“The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters” is supposedly a good book discussing the inadequacy of GDP as a metric for how well off a society is.
> Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing?
I suppose the NYTimes could not be bothered to look for someone to work with in Poland or Europe generally (France would be another option), which is, indeed, a shame. In my home town Kraków we have a wonderful chamber music collective which performs music from this very period on historical piano fortes, so very much the kind of instruments Chopin would play on himself. I contacted them immediately after reading this article and before your comment appeared. I am hopeful we will hear the piece performed by them very soon!
Of all these, only Warsaw was demolished systematically, and to the greater extent not by regular weapons, but by engineering corps using fire and explosives after the fighting has already stopped (the capitulation of the uprising in Oct 1944). It is a rather different case, even though – of course – all the other cities mentioned suffered very much too.
“What was left was methodically looted and then razed to the ground by the German Vernichtungs- and Verbrenungskommando – even as late as mid-January 1945.”
Vernichtungskommando is the specific German unit that was responsible for the systematic demolition of the remaining buildings.
The other one, Verbrenungskommando, was responsible for the cover-up of the mass murder of the tens of thousands of Warsaw's civilians that had just been carried out by the German army¹.
The idea is that with features like this widespread, the probability of a theft leading to the thief repurposing the stolen device will be lower. Therefore, the incentives for thieves – the ones acting rationally within the paradigm of being a thief, at least – will be lower. Therefore, the number of thefts, generally, may go down. A few big ifs here, of course.
I've always felt that system lock was about preventing theft of the device data, not prevention of flipping the device itself. Like tons of other people, I have sensitive apps and data on my phone (banking, cloud services, etc), but unlike tons of people, I take great care to ensure logouts after I am done accessing said apps or data. Even so, a thief snatches my phone, I don't care what happens to the phone itself, so long as the data is safe.
> and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage
Wow. It sounds like you have a grossly misinformed view of this part of the world, with a clear sense of superiority of one culture over the other. So, here's a few facts for you:
> Most likely on October 12-13, 1944, the Brandkommando of the Wehrmacht (Nazi German army) burned collections of the most valuable literary monuments from the National Library in one of the greatest losses to Polish culture in its history, and one of the greatest losses to written culture in history of the world. The National Library lost at least 39,000 manuscripts – and most likely more, perhaps as many as 50,000 – along with some 80,000 books from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, 100,000 books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 60,000 drawings and engravings, 25,000 musical scores and 10,000 maps. The great family libraries were almost wiped out, such as the famous collection of manuscripts of the Krasiński Library, of which just 78 volumes survived out of more than 7,000.¹
> Mr. Garber, the Second World War was also an inferno for German book and library culture. Do we now know more or less exactly what damage and losses occurred at which collection locations in Germany?
> Yes, most of the damage is known and extends across the entire old German Reich, from Karlsruhe to Kiel, from Munich to Königsberg. The largest German library in the Reich was hit most spectacularly. In July 1943, the Hamburg City Library alone lost 700,000 volumes in “Aktion Gomorrha”. As far as the individual titles themselves are concerned, the relevant data is often still missing - unfortunately. There is no large and accurate work on the books and libraries that once existed and were lost or not returned during the Second World War.
> How do you assess the historical and intellectual damage caused to our cultural memory by the absence of German books?
> I will answer this question with a quote from the first expert on the subject from 1947: “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever. But who knows about it? Conversely, the greatest crime committed by Germany has led to an irretrievable loss of urban silhouettes and cultural witnesses. The answer? Never-ending mourning and never-ending work of remembrance.
Generally, the cultural loss via burning down libraries and knowledge is inherent to war, and obviously does not only affect one country. The article also mentions the Library of Warsaw as an example of lost knowledge, but the loss of german culture "has no comparison in the history of libraries", per renowned librarian Georg Leyh.
