> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.
German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.
> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?
Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?
> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.
Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).
A self inflicted wound.
Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers.
And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.
Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US).
But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.
Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.
CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.
I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper.
Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense.
I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.
So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param:
example.com/search?q=text+scam.com+text
On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams.
Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So the moment i fixed it, I allowed spammers to have their links displayed on my page.
Interesting - surely you'd have to trick Google into visiting the /search? url in order to get it indexed? I wonder if them listing all these URLs somewhere are requesting that page be crawled is enough.
Since these are very low quality results surely one of Google's 10000 engineers can tweak this away.
> surely you'd have to trick Google into visiting the /search? url in order to get it indexed
That's trivially easy. Imagine a spammer creating some random page which links to your website with that made up query parameter. Once Google indexes their page and sees the link to your page, Google's search console complains to you as the victim that this page doesn't exist. You as in the victim have no insight into where Google even found that non-existent path.
> Since these are very low quality results surely one of Google's 10000 engineers can tweak this away.
You're assuming there's still people at Google who are tasked with improving actual search results and not just the AI overview at the top. I have my doubts Google still has such people.
I messed around with our website trying url encoded hyperlinks etc but it was all escaped pretty well. I bet there's a lot of tricks out there for those with time on their hands.
Why anyone would bother creating content when Google AI summary is effectively going to steal it to intercept your click is beyond me. So the whole issue will solve it's self when google has nothing to index except endless regurgitated slop and everyone finally logs off and goes outside.
i imagine the search page echoed the search query. Then, a SEO bot automated search(s) on the site with crypto and spam keywords, which is echo'ed in the search results - said bot may have a site/page full of links to these search results to create fake pages for those keywords for SEO purposes (essentially, an exploit).
Google got smart and found out such exploits, and penalized sites that do this.
Isn't HDMI held by TV manufacturers who are looking to make some extra bucks on the side getting a utility from cables/monitors/GPUs? I don't think they would intentionally nuke this revenue stream.
Its all kinds of annoying if you’re bilingual. Youtube now autotranslates ads served in my mother tongue to English and I have not found a way to turn it off.
Society providing incentives for rich people to give money to charitable causes is good actually. An evil person doing good things for selfish reasons is still doing good things.
The real problem comes when you look up what charity actually does with the money.
It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.
Search deals with mobile OEMs and apple(preferred engine in all mobile browsers) also paying off Mozilla for a start.
Also Goog has had a first mover moat for a while before Duck came along.
I think you're right. The author is quite wrong on many aspects in my view. One of the central mistake he makes is that creating a profitable startup is mostly a matter of shipping good product i.e.
> Used to be, you had to find a customer in SO much pain that they'd settle for a point solution to their most painful problem, while you slowly built the rest of the stuff. Now, you can still do that one thing really well, but you can also quickly build a bunch of the table stakes features really fast, making it more of a no-brainer to adopt your product.
It does scale against this form of attack.
This attack propagates by injecting itself into the packages you host. If you pull only 7d after release you are infected 7d later. If your customers then also only pull 7d later they are pulling 14d after the attack has launched, giving defenders a much longer window by slowing down the propagation of the worm.
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
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