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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s absolutely not the textbook definition of arbitrage.

Arbitrage is buy something somewhere at a price and resell it in a different market at a higher price. It’s just price arbitration hence the name.

There are no other kind of arbitrage implied when people talk about arbitrage. That’s what the word means.

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.

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.

So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.

> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable

It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.

Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.

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.

Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.

> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)

Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.

The main issue is that the EPP is basically in service of Germany and France lost a lot of influence when most of their deputies joined Renew, a party which is less well integrated in the European Parliament apparatus. That and France failures to even start tackling the structural reforms it needs obviously.

It’s even more true with the euro zone where some members are directly harmed by the high exchange rate.

It would make a lot of sense to go back to a smaller more integrated union with the countries which want it and leave the ones which only want the single market be part of a less integrated union.

Then again, considering Germany and France disagree about pretty much everything at the moment, I doubt it would go very far.

Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).

I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.

Care to explain how any of that is undemocratic?