My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

It’s what Amazon, Walmart, etc want it to mean. They want the profits, but none of the responsibility that comes with selling goods. So they did some legal linguistic gymnastics and thus according to them, stuff that is bought in the Amazon store, with a % markup by Amazon, with payment to Amazon, and with shipping by Amazon, is somehow not Amazon’s responsibility.

The USA government had gone after the large platforms for selling defective/dangerous goods, but that was in 2024 under Biden, so I expect that investigation to be dead by now. The EU is still going ahead though: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-make-temu-shein-amazon-liable-unsafe-goods-ft-reports-2025-02-01/

I’d say stupid. I live in a country where most houses are brick walls + concrete floors, and smoke detectors are still common + since a few years also mandated by the government.

The government mandate came after it was found that of the dozens of people that died every year from house fires, 95% suffocated in their sleep.

Some numbers for my region: ~7m population, 70% of houses had smoke detection before the mandate, on average 63 died per year from house fires.

Some incorrect approximative math: Lets assume that the amount of dead could have been halved if those 30% houses had 2 smoke detectors per person (lets say 2 cheap ones for 2x20 euros per 10 years): 7m x 0.3 x 2 x 20€ /10 /63 x2 = a cost of 267€ per year per life saved. Imo that’s a no brainer, it’d be stupid to not invest in smoke detection.

Not the same in all western countries. Afaik it was tradition in most countries for the wife to take the husband’s surname, except in Italy and Spain. Regular people also often didn’t have surnames, instead they were “son of …” or named after their or their parents’ occupation. Edit with more musings: surnames could also be their place of birth, their farm, … Names which would then get made hereditary in the early 19th century, but many people still kept using the old changing forms for generations longer. During his life, my great grandfather wasn’t known by his official surname in his village, only the state called him that.

In the last few decades, most western countries (afaik again) are allowing the woman to chose if see wants to change her surname or not. Or to use both surnames. They also allow the man to change his name to that of his wife. Equality.

And that recent development is also why it’s not a problem for same sex marriage. Back when the wife had to take the husband’s name, same sex marriage wasn’t allowed so there was no naming problem. Countries that allow official same sex marriages are typically also countries that will already have equality for surnames.

The surface of the salt grains reacts with what is in the air (moisture, smells), slowly changing the surface over time, and since it’s that surface that touches our taste buts most, the taste of the salt will be different.

Salts are also often not pure sodium, but have added elements that give it a distinct taste and aroma. That original taste/aroma will be lost over time, because aroma = smell = particles flying away in the air. Long exposure to a strong smell will also cause the salt to acquire that different smell as part of it’s new aroma.

Starting from larger grains and grinding them shortly before usage, would thus give salt that smells and tastes more like it’s fresh from the salt factory. But I do wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference in a blind test.

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.