Germany’s Merz recently said that his country has different needs in that matter than France, which needs the jet to be able to carry its nukes and land on an aircraft carrier. Germany’s air force, on the other hand, would like the fighter to focus more on range.
A possible solution could be to develop two separate planes and continue to develop the other elements of the project together with the third partner, Spain.
So now Hungary deals with a potentially less mafia like leader, who still isn’t very pro EU nor Ukraine and might still bloc the 90 Billion Euro. However he’ll have his own mess to clean up and possibly stop blocking the EU from more functionally operating as well as hopefully stop being a Putin conduit/advocate.
Trump and the US shit is world affecting, but get your head out of your US ass. The EU is where the free world game is, and China is still the player to watch. Trump just made the US more irrelevant and your ignorance is part of why that is.
This is the author’s post at Oxford: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/global-poverty-trends-through-a-new-lens-olivier-sterck-article-for-voxdev
Has global poverty fallen since 1990? Depending on which poverty line you use, the answer ranges from “we’ve made huge progress” to “nothing has changed”.
Using the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of US$2.15/day (in 2017 PPP), the share of people in poverty fell from 38% of the world’s population in 1990 (about 2 billion people) to 8.5% in 2024 (690 million people) (Figure 1). This is often cited as a historic success.
But raise the line – say to $21.5/day, as suggested by Pritchett and Viarengo (2025), or $30/day, as argued by Roser (2024) – and the picture changes entirely. The poverty rate is then extremely high, above 75%, and has barely budged since 1990. In absolute terms, the poverty headcount has even increased, from over 4 billion poor people in 1990 to over 6 billion poor people in 2024. Based on these numbers, the fight against global poverty appears to have failed.
This divergence is not just a statistical quirk. All mainstream poverty measures share the same fundamental feature: they ignore everyone above the chosen line. With the extreme poverty line of the World Bank ($2.15/day), someone earning $2.16/day is treated as equally non-poor as someone earning $10, $100, or $1,000/day. Billions of low-income people – who most would agree still live in poverty – are therefore excluded from the statistics. And because there is no consensus on where to set the line, it is tempting to pick the one that tells the story you want.
In Sterck (2026), I propose to measure income poverty without a poverty line. The idea is to measure poverty across the entire income distribution, rather than classifying people as poor or non-poor based on an arbitrary threshold.
The measure’s key intuition is simple: if person A earns half as much as person B, then A is twice as poor. Poverty is therefore simply measured as the reciprocal of income, and its unit is simply inverted. If incomes are measured in dollars per day ($/day), poverty is measured in days per dollar (days/$).
Average poverty is simply the average time it takes to earn $1 in a given population.
In 2024, that value was equivalent to:
Worth reading on the background of 230 https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2026/02/30-years-of-section-230-why-we-still-need-it-for-a-safer-internet/
Good call out of the identifiable victim effect and the affect heuristic, where decisions are driven by emotional responses rather than objective analysis of risks or benefits.
I feel like you watched the video differently than I did because his whole point was about the prewash and the wash. The fact that the main washes where the pod gets dumped in, not during the pre wash for the for 15 minutes, which is his trying to be using powdered soap.
Or at least that was the first half of the video. The second half was about heat and wash cycles.
A dishwasher has two major cycles that are relevant to dish soap. One is the I’ll show about 15 minutes. And the there is the main wash, which is like an hour plus depending. If you don’t use powdered dish soap and split it up then you’re missing the advantage of the prewash.
Second half is focused on the effect of heat and why you should drain your water line of cold water through your faucet before you start your dishwasher. By doing that, you increase the heat and you increase the longevity of that heat on is that are in your dishwasher. It’s worth noting that heat is good for dishwashing liquid both because it helps the enzyme break down and also probably breaks down with the food material at some cases.
Beyond that, he was very enthusiastic about his new soap, which he helped create, and rightfully so. Double blind test, it came out very well against premium pods, and he was able to prove his whole point about pods not being useful in a prewash.
Interesting you say viral pathology and immunology. Can you expand on what you mean on that a bit? I find it a useful analog for what’s going on.
I like this concept and I feel like that a step along the way as it is essentially what’s happening. The EULA’s, TOS’s, SLA’s, etc are all contracts, which should be negotiable by both parties and allow the individuals or groups to define value, be that monetary value (the $5) or something in trade. Some how we the masses skipped over the negotiation, and are left with an almost binary choice either accept and use it or not. (You could sue, or protest, or etc, but without standing or a large following this is not effective for an individual.)
So whilst’ I agree, I also think it might be more useful to focus on the reason the information is valuable.
