They're laughing all the way to the bank, the US has locked Europe into so many long-term petrochem supply contracts courtesy of two energy crises, and the US have stated point-blank that the supplies (of LNG, in this case) are tied to the US-EU trade treaty plus whatever changes the US wants to make.
Same protection racket plus a foot on the brake of the EU's push to renewables.
I don't mind buying from china, as long as they're not irreplaceable essentials (like oil). Solar panels and -batteries are fine as long as they meet safety standards and don't have backdoors, and for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. And since it's electronics, any chip and any software can be investigated and taken apart by both amateur hackers and government funded (IT) security bureaus. Nothing. Unless I missed it, but I don't think something as big as that would go by quietly.
> [..] for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. [..]
Are you asserting no backdoors were found in Chinese made tech? I'm not sure how it'd happen in solar panels (which sucks, since I own a couple of these). Another thing to keep in mind is plausible deniability. If you don't patch software, it will be vulnerable, which is an issue in networked software, especially. So what I have seen happening (and I can name some examples of companies here, both Chinese and Taiwanese) where vulnerabilities are simply not patched. Sometimes, they're plain obvious.
I have seen KRACK vulnerability not getting patched. I have seen old MiFi without proper firmware updates, like ever. I have seen motherboard update software still using HTTP instead of HTTPS. And in the world of IoT, it has been a huge mess from the get-go.
Furthermore, the core network of a major telco here was maintained by Chinese engineers who were flown from China. You can probably guess the company name here.
The tactic is obviously not limited to China or Taiwan only, but it can be tackled with reproducible builds and FOSS.
Yes, but it won't matter. The state energy firms of EU countries are going heavily into debt to survive this crisis, and it'll just turn from "paying high electricity prices because oil is expensive" to "paying high energy prices to repay state debt".
I mean it'll help in the sense that energy supply will switch to renewable sources, sure. Great for the climate, hopefully, But it won't help in lowering energy cost.
And before you say "but solar panels". A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
Which state energy firms? Most countries have mostly privatized generation with just the grid in public ownership. EDF is something of an exception, but they have very different economics (and the nuclear fleet).
> "paying high energy prices to repay state debt"
The whole range of general taxation is available for that.
> A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
* making everyone to use natural gas for heating by making it much cheaper than electricity
* slowing down the EV rollout by keeping to subsidize gas and diesel
could definitely be seen as a scheme to make the fossil fuel gravy train last as long as possible.
And that's not even talking about the absolutely out there schemes that didn't succeed like hydrogen powered vehicles (with most of hydrogen coming from fossil fuels and you can theoretically switch to zero emission one but you never would have because the fossil one is always going to be cheaper because making hydrogen is difficult).
Gas for heating used to be the standard but is on its way out now. My house hasn't had a gas connection for 8 years, and many people qre switching to heat pumps and other cleaner methods of heating.
I'm going to guess if net energy use goes up, due to a glut of renewable energy, the gaps on cloudy, windless days will result in greater fossil fuel use than before.
There need to be assurances renewables are replacing fossil fuels rather than just adding capacity.
> Alas, it is exactly the intermittent renewables that create a dependency on fossil fuels.
First of all, this is an insane statement.
> Unless you have nuclear
Second of all, with nuclear most countries will still be dependent on other countries for their fuel needs. So it doesn't solve the problem discussed here at all.
US sells a lot of other things to Europe that Europe doesn't have to buy. That includes tech. I'm not looking forward to the ensuing trade war but it's not a one way street by any means.
Cheers! Yeah, it's honestly mental how fragmented it is. Every council is its own little island. On the shutting-off worry: the data is statutorily public. Councils are legally required to publish it, and I'm respecting rate limits and not hammering anyone. So far no council has objected. Touch wood this remains the case. Tbh, I think the risk is more from the platform vendors than the councils themselves. It seems Idox etc have a commercial interest in this data being awkward to access.
Except the Swiss are total arseholes about it, they won't even grant citizenship to people born there or who've lived there for twenty years and speak the language. Many want to cap total population at 10 million, we'll see what happens in June.
And twelve years ago, the Swiss voted to restrict EU FoM for itself and the backlash was instant.
Can't blame the government, this is the Swiss voting public doing their best to be dickheads.
