sounds like an interesting genre too 😉

Of course these conversations progressions from a relationship can happen, but in this case, with all the mental stress and issues both sides are dealing with and how toxic the relationship has become, it would be very hard to achieve and questionable if it’s worth the effort. Ultimately, only OP can evaluate what matters to him, but separating completely is not something I’ve should be afraid of evaluating as an option at all.

Regarding the profit incentive: providing free school lunches or medical/ hygiene supplies does not hurt profits. As the meals/supplies will still have to be sourced from the market, it probably will now be a few big contacts with big suppliers that will cover entire school districts.

The costs of these contracts will be a public burden unless they implemented a specific focus tax to pay for it, so it will come out of various broad tax pools. This means everyone pays a little bit so every kid has something to eat. Even if you don’t have any kids or if your kid gets homemade lunch packs. This is where the “social” aspect comes in.

Other countries, many of them European, actually go a step in the other direction: if you do not have kids, you actually pay a premium on your income tax. And that is generally accepted, because for society to live on, obviously kids are necessary. And if you don’t support society by raising kids, you at least help cover some of the associated costs. These premiums are explicitly used to fund kindergartens, schools etc…

An often valid capitalist criticism of public large contracts on infrastructure such as this is that the public offices tend to be notoriously bad negotiators, accepting worse deals than private companies would. This is because there’s little to no incentive for them to reach good terms. It also makes the process more vulnerable to corruption and politicking on a grander scale. These are not guaranteed to happen, good governance can definitely avoid this. But public governance simply isn’t that great to begin with in many areas.

It’s is important to understand what law is used for these rulings.

Germany limits free speech by putting penalties on speech that calls for others to commit crimes. This is rarely actually enforced by police or judges when it is about minor things or clearly satirical/parody usage. On the other hand, when it’s clearly malicious intent and for severe crimes, there’s little tolerance.

Most commonly this happens when people publicly call for violent regime changes (attacking democratic/republican or feudal constitutional principles) or calling for violence against basic human rights, e.g. supporting genocide, deportations of specific groups, etc…

This actually serves as a strong base which is mostly used to combat domestic terrorism and unconstitutional organizations such as far right parties ( see dissolution of NPD).

Calling for support of an officially recognized terrorist organization is a surefire way to get into trouble. Hamas is, as in many countries, recognized as such by Germany. The judge now based their ruling on the belief that the chant is “clearly and obviously used to support Hamas” and as such supports terrorism.

What the article above does not tell: This ruling is incredibly controversial in Germany, and it is actually very likely to be overturned in a higher court. There even are precedent rulings of the same chant with entirely different ruling outcomes.

It really saddens me to see so many clearly well-meaning left-oriented people on Lemmy get outraged so easily without being informed. If you lack info, I feel such news should be approached with cautious neutrality until more info is gathered and an opinion is formed and voiced.

Yes, it’s fine to dislike this ruling and voice such an opinion. But calling Germany fascist or “freedom of speech is dead in Germany” based on such an individual event is just comically far from the truth.

We have checks and balances in Germany. Our system is not perfect, but whose is, and I firmly believe it’s still better than most out there.

Germany has no infinite freedom of speech, but I also firmly believe that being intolerant of intolerance is absolutely vital for a robust liberal society. So I’m fine with deeply disruptive and simply vile inciting speech being treated as criminal.

But it’s not really true. Switzerland has no naval branch of its armed forces.

It has a dozen or so of 10t patrol boats armed with a single 50cal MG for its lakes, and those are organized in a single motor boat company, which is staffed and manned by the military engineers branch.

Their duties are supporting the border guard (police) on the lakes against trespass/ smugglers and assisting (civilian) search& rescue.

Or trainers, equally ready to access. There’s even tools like wemod that offer trainers for all your games at a convenient single click.

Absolutely. Many of these deadlines already have been pushed backed in the EU, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t be pushed back again. The car lobby is incredibly powerful here.

The reason the lobby accepted these numbers at all is because they now use them to demand government subsidies because otherwise they claim they won’t be able to afford the necessary R&D and retooling of factories. All the while raking in solid profits, as usual. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits, as usual.

I fully expect there to be lots of moaning about “unexpected difficulties and expenses” over the next decade.

Actually, there’s a tiny dot next to Switzerland as well. Lichtenstein also is 2025, but that is fairly meaningless, as everyone would just get gas cars from neighbouring countries like today.

It really shouldn’t. My company has reprimanded people for not responding their vacation days. The law is very clear on this and courts have stated as well: vacations are meant for recovering your energy. Healing from an illness does not allow you to recover from work, so you must be granted that time again.

Only a refreshed worker is a productive worker.

Most of the classic big financial tech mainframes actually run on COBOL, at least in Europe. Though even those are very slowly being replaced, mostly by Java. Still, freelancers with COBOL specialty do rake in huge sums. It’s not only about the rare tech skills ( COBOL isn’t worse or harder than other languages, it’s just old and thus simple), it’s about having those skills combined with a sufficiently high security clearance.

It’s more of a political statement, same as the Soviet missiles on Cuba and Pershings in Germany during the Cold war. As such they carry great strategic value.

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.