NYC has a better subway system than most Euro cities. Probably because NYC has the advantage of being old before cars became affordable.
For a few decades it seemed planners all over the world really had this crazy idea that everyone would just drive around for everything. Just put 10 lane highways straight through your town!
> NYC has a better subway system than most Euro cities. Probably because NYC has the advantage of being old before cars became affordable.
Nah, it's just because it's very, very big, nearly 9 million people. Very big European cities have comparable transport, but most European cities are smaller than this.
NYC's subway system is a little smaller than London's (though its commuter rail system is much smaller), and both cities have similar populations. And a little bigger than Paris's.
(Comparing metro system sizes can get messy, because there are things that are called metros but aren't really (eg SF muni metro, which shares space with cars) and things which aren't usually called metros but are metro-like (some S-bahn type things, in particular))
I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...
(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
Counterfeits don't happen when you buy parts from reputable distributors (digikey, mouser, Newark, TTI, arrow, etc) that are not "marketplace" items. These parts often come right from the manufacturer or from a domestic distributor for the manufacturer. You get counterfeits when you buy from brokers.
Often with older electronics designs, the parts the engineers originally picked are no longer made. It's not the end of the world, there are solutions. Sometimes the vendor changes the part number due to a process change or the part design is sold to another company and goes under a new number. You can also sometimes find drop in compatible parts (common for the 7400/5400 series chips), these may be in a different package so you might have to design an interposer or deadbug it. The worst option is finding old stock using a broker. There are legit brokers that will source old stock and "refurbish" them for you (called re-lifeing). But there are also shady brokers that will buy counterfeits (or get tricked into buying them) that may or may not actually work. Sometimes the counterfeits are relabeled parts that are compatible but the new label gets a higher price because they aren't being made any more. Sometimes the counterfeit is actually a totally different design that is shoehorned into its desired purpose (like a new microcontroller masquerading as an old processor or ASIC). Other times it's just some random junk pulled from e-waste that's been relabelled. Other times you'll get a counterfeit that comes from a stolen design. Even when the counterfeit functions, it may not perform to the same spec as the original part (very important for military spec parts) or will have other characteristics that make it incompatible with the rest of the design (like drawing too much or too little current). When it comes to engineering in ISO9001, traceability is a huge thing and brokers just can't provide that.
At my job, we have an "absolutely no brokers" rule. They simply cannot guarantee that what they provide is genuine. If a legitimate distributor doesn't have stock of a discontinued part, they'll never have stock of it. Brokers will tell you what you want to hear while they go out and try to make it happen. I'm not saying all brokers are shady but if you are considering buying from a broker, you should be instead considering how you can replace that part.
The Netherlands has Caribbean islands off the coast of Venezuela. If the US blows up a bunch of fishermen by accident it would be awkward. You can actually sue the Dutch government for this kind of thing and win.
The Trabant was a normal car if you look at what the rest of Europe was driving at the time. In fact the DDR did not economically collapse until the late 1970s.
Ofcourse the real problem was they could not actually make enough of them. You could go to a Citroen dealer and pick up a 2CV the same day.
That's an absurdly blanket statement to make about what evangelicals believe. Some may believe that, but there is an incredibly wide spectrum of beliefs even amongst evangelicals about end times events and the role Israel plays.
I am glad to hear that some evangelicals have much more reasonable beliefs about the end times and Jesus born of virgin, died and rose three days later is coming back… (note sarcasm).
I just finished _Culture In Nazi Germany_ by Michael H. Kater. [0]
Near the end it goes into percentages of which counties Jews moved to and why during their immigration. A good portion of the UK was antisemitic, along with a number of other countries, and didn't want them moving to their country.
UK colonized part of Palestine at the time and pushed Jews to move there. Only the most devoted that wanted to be closer to their religious holy land went because the only work at the time was farming. Ones that wanted to maintain living off their crafts; acting, music, writing moved else where.
UK's antisemitic view actually help create Israel and push for the Zionist movement.
One of the most surprising aspects is that a number of Jewish immigrants actually supported fascism and told themself that it just was not implemented right. It wasn't until the 1960s when the views changed to fascism is bad.
Warning, the book is very dry and goes into detail of what happened to famous actors, writers, and musicians.
UK did colonize Palestine and rejected the indigenous populous. They didn't take over by direct conquer like others. [0]
1939 was during the War period not before. Immigrating out of German started in the early 1930s. Nazis were in power in the 1920s, not fully. It was around 1928 they started the Culture Wars against ideas and works they deemed Modern, like Jazz. As the book states, the UK was pushing for them to immigrate there instead of their main Island because of antisemitic views. [1] [2]
The author actually traveled and talked to number of celebrities that lived during that time period. Even asking the Nazi era actors if they thought their careers would of took off if fascism never took hold and removed their competition.
uk liberated middle east from ottomans who actually colonized it. in palestine there was mandate given to them by league of nations
jewish immigration to mandatory palestine was always severely restricted by british. british were capturing illegal new immigrants and were shipping them off to cyprus or something like this. on the other side arab immigration through syria/trans-jordan/sinai was unrestricted
jews are the indigenous population. at least from all existing people, jews have the oldest and most substantial historical rights to the modern-day Israel.
> The support of Israel relies on two things: the Holocaust and the old Testament.
Come on. Geopolitically, Israel is an important pillar.
The V-Dem Democracy indices ranked in 2024 Iraq, Israel, Mauritania and Tunisia as the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the highest democracy scores. The Economist Group's Democracy Index rated in the region Israel as the only "flawed democracy" and no country as "full democracy" for year 2023.
This "only democracy in the region" line gets trotted out, but most Palestinians don't get a vote in the government that controls their lives. So "democracy" in the sense that Apartheid South Africa was a democracy, only.
Are you referring to the West Bank or Gaza? Because they’re both not part of Israel. Palestinians in Israel absolutely vote and have their own representatives in government.
If you arbitrarily define parts of the territory you control as not part of your territory, and its population as not your citizens (even though they are entirely subject to your jurisdiction), then you only get partial credit for being a “democracy”, at best.
If Israel were really committed to democratic ideals, they would either make all Palestinians equal citizens of the state (currently Israel, which would presumably be renamed “Palestine” the next day), or, more realistically, they would allow the Palestinian Territories to become an independent state, rather than keeping them permanently occupied and subject to Israeli military law.
this is exactly what other countries do since ages - US, UK, France - just to name a few - they all have territories under their control, but not integrated into the state itself, with population having different, but usually lesser rights than the population of the state proper.
on the other hand, the situation in so-called palestinian territories is completely different. Gaza strip was officially annexed by Egypt, West Bank was officially annexed by Jordan - so the official government would be these countries, and if we're talking about Apartheid, then it would be committed by these countries.
Does it matter? A country being allied with the US seems to have little to do with whether it's a democracy, see e.g. Taiwan and South Korea during the dictatorship period, or Saudi Arabia now.
To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if you are white.
I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must have felt in the 19th century?
And yet this issue only seems to impact North America. So much so that the EU doesn't even consider iMessage a "gatekeeper" of the industry (WhatsApp is though).
In Europe people have to pay to send SMS right? So people have a good reason to seek out alternatives like WhatsApp, which are cross-platform. There is no habit of using SMS. Therefore linking iMessage to SMS by default doesn’t create any network effect in EU like it does in US, where SMS is free.
The reason why WhatsApp is dominant here is that iOS never gained the market share it had in the US. The iPhone was exclusive to the US until the iPhone 3G was released and as far as I remember even the 3G wasn't released globally. Also wages are lower in most of Europe and in some European countries an iPhone cost an average monthly salary.
This lead to a much higher market share for Android and the need for a cross platform messenger. While SMS were cheap or included in your monthly plan MMS was not and was really expensive. Except if you communicated with someone in another country. This meant paying expensive roaming fees (these are basically history thanks to the EU).
Meanwhile WhatsApp was "free" and a way better user experience for group chats and sharing media than SMS and MMS. It was also a way around roaming fees because you could use it with your included roaming data or over the hotel wifi. So it was basically universally adopted in the 2010s. Sending a WhatsApp is basically a verb today.
This is of course all anecdotal and is mostly a western European perspective.
I’m curious of the history. Presumably people used SMS when it was the only option, and stopped at some point and installed message apps (but they never stopped in the US).
Pure guess, but given the high market share of iPhones in the US in that demographic, it may actually be the higher usage of iMessage among young adults that prevented the ascendancy of WhatsApp there.
I think this is all stupid. One the one hand the tech companies get slammed for not inter-operating, then Apple gets slammed for inter-operating. Loads of phones have come with vendor specific messaging apps and such, it's just that Apple committed the crime of making theirs decent and successful.
Interoperating? Is the iMessage spec public? Can I use iMessage on an android phone without hacky workarounds like using a mac computer?
Come to think of it, the same lack of interop openness applies to airdrop, use of the on-phone NFC chipset (for uses other than apple-pay), and a bunch of other such things.
RCS has been available for over 10 years. Apple is being knocked for their half-assed version of interoperability, where the iPhone implements just enough of the standard to shame non-iPhone users when they communicate with friends and family. If you have any doubt this is intentional, see the emails and public comments from Apple executives.
>And yet this issue only seems to impact North America.
That's absolutely correct. Outside of US/CAN, everyone has long since moved on to various chat apps. Each country/region basically has a de-facto standard chat app that everyone uses. Here in Japan, you have to use LINE if you want to communicate with anyone outside of work/business. In China, it's WeChat, in many other countries it's WhatsApp, etc. Only Americans (and Canadians I guess) still use SMS for anything besides 2FA.
