I don‘t hold a strong opinion on this, but I still find it a bit weird that they are set to ban something in porn that is - as far as I understand - perfectly fine irl?
What I find weirdest is how incredibly prevalent this „genre“ (?) is? Not only is it popular, it is literally everywhere
It is fascinating to be around such social people. I still remember my great-uncle as a kid. He lived a very simple live as a rural farmer in Germany. He did not have a wife, and he didn‘t have kids, but he had a deep tie to his family and everyone around him. When he passed away during my teens, there were hundreds of people attending his funeral. I was amazed by the impact he must have had on all their lives given they‘ve taken time out of their day to give him a last farewell.
I also notice the generational gap the author of this article highlights. My parents are in their 50s, my brother and I are in our mid 20s.
My parents still have their friends from school, from their apprenticeships and different times of their lives. We can‘t go anywhere in a 100km radius without my dad knowing someone. In school I literally had bus drivers ask me if I am <dad‘s name> son, not because they heard my name, but because we look so much alike.
When looking into my brothers and my life, most of our friends from school left for far away. Things my parents considered normal back in their days, are now considered weird. While my parents still experience an incredibly supportive circle of friends, I would not know who to invite to my hypothetical wedding tomorrow.
Granted, I may be an extreme example. But even when looking more generalized among my peers, most of the friendships we have seem to be significantly more superficial and also fewer than our parents.
The problem is that just because you‘re detecting something, it does not mean it is worth watching. Bodies are not standardized and most people habe something off. But you can‘t really reschedule everybody constantly, as that would entirely break the concept.
> My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment,
These treatments are wonderful and it is great that they exist. But many people fail to understand the difference in terms of pretest probability, etc.
I can absolutely see the heavy psychological impact pending biopsy results may have. People are quick to discount these issues when you raise them as a concern, but only if they never went through this stress themselves
> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?
It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
This is just objectively untrue. Source: I live in Germany, a country with some of the highest electricity prices, I drive a BEV and I heat my home with a heatpump. My systems SCOP hovers around 3.5, which means that my kWh of heat made from my heatpump with electricity is cheaper than my current gas rate.
My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both buildings being roughly comparable late 80s construction.
I charge my car at my standard electrcity rate of 32ct/kWh, and I pay now about half for the same usage.
Electricity is expensive, yeah. But electrified stuff is also significantly more efficient than fossil tech
I'm curious as to how this will shift once the shift towards more electrification continues. This is only about electricity generation, not total power consumption.
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
> Electricity/heating and gasoline in the EU is many times more expensive than in the U.S.
Maybe because Europe as a whole has little to no signifcant oil reserves ready for extraction? Very much unlike the US.
> I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.
The US does have plenty of cheap energy and yet its industrial output is dwarfed by Chinas, which is increasingly relying on domestically products green tech. Also, people seem to be not very concerned with energy prices. If they were, they would not act as irrational when it comes to topics like heatpumps or electric vehicles.
> that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.
Looking at the energy policy of some countries (Germany specifically), it seems vastly more likely that politicans are bought by oil companies.
Nuclear does not cause prices to be lower. Putting that aside, political discourse here in Germany was "interesting" to say the least.
The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.
The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.
The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.
So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
> But it is by no means obvious that carbon taxes are the right path.
When the government says that the market should do something, people complain about government interference. When the government lets the market do something, but sets the right incentives, people are complaining about it again.
Co2 taxation is effectively internalizing the cost of co2 pollution. The price goes up the more we pollute, because we have less budget until we cannot reach our goals anymore.
That is good, because it is a lie that others are not following.
People love to point to China for their emissions, completely avoiding that China, as the workbench of the world, essentially is burdened with the emissions of the world.
Developing nations skip the fossil fuel stage entirely because Solar in particular and at a ceratain point wind is just cheaper than buying Oil and natural gas. Chinese EVs are also increasingly popular in emerging markets, not because they are more environmentally friendly, but because they are more cost effective to operate.
Wether or not it is because of environmental concerns or not, the world is moving towards cleaner technology, specifically it is also more efficient.
Considering that we in Europe have a remarkable absence of easily accessible fossil fuels, Europe should be continuing to push towards renewable technologies
German precision was not only about engineering, it has always also been about having a precisely defined bureaucratic process for everything.
Also, people never explicitly say they do want more bureaucracy. More often, the bureaucracy is more often a result of what people don't want to. They may want more roads, but they don't want them near *their* home, thus they fight for something to prevent construction there. They may want this subsidy, but they most certainly do not want person X to get it as well.
Might still be a useless indicator considering that many of the low GDP countries also rank badly in other indicators that are often taken into consideration more broadly, like quality of life indicies, corruption indices or just the Gini coefficient. Correlation does not mean causation
GDP is not useful to measure how good an economy works. The core problem of GDP is that it does not account for usefulness of spending.
GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.
There are a few noticeable differences between housing as an asset and AI datacenters. Beyond the obvious difference that a house has a depreciation in the order of decades, whereas AI GPUs are a few years.
Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people.
I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years
I find the S&P500 to be interesting as a demonstration for currency risk. Denoted in US, it went up ~18% or so. For me as an EUR investor, it went up just 4.6% when accounting for the loss of the USD. Comparing that to indicies that usually do not perform that well, Euro Stoxx 50 is up ~22% and MSCI Emerging Markets ~21%.
I try to see it positive. With the AI bubble, I finally habe a tangible example to point to when I say that GDP growth is a bad indicator for economic success
> That would be against everything european governments stand for.
I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.
What I find weirdest is how incredibly prevalent this „genre“ (?) is? Not only is it popular, it is literally everywhere