- Unfortunately you are wrong. Most scam centres are Chinese owned, though they are usually based in other countries, e.g. Myanmar or Cambodia.
There were various in depth investigations by media and law enforcement across countries, here is a US source
https://www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-exploitation-scam-cente... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/world/asia/scam-centers-m... https://apnews.com/article/asian-scam-operations-cybercime-f...
German source https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-china-clamping-down-on-scammers...
...
Etc
- I feel there is a point when all these benchmarks are meaningless. What I care about beyond decent performance is the user experience. There I have grudges with every single platform and the one thing keeping me as a paid ChatGPT subscriber is the ability to sort chats in "projects" with associated files (hello Google, please wake up to basic user-friendly organisation!)
But all of them * Lie far too often with confidence * Refuse to stick to prompts (e.g. ChatGPT to the request to number each reply for easy cross-referencing; Gemini to basic request to respond in a specific language) * Refuse to express uncertainty or nuance (i asked ChatGPT to give me certainty %s which it did for a while but then just forgot...?) * Refuse to give me short answers without fluff or follow up questions * Refuse to stop complimenting my questions or disagreements with wrong/incomplete answers * Don't quote sources consistently so I can check facts, even when I ask for it * Refuse to make clear whether they rely on original documents or an internal summary of the document, until I point out errors * ...
I also have substance gripes, but for me such basic usability points are really something all of the chatbots fail on abysmally. Stick to instructions! Stop creating walls of text for simple queries! Tell me when something is uncertain! Tell me if there's no data or info rather than making something up!
- Thanks for promoting russian propaganda (I mean the framing and source). Unfortunately tolerance has to stop with the intolerant. For anyone actually interested in the substance of why she is banned it seems rather clear and reasonable from the official EU Council decision. These decisions always end in front of the courts, so they only can list things for which they have direct evidence; presumably there is this much more - e.g. a good chance that in the background she is being funded by Russia for this work:
> Alina Lipp runs the blog “Neues aus Russland”, in which she systematically disseminates misinformation about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and delegitimises the Ukrainian government, especially with a view to manipulating German public sentiment as regards support for Ukraine.
> Furthermore, she is using her role as a war correspondent with the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine to spread Russian war propaganda. She regularly appears in troop entertainment and propaganda shows on the Russian military TV channel Zvezda.
> Thus, Alina Lipp is engaging in and supporting actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten security and stability in the Union and in a third country (Ukraine) through the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference, and through facilitating an armed conflict in a third country.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L_202...
- Do you use it regularly (20 min a day or so)? If so, how is your monthly consumption - does it beat the subscription costs for either service?
- They didn't use the EU, they put pressure on companies in other countries, notably Germany, which then did the rest.
- The funny part is that many banners are already now not required. But there has been much propaganda by adtech around it, to rule people up against tracking protections and promote their own "solutions". That's the reason you see the same 3-5 cookie banners all around the web. Already today websites that use purely technical cookies would not actually not need any banners at all.
- Just reacting to your first sentence: as a man I find it understandable that the protective laws are focused on protecting women and children as it's a simple fact of our reality that the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men, and that women and children have less physical ability to defend themselves. Yes I also want men protected (though that means mostly again from other men) but as a societal aim the women and children part clearly is a higher priority and need.
- Maps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention..
Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o
- Kuka must be one of the three biggest strategic mistake the German governments made in 30 years (the other being gas dependence/NorthStream and keeping coal running rather than investing the same funds in renewables). Really sad but irreversible as they are now fundamental to the Chinese economy and any knowledge and parents are long gone to China.
- Government intervenes to stop parent company from milking and killing this local subsidiary. Does seem like a consistent and sound decision that every government (should/would) have taken.
For me a clear YES this means a sound regulatory environment that will protect my company and me from abuse.
- While humans and the first basis of culture evolved in Africa, many of the key cultural/technological innovations happened outside Africa, notably the invention of agriculture and pastoralism which happened 3-6 times independently (modern Turkey, China (possibly twice) and South America, possibly in addition also in Iran and India).
So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey.
Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.
- I use these for various European Amazon (often cheaper to buy from the Amazon next door - and shipping is still free) and it's astonishing how bad they are. It's the new Amazon systems of vouchers (in € or %), temporary offers etc that these sites can't keep up with. I saw some products before prime day with a 20% voucher that were more expensive on prime day (10% reduced but no more voucher) but the price trackers showed them as cheapest ever.
Honestly at this point I compare rather with bol, idealo, guenstiger and tweakers and am then usually better off not buying from amazon.
- It is really surreal to see the Americans on here jump to the conclusion that prices should rise everywhere else, rather than that their prices are simply unnecessarily high as there are no proper pricing mechanisms in the US.
If you do have that view please show me some evidence that the US prices cross fund other countries rather than just pad shareholders' profits and CEO pay. No, not partisan papers (plenty of US right wing think-tank papers which confuse corporate income with actual R&D) but actual data on research subsidies per capita or a similar comparable unit.
- This theory that American prices subsidise the rest of the world has really caught on in the US but I have never seen any evidence for it.
Most common drugs are out of patent anyway, so there should be no barrier to low cost production anywhere.
Moreover the EU and China give huge funding to basic and specific research, which forms the basis of many drugs. For instance the RNA research that gave us COVID vaccines was completely European from start to finish, only production then involved American companies due to scale benefits and market access.
On the contrary where the evidence is obvious is that the US pharma companies have amazing profits (such as the few Europeans that sell at scale in the US).
My personal, unscientific, take is that the entire narrative that the US prices fund global low prices is completely unfounded and just an attempt by big pharma to get the US government on their side to break fair pricing mechanisms in other countries.
- That's the reliance on gas turbines....
- Not sure which country's perspective you are taking but you may wish to consider that the largest part of the subsidies building renewables are EU subsidies which to the largest chunk are financed by Germany which makes a contribution to the EU budget far above any other. So if you look at Spanish solar or Danish wind (not to mention anything in the East where the % contributions of EU funding are very high), a good chunk of these are actually subsidised by the EU and thus to large degree by Germany.
- I vacillate between Logseq, Obsidian and paper. Nothing really pleases me fully, though I'm just a boring office worker keeping track of thoughts, meeting notes and todos. Basically I want it to be easy to carry around and searchable (which excluded paper) but also not bound to a single platform (kind of excludes obsidian), and snappy/fast (which is my grief with Logseq).
Basically nothing works 100% but right now Logseq is the go to tool as the daily journal and tagging takes away the barrier to I just starting to write. I have an automation that opens the app whenever I unlock my phone, to as much as possible avoid distractions. The next best alternative is probably paper.
- I think your take is a bit unbalanced
1. You cannot expect a public body to take a legal conclusion with significant financial impact on the basis of a single citizen report or in reply to that report. This takes analysis, technical and legal work, etc. So your expectation that they respond to your message eith something akin to "of course, you provide evidence of a breach. I, the single case officer responding, confirm the facts are true. Thanks for telling us we will now fine them 5 billion" is a bit unreasonable.
2. I don't see how even inadequate application and a non-committal response leads to the conclusion that this is intended to (or even just allows) to entrench the Android/IOS duopoly.
Most obvious decision points were betraying the USSR and declaring war on the US (no one really had been able to print the reason, but presumably it was to get Japan to attack the soviets from the other side, which then however didn't happen). Another could have been to consolidate after the surrender/supplication of France, rather than continue attacking further.