Germany's carbon emissions aren't good.

This isn't letting perfect be the enemy of good, it's not letting greenwashing be the friend of pollution.

They are worse, in many cases much much worse than the UK, France, Italy and Spain. You know the other of the top 5 Western European economies.

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The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect.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.

The way they got so big wasn't that they were super efficient

Joke used to be that they lost money on every sale but made up for it in volume. Turns out it's easy to beat competitors if you're not constrained by needing to make money.

Anyhow, it's been interesting to see Amazon's repeated forays into groceries in the UK. I remember the first launch with great fanfare and press releases about how amazingly efficient they were with their cunning algorithms and amazingly logistics etc etc an they the flamed out very hard after slamming into massive existing logistics networks already locked into brutal competition with each other.

Turns out Sainsbury's had been doing online deliveries since 1995, Tesco since 1997 and they were by no means the only entrants (e.g. Ocado from 2000 determined to do it all with robots). I think Amazon is now on its 4th attempt to get a foothold, and they've recently announced closure of all their stores, and delivery via their "partners" which are all well established supermarket chains.

If we had proper antitrust law enforcement someone would have noticed ages ago that Amazon was going around buying up competitors and shut that down but well, we don't.

Not just that: they can do other things like selling at a loss to put a competitor out of business, and make shitty clones of products which they will promote while suppressing the competing products.

I also use "foe" red dot as the idiot flag to remind me.

But in Snij's case I get a yellow dot which I take to be the turbo-idiot flag :)

If you get angry about real things, you might end up in an awkward situation where you have to eat crow or change your mind based on objective reality, you know if you were wrong, misunderstood or something changes.

Starting from the position of completely made up shit is the ultimate luxury here: you will never have to climb down from your high horse.

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

Particularly one logging to the cloud in another country in near realtime.

If your case is bad enough that there's international cooperation in place to deal with that, well, you're so fucked.

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.

Given they have no monopoly on cellphones

Not this again.

The legislation isn't anti- monopolies, it's anti-trust. Are Apple big enough to have a distorting effect on the market? Yes. Do they make use of that for profit? Yes.

You don't need an absolute monopoly to be guilty of anti-trust violations.

Someone feel free to break it down to me why Apple can't set it's own price policies.

If Apple were one of 10 equal sized players, and demanded 30% fees, developers would leave. Because of their size developers cannot afford to pretty much no matter what Apple does. In other words, their size alone distorts the market. At that point, no you can't simply do whatever you like because of laws which have been passed for precisely this kind of thing.

I guess they need to use Yandex for that.