And not using special chars is cheap, as by requiring a min-length of 13 instead of 12, you can get an even greater level of security.

The judical branch should very much NOT be a part of the government itself, but a fully separate branch.

> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

As we have seen in the past, we have the same, if not worse, power imbalances in private companies as in the public sector. I would therefore not call it irrelevant, but agree that the Justice system can help here if appropriatly staffed.

> Monopolies are not always a negative outcome on a free market if the company in Monopoly situation reaches that position by offering better products within the law. However they can be specially dangerous when they're artificially created by the Government (e.g. allocation of a common resource to a specific company --> corruption almost always follows).

Do you have a single example for a company who did not over time monetized its monopoly power to the detriment of the customer?

> SWIFT’s data centers, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, act as the network’s central hubs, processing and routing messages across the network. The centralization at these data centers is critical for swift (no pun intended) and secure data transmission. These data centers are designed with redundancy and failover capabilities, so if one center is disrupted, the others take over, ensuring no interruptions to the SWIFT service.

[https://ahrvo.substack.com/p/how-does-swift-really-work]

To me, this sounds like SWIFT would posibly be split into 3-parts, without any redundancy. A US and a EU datacenter handling "local" business, with Switzerland possibly be able to interact with either?

You really think the absence of social media would be a negative?

Don't think much of Europe is dependent on LLMs, yet.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672714

Points: 17

# Comments: 2

SWIFT sits in Belgium, why would anyone in Europe need to switch away from it? Is the US able to handle their (international) financial transactions without access to SWIFT?

The financial market being significantly smaller, sure, but will it stay like that?

Quickly summing up total spending of the European countries on this list, the Europeans seem to spend about half of what the US spends on the military, quite a lot more than I expected. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...]

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560937

Points: 32

# Comments: 59

Politics aside, the FDA applies a very generous amount of regulation (mostly justifiable), not sure we want to pay multiples for our consumer electronics, as it (mostly) shows acceptable behavior and rearely kills anybody.

Over a whole month, peak summer production here is 1.4MWh, winter is 0.14MWh.

This is not so much a policy applied from the top, but requested from the bottom. People want to contribute to the transition, and balcony solar installs are a cheap and simple way to do this.