The details are much complexer than “government access to social media”, but the same issues are also applying to US social media sites. If you want to know more, google “US EU privacy shield”

You might call bullshit, it is bullshit, but sadly it is a fact. See this german article here: https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2024/02/berlin-hochschulgesetz-universitaet-gewalttaeter-sanktionen.html

What I want to say: Those cases are complex, have a lot of nuance and it is totally not ok that @[email protected] is going around and doing propaganda totally distorting the complexity of those cases.

I’m pretty sure that TikTok is already illegal here. There have been several reports that the chinese government has access to the data and that would totally be in violation of GDPR. I’m sure that you can find other violations of existing laws. So if someone wants to ban TikTok, he just has to push the responsible government agencies to do their fucking job.

You really should recheck your sources. F.e. this case here

The state of Berlin is now trying to pass a law to allow universities to exmatriculate students on “behavioural” grounds (aka political stances).

is not “behavioural grounds”, but because some students beat up a jewish student for political reasons and the university wasn’t allowed to expell them due to legal reasons.

I really don’t know why Google even bought Fitbit. They had great devices, worked great as fitness tracker, but after Googles acquisition, there is really no clear strategy for the company. They now have two similar hardware products with the Fitbit smartwatches and the Pixel watch, are not integrating them into one product line and now seem to be killing Fitbit. Which they paid 2,1 billion dollars for just 2 years ago.

German here: There are two kinds of ID, our normal ID card, which everyone has and the passport, which is rarer. We can travel to the whole Eurozone + Turkey + most of the Balkans + Switzerland + Norway with the ID card, so basically to most of Europe which is currently not at war. Many people don’t own a passport, because they can travel as much as they want through Europe.

A passport costs 70€ and you have to do the whole bureaucracy for it, take a picture and visit your local town hall. So if I want to visit the UK with my wife, it would cost us 140€ extra and we might have to take time of work to get the passport. The alternative would be, well, every other European country. France. Spain. Italy. Why go to London, when you could also go to Rome oder Paris and it’s cheaper?

Also: The UK was of course a popular destination for school trips. All pupils are learning English and therefore it kind of was a natural destination. Visit London. Go to a few museums. Visit that Shakespeare theater. Those trips are impossible now because you’ll run into serious problems with pupils without german citizenship.

The hope is that once a ceasefire is established, that this will hold and that hostilities will not commence after

I still don’t understand how this would work - everything is staying the same production wise, workers are payed poorly, unsafe conditions, but the product will cost more? And then customers will pay more for their clothings and that will be used to push other, more sustainable manufacturers?

X seems to have stopped fighting against bots. So there are less people, more bots and those bots won’t be banned as quickly as before.

This should be human usage - the user survey was done by phone.

That’s actually quite an insane chart. So the average american eats around 125kg of meat a year? France is at 83kg, Italy at 81kg and Canada at 82kg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption

Current german recommendations for healthy eating are saying that around 300 grams of meat a week are the max and Americans really seem to eat that every day.

I’m not working in the meat industry, but in the german food industry. German meat consumption has gone significantly down, but the most “feelable” effect would be that vegan and/or vegetarian options are now a must for every restaurant owner who knows what he is doing. A few years ago it was normal for restaurants to have no vegan option on the menu or for them to be kind of crappy. Now there are so many vegetarians that you will run into problems with your restaurant if your vegetarian option is crappy - because those vegetarians will complain to their family and friends and lead them into other restaurants.

(and yeah, there are still restaurants left without good options for vegetarians. Your region also might play a role - but chances are that you can find a pizza without meat on the menu that is not a Margherita)

Yeah, and don’t pretend that comparable software like Google Drive, Sharepoint or Dropbox is faster.

I can tell you a little about how Germany does this and I think the rest of the EU & France should be similar. There is a government body defining what specific foods are and if your food doesn’t match that, you can’t name it like the food in question. And that does make sense - butter has to be made from milk and not some palm oil mixed together by shady businesses and milk has to come from an animal and can’t be water & white paint.

This does make sense and really protects the consumer. It does - however - really run into problems when dealing with those vegetarian meat replacements. It would make sense to sell a “vegetarian ham”, but ham has an exact, legal definition and part of that definition is that ham has to contain meat.

Yes, cereal is bad. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s unhealthy. But what many people here are forgetting: There is a whole industry advertising cereal as a healthy breakfast (and now apparently dinner). You go into a supermarket and it is full of colourful boxes telling you what an awesome meal cereal is. Potatoes don’t have that. There is no TV ad for potatoes. And yes, cereal tastes great, because of the sugar.

The idea is even older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

If you cut off russia from the internet, you will gain nothing. Because the FSB is clever enough to operate in other countries. Go to poland. Get a few SIM cards. Start a company in Kenia as a front and use it to funnel hacker into the internet. Rent a flat in Germany and get a landline. Ukraine already raided russian desinformation centers in their own country - they just did rent a flat and brought a few hundred phones with them.

How does this work legally? The article mentions that it can’t be enforced by police. And I’m sure that it’s also not really in the power of local villages to ban checking a WhatsApp in a public park.

In a better world roads would be closed for cars which exceed the capacity of those guard rails. Just put up a sign, do some enforcement and people will start buying smaller cars when they can’t use them.