It's mostly a branding issue, in my opinion.

In my experience, one concrete problem is that so many people misunderstand or are unaware of basic things about the EU and why EU even exists. With the former I mean things like how the EU Parliament is put together, the relation of the EU Commission to the EU Parliament, how is the President of the EU Commission chosen (no, it's not "undemocratic"), what does Schengen mean, what is the Euro and WHY does it exist, why was there legislation which mentioned the curvature of cucumbers, and so on.

As there is no big picture, or it is rejected due to ideological reasons, the lack of knowledge and misunderstandings then manifest as fear of the unknown (=the EU). At this point, these people become against everything in EU: whatever new things are proposed from the EU side, it is somehow "lousy", "bad", "failing", "won't work anyway", and so forth. Any EU company has "bottom-barrel products" and "can't succeed", euro cannot work between countries, Europe is "weak" and "gay" and "collapsing".

Also, some people look at an individual member state and confuse it with the whole EU. For example, the nuclear power stance of Germany is seen as an EU-mandated position and then the whole EU is seen to be against nuclear power. This can also work in reverse: Poland sends generators to Ukraine, well done Poland and why is the weak and failing EU doing nothing (except the generators were from RescEU stores, and one such store was located in Poland, so EU was sending them).

When people understand what the EU is and know the basics, of course they might still disagree with things, that's normal, but at least the arguments are more factual.

Examples for Europe, 2025 vs. 2024:

  Sweden: -68%
  Belgium: -53%
  Germany: -48%
  France: -37%
  Switzerland: -28%
  Portugal: -22%
  Italy: -18%

Yes, Chinese companies CAN do high quality products. Of course they can, they're not lazy or stupid. But if the price difference isn't too big, I'd rather buy something made close-by, to keep the money in the local economy (my country or Europe), instead of bleeding it into some faraway place.

Some people do not consider that aspect, they only look at the price in numbers and think that's the end-all, which it isn't. There is an "invisible cost" added. On the surface it might be cheaper for me, but it ends up hurting the local industry, it will create unemployment, at some point social problems, and so forth; in short: it will harm the place I call my home.

For this reason, to me a Chinese (or US, whatever) product would have to be vastly cheaper than something made close-by, yet have a parity in quality to be worthwhile at all. And the equation of vastly superior quality for a substantially cheaper price is rare.

As for the car industry and cheaper Chinese cars: I don't see the how German industry is "dying", as it's not really a level playing field. It's easy for Chinese producers to be cheaper when the Chinese government subsidizes the exports. I'm sure Germany could do higher quality cars cheaper than the Chinese, if the German government were to subsidize a large part of each produced car. Would government subsidies then mean that the industry is "not-dying"? I don't think so.

If things are of higher quality, higher cost is acceptable to many.

As a trivial example, talking about a ca. 5 EUR purchase here, I bought a German-made pencil sharpener (Möbius-Ruppert nr. 0603 "Vertex").

It's basically a small metallic block (brass) with two holes with blades attached. It is surprisingly heavy and while it may sound strange, the sharpening result is simply excellent. (I bought some Japanese-made pencils to pair with it)

Chinese sharpeners can be had for under 0.5 EUR at best, they can be very cheap.

However, I had Chinese sharpeners and they actually were the reason I ended up buying a German one. Unless I lose the German sharpener, I will never need to buy another.

For example, Duralex drinking glass Le Picardie (as in the article), transparent, 36 cl, 18.90 EUR for 6-pack.

That is 3.15 EUR per glass.

At that price the price/quality is extremely good. Chinese products won't even come close to this.

Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?

In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.

Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.

I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.

So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.

Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.

[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".

Edit: formatting

The "joke" was that implementing bitbanged I3C on an ESP32 (!) sounds absurd. Like doing raytracing on C64. (Of course some crazy folks have done it though)

Awareness of something is the first step in adapting. One can adapt beforehand, or, one can adapt afterwards; with more limited resources, necessitated by circumstances, under more time pressure, with more suboptimal tools, and so on.

It is unquestionable that an EMP would have an extreme impact in all aspects of society and the lives of people. Preparations on macro and micro level can mitigate some of the problems that would follow. And preparations require awareness.

Anything funded with public money should have same proportion going back to the public (the organization running the area which funded it).

For example: a 100% EU money funded innovation should be free for everyone to use within EU and outsiders should license a patent.

50% public funding from state of Norway, then state of Norway has 50% ownership.

And so on.

And yes, empirically, there were several "scary" things which freaked out the smaller children but were just amusing for an older child. The scary parts usually had a logical explanation or a backstory which made sense (or reflection with an adult made it make sense).

For example (I hope I remember all the details right):

The angry Ant Lion preying in a sandpit: eventually the Moomins manage to shrink it to peanut-size with the Wizard's hat, and it's not so scary anymore. It's still an Ant Lion, but very small, and the voice is high-pitched. Why isn't it scary anymore?

The Groke is scary as it stares while making gnarling sounds and all other characters are afraid of it, but The Groke doesn't want to harm anyone. In some episode a character explains that The Groke is actually very lonely. So it follows people as it wants to hang around them, but expresses itself in a scary way and since The Groke unvillingly freezes things where it goes, others avoid it.

The Wizard was dressed in dark clothes, looked scary and rode on a flying panther. But while The Wizard had a stern face and voice, he did not want harm to anyone and helped Moomins too.

Stinky may have a scary appearance, but also he is is not evil as such, just smells bad and does mischief like steals stuff. Which is why the characters are not so fond of him.

The Hattifatteners are like mushrooms, they grow from seeds, and move about, trying to reach the horizon in groups. They are drawn to thunder and electricity and they can zap someone with electricity if one touches the charged-up Hattifatteners. I always interpreted them like a force of nature, they're not looking to harm anyone, and are no more evil than wind that falls a tree is evil.

Or is it 1.09955742876?

What I mean -- did they round up, is there some connection to universal constants?

Edit: I don't understand where the 1.1 degrees comes from. Why is it 1.1 and not something else...

The design is pretty clever, I was expecting more work to make things happen. Also, the individual parts about mud and fireproofing etc. are quite illustrative.

However, for me the best part was the scenery. It just looks somehow... peaceful. Calm. I actually watched this several times just because of the scenery.

I don't know why it seems so peaceful. Maybe because the scenery and nature and the light (?!) reminds me of the late summers when I bicycled (not quite as effortlessly though) home as a child when the Sun was low. I mean especially the part when the dog is chasing him.

I was annoyed at one thing though: he casually throws the empty container of flammable liquid into the ditch. I hope he picked it up afterwards.

Could this somehow be repurposed such that the points would be "check points" for a generative texture algorithm, with zoom level somehow taken into account (distance of dots maybe)?

Then one could, in a computer game, for example look at a brick wall. At first, as one is further back, the surface from tiles look somewhat matte smooth. But when one gets closer, the features become more and more coarse with more and more detail, eventually even some tiny tiny holes in the surface are visible, and so on.

Another example: sand, it looks smooth from afar but as one zooms in, actual grains of sand become visible.