Lego as a brand does imo substantially benefit from positive associations such as heritage, sentimentality, and other positive attributes. Otherwise how would they be able to demand such premium prices.
So I would see it less as them being “dinged” for this action, but more as them losing some of those privileges. Something they are not inherently entitled to.
Imo the title falsely implies that Lego not being a US company means they are completely independent and unaffected by US actions.
Lego presumably does substantial business in the US and thus is beholden to US jurisdiction and the whims of Trump to some degree. Them dropping diversity and inclusion from their reports just shows their priorities. However on that note Lego still being family owned lets us pin this decision more squarely on some particular individuals, rather than the usual vague mass of shareholders.
I think for businesses that deal with physical items, rather than offering services, and are not drop shipping, selling something 3D printed has to be one of the lowest inventory options. You need to have the printers, some filament, and maybe some accessories like packaging boxes, but otherwise you can just make your product whenever you get orders (or have a small stock for faster fulfillment).
I am currently watching Foundation season 3, which is still great, especially the whole empire story line and particularly Lee Pace (as always).
Also watching Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Solid, but imo there are to many special format episodes. Not that I don’t like those in general, but with seasons not being 20+ episodes long like in the past there is just not enough “normal” content for the right balance.
Agreed great show and I wish we would have gotten more, but I am very glad they managed to wrap everything up nicely. Imo the biggest weakness of this season was Lyta Halls (played by Razane Jammal) performance and her motivation for what she does.
Using a spare system that isn’t in active use anymore to mess around and learn is definitely a good idea. However for long-term use I would keep an eye out for energy consumption. Depending on electricity prices it might make more sense to get a newer system with lower power draw, especially for something with high uptime.
Depends on the specific circumstances, but i feel like it can be just as much of an issue, if you want children and don’t even care if they are biologically related to you.
Depending on how much the other parent of ones stepchildren is involved in their lives and their age, taking on a parenting role might not be wanted or even allowed. So you might have children living in your house, but won’t ever have a complete parental relationship with them. You will always have that additional relationship that needs to be build around, whether that be vacations or where you live.
I think a partial explanation can be that for most international tourists a visit to the USA is a major trip that gets planned well in advance. Easily half or even a full year ahead. Things only really got bad in the last few months, so we might still see many holidays that were planned before the madness fully set in. If that is the case I’d expect a continued decline in the future, where people choose another destination when deciding their next itinerary.
What is going on here?
I’m just an interested layman, but i’ll give explaining it a try. I think this is more about whether or not Intel can stay in the market for leading edge manufacturing against TSMC.
The first thing to understand is that there are two parts to Intel: the manufacturing side and chip design.
In manufacturing leading edge chips they are primarily competing with TSMC (the clear market leader) and Samsung. In the past they used to be far ahead of the competition, but they screwed up that lead and are now behind. This is a very capital intensive market as fabs cost billions to build. And each new generation gets more and more expensive.
On the design side there are multiple different markets: servers, desktop/laptops, and mobile devices. Ever since losing out on producing the chip for the first iphone intel hasn’t been a factor in the mobile market. Between servers and desktop/laptops, servers are the fastly more important and bigger market. Here they are competing with AMD, but also increasingly arm based processors, increasingly done by the large hyper scalers themselves (e.g. Amazon with their Graviton processors). Additionally with the ai boom the market has severely shifted towards gpus being vastly more important (which is dominated by nvidia).
Intel is relatively unique in that they still do both design and produce their own chips (not taking outside customers, but in recent times outsourcing some manufacturing to tsmc). Samsung also designs and produces their own arm based processors (exynos), but on a smaller scale and also has other customers. AMD used to have fabs in the past, but got rid of them (today called global foundries).
I would argue that here we need to primarily focus on the manufacturing, not design side. Even though they are also under pressure on the design side aswell and e.g. AMD is beating them in the server market.
It’s more about whether or not Intel can hold on being in the leading edge race as manufacturer or drop out (like GlobalFoundries did a while back), which would leave us with only TSMC and Samsung (potentially China’s SMIC, should they ever manage to develop their own EUV technology and catch up). No western manufacturer of leading edge chips, only asian ones that are heavily concentrated geographically and TSMC bearing a substantial geopolitical risk.
