In the Netherlands flavoured vapes were banned several years ago, because in practice they were getting used to make vaping appealing to kids. You cannot legally buy them anymore, but there are ways to still get them illegally.
Still… it adds an additional barrier to obtaining them, making it more difficult for kids to get their hands on them.
Over the past four years Russia has been ever so slowly gaining small amounts of territory, bit by bit.
I guess that can be described as a “winning streak”, because if that continues infinitely without change, eventually in a couple of hundred years they would have all of Ukraine’s land.
However, that ignores the cost of war, and how Russia will pay for keeping that up.
Looks a lot like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face
I do fear that, even if they get the signatures for a referendum, the proposal might be too radical for the average Berliner to vote in favour of. It is one thing to restrict the circulation of cars in neighbourhoods, and it’s another entirely to effectively ban private transport in a significant part of the city.
I wonder if a more nuanced approach, like an improved traffic circulation plan or the introduction of congestion pricing, would be a more effective pitch to the average voter.
Then again, I am not from Berlin, so ultimately it’s not up to me.
That seems to be the standard in the US though. I’m only following what they already do over there.
The road sign is technically correct, but it looks at the situation as “car by default”.
It reinforces the idea that in order to accommodate pedestrian friendly places, we must punish drivers by restricting them from going where they would otherwise be allowed to go. It assumes that cars are allowed to go anywhere, unless explicitely stated otherwise.
The way you communicate ideas is important if you want to get people on board, so maybe it is better to say the road is “open to pedestrians only”, rather than “closed to cars”
The sign I posted follows the 1967 Vienna Convention on road signs.
Afaik the US is not signatory to that treaty, but they probably have different signs with similar meaning
Perhaps something like this, based on the US bike lane sign?
Perhaps using a different sign would leave a less negative impression
Instead of saying the road is closed to cars, you say the street is open only to pedestrians.
The picture is seemingly from North America, so I’m not sure if a similar sign exists over there.
I must admit I am not exactly sure on the specifics of Monero.
From a cursory Google it looks like they claim to be different from regular crypto-currencies on these fronts:
That leaves me with a few questions.
Assuming that we can trust everyone in our “ring” ourselves, how does someone outside the ring verify that a person is good for the amount they are attempting to transfer? The reason why in regular crypto the sender, receiver and amount are public, is so that anyone can verify that noone is spending more than they have. That is necessary in lieu of a central authority verifying transactions.
I take it that as outsiders we just have to assume that the “ring” is credible, and has verified the transaction for us.
That leads me to my next question. How can we trust the ring? What is preventing a small group of people banding together and forming their own ring, approving each others fraudulent transactions? It seemingly lowers the bar for a 51% attack quite significantly.
Any website I found also talks about stealth addresses for recipients, but how does the money then make it to the actual recipient? At some point the address of the actual recipient has to be made public in order for the funds to actually go where they are supposed to go.
And if there are only stealth addresses for recipients, does that mean there are no stealth addresses for senders? Can anyone still see if I’m making transactions, just not how much and to whom?
I’m currently at work, so admittedly I haven’t taken a particularly deep dive on the topic, but these are just some concerns that came to mind based on the information I found following a quick Google.
You lament the loss of anonymity (and presumably privacy) but then you wish for governments to adopt cryptocurrencies. That does not track.
Crypto is neither anonymous nor private. Every transaction is written to a public ledger that anyone can see. You can easily track each transaction a crypto-wallet makes, and with a bit of effort it is usually not difficult to match a wallet with a person.
Crypto is less private than the traditional banking system. At least with banks your transactions can only be reviewed internally.
I understand they need that information to process payments, but whenever a company I have never heard of before asks for my credit card information it makes alarm bells go off in my mind
How can I trust this unknown company with my credit card details?
Zebra, pronounced like “zay-bra” in Dutch
I use Thunder, and I am very happy with it generally.
I used to use (and paid for) Sync for Lemmy previously, but I had the impression bugs didn’t get fixed, so I switched away from them.
They would probably not have managed to slash the price in half with one generation.
The original Honda E was € 35.330 in 2020, which was a difficult sell given the small 170km range.
Half price would mean an electric car for ~€ 18.000
Looking at other Western manufacturers (e.g. Peugeot, Citroen, Volkswagen, Dacia) for a fair comparison, that is a stretch even today. Most EVs don’t really go below 20k, and 25k seems to be the current range for affordable EVs.
The issue is largely the cost of the battery. That cost has come down over the years, but not to the extent that Honda could have suddenly slashed the price of their EV in half.
Edit: That is not to say Honda shouldn’t have kept releasing more EVs.
I’m just pointing out that they probably would follow the same path as the other Western automakers that have pretty consistently been releasing EVs over the past decade orso.
Losing your job that late in life can be quite a problem. Not many employers want to put in the time and effort of hiring someone and getting them up to speed for their new role, only to see them retire a few years later.
“We’re made of starstuff.” - Carl Sagan
Occasionally I’ll put on the radio either in the car or at home, but it’s not very common these days.
My boyfriend listens to the radio in the car and he regularly finds new music that way.
Prices of HDDs have increased in recent months due to the AI bubble
Here in the NL we have a website called Tweakers for comparing hardware prices. They only really list webstores that sell to the Netherlands, but it could help give you a decent indication of normal prices at the moment.
If I sort by price / TB, this refurbished 6TB Seagate SAS-drive for €122 seems to be one of the best deals I can find:
https://www.redshell.nl/seagate-enterprise-capacity-35-hdd-interne-harde-schijf-6-tb-7200-rpm-128-mb-35-sas/
Given that price, €134 for a refurbished 6TB Toshiba seems like a pretty decent deal. Though I would like to add that my experience with Toshibas is that they are quite loud compared to Seagate and Western Digital. So if noise is a concern it might be worth looking for those instead.
Ranked choice voting is more relevant for elections where one winner must take all (for instance presidential elections or voting districts with only one representative) which will always suffer from not being able to represent everyone
Direct proportional representation gets around that problem by avoiding situations where one person has to “win” an election
As for the president problem, you can get around that by simply not having a president with any meaningful power. The prime minister can be appointed by the cabinet, and the head of state (be it king or president) can be a purely ceremonial role.
Once again, the Onion has predicted the news before it happens…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNixDlRoMvA