While I do agree that HP is a very scummy + awful company, their pricing system is not worse than that of many other companies. Many many companies use an inflated listed price system in combination with very large discounts, often fixed discounts per customer.

There’s several benefits to this. One of the biggest is that it allows their vendors to give nice “discounts” to entice ignorant customers. Ignorant people are more likely to buy a $2000 computer with 50% discount than a $1000 with 0% discount. And occasionally someone will come along and be scammed out of paying full listed price.

Inflating the list price is just very common and 50% is not even one of the worst offenders, just look at American health insurance prices for a much more egregious example. Construction building suppliers also systematically use it and “discounts” of 40 to 70% are common.

Russia wouldn’t even have had to capitulate, a white peace and some empty diplomatic gestures from Ukraine (like signing a piece of paper in which they promise to “denazify”), would have been enough to get a peace that Russia can sell at home. The classic power play of “we’re going home because we accomplished all objectives, we’re definitely not running away with our tail between our legs”. But Putin would rather see hundreds of thousands of Russians die, just so he can pretend one more year to never be wrong about anything.

Little issues should not be ignored because there exists a big other issue. There will always be a bigger issue, so with that reasoning, the right time to do something about the little issue, would be never.

Working on smaller issues also doesn’t stop anyone from working on the bigger issues, processes like this can happen in parallel.

From what I remember (it’s been over a decade since I read it), the southern hemisphere has much more water than the north.

Water is a great heat battery, especially deep oceans. And there’s a gigantic mass of water in the south. So in the summer it stays cooler because that mass of water can store a lot of energy, and in the winter it stays much warmer because the oceans slowly releases the heat that they have stored.

All that water mass is essentially “dampening” the climate extremes. And since ocean water also slushes around + evaporates in much greater mass than the little water on land, heat also gets redistributed better than on land.

So in short: more water = cooler in the summer + warmer in the winter.

It wasn’t really immediately, it was only under Pooh Bear that mainland China abandoned all pretenses and went full authoritarian in Hong Kong. China seems to be doing another great leap forward, again lead by a paranoid authoritarian leader who happens to be superb at politicking, but bad at governing. It’s as if history is doomed to repeat itself.

Edit: I somehow misspelled Hong Kong.

I had never heard of Renault Duster before (nor seen one), so I looked it up. The Renault Duster is apparently a Dacia Duster with mostly cosmetic changes, for sale outside the eu, typically released later than the Dacia Duster is released in the eu. So it’s the same car, but different brand badges + cosmetics depending on the country were it’s sold. They are so similar, that I’d just call it the same car, not a copy.

Dacia sales keep increasing every year. This does show there is an increasing demand for simple cars.

I still use Foxit 9.72 on my pc (which I don’t have open ATM, so I can’t check to be certain I gave the right version). I have tried newer versions, but there always was some kind of enshittyfication change that annoyed me and I always reverted back to that last good version.

I remembered reading many years ago about large solar plants in SA and I wondered what happened to that. Apparently Zuma happened: From a world leader in renewables, to years behind, thanks to Zuma and his cronies.

https://martinplaut.com/2022/07/14/how-zuma-and-his-cronies-destroyed-plans-for-south-africas-renewable-energy-revolution/

It’s an open market, so countries can’t invent subjective regulation to block competing identical eu products from coming on their market. I’ve wondered how this price difference is sustained and I have no clear answer either.

The only thing I could think off was that Belgians (I’m Belgian) and French people are very snobistic + chauvinistic about what we eat: origin is prominently displayed on meat and dairy, so it’s probable that enough consumers are willing to pay more for perceived better quality, so that the supermarket chains keep buying local. To sustain the believe of the population in the superior quality of our local products, problems that could threaten this believe must be taken seriously.

In the Netherlands this is different: the dutch only care about the price, it’s no coincidence that the dutch invented the water chicken.

A few years ago we had our latest scandal in a Belgian slaughterhouse (there’s been many over the years): it had a bad reputation, some people went undercover and made footage (it was no where near as bad as a German slaughterhouse, but still …, could have been a lot better), the footage was published, public outrage followed, inspections followed, the slaughterhouse was temporally shut down, business was lost, expansion plans scrapped, responsibles were prosecuted and ultimately received a slap on the wrist fine.

So slaughterhouses in Belgium do have problems, but scandals have consequences that the slaughterhouse management really wants to avoid, and that’s why I believe that my chauvinistic belief in the superiority of Belgian/french products is warranted. 😁

Edit: the slaughterhouse scandal that I mentioned was about ill treatment of animals, not for hygienic reasons. About 8 years ago there was a case of a slaughterhouse failing inspections repeatedly over a 2 year period and they were shut down after failing to make improvements. The inspection takes hygienic and qc issues very seriously, but seems to have higher tolerance for animal cruelty than the general population.

It is not the settings of your enterprise, the file savings mess is 100% on Microsoft. Imo learning to work with it is pointless, since it will be entirely changed sometime in the future again when Microsoft again tries to trick more people into using these programs in order to boost their quarterly statistics.

I found an article from a more recent investigation, nothing has changed: https://m.novinite.com/articles/212929/Bulgarians+and+Romanians+Treated+as+Slaves+in+a+Slaughterhouse+in+Germany

Also lower safety, health + labor standards probably. Years ago I watched a french documentary where they had gone undercover in a large German slaughterhouse to explain the price difference with France. It was almost exclusively exploited migrant workers who were doing their work with appallingly low hygienic standards, which was then contrasted with a (more expensive) modern + much cleaner french slaughterhouse. I was not surprised when there was a string of scandals with German slaughterhouses during early covid. I will never buy German meat products, which is not much of a boycot, because I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen any for sale where I live.

I don’t think there’s an “at this point”, rather it’s something he’s always tried doing. Corrupt authoritarians/fascists constantly try to push the boundaries and once they go too far, they either go “it was a joke/accident/misunderstanding” or they double down on it. Putin doubled down the last time he went too far, I wonder what Netanyahu will do.

I’m surprised it locked up like that. About 15 years ago I was a frequent customer in a store that had these and I never encountered any problem with it, nor did I hear of anyone else encountering a malfunction while using them.

That store implemented those locks because they were the closest supermarket to a college campus. Some students were taking the carts back to their dorms and chaining them up to a tree with bicycle chains. They would also use those carts to go shopping in a nearby supermarket of another store chain.

Different continent though, so it’s probably not entirely the same technology. People like reinventing the wheel.