gian

It’s about the big, long-term picture. Companies spend money on branding and advertising because it works. You create the perception that your product is for a certain type of person, which makes them more inclined to buy it. By making cigarettes boring, you make them less appealing, and on average less people will smoke.

Fine, but if that the point, a more honest (intellectually) thing to do would be simply ban cigarettes advertising. The way it is done seems to me something like “I want to ban this but I don’t want to be the one that do it”.

Tobacco companies fought it tooth and nail. Kept arguing it wouldn’t stop people from smoking.

They are right, people will not stop smoking only because the packaging is dull.

Well then why are you lobbying so hard against it? Obviously the only reason they will ever fight anything is because they think it will hurt their revenue. So whatever they oppose, I support.

Because they lost advertising opportunity.
People recognize the brand by the packaging before even reading the brand name. This way your country just make any type of advertising for the cigarettes useless. And maybe as a collateral effect some younger people will not start to smoke since they will not see the advertising, but as far as I know people don’t start to smoke because the package is cool.

The fact is these are high tech machines. To follow your example with the car, you don’t need to replace the battery but an ECU, for which there are no available design and you have no idea how to build it.
Add to this that probably if you make a mistake in your try, you destroy the machine.

Basically what ASLM is saying is that they can brick the machine with a software update and even if not bricked the machine cannot run long without specialized maintenance and spare parts (that they obviously will not provide anymore). True, China can try to clone them, but even if/when understand how to make them, you then need to make them, a thing which seems out of question for now for China (else they already would have such machines).

For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking.

Only because the social pressure after the metoo charade. Visa itself was more than happy to allow these transaction before it. And once all this stigma on adult content will pass, Visa will be more than happy to allow these transactions again. They are money to them.

You need a big fancy building in a fancy city to attract top talent, high earners, so it keeps the class system intact as well.

I don’t think that this is that true anymore.

Remote work is not right for ALL companies. Just ones that are completely or predominantly software-based.

I would expand to all the jobs that can be done with a laptop, an internet connection and a phone.

Never tried to force the closing of your trunk lid because there is a bag that is slightly over the limit and you need a little more pressure, even if the bag is a little pressed down ?

The assumption here is that if it is your finger which is in the way, you take it out the way and you are not that stupid to try to close it again if for some reason you are not able move it away, which to me seems to make a lot of sense.

Not a doctor here, but fulminant meningitis can kill a person in about 24/48 hours even if treated, for example.

They don’t live long enough, sadly. If they did, they could easily be the dominant species.

The problem is not how long they live but that they don’t take care of the offspring, so every octopus need to learn everything from scratch again.

Buy a book published more that a couple of years ago. Or ask the people living in the area (the older the better, normally ). Or ask the people living in the area where you can have the mushrooms checked, they usually know where to go.

I think you are seeing this as racism when it is just some old good skepticism about a country that is famous for faking everything.

Maybe they really done what they say, or maybe it is just some proof of concept that need to be ported, if possible, to a viable product stage or maybe it is just a fake, we will see.

Are you so deluded to think that there are no other service provider in EU ?

I think that there are two main reasons that caused them to be fired: insubordination since they occupied the CEO’s office and refused to leave when asked (and probably he don’t asked only one time) which led to the second reason, they were arrested for trespassing in the CEO’s office.

I don’t know, but it seems that at least it is enough to be arrested.

Reports seems to indicate that they were arrested for trespassing.

If there is a criminal charge or conviction I think you would be fired in most countries.

Proton Pass allow you to export your passwords in various formats (both plain and encrypted). That you are able to import somewhere else is not something Proton Pass can guarantee but you have your data.

Not that I want to defend Musk, but

The whole carbon credits thing

I suppose here he just used something that was present, like many other entities

Other companies have largely eaten their lunch, launching solid EV’s that rival or better Tesla

Yes, only after Tesla show that it is possible to make a nice EV car. Do you remember all the EV cars before Tesla.

Their reputation was built off of the end-goal of mass-producing affordable EV’s, something they will now not do.

Given they started from scratch, I’d say the are not that bad

Actually it coincided with IPX rating for smartphones. The last headphone jack smartphones did not have water resistance, but the newer models did. People voted for a more sealed phone with their wallets.

My rugged phone is IP68 but it has Usb C connector and SIM/SD tray, so adding a headphone jack while having an IPX rating seems not impossible.

Wait, I was talking about the fact that most EU bank (if not all) need to have a two factor authentication system in place, which limit a lot what a scammer can do.
In this case I think that a scam like this would not be possible or at least it would be stopped in the moment the bank app would ask to confirm what I am supposedly doing.

A national digital ID system is nice (in Italy we have the SPID), but it does not limit anything if you really can do everything with just the credid card number.