> EU sues Germany over water tainted by nitrate fertilizer
> The European Commission has lost patience with Germany over the high concentration of nitrate fertilizer in its ground water. Taxpayers could now end up paying hundreds of millions of euros in fines.
You're focusing on just one event (the Commission suing Germany), an event that in the grand scheme is pretty insignificant; what I'm talking about is the overall trend. I never denied this enforcement action is happening, it would be pretty silly to do so. The GP claimed that water quality levels are declining (rapidly) and that some sort of enormous change in agricultural practices is needed to stop, let alone revert that (at least, that seems to be his claim; it's a bit unclear, upon rereading, whether he meant it narrowly for just those parts of Germany and what would be required to get within the limits of the Directive). That claim is not true.
> The GP claimed that water quality levels are declining (rapidly) and that some sort of enormous change in agricultural practices is needed to stop, let alone revert that (at least, that seems to be his claim; it's a bit unclear, upon rereading, whether he meant it narrowly for just those parts of Germany and what would be required to get within the limits of the Directive).
I can only speak for my state (Schleswig-Holstein), but the government has been saying this for years, that major agricultural change is necessary.
Our overall trend has been massively down, and it’s similar in many other parts of Germany.
So, even then, it’s still the Ministry of the Environment and Agriculture vs. you.
Or you could have people use busses or other transit methods.
Yet a common criticism when that is suggested is that only the poor use public transit, and that everyone in public transit smells bad.
Which is what I’m questioning here: Self-Driving cars provide no real technological advantage over existing transit methods, and the real issues are social problems.
And we can’t solve social problems with technological solutions.
They very much do provide real technological advantage. They can be smarter than traditional public transit, allow you to be more flexible, reduce waiting times, allow you to get from A to B without changing trains / buses, get rid of stops, eliminate the last couple of hundred meters that you may have to walk today, etc.
Theoretically, you could have multiple self-driving bus operators, and price-discriminate between them. Rich people would pay more to commute in a bus with leather seats, premium coffee and fast wifi, with the added bonus of not having to breathe the same air as the poors.
> Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit.
So the Park+Ride concept. That’s already possible today, yet completely underutilized. A criticism often brought against transit is "I’d have to switch trains at some point", do you think these people would start using that now?
> They will be driving around and not be parked..
All the time? That’d be quite wasteful, considering most cars are only used for about 2h a day, during the rush hours, for the commute.
> I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app?
Why would you want to own a car if you could call a taxi at any moment with your phone with an app?
Why would you want to own a car if busses and trains come every 2-5 minutes at every stop, and you’re never more than 400m from a stop?
Reality is, as European cities show, all these "advantages" can already be gotten with public transit today. I’m not sure what self-driving cars actually improve compared to existing public transit methods. And especially because they’re using space more inefficient than existing transit methods, these advantages would have to be huge to make any tradeoff worth it.
Otherwise you could just invest in better transit, not self-driving cars.
Park+ride combines more of the drawbacks of personal vehicles and public transportation than robocab+ride would. (Initial sunk cost, always having to return to your personal vehicle instead of free roaming using whatever mode and path available, requiring the personal vehicle being operational at all times)
Also, robocab+ride could work on both ends of the commute. Where I live, "office suburbs" tend to have transit connections just as bad as actual suburbs, or worse.
Are park and rides completely underutilized? I've always lived in the cities I've lived in, but whenever I happen to pass one, they seem quite full to me.
Could you link the offer? I couldn’t find any in their VPS or Dedicated offers better than the 16$ VPS (which I then used for the 40$ and 80$ tier, too)
Simple: Seperate documents, interactivity, and programs.
If I browse the web, I usually want documents.
Sometimes I also want interactivity, like in comment forms, which could be a seperated widget which could only interact in limited ways, and only with the page and the server it connects to.
And then there would be programs, which could access even local files – but would have an installation process like browser extensions.
Giving documents access that normally just programs do is stupid, as we have seen in Word Macro-based malware, PDF-based malware, Browser-based malware (the pdf.js exploit, for example), and so on.
In theory, yes, in practice, Google can terminate the contract whenever they want – so they just would terminate the contract with the first company, regardless if the second company is actually the same legal entity.
> The whole Open Source community? Volunteer driven, donation funded projects? Non-Profit charities, mostly composed out of volunteers?
None of those are businesses. Maybe I should have clarified but I meant a business as one where employees work for an organization that derives value from their work (say $A), the organization pays the employees some form of compensation ($B), and the expectation is that the value derived by each employee is more than the compensation (i.e $A > $B).
In that model I don't see many places where ($A - $B) < $7.
Slack offers its standard plan for free if you are a non-profit org. But you need to be an org; you can’t just walk in and claim your free plan if all you have is a GitHub repo and a (even large) community.
But when a lot of tools and integrations only work with Slack, then open source projects often don’t have the time to reimplement them just for their own projects.
The network effect leads to lots of open source projects having to choose slack – which, in turn, means they end up having to pay, without having revenue.
http://www.kn-online.de/News/Aktuelle-Politik-Nachrichten/Na...
This is not happening?
The EU is suing Germany in front of the ECJ because Germany is far above the levels.
The EU Commission is literally suing Germany because our drinking water is exceeding the limits, and you say it’s not happening?
This http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-n... isn’t happening?
> EU sues Germany over water tainted by nitrate fertilizer
> The European Commission has lost patience with Germany over the high concentration of nitrate fertilizer in its ground water. Taxpayers could now end up paying hundreds of millions of euros in fines.
This? https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-ta...
This? https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-...
This? http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1453_en.htm
Every news outlet is reporting on this, and you’re saying it isn’t happening? We truly live in postfactual times.