Apple future strategy seems to be to sell ad placements throughout their ecosystem. Very sad about that. :( I especially chose Apple because of the clean experience.
I am still waiting for a wired AirPod 4 ANC equivalent. Wired, earbud but not silicon in-ear style. Still using my normal wired headphones never switched to wireless so far but longing for an ANC version.
The companies scraping the whole internet without caring for anyone’s tos and illegally torrenting every single book ever written are now complaining about the output of their models being used for training. That is very ironic.
The german energy policy has really been an economic failure on an epic scale.
They destroyed 30+ fully functional nuclear power plants because of fear of radiation. In the last 20 year spend >500billion € to remodel the energy grid. Now subsidizing electricity with ~30billion € per year.
And the result: Carbon intensity of energy production on the same level as US and 3x the electricity price!
This is lot of nonsense. The cost is mostly due to the funding of renewables at a time when they were still very expensive. This was highly successful in bringing down cost. Despite fakenews in this direction, fossil fuel consumption did not increase in Germany and is on the decline with a corresponding reductions in CO2 emissions. According to the following link Germany 338g / kWh Co emissions, US 384g /kWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Again, this is a misleading argument. The low carbon footprint in France is the result form investments of the past, while Germany relied on coal and lignite for a long time and only started to transition to carbon-neutral renewables much latter. The result was substantial drop of CO2 emissions form the grid which will continue. You can see it over time here: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/co2_emissions/chart.ht...
No, what you are saying is a bunch of nonsense. If germany had simply kept its nuclear plants running and replaced its remaining coal with new nuclear back in 2000 instead of going with wind and solar it would have as low emissions as france by now. The decisions to go with wind and solar instead if nuclear meant keeping fossil fuels on the grid
"remaining coal",This sounds as if nuclear did produce the majority. But it never produced more than 30% of the electricity in Germany. In 2000 it was 60% fossil fuels and 30% nuclear. Renewables today produce 60% and fossil fuels are below 40% (coal only 20%). Of course, Germany could have decided to build more nuclear. It could have also decided to build renewables faster. Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked. The result is that there are now immense investments into renewables worldwide.
> Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked
Never worked? How do you explain all the countries in the world with large low carbon nuclear fleets and reasonable electricity prices? Like France, Japan, Korea, Russia, China, the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine etc? Everywhere large nuclear fleets have been built with a dozen or more reactors the per unit costs have been affordable.
None of that really matters though because when you look at the full system cost of intermittent renewables, they are an order of magnitude more expensive than the marginal cost.
DB is well known to be used as a "golden parachute" by german politicians. When they loose popularity in politics they escape by giving themselves a high payed position at state owned DB company. Problem is they have no knowledge in managing a railroad.
DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfortunately that doesn't manifest in the DB being run as the critical infrastructure that it is. I suspect that the indirections in power over the corporation that the privatized structure imposes is a key reason for why it became such a disaster.
I wonder how many times a low-effort "truthy" sounding comment like that is written without someone like you to correct them and to clarify. There's also comments here suggesting UK's privatisation fixed BR that I do not have the energy to correct anymore, so they just sit there being wrong for all to see
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders,
This is not true at all.
The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..
If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it, but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network, which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my understanding mostly built and maintained by state organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car, which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of people) can profit".
Again, having it organized as a private company adds indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds a certain more or less implicit expectation of what private companies are supposed to do. That's my main issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's the states job to provide and maintain critical infrastructure in the interest of all.
>The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason: yes.
But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or incentives.
>I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
> The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be both privatized and public according to your definition.
That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.
Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the state more often than not. I don't think their goal is actively loosing money?
Before artificial general intelligence there will be artificial general interface. One AI model will become the UI to all other services and apps. Maybe.
Many news articles have social media posts as sources. Most articles have other articles as sources. And then wikipedia takes the info from the news articles and compiles them. Now google takes all of these and creates summaries again and they have links to original sources in the ai summaries. EU Commission seems very naive and fallen out of time. They are not gonna stuff the AI revolution back into the bottle no matter how hard they try.
Relying on AI to just ‘summarize and link back’ is like expecting a blender to cook a gourmet meal - it’s technically doing something, but the nuance gets lost. Meanwhile, millions of site owners are already watching their traffic drop like ice cubes in a hot sun. The EU isn’t ‘anti-AI,’ they’re just noticing the kitchen is on fire.
