We already can detect direction of infrared radiation, it’s called being warm on one side but not the other. Technically also possible by, say, lying half-way under a blanket and half-way not, but sensory integration takes care of the ambiguity.

More interestingly, did you know we can see the polarisation of light?

Nope. Or at least not necessarily.

The ranking that generally gets cited to that end judges universities by research output, which is generally not what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a good education – you want a university that’s good at teaching, not good at producing papers and citations. You want a professor that’s not busy producing papers, because they were hired to produce papers, you want one that actually teaches.

It’s also slanted heavily in favour of Anglo countries when it comes to looking at the “producing papers” metric alone: Pretty much all other countries produce the bulk of their papers at research institutes, which don’t show up in the list because they’re not universities. If they were included IIRC Max Planck would top the list. Granted, that’s also to a large degree because they’re absolutely massive, a large number of institutes under a common roof.

I was going to add a jab at the Brits but then thought “nah, they’re going to do that themselves, much more effective that way”.

Ryanair has no plans to introduce them. (sorry for the metro link).

Also Ireland kind of gets a pass they don’t have a rail link to anywhere. A Dublin-Holyhead tunnel would definitely be a good idea.

The lengths the US will go to to avoid building high-speed rail.

So, real talk: How far away is Israel from a civil war?

Meanwhile Germany “unwaveringly supports” this.

Meanwhile, the actual German position:

Israel has now fully blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza for over fifty days. Essential supplies are either no longer available or quickly running out. Palestinian civilians - including one million children –face an acute risk of starvation, epidemic disease and death. This must end. We urge Israel to immediately re-start a rapid and unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza in order to meet the needs of all civilians. During the last ceasefire, the UN and INGO system was able to deliver aid at scale. The Israeli decision to block aid from entering Gaza is intolerable. Minister Katz’s recent comments politicising humanitarian aid and Israeli plans to remain in Gaza after the war are unacceptable – they harm prospects for peace. Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change. Israel is bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid.

Humanitarians must be able to deliver aid to those who need it most, independent of parties to the conflict and in accordance with their humanitarian principles. Israel must ensure unhindered access for the UN and humanitarian organisations to operate safely across Gaza. Hamas must not divert aid for their own financial gain or use civilian infrastructure for military purposes.

We reiterate our outrage at recent strikes by Israeli forces on humanitarian personnel, infrastructure, premises and healthcare facilities. Israel must do much more to protect the civilian population, infrastructure and humanitarian workers. This includes restoring deconfliction systems, allowing humanitarian workers free movement within Gaza. And Israel must prevent harm to medical personnel and premises in the course of their military operations. They must allow the urgent healthcare needs of the population to be met, while allowing the sick and wounded to temporarily leave the Gaza Strip to receive treatment.

Crucially, we urge all parties to return to a ceasefire. We continue to call on Hamas for the immediate release of all the remaining hostages, who are enduring terrible suffering. We must all work towards the implementation of a two-state solution, which is the only way to bring long-lasting peace and security to both Israelis and Palestinians and ensure long-term stability in the region.

On top of that SWIFT doesn’t even do payments. That is, it doesn’t transfer money, it provides a communication interface that banks use to talk about payments, the actual money transfer takes place separately via T2 (in Europe) or elsewhere via correspondent accounts.

If they tried to handle actual money they would not have the market share that they have. Iran is semi-sanctioned right now, that is, select banks are cut off. It’s illegal under EU law to comply with US sanctions against US or Cuba so you can be sure that the commission came up with the precise list of what to block and what not so they’d hit the revolutionary guard but not random carpet or saffron traders.

As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?

Yes. There’s a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren’t as liberally licensed as the source they’re built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There’s a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There’s also the implicit understanding that if you don’t pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.

Basically it’s a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it’s a fucking steal.

I’m not really acquainted with the details of how Spain does it but it’s common practice in Europe to need a license for short-term rentals, it’s usually municipal statute as an extension of zoning law. Details differ vastly depending on location because every municipality is different.

