In Malmö the grenades are frequently old weapons from the wars in the Balkans. The police assume that someone imported a large cache of grenades, which has then been distributed to criminal gangs.[16][3] In addition to grenade attacks, there are a significant number of related bomb attacks with improvised explosive devices, including homemade bombs.[17][18] The number of incidents involving explosives tripled between 2008 and 2016.[19] According to a December 2018 Swedish Television interview with researcher Amir Rostami, Sweden has a high number of hand grenade attacks compared to neighbouring countries Denmark, Norway, and Germany. According to the Swedish police the reason may be the light sentence for possession compared to a firearm and that the evidence destroys itself when used. [20] While gun homicides were on the rise in the 2011–2018 time span, according to a study at Malmö University, the number of hand grenade attacks had shown a strong increase in the same period and a total of 116 hand grenade detonations were recorded. Rostami said criminologists in Sweden don’t know why there was a strong increase and why Sweden has a much higher rate than countries close by. [15] Statistics are hard to come by as the only country apart from Sweden that publishes statistics is Mexico

The hand grenades found by the police are exclusively the ex-Yugoslavian M75 hand grenade.

I remember seeing videos Finnish motorcycle gangs (very white, very Nazis) figthing with heavy arms in the woods sometimes. I remember in the movie “Lord of War” they said it was cheaper to buy real guns than fake ones for staging scenes of hangars full of guns after the downfall of the Sovjet Union, that made their hands into criminal trade. So if some dipshits smuggled in a few thousand grenades and distributed them, that explains why they are used so heavily compared to all other countries.

Also when looking at how heavily armed Finnish Nazi gangs are and how easy it was for Breivik in Norway to get the weapons for his massacres, it seems to simply be easier to get heavy weapons in Scandinavia than in other places. And Sweden being twice as populated than Finland or Norway results in more crime with that too.

Looking at the homicide rate, Sweden seems to be about the same like Finland and still much better than the Baltic states and on par with France and the UK.

So will this be the fifth “once in a century” flooding since the beginning of this century?

Yes please be successful.

Screw all indirect “currencies”, screw all “lootboxes”, screw aggressive sales tactics with “limited offers” for digital goods like Skins.

I think there should be a mandatory counter that is present at any ingame purchase, informing you how much money you have spent on the game in total and in the past year or so. If people want to whale because they love a game so much and they think their 50 € waifu-skin is worth it, so be it. But they should have all the means to make this decision with the best possible level of information.

I know the right candidate to guard that boarder.

I mean i am fully in support of PC gaming and in particular Linux gaming. It is just not as easy to keep upgrading PCs component by component. Eventually there is limits, mostly from the mainboards limits.

Within limits though. E.g. If your mainboard only supports old CPUs that is a huge limiting factor and we saw MS messing with older CPUs just not being supported at all by Win 11.

Now i made the switch to Linux myself too and i am very happy, but for people who want to start somewhere, maybe starting with their own linux gaming PC is a bit much for the start.

Oil and Gas prices going up was also cited as a main driver for the inflation of all sorts of goods, including basic food.

Problem is now “somehow” the prices remain high on these goods whereas the energy prices are back to normal again.

In this case the Unions and HRs rigidity could be part of the problem.

They tend to make groups based on formal qualifiaction. E.g. all trade apprentices get similiar salaries, all trade masters, all bachelor degrees and all master degrees (simplified).

So a person with just a formal trade apprentice, but great experience and proven know-how will still get a much lower salary than a recently graduates business degree “idiot” who mostly managed to study based on his parents pushing him through.

I’ve seen Job ads for cloud experts, who are supposed to organize an infrastructure over multiple data centres, running hundreds of different services in a heightened security environment offered around 3k. The Operations people said that this does not need a masters degree, because they didn’t want to filter out all the self taught people, and then HR and the Union reps said this is a trade level position so it gets a trade level salary.

From what i understood with the complexity of the IT landscape they would have needed to offer more around 6-7k to find people.

The library is legally allowed to hand out the books. However they are not allowed to replicate them and you are not allowed to borrow them with the goal to scan and copy it.

In 2024, Greece has one of the strongest growth outlooks in Europe. Once seen as the “problem child” of the eurozone, Greece has turned things around and now expects real gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 2% this year.

