Kodak's demise is a little overstated just because they have been reorganized several times; and 'Kodak' is sort of the dump entity. There are still a variety of applications for being competent at thin film chemistry, including semiconductor fabrication, just not so much making 35mm film. So Eastman Chemical got most of that. And some of their medical and otherwise higher-end optics and imaging stuff also got spun off, with the business of not terribly optically interesting cameras under heavy threat from apathy and cellphones left at Kodak proper.

They certainly didn't do desperately well; or they'd probably be somewhere more along the lines of Sony in terms of 'who builds CCDs worth disclosing the provider of?'; but the reorgs appear to have been aimed at separating the more viable business units from the liabilities. Probably so the latter could be tied to the pension plan.

More than that, Germany is democratizing energy. A lot of people have balcony power plants and rooftop solar. There are micro grids even.

As an investment over decades, it has paid off with jobs and economic activity.

The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect. Better to spend the money on transitioning away from non-renewable sources.

Remember that Germany used to be split in two, with half of it communist. The transition was a huge economic project that involved a lot of redevelopment in the east. The grid alone needed major upgrades.

They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.

The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.

I guess they need to use Yandex for that.

I'm wondering about that, because for years Google has had better resolution, but not 97% coverage.

Maybe that's the worst case, and it's better in areas with better satellite photographs available. I think Google uses aerial photography too, to get views from different angles.

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

Many developed economies are based on there being infinite growth. Without it, pensions, healthcare, society in general will collapse.

Either we go cold turkey and charge the whole basis of our socio-economic systems, or we have some immigration to ease the transition.

There are obvious flaws. What about Swiss citizens who just want to reunite their family? "Sorry, we hit the quota for this year, and there next decade isn't looking good either."

Lottery? Great for business planning.

It's unsurprising; but I see that the law has several stages of dealing with foreign overcrowding if the 10 million line is breached; but nothing about how locally produced human resources will be stack ranged for headcount reduction should the population remain above the target. Surely anyone who really cares about crowding needs to have a contingency plan for endogenous losers as well?