The German losses were mostly collateral damage related to the bombings of the cities. The burning of the Polish collections and archives by the German army, on the other hand, was a conscious, deliberate act pertaining to the objective of destroying the culture of the Polish nation – I refer you, amongst other things, to Himmler's and Hitler's clearly expressed intent of razing Warsaw, the nominal, but also cultural and intellectual capital of pre-war Poland, to the ground. That intent is not inherent to war in a universal sense – for one, it is a war crime, for which Alfred Rosenberg was convicted during the Nürnberg Trials – and it looks like you are generally convinced the conduct of the German army in WWII was that like of any other, and that war as carried out by Germany in 1939-1945 was war like any other. At this point, my curiosity in continuing this conversation is limited solely to the question on where you received your history education.
It does not, the German state dropped it for safekeeping in Lower Silesia and according to international law, its ownership was transferred together with the legal status of the respective territories per the Potsdam conference. Any discussion on the possible return of parts of the collection would need to start with the return of the thousands of Polish works of art held in German collections, to which, unlike Poland's legal claim to the Berlinka collection, Germany has none.
My original argument was: "and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage"
to which I gave a reference that makes a good case for this to be indeed true.
You chose to ignore it and instead resort to talking about something unrelated (intent), which is a straw man, and you also launch an ad hominem, another logical fallacy. You also resort to faulty generalizations.
In case you have overlooked it, here's the most relevant part of the quotes I gave:
> “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever.
But it's not a thesis of Die Deutschen Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken nach dem Krieg, it's just a quote, and it does not support that "most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage", this is out of the scope of Georg Leyh work
> Like the workers have possible R2 bindings, but you can't use those in a fetch() call - you have to use S3 compatible endpoint instead.
Sorry, could you please elaborate? Why can you not use a binding to an R2 bucket – and perform operations on its objects – in a `fetch()` handler of a worker? Or did I misunderstand this statement?
I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro. I am happy about it, but also baffled. Allegro's customer experience is just stellar, whereas Amazon's interface continues to give the impression that it's still a bunch of widgets rendered by a hundred microservices and glued together without any elegant cohesion in mind. It's as if little has changed since the famous Steve Yegge's letter.
It's even more baffling that Amazon.pl has one of the worst customer support I've ever seen while Amazon.de is a total opposite - an increadibly pleasant experience and packages almost always arrive on the next day.
I'm no fan of either - Allegro has Amazon executives and nearly identical Prime-free shipping strategy. Pretty sure Allegro has the same effect of monopolizing and driving up prices as Amazon has.
I find the eBay-esque artifact interface absurd. It's likely Amazon hasn't found a way because an environment that isn't a monopoly isn't attractive to begin with for that business model.
I think Allegro lowers prices because it forces sellers into common arena where they have no choice but to compete with each other. It's usually cheaper to buy stuff on Allegro than on dedicated e-commerce site.
But think about it - when was the last time you actually got a good comparison in this market between allegro and a dedicated e-commerce site? For many product categories the latter almost doesn't even exist anymore.
Maybe tipping point is ahead of us. But Allegro already has 20mln unique users monthly (in a country of 36mln people) and twice as many as next largest, AliExpress.
Allegro has amazing metadata allowing you to precisely filter out the results. Search experience on amazon is an utter abomination compared to Allegro.
> I am honestly baffled Amazon hasn't found a way to compete with Allegro.
If Amazon is being treated just like all the other companies, and protection agencies are doing their job, then they wouldn't be able to use their neo-colonial business model.
See: what Amazon itself has done in the Middle East among Uber, Delivery Hero, and all the other Big Companies With More Capital have done to dominate these markets. It can't work if the governmental watchdogs like market and/or consumer authorities are able to block them.
> And on top of that, we can do some basic algebra. If we know that x < N and N < 5, then we can infer that x < 5. So if we see a comparison x < 5, we can then rewrite that to true.
Even better: if `x` and `N` are integers, then we can infer that `x` < 4. :)
