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…

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.

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.

You are swapping correlation and causation to some degree. A country does not become industrialized by people starting to have kids at a later age. Rather, people start getting kids when their circumstances allow it: in industrialized countries, you rely less on children to provide for you when old, as there hopefully are social systems in place or you can save up on your own. Downside is, without social systems you also have to provide for yourself at old age, meaning people need to build up more savings before they feel ready for the financial burden a child is for around 20 years.

In developing countries, children often get little support above bare necessities and start contributing to the household income at a much earlier age, even before hitting their teens.

I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.

People should just stop trying to interfere with people’s private life in general. Get pregnant or don’t, how is that a concern to me?

As long as it’s two consenting adults, which should be obvious, but sadly apparently isn’t.

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”.

As a bonus fact: because multiple embryos are implanted at once, IVF has a much higher chance of having multiple embryos take hold at once. So while getting pregnant is hard on the first place, if it works, there’s a higher than usual chance to get twins ( or even more, though much less likely).

This “risk” is clearly communicated in the preparation phase and the potential parents have to ok and accept this for IVF to go ahead at all.

During IVF, you don’t prepare a single embryo. You prepare dozens at once.

IVF is used when for whatever reason the natural process fails. This can be due to had sperm, bad eggs, trouble with the path to the womb, hormonal imbalances, and a large number of illnesses that fuck up this delicate process. So IVF has to fight a steep uphill battle, and you want multiple fighters in the ring to increase the odds. Why do it all at once and not over after the other? Extraction of the eggs requires intense, weeks to months of hormonal therapy. The extraction is also a surgical procedure, requiring a surgeon to access the ovaries. This is painful and has health risks, you don’t want to this every week. Less time and less procedures also help reduce costs. IVF is expensive, quickly costing many thousands of dollars. Last but not least, IVF is an intensely stress- and painful time for the couple on a psychological level alone. Every failed attempt weighs heavy, every miscarriage is a huge loss. Those emotions should not be toyed with and it’s clearly ethical to follow the medical process with the highest success chance and least suffering.

Explaining the process: You extract many eggs and fertilize them with sperm at once. Then you wait for them to do their first couple cell divisions, usually until they are a count of 4, 8 or 16 cells, varies by nation and its laws. The more splits, the easier to qualify the health and success chance of the embryo.

Even during this early stage, multiple of the embryos typically fail to divide properly and are then discarded.

Then, the most vital and hopeful embryos are selected and implanted during another surgical procedure directly into the womb. Again, always multiple. This is because some embryos will die during the process, others will not attach. In the end, you only need one embryo to attach and get supplied by the womb, then you’re on track to getting pregnant.

All the other good candidates are frozen, so you have them ready for possible future implantation attempts. It’s common that the attachment process doesn’t work at first try.

Once your pregnancy is carried out (miscarriage is always a big risk up until the end during IVF) and you are certain you don’t want more kids, the rest of the frozen embryos are discarded.

With this new interpretation of the law, doctors and lab techs would be mass murderers.

Sanctions have been shown to be a very ineffective, but low risk tool to apply external pressure. There is no way to apply sanctions in a way that truly hurt the responsible rulers without affecting the general populace. As the rulers by definition have power, they will simply be able to force lower, non sanctioned ranks to do what they want, circumventing the sanctions.

In addition, the hope of blanket sanctions is that the populace looks their economical suffering to the bad decisions of their leaders and speak our act against them. This rarely ever works, as state propaganda easily spins it to blame the international community being influenced by the state’s enemies. The first to suffer will always be the lowest strata of society, which usually is least involved in international affairs.

It’s the same reason any kind of external punitive action against civilians (e.g. city bombing in ww2) doesn’t work.

Do the proven old trick of simply outlining your text in contrast color. Increases readability means, and it no longer matters what background color you choose for varieties.

Which is fine

But that’s boring. Just close your eyes, grab any packet or bottle at random and apply with gusto. This way you will always be surprised at new and fresh taste combinations!

Germany was “properly humbled” after WW1 and the treaty of Versailles. Pretty sure the consensus is that this was a significant stepping stone to some bad things happening in Europe.

Humiliation leads to resentment, resentment leads to revanchism, revanchism leads to jingoism.

Interesting, will have to read up on how that works in Brazil. We also have a separate tax id here ( which is also used for pension and social security ), but that one is even more secure/private than the passport ID. We only provide that to our chosen medical insurance provider ( bc they need to register it with the ministry of finance ) as well as employers ( because 50% of the insurance has to be paid by employers).

It’s explicitly not allowed and intended for generic identification purposes, because it makes it too accessible for identity theft and associated scams.

Where do you live that providing your government id to a business is standard? In Germany, the only one outside of a judge to be allowed to request that is law enforcement ( even then only with proper cause ). Of course, some businesses are legally required to request and process your ID number ( e.g. when booking international flights, medical insurance companies etc), but these are under tight federal control and supervision to ensure data safety.

Age verification sometimes is a thing for purchasing 18+ things ( media or drugs like alcohol & smokes), but even then businesses will only ever perform a visual check of the date of birth on your ID. Technically they can never demand to hold your ID, not even for a short time just to better read the date. You only have to show them your ID. And actually recording and/or storing any of that information would be insanely illegal.

Germany / Europe might have its issues, but we at least try and take our freedom and data privacy serious. I would never dream of handing my ID to a generic business like a club for anything more than the age check.

Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?

And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.

I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.

Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox