I read it accurately. I just don't agree that "paying someone in a different country with my currency" is what is typically, normally meant by "exporting stuff".
Hetzner is not US-headquartered, so I'd say it should not be possible for the US government to make Hetzner turn out data from its EU locations.
They will most certainly be able to make the US subsidiary of Hetzner turn out any kind of data it technically has access to. But if Hetzner is not entirely stupid (and they are usually pretty smart) they set up their internal networks such that the US admins cannot access data located in the EU.
The problem with EU subsidiaries of Amazon and Microsoft is that the principal corporation is located in the US and subject to US jurisdiction, and that eventually, the owning company is always able to make a subsidiary comply with its demands, so it's virtually impossible to set up an impenetrable barrier between them. It's the other way round with Hetzner. A subsidiary can't command the owning company around, not even if the US government wants it to.
I'd say it's about 2-3x at most, in the best case scenarios. When I have to write some kind of wrapper or glue code on a green field, I approach that factor. And I really love using AI code completion in those kinds of task.
However, writing that kind of code maybe makes up 5% of my work. Analysis, trial-and-error, discussions etc. make up the other 95%, and AI only seldomly helps with that. It can sometimes be useful for research and spec ingestion, but it quickly becomes dangerous in those cases because as soon as you enter any kind of niche area (and unfortunately my work has a lot of those) LLMs tend to hallucinate and present made-up "knowledge" with enviable certainty.
It is not just a problem with Pis, but also other use cases in which the SD card is used 24/7, or at least for long stretches of time, especially if the use case involves writing of data. Dashcams are also notorious for destroying crappy SD cards due to their high write load, for example.
The Lithium ones that they suggest to use do have a decade or more of shelf life, and they also don't leak!
I've got an old pinball machine. Those use AA batteries to store highscores and settings in a battery-powered RAM chip. Typically the batteries must be replaced once a year or at least every two years, largely because of self-drain, and it's a common occurrence of them leaking, which can quickly destroy the 30 year old circuit board they're on. That's why most pinball collectors suggest to use Lithium AA batteries: you get 5-10 year lifetime, no danger of leakage.
Playmobil has a horrible number of super-small parts that'll go missing really quick when taken outside.
Lego has these, too, of course, but with Lego you at least have the benefit of being able to infinitely combine these parts to build stuff from them. Playmobil is "dumb" in that regard, you can't combine anything except in those ways in which it was specifically designed to be combined.
The real alternative to Lego in my opinion is Duplo, from the same manufacturer. They have no really small parts at all, so these are really good for outside play. But still infinitely combinable.
There is also Playmobil Junior [1] for toddlers - also no small parts and really robust. They also have very nice water and bathtub toys for indoors and outdoors.
We have the "Jooki Box" in use since its inception (the version before the current one), and it's a pretty good substitute. Allows to connect figurines to Spotify playlists, so if you have a Spotify Family subscription, you have a huge number of songs and audiobooks for kids at your fingertips with no additional cost.
The original box itself was way more expensive than the Toniebox, like double the price, but I think they've made it considerably cheaper when they released the second hardware version of it. And the original box still works until today, continues to be supported by their app and has already been built in a very sturdy way (I've opened it up once to add magnets inside, so the figurines stick on it, which they normally don't do - that's the one thing the Toniebox people got right).
It seems the company behind this product has gone out of business and the product itself is no longer sold (their e-commerce site is still up, but the shop is empty)?
Which is a bummer, as I went looking after your comment - Toniebox is great but I agree it feels overpriced on the content side (perhaps it isn’t, if their competitor couldn’t make the business model work…)
> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.
That's not exactly true. The single market has been a great thing for companies producing physical products. That's also what was in mind of the people who designed the single market. They wanted to unify standards for physical stuff. Because back then, there were no digital services to speak of. "Analog" services were naturally limited in their scaling capability so they weren't in focus, but mankind had back then just learned to scale up physical production, and the single market for physical goods has largely worked out great to shape global standards and stay competitive in the area of anything that's traded and touchable.
