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Exactly. Here in Europe, SMS feels like the fax machine of mobile communications.

what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.

Old Dutch banks and their Belgian suckers, mostly. You can see a list on their website.

I am not deep into this, but I heard multiple times that the choice of the pan-european payment system was largely political and technnically suboptimal. Old Europe pushed for the aging iDEAL against a much more advanced Blink, so Eastern European banks led by Poland left the consortium.

In the end, iDEAL rebranded as Wero was dead on arrival because a successful system needs to be supported by everyone.


Sounds more like you have some axe to grind

https://epicompany.eu/members


Others joined quite recently, indeed.

Wikipedia gives an overview by year.

As for the axe, I have no personal interest.


I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free. It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.

> If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.

if that happens it can be repaired more economically and faster – as has been repeatedly shown in Ukraine.


I think we need to look harder at the concept of survivor bias and what it doesn't mean for future chance if anyone believes Ukraine nuclear power stations suffering damage as routinely as any other physical asset would have been OK.

If my roof has gone it doesn't matter, as I need to move elsewhere.

Chances are my roof won't be gone though.


These guys...

after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...


What are you talking about? Germany would be more energy independent if it had adopted solar and wind power when Greenpeace was advocating it fourty years ago, like China is showcasing today!

The question is not if renewables can replace nuclear. Obviously it is technically possible. The question is how many times bigger should be installed peak power of renewables. 20x? 50x? And of course if it’s economically viable. Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.

> Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.

You have that backwards. In 2025 China installed 100x as much solar as nuclear.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638024


Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?

You can't ignore physics and climate.


Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?

what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.

China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.



They would depend on china instead of Russia. huge improvement! /s

There is a significant difference in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil. Solar panels are not consumables when int comes to energy production- oil and gas are. China can shutdown the supply of solar panels, but not the energy generation with existing panels. This gives you time to start building other supply channels.

> in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil.

I don't agree. Oil and gas can be sourced from many different countries, you don't have to rely only on Russia. Russia is just the obvious choice if you are in the middle of Europe, but there are many other producers.

If China stops the supply of solar panels today, you are only good if you have already achieved 100% energy needs coverage with solar. No large country is going to be at that level anytime soon.


If I wanted to permanently erode trust within the alliance, which by the way just lost 859 European soldiers into America's idiotic Afghanistan adventure, this is how I'd do it.

There are already 10 times more US soldiers present on Greenland's Pittufik Space Base.

Question is, to whom this fact is more embarrasing: EU politicians or the US admin?


Why would it be embarrassing for Europe? It is a symbolic/tripwire force to show that Denmark does not stand alone.

Hence, you don't hear anything negative from Putin about it.

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.


Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against.

Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.


This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.

But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.

Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.


> head of a sovereign state

Err

> Since 2019, more than 50 countries, including the United States, have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state.

Including the EU and its member states

> a country of 30+ million people

If those 30 M being the remainder after ~8 M fled the country (20% of the population) within the last 10 years, the „destabilization“ was already there.


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