I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

Not denying that Germany faces serious issues, but using Intel as an example to show Germany’s national problems imo is just wrong. Ifthey want to make that connection they better provide some evidence showing this move isn’t purely motivated by the internal problems Intel currently faces, which recently have been in the news quite a bit.

Now if TSMC suddenly decides to cancel their new German fab (admittedly not leading edge like Intel’s would have been), then it’s a point taken.

Also you can’t withdrawal what isn’t there. They have barely started doing any work in Magdeburg

I also have regular problems with some subtitles. My solution is to enable using an external player in the jellyfin AndroidTV app (i think its under playback->advanced options) and then use VLC player which i’ve also installed to play the movie. That has never failed to me.

Downside is that unlike the regular exo player i don’t think it supports dolby vision, so i have to change this setting back and forth occasionally. It used to be that there was an option that you could tick, so it asked you everytime which player to use before playing a movie (with the downside that it couldn’t resume playing at a saved timestamp), but after a somewhat recent update this went away.

(also no telephone booths)

Speaking of telephone booths: With their disappearance the 2001 movie “Phone Booth” also lost its location.

To be fair the article mentions that they did have it figured out, but later canceled the connection, which was part of a separate project.

Seems like the exact problem that could happen with anything, but ofc shouldn’t. Because it really is such a simple mistake that anyone with a brain, who is in charge of making those decisions, should look at the plans and see it. There for sure are systemic issues, if something this basic can fall through the cracks.

Italy, a member of the G7, emerged as another opponent because of the large number of Italians living in Russia, diplomats said.

Rome has argued that it would not be able to offer consulate services across Russia if the Kremlin responds with tit-for-tat bans on diplomatic movements.

Its government also voiced support for maintaining “open diplomatic channels” with Moscow and there were other tactics to fight Russian intelligence agents, a diplomat said.

Feels like you could have also included that part of the article. Because while the headline ofc isn’t technically wrong, it does imply that it is only Germany blocking the proposal. However the article itself also mentions Italy being against it (and who knows how the rest of the countries are leaning), including other reasons than just wanting to trade again. So it feels like they just wanna bash Germany specifically.

A more neutral headline would e.g. be “Europe still divided about Czech proposal to limit movement of Russian diplomats to combat spie activities”.

Personally i think as a layman it is kind of hard to judge who is right in this debate. My first thought would be that you know who you give those diplomat credentials to, so while they might be spies, at the same time it makes it easier to track them.

The proposal of limiting them to only the specific country they are stationed in only makes sense to me, if it is a problem keeping track of them when they change countries (which would be a problem that should be fixed in general I guess).

I do like the part with requiring a biometric passport, that seems like an easy enough and sensible requirement. But ofc who says that spies would come with Russian passports in the first place. Couldn’t they also come with passports from other contries like Kasachstan or Usbekistan for example?

We also shouldn’t forget that we most certainly are doing the same with our diplomats. At least as far as spying goes, maybe not so much the sabotage part.

Besides the obvious fuck up, just judging from the picture in the article I also see a complete lack of solar panels or charging stations.

Feels like when you are already spending such a huge sum just for a fancy place to store some cars, then you could at least add that functionality.

Fun thought experiment, but yeah there is no way it ever happens. The simplest reason is that as soon as Ukraine manages to restore full control over its own territory, they will race to join Nato and the EU. Both of which would not accept Ukraine while holding russian land.

There’s a little competition now with like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, whatever, and competition can keep things from becoming deeply shitty. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if in 5 years the big players had merged together, and then things get more expensive.

But the distribution side is only one part of the equasion and tbh the much easier one, which is why there are still so many even smaller players that offer a more or less complete (or at least large) library. Besides the ones you mentioned i can also think of amazon music, youtube music, deezer, and napster. I think there are also plenty more. It’s really not that hard from a technical side to stream audio, certainly easier compared to the high bandwith you need for visual content.

The more interesting part is if anything could happen on the rightsholder side, which unlike with movie/tv-streaming is completely seperate. There you have Disney, WB/Discovery, and so on all doing their own streaming services primarily with their own content (Sony is one of the few to just produce and sell). But on the music side you don’t have the large record labels like Sony, Universal or Warner Music to try and make their own streaming service. And smaller indipendent labels also make up a much larger share, and sometimes the music rights might also lie with the artists themselves or descendants.