And one last point here, is that these all stem from the way we as humans are built. Although we are capable of rational though, we often do not make rational decisions. Indeed those decisions are based on cognitive biases which we all have and are effected by context, environment, input, etc. It’s possible to overcome this lack of rational judgement, through processes and synthesis such as the scientific method. So we as citizens and humans can build institutions that help us account for the individual biases we have and overcome these biological challenges, while also enjoying the benefits and remaining human.
Great cause and one that reaches to the heart of what I see as impacting much of the governmental and societal disruption that’s happening. It’s a complex and nuanced issue that is likely to take multiple prongs and a long time to resolve.
Let me start by again generally agreeing with the point. Privacy is necessary for reasons beyond the obvious needs. Speaking to the choir here on a privacy community. I think it’s worth listing the reasons that I understand why Americans are generally dismissive of the need for privacy protections. I cheated here, and used an LLM to help, but I think these points are indicative of things to overcome.
Convenience > confidentiality. Nearly half of U.S. adults (47 %) say it’s acceptable for retailers to track every purchase in exchange for loyalty-card discounts, illustrating a widespread “deal first, data later” mindset. Pew Research Center
“Nothing to hide.” A popular refrain equates privacy with secrecy; if you’re law-abiding, the thinking goes, surveillance is harmless. The slogan is so common that rights groups still publish rebuttals to it. Amnesty International
Resignation and powerlessness. About 73 % feel they have little or no control over what companies do with their data, and 79 % say the same about government use—attitudes that breed fatalism rather than action. Pew Research Center
Policy-fatigue & click-through consent. Because privacy policies are dense and technical, 56 % of Americans routinely click “agree” without reading, while 69 % treat the notice as a hurdle to get past, not a safeguard. Pew Research Center
The privacy paradox. Behavioral studies keep finding a gap between high stated concern and lax real-world practice, driven by cognitive biases and social desirability effects. SAGE Journals
Market ideology & the “free-service” bargain. The U.S. tech economy normalizes “free” platforms funded by targeted ads; many users see data sharing as the implicit cost of innovation and participation. LinkedIn
Security framing. Post-9/11 narratives cast surveillance as a safety tool; even today 42 % still approve of bulk data collection for anti-terrorism, muting opposition to broader privacy safeguards. Pew Research Center
Harms feel abstract. People worry about privacy in the abstract, yet most haven’t suffered visible damage, so the risk seems remote compared with daily conveniences. IAPP
Patchwork laws. With no single federal statute, Americans face a confusing mix of state and sector rules, making privacy protections feel inconsistent and easy to ignore. Practice Guides
Generational normalization. Digital natives are more comfortable with surveillance; a 2023 survey found that 29 % of Gen Z would even accept in-home government cameras to curb crime. cato.org
Having listed elements to overcome, it’s easy to see why this feels sisyphean task in an American society. (It is similar, but different other Global North societies. The US desperately needs change as is evident with the current administration.) Getting to your question though, I feel like the real rational points to convey are not those above, but the reasons how a lack of privacy impacts individuals.
Political micro-targeting & democratic drift
Platforms mine psychographic data to serve bespoke campaign messages that exploit confirmation bias, social-proof heuristics, and loss-aversion—leaving voters receptive to turnout-suppression or “vote-against-self-interest” nudges. A 2025 study found personality-tailored ads stayed significantly more persuasive than generic ones even when users were warned they were being targeted. Nature
Surveillance pricing & impulsive consumption
Retailers and service-providers now run “surveillance pricing” engines that fine-tune what you see—and what it costs—based on location, device, credit profile, and browsing history. By pairing granular data with scarcity cues and anchoring, these systems push consumers toward higher-priced or unnecessary purchases while dulling price-comparison instincts. Federal Trade Commission
Dark-pattern commerce & hidden fees
Interface tricks (pre-ticked boxes, countdown timers, labyrinthine unsubscribe flows) leverage present-bias and choice overload, trapping users in subscriptions or coaxing them to reveal more data than intended. Federal Trade Commission
Youth mental-health spiral
Algorithmic feeds intensify social-comparison and negativity biases; among U.S. teen girls, 57 % felt “persistently sad or hopeless” and nearly 1 in 3 considered suicide in 2021—a decade-high that public-health experts link in part to round-the-clock, data-driven social media exposure. CDC
Chilling effects on knowledge, speech, and creativity
After the Snowden leaks, measurable drops in searches and Wikipedia visits for sensitive topics illustrated how surveillance primes availability and fear biases, nudging citizens away from inquiry or dissent. Common Dreams
Algorithmic discrimination & structural inequity
Predictive-policing models recycle historically biased crime data (representativeness bias), steering patrols back to the same neighborhoods; credit-scoring and lending algorithms charge Black and Latinx borrowers higher interest (statistical discrimination), entrenching wealth gaps. American Bar AssociationRobert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Personal-safety threats from data brokerage