As mentioned above Intel has struggled with getting better process nodes working properly (especially in a timely manner) and costs are increasing by a lot. The issue is that now intel is severly cash strapped, as they’ve paid out massive dividends in the past when things were better and now that they’ve fallen behind earnings have disappeared (which is also why the mass layoffs).
Their competitor TSMC can spread the needed investment costs over many large customers such as apple, nvidia, amd and qualcomm. So far Intel manufactured purely for themselves and didn’t take on external customers. With massively increasing costs it becomes obvious how this becomes less feasible on your own and scale increasingly becomes important. Especially if either/both the design or manufacturing side mess up and fall behind on delivering competitive products.
Switching to manufacturing for external customers is difficult. They have to adjust their internal processes to suit what customers are used to from others. There is a potential conflict of interest as Intel might at the same time be the customers rival (an issue TSMC as pure manufacturer doesn’t have). And lastly customers need reliable schedules, if you are e.g. apple and release an iphone anually you need your manufactuerer to reliably deliver a workable node at a specific time and can’t have it delayed (or even have the uncertainty of this happening).
They originally planned for their upcoming 18A (maybe even the axed 20A?) process to have external customers, but that didn’t pan out (they will just produce some of their own products). Now they target external customers for the next generation 14A. Should they by then not have gotten their shit together enough to attract customers or be profitable Intel (the former giant of the semiconductor industry) will probably break apart and be done. At least in it’s current form.
The fabs in germany and poland have been dead in the water for a while now from the moment they fell behind schedule and eventually were put on hold. This is just them officially axing those plans.
so they were lying, except to the youth, because to them they didn’t have a message. that’s a positive thing to me.
No, i might have been a bit unclear with my wording, but the pensioners got their huge gifts. They are the largest group of the electorate (and growing) , so there are plenty of incentives to please them, unlike children, who have no vote.
I was more thinking about a blanked ban on school grounds, not just during lessons. In any case i am not necessarily against it, but i think this brings us off topic too much. My main point was mostly just that particularly in regards to technology there might be a large gap and the younger generations would bring some perspectives that might not be properly represented.
That is just a very stupid idea. The best thing for all of us everywhere is for the most rational and well-informed people to vote. The fact that everyone gets a vote is unfortunate for all of us because that includes voters who vote against the public interest, but it is necessary for a free democracy.
Seems like you are arguing for meritocracy here, which has it’s own set of problems.
Even if you want to make the argument that some are informed enough, they are far, FAR fewer than in the adult populace. You do not want to broaden that window.
Honestly, this sounds exactly like an argument that could have been made in a debate about whether or not black people or woman should be allowed to vote.
I think you said it yourself, democray needs to endure that sometimes people just don’t vote in the same way or for the same reasons as it suits ones own views.
Yes, i think we should definitely pay more consideration to how our democratic system works on a more mechanical level, and not just specific opinions. Glad to hear i am not alone in this and i imagine that other suggestions like e.g. the use of ranked choice voting would be much less controversial than this one.
Now, we both agree that the age filter is imperfect. It’s a heuristic, a rule of thumb. You rightly point this out, and you interpret this fact as if there should be absolutely no filters at all. For you, any filter would be imperfect or problematic.
I’d say the age filter is perfect. But it only filters for the one thing it measures: age.
My argument is that (here in Germany) when i go to vote there are 4 requirements asked of me:
Citizenship (although in some more local elections i think this isn’t even a requirement as e.g. other EU residents are for example also allowed to vote). Which is a binary classifier, one either has it or does not. I’ve had it since birth
That i am currently not stripped of my voting rights. Something that (rightfully) is done extremely rarely and on an individual basis, e.g. for high treason or bribing officials. Here in Germany it’s also always a temporary measure for a maximum of 5 years.
There are some limitations based on residence. For example federal elections seem to require that you’ve lived at least 3 months in Germany during the past 25 years (with exceptions for some professions).
Age, currently being over 18 in federal elections, 16 in some state and regional ones. Again a binary classifier, once you pass the threshold it becomes irrelevant.
The last aspect of course is that it is done so by ones own free will.
