Why should the EU not see an expansive authoritarian superpower as an adversary, or, at the very least, a real threat to its continued existence and sovereignty?
China needs Europe to support its export economy because there will never be enough domestic demand to prevent a deflationary spiral. Europe is a rational actor China can expect to act rationally in trade, and Europe can benefit from that.
The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.
> In 1995, China accounted for less than five percent of global manufacturing output. By 2010, that number had jumped to around a quarter, and today it stands at nearly a third.
> The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.
This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline.
https://www.shell.com/news-and-insights/our-stories/lng-cana... ("July 1, 2025: With production underway in Kitimat on Canada’s west coast, LNG Canada connects natural gas from British Columbia to Asian markets. Explore the project with our interactive map, read about the extraordinary engineering behind LNG Canada, and watch the videos to learn more about LNG.")
China is not exporting LNG at all, did you mean Canada?
The US is still a very large and attractive market for European exporters, and it would at the very least substantially least hurt Europeans if they had to fully substitute the US with China as a trade partner.
Apologies if my phrasing was not concise. The idea I intended to communication was "Europe can get all the LNG they want from Canada, and anything manufactured from China."
To your point about the US market, I would put forth the size of China, India, and Africa as import markets for Europe. The population of the US is ~343M, ~745M is Europe, while that of China, India, and Africa combined is ~4.6B (as of this comment, rough proxy for total addressable markets). Admittedly the latter are at various stages of development, but I am of a strong opinion they can replace the US considering demographics, proximity, rate of development and purchasing power increasing, etc. International equities have already outperformed the S&P500 this year, so this may happen faster than we might expect. China is not as quite as wealthy as the US, but India and Africa are the last of global emerging markets and where the economic growth future of the world is. Do you configure and target your export economy for growing markets? Or declining markets?
They're on the opposite end of the world, our interests do not conflict, but even overlap (i.e. they're the only other major power taking climate change seriously)
Any half-decent person is going to keep on breathing. It's one of the basic prerequisites of bringing some value to society. Not breathing is selfish and completely misses the point of life. If you're going to exist, then breathe; it's really as simple as that.
Then you care about a different kind of freedom than GPL proponents: licensing freedom, rather than user freedom, basically. There is no 'true freedom', as it comes down to the point of view; no licence will give you both at the same time.
User freedom isn't really that though. It's corporate goodwill. If a company uses GPL code and doesn't release it what is the enforcement mechanism? A lengthy court proceeding that can go either way and will likely bankrupt the less wealthy party. Or if they are in another country they can tell you to piss off and you have no way of getting the code. We see this all the time with China. In essence, they are the same but one allows you ask nicely and hope that the corporation is feeling generous.
You might want to check out MNT Research if you haven’t yet. They make repairable laptops, too, but they also release their work as free software and open hardware.
My recent experience with social media has been very different. These days I'm mostly active on the Fediverse, and in contrast to the News, my timeline doesn’t feel like a model of the world at all. All I see are little snippets. Many individuals are sharing their feelings, creations, thoughts, or seeking advice. The posts don’t feel like a collage meant to capture the state of society as a whole, but rather as windows into different people’s lives.
I don’t think that’s how everyone feels on the Fediverse; browsing the federated timeline or viewing the public posts on some large instance doesn’t feel much different from the other big sites. But your own experience on your personal timeline is truly your own, and you decide what to make of it. I keep seeing personal snippets because I choose to follow people who post a lot of personal snippets that I’m interested in seeing. I get a relatively low amount of global politics and polarising topics because I seldom follow people who talk about those a lot. I quite literally get what I ask for—no less and no more.
At the end of the day, I think the key is understanding your network and adjusting your expectations. Following someone means you’ll be seeing their posts. So if you don’t want someone’s posts on your timeline, for whatever reason, just don’t follow them. Problem solved, easy as. (Then again, I imagine getting to see only the content you want to see might be more difficult on the more corporate networks, so if that’s the case, you might need a better social network.)
… and perhaps I should add that seeing only what you want to see won’t help you avoiding a simplified view of the world if such a view ultimately is what you want to see. Being in charge of your social experience is only useful if you're in charge of yourself. If you're not, you might need to change that before any social network, no matter how user-friendly, will be able to benefit you.
If you have customized your fediverse experience to avoid big social themes, you are arguably using it wrong. Several major founding figures of the fediverse have stated that they want trans and disabled advocacy to always remain central in the fediverse even as it grows larger. If people are able to use the fediverse without seeing issues of political concern to their community, then that represents a failure or abuse of what they created.
