> I think this is one important reason that more and more emails are just links to some website with the information on it (often with a login required as well).
That's an unfortunate requirement these days.
For one, in Europe concerns around GDPR: e-mail is not guaranteed (!) to be encrypted or protected against modification in transit so it might get snooped up on its way, which makes it a no-go for sensitive stuff such as healthcare information or other highly protected classes of PII, unless PDF encryption or other ways of encryption are used... but these have the issue that UX around many of them is horrible. A link to a portal however? Easy, and provides automatically the guarantee that the other person is who they claim to be.
The second problem is deliverability: more than enough email providers still have laughably low limits (sometimes < 3MB), virus scanners don't like PDFs or ZIPs that they can't read (because they don't know the password, obviously), and on top of that come the usual anti-spam concerns.
IMHO, the best way to go would be an extra header field, think like "X-External-Attachments: https://foo.com/<uuid>.pdf <hash-alg> <hash-value>"... this could be used by MUAs to prompt the user if they wish to download and store the file, provide cryptographic checks of the file, and sidestep the issue of dumbass middleboxes yeeting password-protected files, as the files can be scanned on the endpoint side.
I hate these EU requirements. They do nothing to help real users, and really make everything worse. Like, is it helpful that every single website now has an added banner that we have to click, but which still nobody reads and doesn't really help anything? All to avoid cookies, which are not really the source of the problem these laws were meant to address? ARRRGHHH!
As far as the file size - does that critically important message need to be embedded in a 10MB PDF? Maybe we should go back to 50k limits and force them to put that one-liner in plain text in the email. ARRRGHHH!
> And density of European cities is still nowhere near what people have in East Asia
And thankfully, because of that our suicide rates are lower than in East Asia.
People aren't chicken and hell even poultry will show signs of aggression, depression and other mental health conditions when cramped in too tight conditions.
> Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.
If it's building insurance hikes, for fucks sake it should not be allowed to roll these over to the renters - they have had zero say in shoddy construction, the developers should be the ones held liable.
They should, but they’re not and the government appears unwilling to do anything about it.
Hell, my building recently lost it’s fire safety certificate because one guy decided to scam the system which has caused a ton of knock-on impact for owners looking to move out.
ICAO compliant ID cards (aka passports) and many national ID cards already are smartcards with powerful crypto processors.
Hand out certificates to porn, gambling or whatever sites, that allow requesting the age of a person from the ID card, have the user touch their ID card with their phone to sign a challenge with its key (and certificate signed by the government), that's it.
Government doesn't know what porn site you visited, and porn site only gets the age.
That is true but there’s 3.7 billion years of evolutionary “design” to make self replicating, self fueling animals to use that brain. There’s no AI within foreseeable future capable of that. One might look at brains as a side effect of evolution of the self replicating, self fueling bits.
You absolutely can because some negative aspects are already cropping up - services capitulating before AI training scraper bots, children being extorted by schoolmates for AI-"nudified" pictures, lawyers submitting AI-generated filings full of hallucinations... that is something that warrants urgent regulatory attention.
Actual customer support by humans being replaced by AI is also something that warrants at least investigations - if not for the protection of one of the last classes of low-skill employment, mismanagement of support has been a thing for so long, "submit your complaint on Hacker News" is a meme.
> The main reason TikTok is being targeted is because it doesn't silence pro-Palestinian perspectives on the conflict.
First of all, TikTok was being in the crosshairs ever before Hamas decided to slaughter and take hostage civilians on Oct 7th.
Second, why is it always the pro-Palestine crowd that acts like their issue is the most important thing in the world, completely de-railing any debate? Seriously, no other geopolitical conflict has so many people injecting it into any debate they can find.
The entire identity of being pro-Palestinian is one of resistance to power, so it's natural they would view all issues through that lens. The only form of activism for that movement is posting about it online, so it makes sense that it would seem to infest everything.
The same people who continue to make excuses for and rationalize the ongoing genocide are in charge in the USA in the political and business sphere. All dissent will be crushed until morale improves.