What's been created is a bad fit for digital products and services, unfortunately. The legal frameworks covering purely digital services are far less unified than the standards for physical goods. And digital services are way more reliant on localization than physical stuff is. No amount of EU single market legislation will ever be able to eliminate the language barriers, much less other cultural barriers that are often hindering digital services successful in one EU country from being adopted in neighboring EU countries.
Therefore, for those digital services that benefit greatly from network effects, it'll be hard for European variants to ever beat their US counterparts on the domestic turfs, and virtually impossible on the global market. However, not all digital services are dependent on network effects, so there are good reasons to continue trying to make the EU single market more applicable to digital services and to foster domestic offerings whereever possible, even if that strategy will probably never lead to the next Facebook or Instagram or Amazon to be built by a EU company.
the fact there is no EU single market for services is why I was not concerned on a long term basis for the UK economy as a result of leaving the EU
the UK is a service based economy, all growth from the next century is going to come from services, not by increasing cheese exports or trying to compete with the Chinese on battery production
almost all UK startups branch out to the US before they try the continent
no single market legislation is ever going to change this
>all growth from the next century is going to come from services
Why do I feel like many workers in the service industries are gonna be unemployed or working for pennies in the future following this hype leading to labor oversupply of service workers, while the likes of tradesmen will be making more money? There was even a south park episode about this.
The UK is already heavily fractured between the rich service based City of London and the rest of the country being relatively poor by comparison, especially the areas that suffered industrialization and haven't recovered and need constant subsidies from London.
Min-maxing a society like that doesn't usually end well but usually in some dystopian way, like rich workers needing to driver everywhere to avoid the masses of unemployed homeless people on drugs roaming the streets.
Not everyone can be a hot-shot banker or AI engineer, we should have career paths that can fit every level of skill and intelligence.
Simple way to eliminate language barriers is to introduce English as main language of schooling, thus making all next generation bilingual. It's done by middle and upper classes anyway so idk why commoners are intentionally left in the dust by the System.
Let's face it: our culture (all across the EU), is American, anyway. It's stupid to pretend otherwise.
> idk why commoners are intentionally left in the dust by the System.
There's extreme wealth inequalities between EU countries (we're talking about one order of magnitude in the extreme cases), language barriers are the main things holding back the demographic crisis that would come from mass economic immigration within the EU.
> Let's face it: our culture (all across the EU), is American, anyway. It's stupid to pretend otherwise.
EU is a big place (and so is the US).
Perhaps you've mainly visited major urban centers of both and so don't see the rather unique cultures both hold.
>There's extreme wealth inequalities between EU countries (we're talking about one order of magnitude in the extreme cases), language barriers are the main things holding back the demographic crisis that would come from mass economic immigration within the EU.
But that was the whole point of EU's existence: to make it easy for people to move countries. Do you claim that removing extra point of friction will make things somehow worse?
> Do you claim that removing extra point of friction will make things somehow worse?
Yes, did you not read my comment?
The peripheries of the EU (Portugal, Spain, Southern Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, etc) already see massive youth immigration and brain drain to the richer areas of the EU.
Make the majority of EU citizens fluent in English, and you can imagine how that would quickly massively increase this issue and destroy local economies and create massive political issues.
> Let's face it: our culture (all across the EU), is American, anyway.
No, it isn't. At most you could say that a part of our culture is American, but even amongst each other, EU countries differ quite a bit in terms of culture.
I hate that you are right regarding the cultural aspect. I wish we were better at preserving our respective identities. That's why I like going to small movie theatres; they tend to play local films. And you do stumble on gems from time to time.
Good idea - wrong language. English would make EU less European. German would be a better choice, or French or <inset an actual EU language>. Not that I believe in the idea.
English is the language spoken by the broadest base of people in the EU, and since Brexit lacks the kind of partisan status that e.g. French or German would have.
At least in the wealthier western European countries, English is already a mandatory subject from a young age. It of course varies by country, but for example Danes are learning English by age 10, followed by German/French/Spanish by age 13.
Is it that hard to admit that you didn't properly read the comment you responded to?