The 15% tariff is probably a positive thing. It’s motivation for European companies to find customers outside of the US and eventually decouple, without the shock of a total embargo.

I’m definitely a big outlier, I was always pretty bad at foreign languages in school, and I was in a very english-heavy daily environment. I have social anxiety too so I just switch to English whenever I’m worried I’ll say something wrong.

I studied Swedish in an international gymnasium and then barely passed Svenska som andra språk III in Komvux during the first 3 years I lived in Sweden and I would say I was at a B1 level after that. I went to English-language university and worked in IT afterwards so I wasn’t speaking Swedish on a daily basis, just some jobs where we would have the occasional Swedish meeting or I would send some emails in Swedish. After 10 years though I got a Swedish-language government IT job and my Swedish has improved a ton in just a few months. Nowadays after 11 years I’m definitely a C1 or C2. I might trip up and sound foreign on some complex topics, and I definitely still have an American accent, but I basically speak like a native. But yeah, it is very rare to not be able to speak English with someone on the street, but of course, it is important to learn Swedish to make social environments, paperwork, and work easier.

I would say Swedish is probably the easiest foreign language to learn as an English speaker. The sounds are quite straightforward or can be approximated, the grammar is super simplified and nearly identical to English, and most of the vocabulary are cognates with English. A lot of words can be verbified or adjectified so the vocabulary comes quick. Both Swedish and English are germanic languages with tons of French loan words so the overlap is huge.

SSDs are getting crazy cheap.

If you need 10tb of storage, you could get 2x used 10tb hdds in raid 1 for $200, but 6x used 2tb nvme in raid 5 is only $600 and 100x faster. Both take up the same amount of space.

SMR is designed for enterprise raid that is SMR-aware.

I’m not aware of any open-source zoned storage raid but I think Ceph is planning to add support next month.

https://zonedstorage.io/docs/getting-started/smr-disk

Can confirm, took me way too long to become fluent in Swedish because I just talked English with everyone 😅

I definitely recommend practicing the language though, it’s very important for social interactions, official stuff, and many careers.

Välkommen!

They literally campaigned on a slogan saying that doubling the prison time would cut crime in half. Insanity.

Better source from Vox:

https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/415360/state-department-substack-samuel-samson-adrian-vermeule-integralism

The memo in question:

https://substack.com/@statedept/p-164571608

Excuse you, I don’t have a problem.

Trump and Netanyahu have alienated 92 million people from the west and kicked a massive, nuclear, hornets nest. I worry that the Tehran regime has nothing left to lose at this point. They’re on the ropes militarily, but they’re not out of power.

On non-Fairphones, which tend to have larger batteries and lower power consumption batteries tend to be usable for much longer. We are talking 3-5 years there.

No way.

Get the battery replaced once in the phone’s lifetime at a local 3rd party repair shop for €100 wait for half an hour and get your phone back.

These shops only service iPhones and Samsungs, there’s only like 1-2 shops in Stockholm that repair Pixels and Xiaomis at all, let alone whatever 3 year old model you have. Not to mention things like screen and USB port repairs cost 100-200€ more than the fairphone parts.

(Fairphone tends to have availability issues with spare parts. For example, right now the FP5 battery is out of stock.)

I’ve had to wait a month for a fairphone battery before, but it’s not like they’re discontinued. I can imagine battery warehousing costs more than screens and USB ports.

A repairable phone is the most important thing. I could buy a used flagship, but the battery will be trashed. I used to buy a phone every 2 years but now I just buy a battery every 2 years. I can use my phone knowing that if anything breaks I can have a replacement part in within a week, and I don’t have to spend 100€s to ship it to some repair shop in a different part of the country.

Fairphone 4 and 5 are also the only smartphones certified by the Swedish unions: https://tcocertified.com/product-finder/index?category=Smartphones

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCO_Certified

Who in the US is buying midrange or flagship phones without a loan?

would probably take a month or two

Closing Hormuz would blockade the Saudis as well.

That is not the argument stated in the article

Sánchez argued that Spain doesn’t need to spend 5 percent of its GDP to fulfill its so-called capability targets, meaning new objectives of weapons inventory agreed by NATO defense ministers earlier this month.

He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system, force the government to increase taxes on the middle class, scale back commitments to the green transition and curtail international development cooperation.

“It is the legitimate right of every government to decide whether or not they are willing to make those sacrifices,” he wrote.

Rushing to 5 percent would also force Madrid to buy off-the-shelf equipment instead of fostering its own industrial base, as well as take money away from welfare policies, Sánchez also wrote.

The Spanish Socialist party is in a coalition with the junior left-wing Sumar party, which opposes increased defense spending and whose members are expected to attend a counter-summit for peace in parallel to the NATO summit.

Have you actually met any of them at say, Fosdem?

Can we stop letting chatbots make economic and administrative decisions, thanks

From the license:

Unless expressly stated otherwise, the person who associated a work with this deed makes no warranties about the work, and disclaims liability for all uses of the work, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.

Trump can just veto the bill if he doesn’t want to sanction Russia, they should stop trying to water it down.

Wouldn’t be funny at all.