Now this i think is what you are going for, but i don’t think it has anything to do with the age requirement. It’s required from anyone that votes regardless of age. And in fact we already have a system in place that we deem sufficient enough to decide it, since we already have citizens where it might be in question like e.g. someone with an intelectual disability which can voice their wish to vote and sometimes receive help in doing so. Similarly if you have physical issues and are e.g. blind or can’t read you can get support to allow you to vote. Prisoners who are not able to control a lot of their circumstances are able to vote. Notably we do not care about whether or not you vote “badly”, for the wrong reasons, or for someone we disagree with.
The filter for this imo would be the same as for anyone else. A declaration that you want to vote and that you do so free of duress. This filter could imo be fulfilled by a child stating their wish to vote just the same. However as stated somewhere in another comment above i’d be fine with having an additional requirement here that the first vote would need to be either in person or that one would need to actively apply for it (and if not the automatic registration comes at a certain age), in which case we’d probably need to give children some options on where to do this, e.g. in school.
I’m reading your post and it reads just the same as what applies to many adults.
I know that I would have voted for a liar with a corrupt past, because of facebook ads of their party I assume. “oh look, they are apologizing and they regret it! they look so honest!”
I can’t even get started how many politicians have a corrupt past here in Germany and got plenty of votes.
nowadays? they just post a tiktok video that they’ll give money to all below 20 if they are elected
Here in Germany parties actively ran on the promise of raising and fixing the pension levels in an already unsustainable system. Alongside other gifts to certain voter bases. The one left out (I assume partially because they are not able to vote): The youth.
I also think you vastly overestimate the amount of influence underage voters would yield. Especially in our demographic structures and based on the fact that a significantly lower share of them would actually make use of it. They certainly wouldn’t have the power to introduce sweeping changes against the better judgement of other voting blocks. But you are right that they might influence smaller changes.
To take one of your examples i could see that for something like the smartphone ban. But would that be so bad? It might be a good thing, but i don’t think this is conclusively proven. In return it is probably something being pushed by a large majority that might not even use a smartphone on a daily basis or at the least is very far removed from the current level of technology. And it also wouldn’t all need to be negative. Take for example the stop killing games petition that is quite popular on this site. That one might suddenly gain some more supporters, which are actually affected by it.
However i’d also see a need for more studies. And i probably wouldn’t just make a major shift like that instantaneously, but rather in a gradual way and maybe lead with changes to smaller more local elections first. Which might give opportunities for such studies.
The episodes aren’t even 30-minutes. Take a look at the episode length on TMDB, only the last episode is 34min long. Others are as short as 23min and i think you still need to substract the intro from that. And factor in that you waste additional time since you want to ease in and out of each episode, which you wouldn’t with less episodes or if the whole thing was a movie.
just the right amount of run time.
The overall amount of runtime might have been ok, but imo the short episode duration paired with a weekly release schedule imo was terrible.
Besides that (as a book reader) i felt a bit underwhelmed. Somehow i just didn’t click with the cast. Although i wasn’t as irritated as expected by the fact that murderbot was depicted as male. In the books the gender and appearance is never specified and i somehow had a female mental image, a bit more in the sarcastic direction like glados from the portal games.
you can’t ignore the fact that even more propaganda would directly target them, taking advantage of very effective data mining based profiling. they should be able to experience more of life before advertisers starts to dictate their agenda, otherwise they’ll easily think that advertisers are speaking the truth.
Yes, this is indeed an argument that shouldn’t just be ignored. And honestly this should simply never be the case, regardless of age.
I’d break it up into two parts. Official election material and just general advertisements/media. The first one typically is already quite regulated and arguably for the benefit of all should already follow standards that are not harmful to children. The second one seems like the problematic one. However I’d argue that even children are already to some degree getting confronted with what’s going on in the world. Anecdotally i can say that even at elementary school age children seem to be (to varying degrees) at least rudimentally aware of many things. To give a recent example like when Israel bombed Iran.
We have things like cigarettes and alcohol where we impose age limits, but those are directly harmful things. Hard to argue that voting in a democracy is harmful. Sometimes there might be anti democratic parties (like the afd here in germany for example), but in those cases you’d think about banning those, not taking away the ability to vote. Maybe you or someone else could give me an example of something positive being banned based on age because the state/society can’t provide protection from something secondary.
I would also add that advertisement to a young voting base wouldn’t exclusively need to be a bad thing. Take free school lunches for example. If as a politician you run a campaign on that for example you are banking on gaining favor from a voter base that only indirectly is affected by it. The people directly benefiting from it can’t vote for you.
they have a voice. It’s not like people can only vote if they are in their last decade. turning 18, just 2 years, anyone can vote, and I would say even 30 and 40 years olds are largely affected by these issues.