I think that’s a stretch. They may have hoped for the Fediverse to be used a certain way and/or by a certain kind of people, but the network itself and the design thereof don’t really reflect, support or enforce this in any way. (I also haven’t read any statements by said figures on this, although I know some of them do care about these topics a lot.)
In practice, there is no authority nor built-in mechanism to decide what people should be talking about on the Fediverse. Everyone is free and even encouraged to host their own server and make it about whatever they like. I’ve seen guides explain how federation works and encourage newbies to pick a server they like and try to have a fun experience, but I’ve never seen them present specific topics as inherent to the Fediverse, much less mandatory. And that doesn’t feel like abuse, but the way it’s intended to work, and has been advertised to work from as far as I can remember. And frankly, I find it disturbing to think it should work any other way.
How do more sugar and syrup constitute a better deal? Shouldn’t the better formula result in a good-tasting drink using less sugar and syrup, i.e. what Austria seems to have?
The drink is delivered as syrup and water. I can always add more water to a bottle of coke, but I can't add more syrup. Unless I boil off part of the coke, I suppose, but then I'll just have less of it.
Are we talking about the kind of syrup that’s essentially just a solution of sugar, or the kind of syrup with other flavourful ingredients? I was mostly concerned with the sugar, since it’s detrimental to our health (and following your argument, you can always add more sugar if you will it); it’s really the flavour that’s the bread and butter of the drink.
I’m not sure if you're being ironic or not, since ‘regional taste preferences’ is a somewhat famous excuse brands frequently use to justify selling inferior-quality products (think less meat, less nuts, less fruit, more unhealthy filler) under the same name in different parts of Europe. I recall it being a major topic in our elections several years back, but I don't think anyone has really done anything about it.
It's something that does certainly happen, but regional preferences are just as real. For instance, the amount of juice in Fanta across Europe doesn't seem to correlate with wealth at all. Even the sugar contents vary wildly, even across eastern Europe.
For Nutella specifically, there are also differences in composition between the more wealthy European nations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXp2MTWNoZ4 According to that report, the texture is different to accommodate for the differences in common bread types, which makes a lot of sense IMO.
With how little actual hazelnut goes into a jar of Nutella compared to palm oil and sugar that make up most of the spread, I doubt Ferrero is saving a lot of money selling inferior product to poorer countries. With expensive goods such as meat and "pretty" vegetables, there's more money to be made.
'inferior-quality products' is something companies resort to to keep their profits higher, saying the purchasing power, and local nutrition standards differ between different markets.I bought instant coffee from a shop and later regret it that because the taste was very bad, and noticed that the label displayed an Eastern European language.The same happened before with children foods and many other products.Now there is a very interesting thing happening in Turkey with their dire financial situation, you could be any digital product cheaper than anywhere else, from ms office to Netflix subscription to even iPhone. That is surely readjustments for purchasing power.
Coming from soviet union trash a lot of foreign products were god sent. Of course for many point of reference was farmers markets so decline must’ve been apparent too.
In my circles such mutterings would be seem as populism and woowoo crap.
Can you elaborate what you mean by pushover license?
Ladybird uses bsd-2 license which is OSI, I mean its not fsf/copyleft but permissive which should be better sometimes for things like embedding etc. no?
It looks like servo uses mozilla public license 2, can you please explain me the difference and why you think one is pushover and other is not?
‘Pushover’ is another term for ‘permissive’. It emphasises the fact that, unlike copyleft licences, pushover licences don’t make an attempt to protect the freedoms they grant their users. In other words, they allow anyone to make and distribute derivative works without preserving any of the freedoms which came with the original work.
As far as I can see, for an author of derivative work, permissive licences are only really preferable when you either can’t or don’t want to grant or preserve the freedoms which a copyleft licence would require you to grant and preserve. (Which, to be fair, may often be the case.) From a different point of view, copyleft can be seen as better for embedding, since it means that Free Software in question will only be used to make more Free Software.
The MPL is a copyleft licence, but it’s known as a ‘weak copyleft’ licence. That means it preserves only the freedom of the program it initially covers; any changes made directly to that program can only be distributed as Free Software, but the program itself may be used and distributed as part of a larger work, which as a whole does not have to be Free. (This is in contrast to ‘strong copyleft’ licences like the GPL, which require the entire larger work to be Free.)
Weak copyleft is a kind of compromise which lets you e.g. embed a piece of software without having to grant all your users freedom to use, share and modify your entire work, but you're still required to grant them those freedoms in regard to the piece you’re embedding.
