They also often want growth beyond what the original market niche supports.

Agreed, the correct way to handle yellow cake is with special napkins

Does this actually matter that much? I have a pixel 6a that has the visor style camera bump and with a case on it just disappears.

And even if I’d use the phone without case Google’s bar shaped design still allows the phone to lay stable on a surface without wobble, just at a slight angle instead of flat. Which I guess would be an issue with other designs.

That definitely sounds like something we’d do. I think I read somewhere that the difficulty with painting blades is that (especially with dark colors) it leads to them heating up more from sun exposure making differences in thermal expansion a potential issue.

If it’s am unsolvable issue particularly with larger birds, then I guess it can’t be helped. But to me it seems like this is one of those times where we overemphasize easily countable direct environmental impacts, whereas the diffuse statistical damages of fossil based power plants get ignored.

It might be next to impossible to calculate the impact one individual coal power plant has and how many birds (and other animals) die due to its carbon footprint. But that doesn’t mean those aren’t happening just because they don’t die from flying against the building.

On that note they should also finally stop using it. If every politician, institution and public broadcaster would stop using Twitter and start using mastodon it would easily gain enough momentum to replace it as the default platform in Europe.

Solar panels and batteries in a shit ton of homes because of energy prices and older government incentives

Yeah, the rise of balcony and roof solar modules here in Germany probably helps us in a similar way.

10000L rain water tanks because government regulations now require rainwater hookups for future toilers and washing machines plus water is expensive here

That on the other hand i don’t think is common and especially in cities i don’t think that’s a thing anywhere. So imo drinking water probably remains the most serious bottleneck, if it were ever compromised.

But don’t you still have some staple stuff like noodles, rice, frozen or canned foods and so on in your house? Combined with the fact that you might buy food in larger quantities (e.g. not just 1 apple, but 6 or maybe 1kg), i’d also imagine that most people have enough food for 3 days in their house.

The imo more interesting thing would be fresh water.

I was under the impression that this was one of their demands at some point, but it didn’t make it into the final compromise.

Von den zu berücksichtigenden Einnahmen aus Krediten ist der Betrag abzuziehen, um den die Verteidigungsausgaben, die Ausgaben des Bundes für den Zivil- und Bevölkerungsschutz sowie für die Nachrichtendienste, für den Schutz der informationstechnischen Systeme und für die Hilfe für völkerrechtswidrig angegriffene Staaten 1 vom Hundert im Verhältnis zum nominalen Bruttoinlandsprodukt übersteigen [emphasis mine]

Source (german), pdf warning. This is the official text.

Additionally it’s not even purely defense spending that they can exclude, but also some related costs. Making even more space in the regular budget for unrelated expenses.

You are right that low orbit satellites aren’t in a stable orbit and eventually fail in a matter of years. I think it very much depends on what the intended useage would be for a european constellation:

• How much coverage do we want? Global or just the continent+ a bit more?

• Would it just be for critical systems or are we also looking for economic independence?

• What about bandwith and latency, how much do those matter?

All that would influence how many satellites are neccesarry and which orbits would be suitable. And also to what degree cost efficiency would play a role.

I’m not quite that optimistic.

Yes, things are happening, but imo these are still mostly reactions to external pressures. There is no structural change or politicians that have the quality to properly lead.

As an example here in Germany we recently approved a huge amount of new debt for investments in infrastructure and weapons. But the leaked contract negotiations for the coalition of our next government includes tax gifts in the form of lower tax rates for eating out, ev subsidies for the car industry, and higher pension benefits for mothers payed out of the regular budget (while we already have a unsustainable pension system).

Also in the above mentioned decision to take on new debt we decided that defense spending above 1% of GDP doesn’t count towards the regular budget, but can be financed through debt separately. Which on the one hand might be nice, since right now we might invest more. But imo setting the limit at 1% kind of shows how much we actually value it. We could have set it higher and committed to sustained change, but this way leaves more room open in the regular budget for the gifts mentioned above.

I find it’s at least theoretically in the right spot for mass adoption. Something like a valve index or bigscreen vr paired with a strong gaming PC would of course offer a much better experience. But thats just not realistic for the masses.

Also Apple failed with their expensive premium device (although I guess it was always kind of a dev device sold to the masses).

It’s certainly debatable, but at least for the price it offers a lot imo.

The quest exclusives are of course frustrating, but it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective, considering Meta is trying to position themselves as the VR platform (similar to say android with smartphones).

If you don’t mind Meta/Facebook, then the oculus quest headsets are also very affordable hardware and deliver a good experience. I think the issue lies with content.

Smartphones or handhelds like the steam deck with flat screens could use plenty of already existing content made for screens. With VR you want different content that is made specifically for it. There is a decent amount of games (but still much fewer than for other devices), but honestly not that much more.

Additionally it also can only really be used at home, where most already have other devices.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. But imo if there were more genuine unique productivity tasks and experiences available through VR, we would see more adoption.

The one issue that i see is that in a way (at least some) countries are on both the buyer and seller side. As long as there is still drive to favor domestic companies and keep know-how/capabilities rather than sharing them.

That’s what usually hinders joint development projects e.g. between France and Germany. Both want as large of a share as possible to go to their own industry. Or i think it is partially why Poland went with korean tanks, rather than leopards (but i might remember this one wrong).

To me it seems like this will particularly be interesting to smaller countries without large weapon manufacturers, but maybe it could also help us here in Germany to finally fix our terrible procurement system.

Watched Gattaca (1997) the other day and really enjoyed it. Sci-fi movie that imo aged quite well and i somehow hadn’t seen until now.

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