It’s been a while since I used chrome, but I used to use incognito to avoid that from happening. You can log into your services in the incognito session and when you’re done and close the incognito session, the temporary folder with your session stuff will get deleted, leaving the normal chrome browser unaffected.
In a non first past the post voting system, it’s less likely that 1 radical party remains in power long enough to screw up the high courts. But it can still happen, case in point Hungary and Poland.
Iirc, Orban had been in power for many years in Hungary and went for a gradual erosion of the independence of the courts. Death by a thousand cuts.
Pis in Poland only had a majority for 2 election cycles, but they needed only the first win to screw up the courts. Instead of a gradual (legalistic) takeover, they went for a bonkers hostile takeover of the supreme courts: https://freedomhouse.org/report/analytical-brief/2018/hostile-takeover-how-law-and-justice-captured-polands-courts
The eu should have kicked out both states out of the decision making process and implemented sanctions, but since that required unanimity, Poland and Hungary were essentially protecting each other from consequences. Now that pis lost in Poland, I hope that the eu takes action and prevents this from happening again.
I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.
If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.
I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.
I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.
And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.
About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.
Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.
Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.
Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.
Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).
That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.
Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?
And why are you unwilling to accept that there is a lot of nothing land in Finland? Most of Finland is a lot of nothing land, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer and darkness in the winter.
Your country is neither unique, nor exceptional in this regard.
The Finn already addressed this in their first post: 97% of the country has 4g. That is country, not people in the country. So yes, a reindeer in Lapland has a better potential internet connection than many rural north americans.
Edit: I found some recent numbers: this carrier claims to provide 4g to 99% of the population, 5g to 96%. https://www.dna.fi/wholesale/about-us/networks That 2nd statistic must be pretty damn rare, the country of Nokia indeed.
This reads like a case of game design by spreadsheet to me. Instead of the lead designers being creative persons making creative decisions, these are accountants that are designing a game by ticking boxes. They didn’t try to make a game that they would like to play, they tried to make a game that they think others would like to play.
I’m using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.
14 to 16h is too short for a default. Not everyone will (or even has) the ability to take out their smartphone multiple times per day every day to catch up with the news. Someone who will only read it during the evening, would need posts to stay up 24 to 26h. So that to me is the minimum. Personally I don’t mind if they stay up longer, there might be new interesting top comments if the post itself stays on top longer.
Strategy games are still my mainstay, but I’m always returning a few old familiar games. I’ve not bought any new releases in a long time. If too many other players are like me, then strategy game development is going to be in dire straits indeed.
Not ibm. You might be thinking of Bell: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
I’m going to second this: a few pairs of Crocs, each placed at a strategic exit and going outside for a few minutes is no inconvenience at all anymore. For anything that takes longer than that, I put on suitable footwear for whatever I’ll be doing.
An example of ill intent on Microsoft’s part: https://mashable.com/article/windows-10-upgrade-snafu-analysis
If you haven’t used windows in years then you might not know how bad it has gotten, but … it’s bad. Windows update is not just for security updates, it’s also there to change users default browser to edge, their search engine to bing, trick them into using onedrive (too bad if the synced files get corrupted), old features get disabled for no good reason, it hijacks other browsers to show messages and change browser settings, …
All those things are definitely not for security, but rather a way for Microsoft managers to meet KPI, for example: they want more users of a new application, so they remove the old way of doing things and boom, their quarterly report looks prettier. And to top it all off Microsoft doesn’t test updates properly anymore in house, so it’s the customers who are life testing that shit. And because those users have to keep updating windows for security, Microsoft has them over a barrel.