Eu banks typically use a MasterCard or Visa partnership for their credit cards. The EU bank might issue the credit card to their customer, but the actual payment processor is an american company. If MasterCard/visa starts blocking certain payments, then there’s nothing that the EU bank can do about it.

You can know which payment processor your bank’s credit cards uses by the presence of a small logo on the front of the card. 2 overlapping red and orange circles = mastercard network.

As for car rental companies, Hertz has some wonderfully twisted logic on their Belgian site where they say that they accept debet payments from any eu bank card, as long as the card has the visa or Mastercard logo. In other words, they only accept Mastercard or Visa payments, not eu debet payments.

Public payphones in the streets and emergency phones alongside highways have also been removed (at least in my country). So yeah, our society expects us to have our own phones with us whenever we’re away from home.

It’s going to depend on your country and the stores you visit. If I wanted to, I could buy milk in a plastic bottle in most stores in Belgium. Tetra pak also exist in various sizes, 200 ml is the smallest I’ve seen and 2l the largest.

Iirc, they knew that it was stupid, their publisher forced it on them. They weren’t happy about it either.

I found an estimate of annual expenditures of 3.25 billion, without content payouts, but with engineering/legal/moderation costs. As 2024 revenue I found back 36 billion from advertising & 14.5 billion from subscriptions. Forbes had an article where Google claimed to have paid out $70bn in 2021-2023 to content creators, this number probably includes subscriptions. In those 3 years youtube had an ad revenue of 89.5 billion, but I have no number for subscriptions. These are all very opaque numbers. Based on these opaque numbers, I’d guesstimate youtube’s profit margin at 42%, which I find excessive.

$36bn ad revenue + $14.5bn subscriptions: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

$3.25bn annual expenditures: https://www.clrn.org/how-much-does-youtube-cost-to-run/

$70bn payed out to creators from 2021 to 2023: https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/youtube-70-billion-creator-payments/

Edit, how I got to my guesstimate of 42%:
36bn ad revenue in 2024. An average of 30bn ad revenue in the 3 years prior. Estimation for the subscription income in those 3 years: 30/36 x 14.5 x 3=36 billion. 73bn expenditures & 126bn income = 53bn profit. 53/126 = 42%.

This is another sign of how youtube’s story of “we’ve never made a profit” is bogus. More and more organisations are advertising on youtube, youtube is pushing the limits on the amount of advertising that viewers can stand & at the same time they’ve started paying creators less.

It looks like they’ve really started abusing their market position in the last few years: more income and less expenditure. And it’s probably no coincidence that there are no financial figures for youtube alone.

I see 3 possible reasons:
The continued existence of a free and democratic Europe could remind US citizens of what they once had and how much better they could be living, which makes the continued existence and success (fingers crossed) of the EU an existential threat to US conservatives.

Or maybe Putin + Xi consider the battle for the spite and minds of US Americans won and so they’re now moving the focus of their troll armies + proxies to the EU. If all trolls suddenly get the same new talking points, that’s not organic, that’s a strategic shift mandated from the top.

And the 3rd reason I can think of is the combination of the above, which I think is most likely. And if the authoritarians fail at making the eu fail, they’ll double down on displaying the eu countries as dystopian hellholes to convince their own population that they have it so much better.

It looks normal to me for a 1980s tv, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one. I remember it being almost unwatchable during the day with the curtains open. I suspect that the bleed comes from the digital camera capturing the crt scan lines as they are refreshing, which would be too fast for a human to see.

Edit: like the other commenter said, it’s going to be the Moire effect. https://nyanpasu64.gitlab.io/blog/crt-photography/

Why are you comparing the peak year of the usa numbers with an average rate over a longer period for the ussr? Insulting others also doesn’t help your credibility. Nothing you said disproves the assertion of the person that you’re calling a liar.

It seems like the word is eponym and eponymous is the adjective derived from eponym. So from that I think “eponymous noun” and “epynom” would thus mean the same thing.

“An eponym is a noun after which or for which someone or something is named. Adjectives derived from the word eponym include eponymous and eponymic.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eponym

Personally I’d call it buy to play with an unlimited demo and optional mtx. Back when I played it, the default stash tab wasn’t remotely enough, but after spending 20 euros I had enough tabs for all my needs and I then played several seasons without spending anything more. It’s still the best freemium model that I’ve ever encountered imo.

As a child I read Groosham Grange from Anthony Horowitz, and when I first heard a description of Harry Potter, I thought that they were describing that book from Horowitz. I can’t believe no one else noticed. But I also think that most people active in children’s literature will have an attitude of “anything that gets a child reading, is a good thing”, so they’re not that upset about poor quality being popular and they’d rather keep the positive vibe going.

I wonder if the ballroom will contain a throne and will thus actually be a throne room.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

One of the other replies said that: “1”+(2+3) is “15” in JavaScript.". So my last theory as to what was going on, was that the creator of the meme had as cell contents =“1”, 2 and 3. And then copilot used python code to sum those, not sum() which would have answered 5.

But since the answer is a black box, who really knows. This blind trust that open ai+ms expect, makes it unusable for anything that needs to be correct and verifiable. Indeed incomprehensible that they think this is a good idea. I’ll have to try finding something better on lm studio the next time that I have a math problem, thanks for that tip.

It is theft though: they are taking something that would otherwise belong to someone else (the wealth difference that would have been accumulated), and they’re keeping it for themselves. That fits the definition of theft. The method may be more indirect, but the end result is the same. Inventing euphemistic terms to describe something that can be described with a simple existing word, will only end up muddying the waters in my experience.

It’s not going away any time soon. There’s currently 2 to 3 times as many humans as what would be long term sustainable with the way that we live. That means that it’s going to be a problem for at least many decades, but more likely a few centuries. It’s definitely not yesteryears problem. And sustainability should always remain a concern, in everything that we do. Many countries (not the USA obviously) are already taking steps to be more sustainable, but it’s baby steps compared to what is needed.

To sustain the current amount of humans, we are using unsustainable methods. That makes us unsustainable as well.

Some estimates from Wikipedia: “Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on.[9][10][11] Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population often suggest substantially lower figures, between 2 and 4 billion.[12][13][14] Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion.[15] Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

I found a moment to look up that edible part that you found: "For the purposes of this part, ‘meat’ means edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, " So no, they do not define meat as the edible parts of the animals, they define meat as the edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I etc. You can’t just ignore parts of a definition.

1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 is:

“Meat” means edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8, including blood.

1.2. “Domestic ungulates” means domestic bovine (including Bubalus and Bison species), porcine, ovine and caprine animals, and domestic solipeds.

1.3. “Poultry” means farmed birds, including birds that are not considered as domestic but which are farmed as domestic animals, with the exception of ratites.

1.4. “Lagomorphs” means rabbits, hares and rodents.

1.5. “Wild game” means:

—

wild ungulates and lagomorphs, as well as other land mammals that are hunted for human consumption and are considered to be wild game under the applicable law in the Member State concerned, including mammals living in enclosed territory under conditions of freedom similar to those of wild game; and

—

wild birds that are hunted for human consumption.

1.6. “Fanned game” means farmed ratites and farmed land mammals other than those referred to in point 1.2.

1.7. “Small wild game” means wild game birds and lagomorphs living freely in the wild.

1.8. “Large wild game” means wild land mammals living freely in the wild that do not fall within the definition of small wild game.