Brokers sell address histories, phone numbers, and real-time location snapshots; abusers can buy dossiers on domestic-violence survivors within minutes, exploiting the “search costs” gap between seeker and subject. EPIC
Identity theft & downstream financial harm
With 1.35 billion breach notices issued in 2024 alone, stolen data fuels phishing, tax-refund fraud, bogus credit-card openings, and years of credit-score damage—costs that disproportionately hit low-information or low-income households. ITRC
Public-health manipulation & misinformation loops
Health conspiracies spread via engagement-optimized feeds that exploit negativity and emotional-salience biases; a 2023 analysis of Facebook found antivaccine content became more politically polarized and visible after the platform’s cleanup efforts, undercutting risk-perception and vaccination decisions. PMC
Erosion of autonomy through behavioral “nudging”
Recommendation engines continuously A/B-test content against your micro-profile, capitalizing on novelty-seeking and variable-reward loops (think endless scroll or autoplay). Over time, the platform—rather than the user—decides how hours and attention are spent, narrowing genuine choice. Nature
National-security & geopolitical leverage
Bulk personal and geolocation data flowing to data-hungry foreign adversaries opens doors to espionage, blackmail, and influence operations—risks so acute that the DOJ’s 2025 Data Security Program now restricts many cross-border “covered data transactions.” Department of Justice
Social trust & civic cohesion
When 77 % of Americans say they lack faith in social-media CEOs to handle data responsibly, the result is widespread mistrust—not just of tech firms but of institutions and one another—fueling polarization and disengagement. Pew Research Center
If Lemmy has a best of, this should be submitted. Or maybe we just need to create a new one called hardest life lesson.
This is the realpolitik answer. Intake perception of power, intentions, hard power, and leverage, among other things to get the context for position changes.
Russia sees creating the “macroregion” as an important long-term project, which would outlast any talks with the west over the future of Ukraine, to help strengthen its footing on the “global arena,” the report says.
The new bloc would connect Russia to the global south by giving each side access to raw materials, developing financial and transport ties, and uniting them through a common “world view [ . . .] where we write rule for the new world [and have] our own sanctions policy”, the report claims.
But it admits the obstacles to Russia’s global resurgence remain considerable. The report says western countries have successfully threatened central Asian countries into complying with sanctions through a “carrot-and-stick” approach while offering them access to global markets, transport corridors, and supply chains that bypass Moscow.
Russia’s allies, meanwhile, have profited from the sanctions by driving Russian businesses out of their home jurisdiction, taking control of import and export flows, and relocating production from Russia, according to the report. It adds that central Asian countries have also sought extra commissions to compensate for the risks of violating sanctions.
While I have little doubt they are spending many millions on it, I sort of doubt it’s billions of euros. They link a telegram source, which talks about German Intelligence. Not impossible, but not an easily verifiable source.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
It just seems rather unlikely they are spending that much on disinformation when the have a real and present war in front of them with huge hardware/personnel loss, and have a waning treasury.
Been a while, but in several US states where the free report was mandated, they also allowed a request to be mailed in, of even faxed. Old school, but I would be surprised if they don’t still have some of those methods, and probably don’t require web form consents to privacy invading terms.
Indeed! Find yourself. Only then can you really connect with others authentically.
Disagree. It’s a tool that in it’s current form changes our way of processing and way of perceiving. It literally changes the way your brain seeks pleasure as well as intakes facts. One that individuals have to have a the money, knowledge, and social/legal/cultural power to take control of otherwise it will modify your decision making in such a way that you don’t feel, see, or believe there is a change. It’s so ubiquitous, pervasive, and disruptive, that contact and at least minimal acceptance is required to function in the global society.
The isolation, cognitive disrupted, physiological change that the internet has wrought through the smartphone, social media, and the apps is huge and yet not well discussed in anything but academic studies and other rarified forums.
Fair point, well played.
Just because history is idealized doesn’t mean it was actually better. Hans Rosling said it really well describing his standard of living improvement.
With that said, the world has not adapted to technology in it’s current incarnation yet, along side the other challenges it’s a tough world for all but the very wealthy and even they are showing signs of increased anxiety, stress, and depression.
Being ruled by our evolved cognitive biases through our technology, requires external regulation before the vast majority of the humanity can cope with the change.
Fase 1: Alertering (Alert)
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/binaries/rijksoverheid/documenten/rapporten/2023/02/03/bijlage-landelijk-crisisplan-olie/landelijk-crisisplan-olie.pdf