Japan is a bunch of islands, yes it's pretty closed, but Switzerland is a land-locked village with fewer people than London and entirely dependent on trade and the movement of people and money for all they have, and barely a scrap of a language to call its own. English is super common there, probably as a way of democratically inconveniencing everyone.
No country in Europe automatically grants citizenship just because you were born there. That’s a US thing. The closest are places like France where you can get it at 18 if you were born in France and meet a few more criteria.
And because Switzerland has mandatory military service, a lot of men born in Switzerland don’t _want_ to naturalize, especially those with EU passports.
Switzerland isn’t really that much different from other EU countries when it comes to citizenship, except for the 10 year requirement. That one is on the high side.
But for some reason it gets a lot of press as a particularly difficult country to naturalize in.
More accurately it's a New World thing. Almost all (30 out of 35) of the countries that have jus soli are North or South American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
This is completely untrue, right after obtaining C permit, you can apply for citizenship since its also 10 year residency requirement. Language requirement is lowest in countries I know, written test is a joke, blindly I did it online and it was above 90% without preparing at all, threshold is around 70% IIRC. Rarely there is committee after that, most people around got it after passing test.
Of course if you have active criminal record no point doing that. If you keep going away for 6+ months often it gets reset. If you have obviously lied on your tax return thats an issue too.
I know this intimately since right now going through this proces. One american colleague is doing the same. Right now, its much easier than ie in France.
>Switzerland is a land-locked village with fewer people than <one of the biggest cities in Europe> and entirely dependent on trade and the movement of people and money for all they have, and barely a scrap of a language to call its own.
Everything in that quote has been always been true though, and my guess is that they never allowed significant numbers of migrants at any time from about 800 (i.e., after the end of migration period) until whenever they started letting in large numbers of immigrants (some time after 1990 probably) (but not large enough numbers to suit you, I gather).
Who cares about citizenship? I know Japanese expats. They don't speak Dutch and they keep their Japanese passport. They just get a permanent residence and everyone is happy.
We all know that there are two groups of foreigners: people from first world countries and the rest.
Ofcourse the Netherlands constitution says that you have to treat everyone equally but that's just hippie talk.
Don't muslim citizens and foreign residents in Switzerland enjoy more rights than in pretty much any Muslim country?
There is definitely some hostility to some aspects of Islam, aspects which seem to only recently have become central to the exercise of worship for some (the veiling of women for instance), yet this has not translated to some outright discrimination of muslims. Bosnian and Albanian immigrants for instance appear to have been integrated and/or assimilated into society.
It looks like they are proud of their country and want to keep it as is. They’ve seen what limitless immigration did to other countries and want none of it. Respect to them.
Switzerland has a fertility rate of about 1.4 and decreasing, unless they do something, there won't be much of a country left in a few generations. Solutions can involve immigration or natalism, but something has to change.
Or significantly increasing life-expectancy. Or new fertility technologies. A few generations is a long time.
The birth rates of the immigrant waves would presumably just plummet quickly anyway as they join the culture. Since that seems to have happened with all our other health problems.
I don’t know anything about Switzerland, but immigration isn’t a solution to the prospect of Japan “not having a country left in a few generations.” There might be more or fewer people living on the islands, but “Japan” will be gone either way.
Nowadays Japan’s fertility rate is higher than most of its neighbours. We are just used to pick it as an example because it started aging earlier than most other countries.
Japanese population is still over 120 million. Forecasts put it falling below 100 million at some point in the second half of this century.
Things will have to change in order to keep population stable in the long term, but the Japanese approach seems IMHO more sensible than that of other countries.
Your idea of “racism” arose in a western historical context and simply has no application to Japan. Japan didn’t bring a bunch of people to their country by force and then enslave them and deny them political rights for hundreds of years.
Nation-states not only exist, the UN recognizes their existence as a human right in the The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The UN recognizes a right of “peoples”—groups of people bound together by culture, ancestry, language, etc.—to self determination. I was born in a country named after one ethnocultural group (Thailand) and my family is from another country named after our ethnocultural group (Bangladesh). Japan is the homeland of Japanese people, just as Thailand is the homeland of Tai people, and Bangladesh is the homeland of Bengali people.
Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept and not something that God handed down to us thousands of years ago. It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand and living (presumably, based on timezone) in North America to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bengladesh).
> Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept
The desire for cultural groups to form their own communities isn’t modern, it’s ancient. What arose in the 20th century—in the aftermath of colonialism—is the global recognition that these groups have a right to form nation-states. The recognition that right was a driving force across the world in the 20th century: Pan-Arab nationalism, Indian nationalism, Bengali nationalism, etc.
> It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand … to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Because your criticism of Japan undermines the legitimacy of the existence of countries like Bangladesh as well. My uncle didn’t get shot at by Pakistanis to establish a multicultural economic zone.
> Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bangladesh)
If Japan allows immigrants into the country then mistreats them, then that’s wrong. But that’s not what this article or my post is talking about.
A lot of people would rather live in their own aged society than a slightly younger foreign one.
Emphasis on slightly younger. Fertility is declining basically everywhere. Much of the developing world is now below replacement including India and China.
'A lot of people' usually means the predominately older strata of society. Japan has been having issues with the younger generation being locked out of employment and advancement because of older generations needing to hold onto their career with a death grip and retirement ages going up.
The aged society scam can only persist as long as they can exploit the younger generation. When that collapses, the end result is either going to be leaving the elderly to die or things start collapsing in new and interesting ways
The only reason why people 'prefer' this is for the same reason 'prefer' to believe climate change doesn't exist. Eventually reality catches up.
Immigration is not a long term solution to an aged society. The societies of target countries are aging as well and not far behind.
What you advocate is to bolster the work force of a country with a fertility rate of ~1 and falling, with people from a place with a fertility rate of ~2 and falling.
Idk why people who hate women can't resist telling on themselves like this. What makes you think this line of thinking is acceptable, or even rational?
The first paragraph in the GP comment makes a lot of sense. Just today I was listening to a program on NPR about birth control in Uganda - women were complaining about their husbands want more and more children. These women in Uganda were getting their contraceptives discreetly without their husbands knowledge.
When women are empowered they choose to have less kids.
(Another example of this is closer to home. Project 2025 wants to curtail contraceptives distribution and usage with the same goal: more kids. It is the same logic - diminish women’s power have re: pregnancy in order to increase birth rate)
This is the correct reality. If there would be public vote in surrounding countries, ie mosques would be banned there too (btw those standing and having permit before the vote keep functioning).
But none of the german, french, italian etc politicians have the balls to let society decide for themselves, controversial topic or not. And people then wonder why in extremely left-leaning country like France there is high popularity for extreme right parties.
Maybe british with their one self-kneecaping brexit vote cured them, but public voting in general was never on the table.
Swiss are the most free nation globally. At least I havent hears of any on similar level. They vote responsibly, heck they have 3x the amount of immigrants per capita then next top country in Europe, but they want only people who can find work there, plus they host tons of refugees. And yes they dont want to lose their unique identity, they have enough examples around them to be wary and smart. I'd say they do their share and some more
I'm not saying you should ban mosques but when they do the whole call to prayer thing at 2am, I understand. Guessing you've never had to sleep any extended period of time near a mosque. If church bells rudely woke me up at 2am I'd understand the church banners too.
It's a numbers game as to why, not an argument being raped isn't worse. Relatively fewer people have been raped by a priest. Easily 100+x have been sent into a rage by the fucking call to prayer at 120 decibels. People tend to get more upset about things they have actually experienced.
> Except the Swiss are total arseholes about it, they won't even grant citizenship to people born there or who've lived there for twenty years and speak the language.
Japan has those issues as well, look up Zainichi Koreans
These days Zainichi Koreans are granted citizenship pretty much automatically if they request it. But some choose not to, mostly because they prefer to retain Korean citizenship instead (Japan does not allow dual citizenship).
Yes, previously they were forced to choose Japanese names to naturalize, but this has not been the case for a long time.
My German ISP supports it now, which was the limiting factor for me, and a new VPS I just bought also does, so finally I was able to create my first personal AAAA record. I am hoping that we're seeing a tipping point. Again.
I mean, the moment the American Supreme Court gave the president immunity for acts in office, they basically gave him the ability to issue a price list for doing absolutely anything.
Same protection racket plus a foot on the brake of the EU's push to renewables.
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