I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can’t really use the system of one country in another country.

The only country in Europe which I know for sure doesn’t have its own local payments system is the UK, though it would not surprise me if there are others.

What’s really needed is some sort of pan-european payments system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World. The closest we have to it at the moment in the EU is that you can do normal (so called SEPA, if I remember it correctly) bank transfers to any account at any bank in the EU, all for the same cost (generally free) independently of it being in the same country or across borders, and quite a number of retailers all over Europe do accept payment via bank transfer, but that’s not an actual payment system, it’s a bank transfer system that you sometimes can use to pay an online order from a retailer.

As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment has to go via Visa (Mastercard isn’t really common in Portugal)

The EU is not a country.

Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are Neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US - even the ones with a Health Insurance based system have way more rules and consumer protections around it - and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than in the in US.

Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.

In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US’ method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, and more broadly with consumers having way more rights all across the EU than they have in the US (were it massively depends on the State) and with stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.

I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it’s very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it’s Social Democrat when it comes to consumer rights and protections, especially for things like food, though even there it’s sort of somewhere between lax and strict in regulatory terms. I suspect this is due to different countries caring more about different domains and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific domain getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level so it ends up reflected into very different political spins for different trade domains.

Pretty similar to how Brexit reduced the popularity of being anti-EU in the rest of the European Union.

I agree with that: I don’t think any “people” has an intrinsically heightened disposition for racism.

In fact, if I thought otherwise I would be quite the hypocrite as that would be pure and simple racist prejudice.

What I do think is that the Press and Political environment in Germany for the past decades have promoted race-based thinking thus increasing the acceptance of racism and even a certain blindness to it because the dominant forms were “benevolent” racism. This is how Germany ended up were it is now: by the active normalizing of a dysfunctional behavior as being “benevolent” rather than due to predisposition of those living there for such things.

You see a lot of that too in places like the US were one party is Racist in the traditional sense and the other spins their Racism in the modern sense (but when it comes to, for example, Muslims, they’re both traditional racists).

The really alarming thing is that rather than stop and re-evaluate that posture in light of how that ended up with the German Government supporting the most extreme Genocide of this century (so far :/ ) very overtly due to the race of the genociders, the German authorities have instead doubled down with authoritarian measures (IMHO, bypassing the Courts to expel dissidents is pretty authoritarian for a supposedly Democratic nation).

IMHO, such climate of race-based thinking and normalization of racial prejudice and discrimination (even if spinned as “positive”) is also fertile ground for the growth of traditional racists such as the AfD in Germany and the MAGAs in America - the moral and ethical distance between “those people should be supported because of their race” and the traditional racists’ “we should be supported because of our race” is much, much smaller than the distance between “people’s race should not mater for how they are seen or treated” and “we should be supported because of our race” - “if it’s OK to do it for them then it’s OK to do it for us” is quite a tiny mental step.

I don’t actually think that Germany is worse in this than for example the US, it’s just that I had a far, far better opinion of Germany than I had of the US previously and the deep disappointment of figuring out the dark nature of racial policies in German Politics makes it hit me harder than what’s happening in the US.

That makes sense.

I stand corrected.

Oh, casual Racism is a plague all over the World and, worse, some of the countries which supposedly have gone beyond it, really just changed the lists of “good”/“deserving” races and “bad”/“undeserving” races and called the discriminatory behaviour anchored in those new lists “positive”, as if treating people differently depending on their race is a good thing as long as it’s only for certain races but a bad thing for others.

Racism is always a coin with two faces - there are always some who are presumed to, due to their ethnicity, be relatively better people and thus treated in a relatively better way, and others who due to their ethnicity are presumed to be relatively worst people and treated in a relatively worst way - and just because one goes around empasysing the “positive” side of treating some better due to their race doesn’t make the thing any less Prejudiced, Discriminatory and unjust.

The boundary between Racism and not-Racism is not defined by which are the races for which you will treat individuals better and which for which you treat individuals worst, or even on the focusing on positive treatment for some races (the modern spin on Racism) rather than negative treatment for other races (the Fascist spin on Racism), it’s defined by judging and treating or not people differently depending on their race.

To eliminate Racism you need to eliminate the way of thing thinking that is the foundation of Racism: that the character of people, their worth and the treatment they deserved depends on their ethnicity.

“Positive” Discrimination doesn’t eliminate Racism, it just moves the unfair, Racist, treatment to favour different ethnicities - a different list of ubermenschen and untermenschen rather than just treating all as equally being menschen.

Whilst you (rightly!) point out and criticize the casual racism all over the place done with the traditional (Fascist) spin on racism, you seem to be totally oblivious to the Racism with the modern neoliberal spin which is just as unjust, prejudiced and discriminatory (hence just as Racist) as practiced in Germany, where it is systemic and even weaved into the structures of power (exactly as shown in this news story, with people being deported without trial for being against it), and the powerful activelly practicing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and suppressing criticism of it with laws that bypass the Courts, is a far, FAR worse situation than merely the powerless being casually racist.

