That's a nice theory.
The other theory which explains the observed facts is that the DOJ has long been under political pressure from both parties of American's Power Duopoly to bury the Epstein files, it's just that the Democrats weren't so brazen about their control of the gatekeeper of the American Criminal Justice System as the current bunch are.
But I seem to remember him being the first president to finally stop our direct military intervention in the middle east in 20 years.
FIFY
Sending weapons, ammo and money to Israel even whilst they kept on provoking their neighbours and even started a massive Genocide in Gaza does count as "intervention in the Middle-East", just not direct military intervention.
Had Biden stopped American intervention in the Middle-East there would not have been a Genocide in Gaza or Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon.
Yeah, that does make sense.
However I suspect that what's charged in Portugal for that cost is way beyond a fair value, with rent-seeking "administrative costs" of the power provider which far exceed actual real costs in the era of smart-meters and computing (plus which are already included in the price for power itself, which is why retail power prices are much higher than bulk market prices, thus there's double-dipping going on there) as well as "taxes" to pay for subsidies for renewables which were often de facto politicians needlessly shoving money to their mates so that they had higher profits - the big power company in Portugal is very well connected politically and is involved in at least on major Corruption case - rather than actually needed to incentivise provision of things which would otherwise not be provided.
The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren't in the EU anymore.
And this is just State surveillance.
When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.
That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that's a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.
The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.
Surelly it's at minimum a post about shit, so posting it here is kinda like going to a meeting of Alcholics, Anonymous only to find out it's actually a bar where nobody knows your name.
Yes, several dams in Portugal do have the capability of pumping water up to the top reservoir when there is excess power from other sources to latter use it for power production when conditions change.
However most don't and for those, given that the long term trend is that hydro-generation is going to be a lot less effective in Portugal and in the meanwhile it's already become less reliable, they'll become a lot less effective, hence why Renewables in Portugal was just 45% a years ago when the country wasn't having an unusually high-precipitation period like now and instead was at in its second year of draught conditions (a situation which has become much more common in the last couple of decades).
Further, solar is hugelly underdeveloped in what is one of the countries of Europe with the most sunshine, no doubt due to amongst other things policies that de facto reduce incentives for home solar all in the service of keeping the profits of politically well-connected local Power Companies high.
The country needs more solar generation, especially home generation as well as the kind of solar technologies - like molten salt solar concentrators - that are capable of keeping generating power at night.
In light of Global Warming trends there's still a long way to go for Renewables in Portugal, IMHO, and local policies are still quite disjointed and poluted by politicians putting the interests of a handful of private companies above all else.
Actually the Iberian peninsula countries - Spain and Portugal - want to sell their excess of Renewable to the rest of Europe, but France keeps blocking creating a connection for that throught their territory as it would negativelly impact the price they get selling their Nucleal power.
It would make a lot of sense to have an Europe-wide high capacity grid across large enough distances that it averaged out a lot of the local weather factors, but some countries are blocking it to maintain the profits of their own private electric power businesses.
The fixed part of an electric bill in Portugal is insane, both because of a good chunk of it are taxes charged via it and because the "fixed network connection costs" are very high.
This means that if one invests in saving power the returns of that are pretty bad because there's still this huge immovable cost chunk from merelly having a grid connection: I've been an early adopter of things like LED lights and tend to take power consumption in account for my computing equipment and nowadays outside Winter (when I spend a lot of power in warming as over 70% of houses in Portugal have very bad insulation and mine is one of those >70%) my bill is literally only half actual electricity costs and the other half is that fixed componen - my incentive for saving power is mainly one of principle because the actual financial incentive only goes so far before you start seeing diminishing returns from investing into more efficient electric devices.
Meanwhile policies in Portugal are such that they almost try and stop people from having home solar - for example if you try and sell excess power to the grid you'll get at best 1/4 the price that it costs when you buy power from the grid, so it's simply not worth it to have an installation which produces excess power, all this in one of the countries with the highest number of sunshine hours in Europe were it would make a lot of sense for people to have home solar.
And then, of course, there's the French problem: specifically France keeps refusing the creation a proper connection for the Iberian countries to sell its excess of power due to Renewables to the rest of Europe (because France wants to sell their own from their large number of Nuclear Power Plants at a higher price), so there are actually plans to do it with cables in the middle of the Med going around France and enter the rest of the continent via Italy.
Most of Renewables in Portugal is hydro-generation so it's highly dependent on amount of rain, in a country which the Global Warming models say it's going to turn into pretty much a desert except in the coastal areas.
This is why just a year ago only 45% of electricity came from Renewables since, after 2 years of draught, most dams were pretty much empty, whilst right now the country has had so much rain in the last couple of months that dams are full to the brim and even have had to release excess water, and there are even floods around most major rivers.
Given the way things are going, Portugal needs to invest more in Solar since the very high capacity in terms of hidro-generation (a policy that dates all the way back to Fascist days, possibly the only good thing those types ever did for the country) will turn far less usefull with Global Warming.
Let me put things this way:
Even if one's relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a "Terrorism" for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.
Even you think you're above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.
I'm pretty sure plenty if not most of people here pay most of their shopping with a card rather than cash, even though that shit at minimum goes into a database for ever and ever, probably shared with the authorities and in some countries just outright sold for pennies to anybody willing to pay for it.
And don't get me started with just how many Techies jumped into Tesla's "surveillance nightmare on wheels" - I mean, Techies were very much a large block of early adopters of Tesla cars and this was already well after the Snowden Revelations.
Further, how many people are in the habit of accessing the Internet behind a VPN?
(Personally, living in Britain - maybe the worst offender - at the time, the Snowden Revelations were what prompted me to start using a VPN regularly)
Whilst lots of people here have an actual "lets keep my digital footprint" mindset and praxis, I get the impression that most do not, and even those who bitch and moan about "surveillance" trade convenience (or, even worse, the Techie desire for "shinny new thing" thus getting shit like Alexa) for high digital visibility.
So yeah, maybe not "Yall", but probably "Most of you".
What "global backlash"?
If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America's hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist Everywhere.
For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one's data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a "safe haven" for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein's "services" or corrupt as fuck).
In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn't really a "global backlash", otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.
Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.
Yeah, I think in all countries with universal Education, at highschool level and even earlier there are classes for native speaking kids covering readind and writting in and later knowledge of things like formal grammatical structure and such for the local language, so it makes sense to distinguish classes aimed at foreigners to learn the local language from the ground up from classes aimed at local kids who already know how instinctivelly how to speak it.
So "
<Local-Language>
as a Second Language" is a valid name, if a bit presumptuous sounding (it makes it sound as if that's the second most important language one speaks). In other countries I've more often seen "<Local-Language>
for Non-Native Speakers" or similar, never calling it a second language.One is left wandering what a manatee in a bikini was doing in a public park...
The US can change their laws to not have a global wiretap and secret backdoor warrant program, then this would be possible.
Even if they did, they can change them right back whenever they want and the thing with data is that, once it's out there somewhere, there's no way of knowing for sure it hasn't been copied and archived.
Not just from recent events but from the Snowden Revelations and the decades of 4-eyes operations even before that, we're well beyond the point of it being possible to trust US-based and US-registered companies with the data of Europeans, and ditto for those of any other of what are now the 7-eyes countries.
Actually it's more spectacularly stupid design than merely asshole design.
Risking losing potential customers at the last step of the customer acquisition pipeline is incredibly idiotic - from the beginning of said pipeline (for example, an advert being shown to a person) until the end (the customer actually pays for something they bought) there's can be a ridiculous percentage of potential customer which drop of (something like 99.9%+ if it starts at "show advert")
As for somebody that's confronted with this at a checkout, just drop that shopping cart and go somewhere else (also valid in real life when you're at the till and they do something shitty - just drop it and walk away) since that's literally the point were shunning that store does them the most damage.
Germany has a massive ongoing problem of the use of ethnicity to classify people and the practice of ethnic-Descrimination being normalized in German society, especially Politics and the Press, all of which adds up to Extreme Racism (it's the only country in Europe were a head of state has justified sending weapons and ammo to a Genocidal state whilst they were mass murdering children, with the need to support the dominant ethnicity of the aggressor state).
This shit is definitely not Humanist Values - were people's treatment depends only on their actions and their need, not at all their ethnicity - but rather an older way of looking at other people and the World which, curiously, is very much the same as the NAZIs, though not quite yet taken to the same extreme in terms of action inside of Europe (though the same can't be said for how extreme its practice has been Palestine).
The revelation of Modern Day Germany being so profoundly Racist that even Genocide committed along ethnic lines is something that the country will support as long as the ethnicity of the genociders is one deemed "good" (Jewish) and the victims one deemed "bad" or "lesser" (Muslims), should be scary for all of us Europeans as you never know when Germany will whilst walking such path come to the point of seeing other European ethnicities too as "lesser" one which can be eliminated to take their land just like Israel is doing to Palestinians.
I was thinking Germany.
Lemmy world moderation as usual using "anti-semitism" as a cudgel against Humanitarian beliefs.
Wasting the wing-effect on something like that and instead doing it as a quadcopter is seriously wasteful.