No it’s not. It’s made very easy to vote and it has only been made easier and more people have been given the vote. That’s the whole point, so you on the one hand believe you have your say, and on the other hand the expansion of the vote was always for the purpose of drowning out the vote of intelligent, informed, smart, invested, productive people.
For every vote the most informed and well read and intelligent person has, whose family built everything there is in any democracy…every single year of your life there is one additional foreign, alien, hostile person that was just given the right to vote along with the 5 children they will have to your 1.5 to all vote against you.
That’s why the rich don’t vote, they got politicians, institutions, academics, organizations, etc. that’s our vote, we vote millions and billions of times with dollars, while importing millions of people who totally neutralize your vote and say every single time you go through that charade called voting.
I hope the charges are on the sending part, if I would have to sign up to receive letters I see some issues..
And yeah, elderly and digitalization is not always working well. Where I live the average age is ~80, and people need assistance to use the laundry machine.
The booking system for the public facilities such as laundry services is a piece of paper.
I have experience with an IB school in Europe - the kids have a special unit about clocks (analog and digital) in their math class in fourth grade. The student books have a lot of problems involving reading both types of clocks and calculating diffenreces between two clocks in hours/minutes/seconds.
Not a student in any of those countries, but speaking as a Canadian: I was taught how to read a clock in early grade school (grade 1, I believe?), and retain this ability now. I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years given that I tend to keep my phone on me much more often than before. I believe that most Canadian kids were probably taught to read a clock, but by high school when everybody has phones there's not much reason to.
> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years
Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.
What I mean by "forget" is more about losing fluency. Right now when I look at a clock, I can have the hour in around half of a second and the minute in another half a second. But I know that a) I was faster a few years ago and that b) this trend for me will likely not reverse.
Earlier this week I met a friend who teaches undergraduate courses at a Chilean university. They told me that some of their students don’t know the meaning of “counterclockwise”.
This specific plant employed less than 500 people in its heyday and never had a 'competitive edge' because it was originally built to manufacture luxury cars mostly via manual labor (specifically the doomed VW Phaeton).
It never really made sense after the Phaeton, which it was built for, comprehensively failed (expected production 20k/year, demand never went over 10k/year); it has been effectively closed before, and honestly it's kind of surprising it wasn't closed a decade ago.
I assure you, there is no more layoffs to do at any auto manufacturer that will effect the bottom line. IF that is the problem, the brands dead anyways.
I assure you that the biggest cost to VW, Ford, JLR, Renault etc is:
1. Building/investing in Chinese domestic market (IE, building plants in china to sell to their market)
2. lobbying governments to dissalow chinese branded/manufactured OEMs in western markets
3. Litigation on IP against those same chinese manufacturers they are both working with in chinese market, and preventing entry into their western market.
These problems "can be gotten around", by simply accepting this is reality. VW is doing such unfortunatley, while a company like BMW REALLY pretends "it's fine", as they have way too much cash doing nothing.
Funny, but I am not a Russian troll. I am in fact native to West Europe and have to face the consequences of this bullshit (including rising energy prices) every single day.
If we become the same shithole as the US of A, we could produce very cheap cars.
But for that goal, we have start or fuel some foreign wars, making the own population poorer and dumber every day.
At least we have a residue of normality these days.
As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
> so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away
As a Western European, I want to give you a different perspective on this. For us, everything behind the iron curtain was Soviet. Then the curtain fell and we saw all these countries like yours, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Baltic states, etc, transition into democracies. While doing that, they lifted their welfare significantly. We had no reason to think Russia wouldn't do the same (why wouldn't they?).
Plus, our neighbor Germany was not the nicest kid on the block in the past, and we also saw them transition into a normal, peace loving nation. So in the end, we had no reason to believe why Russia would stick to something that actually hurts their own lives.
It was very naive, I agree. But only recently, we realized that Russia has no intention to follow the path that central and eastern Europe took.
And yes, I'm ashamed of how little support Europe is giving. I'm sending money out of my own pocket, because I hope every bit helps.
As I understand, if Europe stopped buying Russian natural gas, it would have to buy it at much higher prices elsewhere, which would raise things like electricity cost, logistics cost, which in turn might make voters unhappy and vote out the current government. That's the weakness of EU, it's made of many countries which put their interests first and have a democratic system.
Furthermore, there are suspicious things happening, like appointing former German chancellor for a Gazprom directors board [1]. Was he appointed for his exceptional skills and expertise, or for some other reason?
For comparison, Russia has no such problems; due to centralization and localization of economy, the prices and rouble value are kept under control; due to more authoritarian style of governing, nobody complains when utility bill raises every year, and sometimes twice a year. Russia also had tax increases for couple years straight, and again, nobody complained, unlike Europeans which tend to change the government every time they become unhappy with something. And obviously, West has no means to bribe or corrupt Russian leadership or finance any political movements.
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Guess who else is very much interested in that happening.....
"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-meg...
Well, this was the case decades ago, too, just few people paid attention. The US made sure their interests are always put before Polish interests, and these were regularly reported by the US embassy in Warsaw. See e.g.:[0]
"Rozanski went on
to explain that Polish food products are viewed in the EU as
healthy and natural, and are competitive in their current
state. Use of GM seeds could threaten this perception, and
thus Poland's place in the market. When Spirnak and Embassy
Agricultural Counselor noted that such an approach would be
of great concern to the U.S. and would be contrary to EU as
well as WTO commitments, Rozanski backed off and said that
Poland must comply with EU and international commitments
(Note: Rozanski softened this message further at a subsequent
meeting that Agricultural Counselor attended)."
The bright point is, since it's more or less clear that the US basically stopped caring much about Europe militarily, the "great concern to the U.S." cited above is not that relevant. Trump basically destroyed most of the soft power the USA had over Europe.
>>I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger
As a Pole, I think the nation as a whole doesn't recognize that we are already at war. By any estimate, Russia already uses thousands of people online to post false information about both the war and Ukrainians in Poland, trying to incite hatred towards them so that Polish support for them goes down, and so far it has been working. Just go to a comment section on any news article or(if you're brave) Facebook, it's dare I say infested with brand new accounts whose entire posting history is just "get those ukrainian vermins out of this country" or the variations of. The governments office that was meant to investigate and combat this had....2 employees until very recently. Our response to this is not just inadequate, we are literally being "attacked"(not in a physical sense) by another nation and we do very little about it. And it appears to be working too - outright xenophobia and actual physical violence against Ukrainians is up on the raise in Poland, and political stance of "you know maybe Putin isn't such a bad guy" is coming out of the fringes and entering public conversation too. For a country such as Poland which has suffered first hand at the hands of Russians, this is an insane position to take.
The Netherlands (population 18 million) has an annual budget of 350 billion.
Russia is in reality a poor country.
The strategy of the Netherlands is to just keep the war going by sending money. The reality is that we're actually WINNING but some people don't want that.
I definitely hope it will, but you know, the further remote from Russia the safer and less interested they can afford to be. Because the cyber war is here, there's lots of messages with "Russia is not my enemy" on the Romanian Facebook as well. This even when Putty's goon just said they're at war with Europe.
Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
For now at least - for H.264 AVC, the patents are expired in most countries and most of the final US patents that may apply to AVC High profile will expire in the first half of 2026 [1].
Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2].
BS took over Evernote and I cancelled the subscription after a year. Their idea of value for the customer vs the price is not realistic.
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