The takeover of Israel by a nakedly ethno-Fascist regime which has started a full-blown Genocide along ethnic lines of proportions and cruelty exceeded only by the Holocaust, is what shined a harsh light on the reality that the whole business of presuming things and treating people based on their ethnicity is wrong even when you spin it as “positive”, and Germany was so far down into Racism with that modern neoliberal spin that the country, unlike many other countries in Europe which also previously supported Israel, has been unable to pull itself out of it when it de facto transformed into support of a very extreme form of Fascist-style Racism.

True, I never lived in Eastern Europe, only in Northern, Western and Southern Europe.

Are you telling me that Eastern Europeans commonly support groups mass murdering children along racial lines if the ethnicity of the members of the group doing the mass murder is deemed more important than other ethnicities?

Because that’s some pretty extreme Racism (as race-based discrimination goes, it’s pretty hard to beat actually sending weapons to child mass murders and justifying it with one’s “unwavering support” of their ethnicity), whilst the most extreme Racism I’m aware of in EE is in ex-Jugoslavia between mainly Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians which was also a Genocide but didn’t leave tens of thousands of dead children, bombed out hospitals, a long list of murdered journalists and a list of babies murdered just in the first 6 months which is 17 pages long, not even close.

Even the stuff that happened following the break up of Jugoslavia did not get anywere as bad as what Germany supports in Gaza very overtly because of the ethnicity of the Genociders and I’m not aware of any present day EE nation like Germany supporting outright Genocide openly because of the ethnicity of the genociders (though from what I’ve heard there’s a lot of Racism in Hungary, though I believe they fall short of supporting mass murdering of children if done by those of the “right” race).

In this Germany is almost in a class of its own (though not quite: it’s there together with Brexiter Britain and Trump’s America, hardly stellar company).

PS: Re-read how I named the Roma People, “Roma people” and how my use of the word “Gypsies” is very clearly framed as a clarification for those who do not know the proper name of that people. I expected that the way I wrote would make it pretty clear that the proper way to refere to them was “Roma people”, but guess I was wrong in that.

I was born in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship.

Not long after, there was a Revolution, the Fascist Regime was overthrown and the country became Democratic.

Still now, half a century later, people in my country of birth remain quite sensitive and easilly alarmed by practices of those in power which are similar to the kind of things that those in power in the Fascist regime would do (for example, things like civil society surveillance).

I expect exactly the same from Germans, maybe just less of it since their Fascist days have been gone for longer and (judging by my own country), people’s alertness to and rejection of things “like what they used to do before” seems to fall the further away from the dictatorship days we are.

Or are you telling me that Germans are special and different from other people and hence it’s wrong to expect them to have a higher tendency than those who never had Fascism to reject practices by those in power now which are similar to those of their very own past Fascist dictatorship?!

PS: That said, maybe a people who has freed itself from Fascism is significantly more sensitive to anything that bares even just a passing ressemblance to what the Fascists use to do, than a people whose Fascism was overthrown by others, in which case I was wrong in expecting Germans to have a natural rejection of Fascist practices. That being so, it would also explain just how easilly the German power elites keep on bit by bit, doing more and more things like they did in the “old days” and most of the population meekly accepts it or even defends and aplauds it.

I suspect the problem was that the attempt at making amends was framed in a way that kept the Racism alive and well (i.e. the duty of making amends was framed as being towards an entire ethnicity rather than being towards the actual people who were victims, their families and their descendants - so kept treating people as ethnics but a specific ethnic group is now “good ones” rather than “bad ones”). This both explains the repeated loud proclamations of “unwavering support for the Jewish People” and the complete and total lack of similar support for other etnicities targetted by the Nazis with the Holocaust, such as the Roma People (more commonly known as Gypsies).

That the making of amends was itself structured within a Racist thinking framework isn’t exactly surprising given than the whole thing was done back in the 50, which was still very Racist by modern day standards, and that pretty much all of the Nazi “middle management” as well as the Nazi-supporting wealthy elites were kept in their places (it’s easy to get old Fascists to loudly proclaim their disavowing of the last regime, but changing the actual way they look at their fellow human beings in the privacy of their minds is something much harder).

The surprising part (certainly it was hugelly surprising for me, who used to have a very good opinion of the country less than a decade ago) is that in its way to the XXI century Germany has not in fact evolved along with the rest of Europe away from a mental framework that sees ethnicity as more relevant than character.

Absolutelly, all Western nations have problems with the Far-Right and its favorite practices (Racism, Fascism, Might is Right, Nationalism and so on), to a less or greater level depending on the country, but the vast majority of countries in Europe had actually, before this period or moral and ethical regression started a decade ago, gone far further amongst the population in general in disassembling the ideological foundations of Racism and Authoritarinism supporting that kind of crap, than Germany.

I’ve lived all over Europe and once upon a time I naively expected that people in the country of Nazism would nowadays be the most sensitive to racist thinking and acting of all, and hence the least racist of all, but that’s not at all my experience.

