EU Commission and Council are indeed not elected directly, but the Parliement who propose and vote laws is. The way it works is similar to a parlementary republic (where coalitions of parties that includes >50% of MEPs make a governement together).

It’s as democratic as democratic gets on that scale.

Last I heard about this, they did not fully commit on a singular technical solution yet. The closest I know being NGI Taler (FLOSS, created by a Swiss company, and plans a lauch in Euro this year), but it doesn’t support offline payments yet, unlike what the digital euro’s brochures say.

Hopefully this will be resolved, but I hear this is a very polarized subject since it would remove a lot of powers from the banks (by concentrating it around the ECB), and they are lobying heavily against it, and the right wing is listening.

Supply chains are globalized. It just needs one step to be performed in the US (e.g to protect critical IP) for the tarrifs to be applied. Your comment prompted me to do a bit of research on Nvidia’s supply chain, and here is what little I could find, a non-exhaustive list of suppliers.

You’re right, it doesn’t seem like they have parts done in US (mostly Taiwan, China, and Thailand), which should mean they are somewhat safe drom this. But depending on the reseller you buy from, if their distribution network goes through the US, you might still get those tarrifs applied back to you (even if you don’t live there).

Is it fully manufactured in China, or is the final assembly done in Japan/somewhere else? Because that would change the tarrif.

20 percent on goods from the European Union, 25 percent on South Korean imports.

Bit higher than expected, but not wholly unexpected either.

34 percent on Chinese goods, 32 percent on Taiwanese imports

Oof. That will tank the tech manufacturing industry. GPU card price will shoot through the roof.

46 percent on Japanese products

Holy shit! What did Japan do to deserve freaking 50% tarrifs? I knew there was some bad blood in the 80s and 90s but is it still the case now?

I hope Nintendo stocked those Switch 2s everywhere ahead of time or it’s gonna be rough.

*article is two years old. I don’t see much point in republishing it now, unless there is something new aboit this affair?

Doesn’t change the fact that many parents do and it would be a massive voter issue if a law for picking between winter/summer time were to be proposed.

It’s not about ‘Google’ vs ‘the other search engines’. It’s about transparency. You’ve probably read some news about how AI crawlers have been destroying infrastrucure and half the time does NOT declare themselves as crawlers in their UA.

Can confirm that nealy 90% (read hundreds of thousands) of daily visits to several of my websites are made by crawlers from datacenters and I HATE not knowing whose who. Because when I don’t know, I block and report. Website owners already have enough between AI, Page Rankings, and Research Agencies who all exploit free infra for their own business.

Do I make exceptions for Search Engine crawlers? Yeah, I do. I’ve seen Google, Bing, and Mojeek, but weirdly enough, never Brave. Now I know why. And frankly, if they can’t be bothered to be transparent about their crawlings, then I won’t be bothered to make exceptions for them. They’re freeloading just as much as the rest. If they act like shady chinese crawlers, then they have no right to go pikachu face when they’re treated like one.