You can easily book at big chains in the US as a foreigner despite having no credit score whatsoever so I don’t think that’s it. I guess it’s probably just that a having credit card and an id card ensure that they won’t have trouble charging you if they need to. The possibility alone is probably enough to deter most people who could be tempted to commit petty things like stealing towels.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.
> in contrast to the US, there is absolutely nothing that limits the illegitimate power grab of the EU.
I am happy to inform you that the EU actually works according to treaties which basically cover every point of a constitution and has a full set of courts of law ensuring the parliament and the European executive respect said treaties and allowing European citizens to defend their interests in case of overreach.
> European aristocrats just decided
I am happy to inform you that the European Union has a democratically elected parliament voting its laws and that the head of commission is appointed by democratically elected heads of states and commissioners are confirmed by said parliament.
If you still need help with any other basic fact about the European Union don’t hesitate to ask.
I am rather disappointed that on this kind of forum you lack systems thinking skills. You appear to lack a fundamental understanding of what a constitution is and is not and what "treaties" are. Treaties do not a Constitution make, my coping friend.
This is not meant to be an insult or a competition either, it is a caution that you are being conned and scammed if you think that the EU has anything to do with democracy, let alone the will of the people. And no, America and its people are under equal attack as the EU, even if by somewhat different methods and schemes due to the nature of our system. The very nature of self-determination is under direct assault behind the smoke and mirrors you are refusing or are unable to look past/through.
I am happy to inform you that it is always so surprising to me that you types are so quick to make excuses for and rationalize your own subversion and control over your own lives and government, your own freedom. The parliament does not make laws, only votes on it, the commission president is not exactly voted on democratically either since all those that propose them and also vote on them are also several steps removed from the voters by various means in various nations.
Take Germany and many other states (which is really what you are willingly and inexplicably relegating and subjugating yourself to), the party politics system so totally dominates you, that even the heads of state and the heads of the parties are so far removed from the citizens that even at that level it is not even really democratic, let alone at the EU commission president appointment and approval level. It's basically a Neo-aristocratic system by different methods you have not caught onto quite yet. It has never dawned on you that it is odd that somehow so many children of politicians and aristocrats somehow managed to get into the EU parliament and commission and bureaucracy? That's just a coincidence? Any representatives of the Common (as the brits still blatantly call it) are basically ineffective on a good day. The only logical conclusion a logical and rational, objective person would have to come to is that it is really all just a con job.
You do know what a con job means right? It comes from confidence trick, tricking you into having confidence into something like investing or buying something or believing you have a say in the system of the EU that dominates your life when you don't. It's just you pushing buttons that are not connected to anything!
> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be
As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.
It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.
I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.
I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.
The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.
The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.
> It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I think I understand that, it's just not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike social experiences – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.
Plus I'm lost without subtitles, even if the dialog is crystal clear!
Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun.
These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.
I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I feel like when a movie comes out now that I want to see, I am in a constant tension between dealing with a potentially rowdy or obnoxious public, or a less ideal viewing experience at home.
> the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.
The letter is the problem. The US companies are sick and completely refused to take the necessary steps to reduce their costs out of sheer hubris.
That’s Stellantis issue. American car manufacturers are irredeemable. It was a far better companies before the merger. Tavares was right. He was cutting costs which shouldn’t exist - Chrysler is an extremely ineffective company compared to PSA - and is investment strategy in electric was great. I was so happy when Tavares started talking about losing the dead weight and selling Chrysler. It’s a shame the board didn’t go with him and that he was sabotaged by the frankly incompetent management in the North American branch. The company now has an utterly stupid strategy.
Anyway, the issue in China is the GAC had control of the JV, a terrible idea of Fiat Chrysler which the company will now have to deal with. I’m still sour PSA had to merge these idiots.
> The only thing I see is that manufacturers prefer an ip stack because it's "easier" to develop for.
It is easier to develop on an ip stack.
You have great tooling and great libraries out of the box because pretty much everything uses ip nowadays.
Plus, at least part of the controllers people use for their smart home will use ip anyway. A non ip network will need a bridge.
> How is that possible when thread use an ipv6 stack over 802.15.4 while zigbee use a simpler stack also over 802.15.4?
Easy, zigbee doesn't use a simpler stack. Using the same physical layer protocol doesn't tell you anything about the rest of the stack.
It's actually pretty simple. 6LoWPAN which is what Thread uses is more efficient than the Zigbee network protocol. Packets are smaller and the routing is better. It's not particularly surprising to be honest because Thread was designed by people who knew Zigbee really well and were aiming for an improvement.
The example (ok - not exactly the definition - but close enough) is the Triangular Arbitrage in foreign exchange. This is cited in almost every textbook on explaining the topic.
The Wikipedia entry on arbitrage lists a dozen types of arbs. So while they may all be of the same "type" (buy low/sell high) there are nuances. It's like saying all cow meet is just beef: there are different cuts that taste different.
I could see it becoming very useful if on device LLM becomes a thing. That might allow storing a lot of original sources for not much additional data. We might be able to get an on device chat bot sending you to a copy of Wikipedia/reference material all stored on device and working fully offline.
If mobile phone conversations over the last 2 decades have taught me anything it's that people talk about anything but battery life and ultimately the crowd ends up doing "whatever means I don't have to put it on the charger twice a day". Especially when the base iPhone SE already has enough storage to fit more text than one could read in their life anyways.
The UK complained at length about the EU for decades including educated people so much so that they decided to leave and are now out.
Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.
I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.
Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.
The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.
We cannot know what really happened, but we can look at the end result. Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade. Britain has worse trade agreements than before joining the EU.
This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.
This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.
EU is much more than a trading union, to these people EU represents giving up on the sovereignity of your nation. I have not read that anybody would be opposed to trading. They were and are opposed to giving up on sovereignity, and against the laws passed as a consequence of that, but not against trading with other EU countries.
There are other trading unions and agreements that are possible besides EU, and it seems like EU has prevented UK from re-establishing the trading unions and agreements it had prior to joining the EU.
We can only speculate why, but it seems plausible and rational that EU is doing this as kind of a punishment and warning to other nations considering leaving the EU. UK benefits more from these agreements, while EU benefits less from these agreements.
On the other hand, EU is under an existential threat, and will disintegrate if other nations follow Brexit. So it is kind of rational (albeit only for the short term) for the EU leaders to think that EU benefits from preventing these agreements from happening if it prevents or hinders the disintegration.