Before the days of AirBnB circumventing those municipal regulations was very hard as big hotels are kind of hard to hide, they’re rather obvious, and if you have small apartments where are you going to get your renters from. AirBnB made it possible to get renters for small properties that fall under the radar of authorities. So requiring AirBnB to, effectively, ensure that what they list is licensed is closing that loophole.

The “anti-tourist” thing only really comes into play when municipalities are actually limiting the number of licenses they give out: When licenses are abundant it doesn’t matter that you can skirt them with AirBnB. Cities like Barcelona do limit them, other places don’t, as such only places like Barcelona had an actual problem with AirBnB, as such cracking down on AirBnB is helping the anti-tourist “agenda” of places like Barcelona. With agenda I mean allow people to continue to live and work in their own city doing something else but wipe tourist asses.

Found a paper (a bit older, 2001, but should still be mostly accurate) comparing the two. Cliff notes:

• Despite legislative power going by default to the central state in Spain and to the states in Germany, distribution of power is overall comparable. Less uniform in Spain as every region gets its own autonomy statute instead of all German states pooling their sovereignty in a uniform way.
• Administration is practically completely state matter in Germany, while Spain retains central administration structures in all regions. Those largely delegate matters to the region’s administrations, though. So again overall not too dissimilar in practice.
• Regarding the judicature: The regions don’t have courts. They have some say when it comes to how court districts are drawn and that’s pretty much it. German states all have their own courts and appeals courts, the federal level only has cassation courts. In this area German states have way more autonomy. States elect judges for their own courts as well as 50% of federal judges, or 50% of the people who elect them are designated by the states, depending.
• Spanish regions have very limited means to influence central legislative. No right to initiative, no own legislative body, just a right to petition. German states can initiate federal law, have their own legislative body, and much federal law needs passing by both federal and state bodies because it tangentially affects state prerogatives.
• Interestingly, the federal level has larger powers of oversight over the German states than Spain does over the regions. In both cases the oversight isn’t large, though, in Germany it only exists in so far states are administering federal law on behalf of the federation, which isn’t often the case. E.g. (practically all) criminal law is federal law, but administered by the states on their own behalf.
• German states have more financial autonomy. I won’t get into details the distribution of taxes between federation and states in Germany is complex AF, also, has been renegotiated multiple times. Regarding administration, though, as said: The federation has no tax office, they couldn’t collect taxes if they wanted to.
• German states have much, much, much more power when it comes to asserting their power. Maybe that’s why they’re not as hell-bent on carving out power for themselves: Autonomous regions have to rely on public sentiment and the good will of the constitutional court, otherwise the central authority can just walk straight over them, so they take whatever they can get their hands on while German states are much more relaxed about it.

All of that is things that German states have. Not sure what federal agency you’re in contact with but it certainly isn’t the Ausländeramt that’s state-level.

Spains regions lack of their own police, tax collection (the German federal level doesn’t even have a tax office), only partial cultural autonomy. Also the powers they have are only devolved, they’re not guaranteed those rights.

German states are fully formed states in themselves, they have their own sovereignty, delegating the exercise of parts of it to the federal level just as EU member states delegate sovereignty to the EU. “Fully formed state” here meaning that they do not rely on the federal level for their administration, in fact living in Germany you generally don’t come into contact with federal bureaucracy at all, it’s all state or municipal level (district level is technically state level, they’re devolved public bodies).

I’ll grant you that among unitary states Spain is quite federal, but it’s not “more federal than federal countries”.

Well it is an anti-tourist thing in the sense that regulations on AirBnBs and the like are meant to close the “hotel license” loophole. Touristy places generally don’t mind new short-term accommodation and give out licenses like candy, likewise small places with relaxed property markets, non-touristy places are much more restrictive because they don’t want to tank their economy.