Germany and Germans justifying the racist practices of their own power elites and the fast slide back to authoritarian practices, with whataboutism and “legality” (as if most of the worst actions of the Nazis weren’t things they first made sure to make legal) is, frankly, scary as fuck for any European who is not a far-right Muppet, not least because it shows the moral and ethical distance between mainstream German politics and the AfD is paper thin.

Most of Europe isn’t supporting the mass murder of children by a nation because of the ethnicity said nation claims to represent and most of Europe hasn’t made it legal to deport people who weren’t tried and found guilty of something, and that Germany, of all nations, who did what they did almost a century ago and spent the time since telling us “Never again!” are back to the level of racism that knowingly sends wepons and ammo to a nation mass murdering chidren justifying that support with the ethnicity of the people of that nation, and is passing Fascist legislation to deport people without trial, is really making them stand out from the rest of Europe when it comes to Racism and Fascism.

Your peers in Europe on the Racist and Fascist scales are the likes of Hungary, not the Scandinavians or even the French.

I seem to remember that most of the actions of the Nazis once they got into power were also legal.

Maybe, just maybe, people should have a standard of right and wrong which does not delegate that definition to “legality”, especially people in Germany.

If what you’re doing is database queries on large datasets, the network speed is not even close to the bottleneck unless you have a really dumbly partitioned cluster (in which case you need to fire your systems designer and your DBA).

There are more kinds of loads than just serving static data over a network.

Honestly, both here and on Reddit I see more of that blind faith for Google and Microsoft. It’s so weird that the open-source community has a slice of people insisting their giant company is somehow virtuous because it’s slightly less fashionable.

Even weirder when they write paragraph’s psychoanalyzing imaginary people.

Oh, the irony!

It’s funny how your attempt at psychoanalyzing me from my post ended up relying on the idea that because I’m not pro-Apple then I must be for some other large company.

What you just did is called Projection - you’re interpreting others as if they were you and had your drives and motivations.

Allow me to introduce you to the idea that some people simply don’t think that having an emotional relation towards a brand, any brand, is healthy, and that not everybody is some brand-fan fighting against the fans of other brands like they’re sports teams.

The obvious Apple fanboy is the kind of person who sings praises to every single new version of every Apple product even when it barelly differs from the last one, never criticizes their products and goes to a queue outside an Apple store the evening of the day before a new release of an Apple product to be one of the first to buy it next morning when the store opens.

I’ve personally came across a couple of people just like that over the years.

(Granted, they were more common a decade or so ago)

Every single person here doggedly defending Apple’s choice whose argument boils down to “it’s fine it’s as I like it” (whilst ignoring that everybody else has their own likes and dislikes) to justify Apple only having a closed-down environment without an open environment as another option, is probably a fanboy.

“I love it the way it is” isn’t logical, it’s emotional, and there really isn’t a natural human tendency (in most people) to want to have their choices taken away, so something else is at play when somebody defends nobody having any options with Apple other than Apple, with the argument that “I like it like that”, since logically, having the option of an open system won’t take away the option of the closed system for those who like it.

That said, an alternative explanation for such behaviour is that they’re just self-centred people who are extremely used to a specific environment and couldn’t imagine why anybody would want it to be different, a posture which is often associated with fanboyism of the brand which makes that environment, but not always.

Also another explanation is paid sockpuppet.

There is a ton of fanboyism around Apple, same as there was for Musk some years ago.

I love BRAND is just another form of tribalism and one that Apple cultivated for themselves for decades.

(Curiously, going down the thread I saw fewer Apple fanboys that one would find in, say, Reddit)

Also the energy for those datacenters has to come from somewhere and non-renewable options (gas, oil, nuclear generation) also use a lot of water as part of the generation process itself (they all relly using the fuel to generate the steam to power turbines which generate the electricity) and for cooling.

It varies massivelly depending on the ML.

For example things like voice generation or object recognition can absolutelly be done with entirelly legit training datasets - literally pay a bunch of people to read some texts and you can train a voice generation engine with it and the work in object recognition is mainly tagging what’s in the images on top of a ton of easilly made images of things - a researcher can literally go around taking photos to make their dataset.

Image generation, on the other hand, not so much - you can only go so far with just plain photos a researcher can just go around and take on the street and they tend to relly a lot on artistic work of people who have never authorized the use of their work to train them, and LLMs clearly cannot be do without scrapping billions of pieces of actual work from billions of people.

Of course, what we tend to talk about here when we say “AI” is LLMs, which are IMHO the worst of the bunch.

The 180€ Mini PC I have as torrenting server, NAS and TV Box (and it’s overkill for just that) says otherwise.

$300 will buy you a lot of Desktop PC nowadays if all you want is to browse the web and read emails (in fact that approx. $200 mini-PC of mine is more than enough if you’re running Linux on it as I do and if you add a simple monitor, keyboard and mouse you’re about $40 shy of $300).

A $300 PC is only shit if you’re trying to run things like AAA games on it or use Windows 11.

There used to be a point back in the day when you did need a good PC for things like document edition or watching videos, but now we’re well past the point where you needed anything more than the most basic PC for everyday stuff.