They have a voice, but no vote, which is what matters for the politicians in charge. Also “just 2 years” falls flat since my argument is not about the lowering to 16, but abolishing it in general. So for the sake of argument for example an 8 year old, which would make it a full decade. In practice even longer, since elections aren’t every year and you aren’t guaranteed to have one in the year you turn 18.
And you are right that even 30 and 40 year olds are affected by these issues, but i don’t see how that would be an argument against it. If anything i’d see it as an argument that children should also have a say. We also don’t have an upper limit after which you aren’t allowed to vote anymore. And for obvious reasons it would e.g. be impossible to have a rule that says x years before you die you aren’t allowed to vote anymore, since you won’t suffer all the consequences.
Yes, but we are not filtering for maturity and capability in adults. So if this is the argument then imo it is flawed, since we’d filter for something just to stop filtering for it after a certain age.
If one wants to filter for these things then it should be applied across the board. However we are not doing so for good reasons (I can provide some if needed).
Babies and toddlers don’t know shit, plus parents have an extreme amount of coercion over their children until they’re teenagers.
Like I said we don’t make this a prequisite for adults. There are plenty of disabled or old people fully dependent on others.
Also allowing children to vote will result in more political propaganda targeted at children.
That is an interesting point definitely worth debating. Propaganda would definitely be an issue, but this is the case not just in children, but adults alike. On the other hand with children becoming a voting block it might shift the focus slightly on topics benefiting them.
They deserve to enjoy childhood without worrying about the clusterfuck.
True, although I think children pick up a lot regardless. And importantly obliviousness of issues doesn’t change how it affects them. Climate change and unfair pension systems for example will affect them regardless, this way they’d at least have a voice.
I think “teenager” is probably as low as you want to go for the foreseeable future.
I can for sure see how opinions can differ on the topic and I’d totally be ok with compromises and accepting some degree of hypocrisy. But nonetheless it’s imo worth looking at the issue from the extreme.
As far as compromises go I think another way to go about it would be to have staggered voting with lower limits in more local votes. I could see how it might be more acceptable there for some.
Edit: also regarding babies and toddlers i’d think that they would need to express a desire to vote in some form, which would probably make it so you don’t have literal 1 year olds voting (unless they are like an extreme genius, at which point they might aswell and it would only be a single vote of millions). Maybe one compromise would be to require some more active component below a certain age threshold, like having to vote in person for the first time or at least having to register somewhere (which if not done prior would happen automatically at a certain age).
Controversial opinion: I don’t see a justification for ANY voting age.
For adults we (rightfully) don’t make voting dependent on mental or physical capacity, being dependent on other people, and there also is no upper age limit.
So i wouldn’t be opposed to allowing anyone elegible for voting to do so when he/she expresses the wish to do so.
Thanks.
Things are definitely shifting and it’s not clear how they will play out. And considering leading edge semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex processes invented by humanity, while being crucial to our economy, calling it fragile might be accurate.
Interestingly enough laptop processors might be the one area where Intel is still decently competitive. Their Luna Lake processors (Core Ultra 200V series) are quite competitive and some of the best offerings on the market. Solid performance, good efficiency and strong battery life, and great integrated graphics. However they are using TSMC to manufacture them rather than their own fabs and similar to apples M series chips they utilize integrated memory, which does reduce margins and laptop manufacturers don’t like it as it reduces their ability to differentiate their models.
Intel in it’s current form can’t, because as explained above it is so much more than just the designer of laptop processors. Split up into parts a small fabless design firm for x86 client processors would probably survive, but that wouldn’t be Intel anymore, adress a much smaller market, and also not completely “make”, but only design them.
the client market for desktops and laptops is just way to small to sustain leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on its own. On that note one of the recent comments of Intels current CEO Lip-Bu Tan was that they will only pursue 14A (the process node after the upcoming 18A), if they can at least win one major external client as customer, since otherwise it wouldn’t be economical to scale up. Which basically puts them on a timer of like a year considering the leadup times required.
If that were the benchmark we’d have passed it a long time ago. Although it should be noted that progress not only means better performance, but also better efficiency.