This [debt to GDP] is higher than it was before the start of the sovereign debt crisis, simply because economic performance shrank by a quarter as a result of the crisis

After the immense downturn, Greece is still far from pre-crisis levels. Meanwhile ordinary people are very much fucked economically.

Even though the resulting economic success surpassed expectations, not everyone was happy. There was opposition, criticism and accusations of an alleged “sellout of public property” to foreign investors, from left-wing circles in particular. Economic expert Petrakis doesn’t understand this attitude. “The accusation of a sellout when it comes to investments within the EU is senseless,” he said. Petrakis pointed to the fact that the Fraport investment was a success, specifically because the Germans invested in smaller airports, thereby attracting even more visitors to Greece. He emphasized that it wasn’t just the German investors who had benefited from the project, but also the local economies in all of the regions where Fraport is active.

The problem is not that some public property was sold, but rather that the profitable ones were sold, now generating money for foreign investors instead of keeping it in Greece. meanwhile society is footing the bill of non profitable infrastructure.

Cant you do that in mono with two oscillators? Also aren’t analog synths mono most of the time?

I don’t get the downvotes. Landmines are a huge issue. The balkan countries are still struggling with them 30 years after the wars. Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq… every “theater” of war, where landmines have been used are, still struggling with them decades and decades more after. Ukraine too will suffer for decades.

If there is an inevitable military need for them, there is no alternative. But they should not be used lightly and i am fairly certain, that Lithuania is not doing so lightly either.

The big problem is, that for now the only reliable technique to remove landmines from an area is to dig up the area step by step. This is extremely costly and still dangerous, despite all effort in using robots, animals detecting the explosives and so on. So i hope Lithuania triple counted the mines they put and keeps that record very well.

The German automotive industry became “victim” of its own political success. Instead of being exposed to the shifting markets and forcing real innovation, they lobbied successfully against changing regulatory frameworks. The article mentions an expert saying there is little economic reason to produce in Germany.

The German economy relies on meaningful innovation and it has been the driver of its success in the 50s-70s. By falling behind on that key competence, the automotive industry is dismantling itself.

However because of its political power, the automotive industry is not only dismantling itself, it is destroying the entire economy with it. Germany used to be leader in Solar and Wind power production. Then in the 2010-2012 China pressured Germany to let these industries fall apart, as it otherwise would create trade barriers for German car makers. Now China is dominating renewables and on top of it is taking the automotive industry away.

Beware Estonia, or this might be your future:

If you want to believe that…

The CIA operated a network of so called “black sites” in Europe , which were undeclared operations for torture and abduction of people. While not formally recognized, the countries like Germany must have know about them and aided in their operations or prevented legal repercussions for the people involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites

The only difference is in how discrete they are about their methods, but intelligence agencies are equally violent all around the world.

If your business model is hiding criminals billions it is a bad idea to get on the wrong side of criminal billionaires.

I really hope we don’t get riots like in the UK now. I am sure we will see a lot of incitement from the extreme far right and i am worried that the populist right will flank the incitement rather than distance from it.

Also there is global and local environmental effects. What can have relatively smaller global effects can still have huge local effects, and subsequently indirect global effects, that may not be attributed correctly.

The opposition to the Tesla plant is mainly because of their lavish consumption of ground water in a strongly stressed water resource, intransparency about potential pollution to that water resource region and last but not least political influencing on the local environmental regulatory bodies, to make the factory happen while looking the other way on environmental regulations.

It is perfectly reasonable for people not to want a factory to steal and poison their water while the government deliberately looks away. Tesla could have addressed legitimate concerns proactively and respectfully. Instead they gaslighted the people and picked fights with many local stakeholders like the local water utility.

That is a very strong wording. Most people would have said something like “i can no longer support this in good conscience”.

I hope it is reflective of the UK support for Israel crumbling, and hopefully applying pressure on Germany’s insane support for Israel too.

I’ve seen videos of mobs rampaging through neighbourhoods, smashing in windows and cars, throwing molotov cocktails at houses… While i appreciate that finally there is a counter movement, the pogroms need to be stopped at all places and the perpetuators must be jailed.

However this is the direct result of decades of rampant racism in the Tory and Labour party, as well as major British media outlets. Unless these agitators are brought to justice too, the next pogrom is only a matter of time. Looking how Keir Starmer was eager to purge mostly non-white MPs and members from the party, often resorting to racial attacks, while defending openly racist MPs, i am afraid this was only the beginning of a further spiral into violent hate crime.