Because if Hamas isn’t victimizing themselves as hard as possible, everyone will remember that they abducted, raped, and maimed 1500 people at a concert. And then refused to apologize. And took hostages. And still have the hostages.
I guess the closest analog is the rape of Nanking? I don’t think Japan ever truly apologized or even properly acknowledged it and I’d definitely still be salty if I was a Chinaman today. That said, the Japanese got nuked twice and lost their dignity in a number of other ways.
Edit: I forgot about the 6+ million Chinese the Japanese wiped out in WW2! WW2 China really is what Palestine thinks it is today.
> Commercial produce today is both less flavorful and markedly less nutritious than what our great-grandparents ate. Outside a home garden or a farmer’s market, the modern consumer can’t taste truly fresh produce. In our pursuit of endless abundance, Twilley explains, we have lost “diversity and deliciousness.”
Yup. Turns out, the varieties that do best in climate controlled greenhouses aren't the ones that have much going on in terms of flavor.
Thankfully at least in Germany there still are farmers' markets, and in Croatia any small town will have a daily one - and the difference is night and day, even compared to German farmers.
Farmers markets (at least locally for me in California USA) are a bit of a crap shoot. They've become popular enough that one has to be discerning because some are infiltrated by people simply reselling goods from warehouse stores, though the boutique varieties of produce are pretty much guaranteed to be authentic and if one is lucky some regular produce is much cheaper than even discount grocers.
Decent vendors usually list their website or farm name on their tent/stall. They could make things up of course, but people who frequent the market would get wise to the shenanigans. If it’s some guy with a bunch of wax boxes worth of produce then yeah, they may just be reselling -just like the rando selling strawberries on a random corner without a license.
Both in Germany and Croatia, that's enforced by the market managers, aka the local government.
Obviously there's exceptions for stuff that's out of season or doesn't even grow in the country - but they do a darn well job at ensuring everyone plays by the rules.
I’m quite envious of that situation, here it’s an anything goes for the provenance of goods and the onus is on the consumer to be ever vigilant in almost all markets and guaranteed to get worse for a generation at least (federal judges being lifetime appointments).
> It's always seemed weird to me that the founding fathers designed this system without thinking what would happen in such a scenario.
The thing is, no political system is foolproof and free of issues. But the US and the UK are about the only major countries in the world that didn't experience a forced reboot of some sorts - wars, revolutions, secessions, whatever - that brought an update of the constitution and legal system with it. Everyone else, however, did and learned from the issues that they and other countries had experienced in the meantime.
By now, the US is running on the same system for over 238 years. Yes, there have been some updates and amendments, but the fundamental assumptions are still the same stuff from centuries past, when virtually instant, global communication and transport of goods and people wasn't even thinkable.
Voting is all but useless in deep-(any color) states though, that's the problem. I mean... yes, it's the decent thing to do, but in the end it's wasted effort in the American political system.
That's only true if you think "vote" means "vote once every 4 years, for the President".
Even if the only political action you ever do is informed voting, if you're voting in every election, knowing as much as you can about the candidates, then you have a real chance of starting to move the needle.
That's an unfortunate requirement these days.
For one, in Europe concerns around GDPR: e-mail is not guaranteed (!) to be encrypted or protected against modification in transit so it might get snooped up on its way, which makes it a no-go for sensitive stuff such as healthcare information or other highly protected classes of PII, unless PDF encryption or other ways of encryption are used... but these have the issue that UX around many of them is horrible. A link to a portal however? Easy, and provides automatically the guarantee that the other person is who they claim to be.
The second problem is deliverability: more than enough email providers still have laughably low limits (sometimes < 3MB), virus scanners don't like PDFs or ZIPs that they can't read (because they don't know the password, obviously), and on top of that come the usual anti-spam concerns.
IMHO, the best way to go would be an extra header field, think like "X-External-Attachments: https://foo.com/<uuid>.pdf <hash-alg> <hash-value>"... this could be used by MUAs to prompt the user if they wish to download and store the file, provide cryptographic checks of the file, and sidestep the issue of dumbass middleboxes yeeting password-protected files, as the files can be scanned on the endpoint side.
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