• 26 Posts
  • 376 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Craft, pure craft, is what makes a Tarantino movie. Especially strong when it comes to dialogue and framing it.

    Tarantino is about as special as Villeneuve is special – but not in the same way. They both have their specialities where they’re extraordinary, and in other aspects they’re only rock solid.

    Not liking/enjoying a movie is fine, but it doesn’t really say anything about how good the movie is, it just might not have been for you. Maybe watch a scene analysis and even if the movie still doesn’t do it for you, you can appreciate the skill with which it’s done.



  • There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.

    In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.


  • All minimums taken together only sum up to 497025. The million signatures is the actual hurdle, any campaign that is not horribly lopsided should easily get the seven countries.

    The idea is that if your initiative is excessively national it has no business being a EU initiative.

    A strange wibble is that small countries need more signatures per capita to count towards the minimum because they have more MEPs per capita. Which brings me to putain de merde où es-tu France.




  • Nope. Aldi was created by brothers who, after pioneering the discounter model and being quite successful with their stores, broke apart their empire over a disagreement – which was whether selling cigarettes was a good idea, in particular whether the theft rate would be too high. Completely fucking un-dramatic (very much in contrast to Puma/Adidas which is a feud that’s still going on), they always cooperated a lot in procurement etc, and definitely don’t compete with each other: The world is split into Aldi North and Aldi South, referring to their territories in Germany. The only other country where both are present is in the US because Aldi North bought Trader Joes, ages ago, it’s the only country where they’re technically competing but not really because they’re serving quite different market segments. Aldi South (under the Aldi brand) has been in the US for ages too, btw, but mostly kept a low profile. They both like to grow organically, no flashy fancy billion buck investments. In Aldi North stores at least in Germany Trader Joe’s is the store brand for nuts, dried fruits etc.

    The two Albrechts got into the business because their father, a learned baker, got ill with baker’s asthma and turned to bread trading instead, they expanded the product range of the business, after the war focussed heavily on high throughput on low margins and opened more locations, then introduced the supermarket model in Germany. Even in Germany it took some people quite a while that their quality was never shabby, on the contrary, but combine their low prices with the back then right-out warehouse atmosphere and you definitely didn’t see rich people there.

    Lidl is wholly separate and not founded by brothers. It technically predates Aldi and also the brother’s expansion before the split and rebrand (they were known as Albrecht Discount before), it was a small fruit trader which then got bought by Joseph Schwarz, then turned into a larger but still regional fruit trader. Lidl stores as we know them only go back to the 1970s when Dieter, son of Joseph, was already at the helm.

    Lidl is much more common outside of Germany than inside, though, long story short establishing yourself as a hard discounter in a market where Aldi is already present is hard. They did make Aldi turn away from the warehouse aesthetic, though, yes you can have nice signage and lighting and stiff be efficient.




  • She’s a good science communicator in her specialised area from a particular POV (No, Sabine, physics, also theoretical physics, has made progress in the last 50 years) but past that she neither has a clue nor the discipline to work towards having a clue, or the sense to work with people who have a clue.

    She lacks that one crucial virtue of a scientist: Considering herself to be clueless. And as a science communicator you need to be a good scientist – not in pedigree of your degree, but approach to knowledge.


  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

    In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

    Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

    If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.





  • The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

    The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

    None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

    Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.


  • Organisation is actually pretty good at the battalion level, there’s plenty of EU Battlegroups integrating neighbouring armies on a deep level – or at least making them acquainted with each other. Gotta know the MRE exchange rates. And that’s not counting stuff that you mentioned, like the Dutch land army being rolled into German C&C or the German/French brigade.

    What’s lacking are strategic C&C capabilities on the EU level: There’s just too few of them, there should be more cooperation on that level (member states have those kinds of capabilities) which is exactly what the “EU army” thing is about, operationally. Although it has to be said that push come to shove, with so many EU members in NATO, everyone would just re-assign everything NATO to the EU should the NATO fall flat. Armies have scrambled into fighting stances from worse positions.

    Macron could lead Europe, yes, but first he has to manage to lead France.




  • The French want to expand the programme precisely because it is expensive: Under French doctrine you don’t really need more nukes to defend the continent vs. the country, but the costs can be shared.

    Also there’s no way to get Germany to stop buying F35s without switching Germany’s nuclear sharing over from the US to France: Eurofighters aren’t certified for US nukes due to industrial espionage concerns. France wants to extend their doctrine of strategic autonomy to the whole of Europe, again, costs, which is why they regularly get pissy when other member states buy US equipment.