I’m not sure if buying American equipment is a good way to rid ourselves of our dependence on America.
It allows America to control our supply of spare parts and software updates, and it doesn’t bolster the European defence industry.
I’m no fan of Musk, Tesla or FSD, but this headline is quite sensationalized.
This is the video of the moment they are describing, and I would not call that “driving into oncoming traffic.” It’s driving on the wrong side of the road (which is not good), but there is no cars coming in the other direction while it is doing it.
The hobbies are photography and videography, and it depends a bit on how frugal I am being.
If I limit myself to buying new stuff? Not a whole lot. Maybe a camera body or a few lenses.
But if I shop around and get stuff second hand, then I could buy so many lenses and cameras that I’ve been meaning to try out.
Usually I do the latter
But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.
That is not entirely a fair equivalence though.
A road is built once and after that it exists. Its a matter of maintenance and upkeep to make sure the road doesnt deteriorate over time. But even if you neglect that, the road will still exist… only now with potholes.
There are many places around the world with shit roads like this.
Public transit requires staff pay, fuel costs, upkeep, etc besides the initial investment and maintenance. If that money doesn’t exist the busses don’t disappear, but there will be noone to drive them. Same for trains and other modes of transit.
So when public transit has funding issues they are more immediately noticeable than when the road authority has funding issues.
Converting that to a yearly inflation figure:
1.01512 =~ 1.196
So about 19.6% yearly, assuming it will stay at 1.5% monthly for the next year.
By Argentinian standards that is honestly not too bad
In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.
Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp
After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.
It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.
WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.
Which is entirely optional. You can install nice looking bollards that fit the scene (Noone complains about the bollards in Amsterdam looking ugly) or are integrated into other street furnishings (e.g. flower pots and planters)
So they are just openly arresting political opponents now. America is really spiraling down the drain fast.
Is that an AI image in the article? Could they really not find a stock photo of a street in Paris?
AZERTY is not really about being similar to QWERTY. It’s the French standard keyboard layout.
Similarly QWERTZ is the German standard keyboard layout.
Most (European?) countries use some variation of QWERTY with the symbols and special characters moved around to fit their respective languages better. Over here in the Netherlands we are a bit of an outlier in the sense that we use the US layout of QWERTY, but with additional modifier keys to make special characters available (It’s called US International)
There is also niche layouts like DVORAK (optimized layout for English) and BÉPO (optimized layout for French).
What is the reason you switched to AZERTY, if I may ask? I’m quite curious.
Fairphone’s current line-up almost makes me wish my current phone would break, so I’d have an excuse to upgrade.