That fragmentation of rights combined with the large variance of musics tastes requiring a mostly complete library to make sense imo is what currently holds of enshittification. So i would actually say there is decent competition, although at the same time it is very hard to truly distinguish yourself from the other services.

The question is whether something can break this balance.

Imo unlike movie/TV-streaming music-streaming services at the moment still kind of fulfill their promise to the consumer:

A for the average consumer mostly complete selection of content at a reasonable price (at for the consumer, maybe not for most artists) and a high degree of convenience.

Until you build your own library, which would take quite a while until you drop a lot of money in advance, you’ll have a worse experience.

And even when living alone you could still share with friends, parents/siblings or a partner.

All that said I am very sympathetic to your line of thinking. Because it only works as long as the deal doesn’t change.

And we see all to well how it might not last when looking at the movie/tv streaming market. Prices might increase beyond purely matching inflation, content might fracture into multiple services, sharing might get disallowed, and specific versions of songs or artists might disappear due to censorship (or similar reasons).

The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).

But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.

I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.

It can be cheaper than Spotify if you’re like me and pick up about one new album a month. Some stuff I listen to and don’t buy. Some months I don’t buy anything and just listen to what’s in my library. And after a couple years of this, I have a large library of drm free music.

The starting from zero and needing a couple of years to build a solid foundation for your library is the biggest hurdle. If you have that foundation, then sure there are probably not more than 12 new albums per year that are worth to buy. But If you don’t it’s just impossible.

Say you are starting from zero and find that you like the rolling Stones? How long or how expensive does it get with your method before you are even done with their catalogue?

Also a lot of people are probably on the family plan. That changes the equation in favor of Spotify by a lot. You might have 6 users with different tastes, but are only paying like $20 per month?

Temu habe ich bisher erfolgreich vermieden und bisher nichtmal angeschaut. Aliexpress nutze ich auch ab und zu, wenn ich etwas will, dass offensichtlich einfach nur China-resell Wahre ist und bei Amazon etc doppelt so teuer (oder mehr) für ein identisches Produkt. Das ist dann auch nichtmehr mit Bequemlichkeit und Garantie zu rechtfertigen (sind aber eh nur Produkte bei denen das für mich keine relevanz hat), Steuern zahlt wohl weder Aliexpress noch Amazon korrekt in deutschland, da macht das nur wenig Unterschied.

Danke für den Link, werde ich mir merken und beim nächsten Einkauf mal testen.

Ich versuche generell, möglichst viel im lokalen Handel zu kaufen oder direkt bei Herstellern zu bestellen

Direkt beim Hersteller bestelle ich tatsächlich auch relativ gerne, falls es denn ordentliche Rabatte gibt. Die UVP kann man ja nie erst nehmen.

Den lokalen Handel würde ich gerne unterstützen, aber ehrlich gesagt fällt mir das extrem schwer. Bestes Beispiel sind z.B. Laufschuhe: Da hätte ich durchaus interesse Vorort ein paar zu testen. Aber faktisch habe ich nur mein allererstes Paar im Fachhandel mit Beratung gekauft und dafür damals glaube stolze 140€ oder so gezahlt. Das ist gerade bei einem Verbrauchsgegenstand einfach zuviel, deshalb wurden alle weiteren im Internet bestellt, wo es Rabatte gibt die die Preise human machen.

Thanks for sharing your experience, i assume most like me will have little to none.

This is their best chance to escape their coming economic trap. They control so few actual resources beyond labor.

Is that actually the case? I am not sure how many resources china has in their own country (I assume there are a few with it being this vast), but I think they are tackling the resource problem more so with their investments in Africa and other poor countries. And because of the war Russia also has fewer countries to sell to besides China.

I think the true longterm problem is actually with the cheap labour force you mention. As the standard of living rises, so do wages. And more importantly they’ll experience the same demographic shift other developed countries are currently experiencing with an aging population. With the difference that it’ll be worse for them due to the one child polic.

Thank you for giving some perspective on how long basic training roughly takes.

If we are talking months, even should Ukraine speed up the process a bit, then i think it is fair to assume that a few days for travel don’t make a significant difference. Especially should there be other advantages to training in existing facilities.