For grandma in a village renting out some rooms to visitors getting delisted will result in her going to the municipality, asking for a license, getting one, and putting the listing up again. For an investor buying up apartments in big cities to illegally use as a hotel because renting long-term has lower ROI, well, they won’t get a hotel license, their listings are going to stay down. If you want to build only hotels and have no long-term accommodation may I suggest building a theme park somewhere.

Under Article 80, the GDPR foresees that non-profit organizations can take action or represent users.

Emphasis mine. Just in case anyone is still denying that Euro-English is a thing. It provides for it, which implies it anticipats it, so if we get rid of unnecessary Romance it foresees it. Plans for, as Wikipedia puts it, but not only the French etymology (prevoir) works, there’s also German vorhersehen/vorsehen which collapse when you calque them into English. Gives Brits all kinds of headaches, they were writing lots of huffy memos before Brexit.

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I think there’s some „reasonable” keyword in the right to be forgotten.

The original case was a Spanish cook being haunted by the first google result for his name being an article in a local newspaper about his restaurant going bankrupt decades ago. No scandal or such, just an ordinary bankruptcy, but he could demonstrate that it was impacting his current business.

He sued, and google had to remove the thing. Not when you search for his name and bankruptcy, not when you search for “what happened to that restaurant”, and the newspaper itself also didn’t have to do anything. As far as I know you can still find the article.

If you’re a journalist writing the guy’s biography, you’ll find it, push come to shove in some offline archive. But random people won’t see him nailed to a virtual pillory, that’s what all this is about.

I don’t think it’s really an issue for AI, but it has to be engineered in. Ultimately it’s about judging relevancy.

Dude the issue in Barcelona is that AirBNBs take up housing that’s supposed to be occupied by supercomputer researchers. The city also already has plenty of Hotels. Licensed ones.

If more tourists want to come than there are hotel rooms tough luck why should Barcelona tank its economy for them. Barcelona is a city, not a theme park. The reason it’s beautiful is not because it was built to attract tourists, but because it’s an economical powerhouse run and lived in by people who value things like architecture and urban planning.

Take your tourism dollars and spend them in Extremadura, Barcelona won’t mind. Great food there, nature, small places, little industry, Roman architecture, they can actually use that money.

They talk a good game about eliminating child labor, but always seem to look the other way in their supply chain.

Maybe in the past, but they actually lobbied against the EU diluting the supply chain act which makes companies responsible for human rights abuses of their suppliers.

My best guess it’s that it’s a combination of being sick and tired of being sued and not having due diligence documentation at the ready to defend themselves not just in state courts but also the court of public opinion, as well as the realisation that human rights abuses don’t make cocoa any cheaper for them: It’s not like slave plantations would cut them a share of the extra profit, they’re still paying word market prices. So for them it’s a way to get rid of grift and corruption within their own supply chain and they don’t want to be the only ones playing along those rules.

It definitely isn’t caused by Nestle suddenly growing a conscience, it’s just that making money, for a change, in this specific case, actually aligns with corporate responsibility.

“Variety” doesn’t imply status as a dialect or as a language; it’s neutral in this regard, that’s why I used it.

I believe and forgive you.

The reason why I bristled is because there’s a political dimension to the classification: The reason we have that generational gap in native proficiency is because the language was actively combatted, sidelined, and bemeaned by academia, “Low Saxon is an obstacle to education”. Parents were made to believe that for their kids to have success, they needed to chide the grandparents for speaking it while the kids were around. In that effort, it was quite popular to class it as a dialect which goes contrary to the experience of speakers, flies in the face of more than a millennium of literary history, status as Lingua Franca, and much more. So for me, being neutral doesn’t cut it: It diminishes the hard-won spark of self-esteem that’s necessary to revitalise the language.

Also it’s important to distinguish proper Low Saxon from Missingsch, the contact variety to Standard German. (Contemporary) Missigsch indeed is a dialect of Standard German, you can go full-tilt on its non-Standard features and Bavarians will still understand you.