Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)
Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.
Including 2000lb bombs, which the US Military refuses to use because the collateral damage is so massive and which Israel used in residential areas in both Gaza and Lebanon.
The useful idiots that have been going around for months defending Biden whilst he was sending Israel some of the worst conventional weapons the US has in the full knowledge that they would use them and with his own military advisors telling him how much collateral damage they cause, have a lot of blood on their hands for enabling this.
Coming from a country - Portugal - which was very Catholic not that long ago, I would say that the children of Catholic parents went through a great process of “self-reflection and criticism” and dropped Catholicism.
The religion itself is pretty much as backwards as ever.
What happened is that the number of actual practicing Catholics (you know, people who actually go to church and spend time thinking about that stuff) has fallen steeply, even if there are still many who just because they got baptized (which is something one has no choice on), get counted as religious.
Even with the Christian sects dominant in places like the US and Brazil trying to get a foothold over here, there’s nowhere the level of dominance of religion in public life there seems to be in the US. It’s funny that a country which maybe 50 or 60 years ago was, IMHO, very socially backwards compared to the US, is now more socially evolved than it.
Dutch people pay so much tax because dutch companies pay so little tax, so pretty much the entire burden of paying the costs of the State comes from the wallets of individuals (whilst companies too are owned by individuals, those rich enough have many ways of avoiding paying tax on that and a lot of the biggest owners of the companies making profits in The Netherlands - whilst paying little tax on said profits - aren’t even resident in The Netherlands).
In countries were the tax take is more evenly balanced between people and businesses, people pay less taxes for more services (The Netherlands doesn’t even have a National Health Service, only a mixed Health Insurance system).
I lived in The Netherlands over a decade ago and already back then the country already had Northern European levels of taxation with nowhere near the levels of Public Services that countries with similar individual taxation - such as the Scandinavians - had and I doubt a decade of right-wing neoliberals in government has made things any better.
That’s a wierd as hell take.
The first placed was the supposedly Center Left (Partido Socialista), the second was AD - a cohalition of the Center-Right “Partido Social Democrata” and the conservative party (to were the fascists migrated post Revolution) CDS - the third was the hard neoliberal party (Iniciativa Liberal) and the fourth was Chega.
The first 3 parties are neoliberals, curiously from softer to harder (if we ignore CDS, the junior party in AD, which is a traditional conservative party rather than neoliberal) and the 4th is towards the Fascist side of the rightwing.
The Iniciativa Liberal who got 3rd place is almost as far-right as the Chega, it’s just that they’re from the American-style ultra neoliberal side of the far-right whilst Chega is from the Fascist side, so they’re less into moralism, nationalism and statism and more into privatise everything including the National Health Service, remove all regulations and cut the top tax rates - i.e. basically replace the European style social net with the American model on steroids.
Curiously both Chega and Iniciativa Liberal grew from nothing roughly at the same time, both a few years after Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from several very wealthy Americans very openly to “expand the far-right in Europe”.
This was not at all a victory against the far right because the two far right parties, Iniciativa Liberal and Chega got more seats than ever before.
You would need to be seriously deluded to think that a party whose politics are those of the fat-cat rightwing of the American Democrat party (think Finance types and Tech Bros) in an European country like Portugal is to the left of anything but the new Fascists of Chega.
Judging by the prices in the various countries I’ve lived in, in Europe, mobile data prices are a pretty good indication of a cartel.
In my experience Germany is one of the worst (by comparison to what you quoted, I use to get unlimited 4G in the UK for £10/month some years ago) though my own country, Portugal, is even worse.
I bet there were “radio spectrum” or “mobile operator license” auctions won by a handful well connected large companies and there’s nothing in the law forcing them to open their networks…
I disagree in your theory of why.
It seems to me they’re just racists who have never stopped being racist, hence why their support for Israel is anchored on it being “the Jewish Nation”, or in other words they support any and all action of a specific nation because of the etnicity of the people who are the majority there and rule it, which is entirelly abour race and a dictionary definition “racial descriminiation”, very much the same kind of judging and acting towards other people as in the “old days”.
Humanitarians would’ve interiorized “Never again” as “never again should genocide be permitted to happen”, but instead at least the German elites seem to have chosen for their theatre of “Never again” to the most racist interpretation possible: “never again will our race go against this other specific race, and we should treat them as a good race, not a bad race”.
Their way of thinking wasn’t changed, what changed was that one specific etnicity went from the list of “untermenschen” to the list of “ubermenschen”.
Lebensraum!
Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.
The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.
Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.
I actually feel sorry for that first placed kid on the picture: he formally won but clearly feels beaten by the sheer enthusiasm of the 3rd place one.
It’s do with living in the moment vs spending your time thinking about what you did or worrying about what the future might bring, IMHO.
We become way more prone to spend our time doing things like thinking about stuff we did (and how we miss it if it was good or could’ve done it better if it was bad) and worrying about what the future can bring (and not necessarily in grand terms: somethingas simple as “I have to get a haircut” which then goes one to “when will I have the time”, then “but I need that time for X” and so on) as we grow older.
You absolutelly can still have some moments of wonder (for things as simple as how a cobweb looks with droplets of morning mist on it) but you need to be present there in mind also, not just in body, and not to not let some memory or concern rush in to take your mental attention away from the now.
I had a point in my life with a ton of anxiety and ended up learning Mindfulness (which is simply to try and not say anything to yourself in your mind, which is surprisingly hard to do for more than a few seconds) to stop the feeling (if you’re not constantly looking back to something bad or fearing for something bad in the future you don’t feel anxious about those things) and as a side effect I ended up with the habit of being more often present in the moment and that’s how you just enjoy little wonders when you come across them.
Still, it’s nowhere at the level one has as a kid.
Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.
Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.
Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.
I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)
So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.
So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.
Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.
Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.
That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.
(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.