When you’re looking at your bank balance you’re seeing bank Euros, for which your bank has to hold a certain percentage of actual (central bank) Euros in reserve (that’s what fractional reserve banking is about: Not just the central bank, also ordinary banks can create money), when you transfer money to another bank the receiving bank will have to make sure that it has enough central bank Euros to back up the recipient’s balance. SEPA is a standard interface and procedure to negotiate such transfers.

The Digital Euro is central bank money, just as bank notes and coins. It’s a (possible) step towards a full-reserve banking system without having to actually keep actual notes and coins around. And the ECB is very aware of this which is why they’re talking so much about limiting how many digital Euros you can hold at one time so the current banking system doesn’t get completely up-ended over night.

…if that doesn’t really answer anything then that’s because money is fucking complex, and how our system works is completely unintuitive. But, essentially, Digital Euros are the same stuff as money under the mattress, just digitally.

CPUs don’t make something a mainframe, the whole system design does. They’re transaction-based throughput monsters with all kinds of bells and whistles when it comes to reliability, seamless fallover, etc. The European CPU initiative currently focuses on supercomputing (weather simulations and such) which is a completely different beast when it comes to dataflow but certainly a good foundation for general compute.

Looking into my crystal ball, at some point SAP is going to enter the hardware business.

Same in Germany with the girocard system. Key feature is that there’s no real intermediary, it’s a standard the banking sector came up with to easily authorise ordinary bank transfers. Online shopping was never an issue in Germany push come to shove you just wire them the money.

And I have no fucking idea why the EPI is launching a whole phone-based system instead/before standardising debit card infrastructure. That app offers literally nothing that I can’t already do with my card and bank app on my phone short of a wallet and why the hell would I want that I already have a giro account. And why would I want to send money to a telephone number instead of an IBAN. What kind of stuff are those people on that they think that’s a feature.

But at least the general structure of the EPI is similar to how girocard came about: A consortium of banks, public, cooperative, private, coming up with interoperability standards. Germany has like 1400 banks (and that’s after a lot of mergers), most of them only serving a district or larger town and surrounding villages for those there was never an alternative to working with each other and the over-regional banks jumped on to not be left out.

Sometimes, all you need is some marketing. E.g. it’s been possible to print out a QR code with your account info so you can receive transactions at a flea market for ages (in lieu of having your phone display it and people scanning from there), and ever since SEPA instant payment it’s basically cash, as far as the seller is concerned.

As so often, the answer is found in scripture:

One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?

“O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!”

WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON’T SOUND WELL.

“I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.”

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?

“But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.”

OH. WELL, THEN STOP.

At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.

Answer. I said answer. Not solution. Too much aspirin and your blood thins out and you need to move to Transylvania.

Yeah that’s a much too enlightened take for these parts it’ll never fly.

He’s not elected yet, Scholz is still Chancellor and Baerbock still minister of foreign affairs. The position of the foreign office regarding this definitely won’t change no matter what Merz tries to virtue signal: They prefer Netanyahu a) out of office, someone please resurrect Rabin, that failing b) as far away from Germany as possible so that this whole ICC thing does not have to even be considered.

Merz is an idiot constantly, impulsively, running his mouth, either he’ll get reigned in by the civil servants (and the most likely SPD foreign minister) or he’s going to fall on that sword. More likely he’ll find some other sword to fall on, find something else to piss everyone off that doesn’t have that kind of protective cordon around it so people won’t warn him off.

Can you imagine? Merz trying to repeal both ICC membership and the VStGB? Or having to argue before the constitutional court that the federal government should be able to grant immunity to known fugitives? This isn’t something you can do silently, it’s not even something where he can rely on party discipline. Whatever he means to gain from it, the costs are too high. Then, OTOH, he’s a shit strategist.

It can’t, municipalities and states can, and the EU law allowing for this requires showing they’re a threat to public safety (which is why it’s not a federal matter the federation doesn’t do public safety). The Berlin state government wants to expel some people, so far no other state has made similar moves, and it’s very questionable whether Berlin courts will let them do it. And then there’s federal courts. And then the ECJ.

The one thing to criticise about steam (and that they’re slowly, but surely, losing a EU court case over) is inability for customers to sell their games.

Their marketshare is organic, based on being the choice of store both from the customer and developer POV. As a customer you get the usual painless returns, great interface, community features and whatnot, as a developer you get plenty of store features which make life and customer acquisition and gamedev a lot easier (things like playtesting, next fests) and most of all you get customers because steam has lots of customers and a real, I mean real good, recommendation algorithm. Sure, Epic wants a smaller cut but you’re also not going to sell much, there, which is why they had to lure devs in with advances, guaranteed sales, etc. Larger publisher might not like steam so much because they have gigantic marketing budgets in the first place so all the discoverability/recommendation stuff is not as relevant but, well, fuck EA, Ubi, etc IDGAF, I don’t want to hear it, cry silently.

As to the “can’t sell games for lower prices elsewhere” myth: That applies to when you’re selling steam keys in places that are not steam. Which is fair, if you’re selling steam keys then that’s incurring costs for them (if nothing else, bandwidth) and they don’t even get their usual cut when you sell a steam key off-steam, least you can do is not undercut them.

Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is.

Be adulated. Get a nobel peace price because Obama has one (for not inexplicable but inexcusable reasons)

but most of the ultra-wealthy’s money is tied up in the market, too.

The ultra-wealthy have enough of a buffer to buy out all the middling-wealthy when they go bankrupt. They can buy the dip without themselves going bankrupt.

Oracle is not a tech company it’s a racket run by an army of lawyers. Obligatory link to Bryan Cantrill’s talk.

The affected people can challenge the decision before court: State courts, federal courts, ultimately the ECJ. For the federation to get involved in the administration of the state of Berlin, Berlin would have to ignore court rulings or such to allow the federation to trigger Article 37 GG, which is actually not too dissimilar to how things work on the EU level. Unlike on the EU level, within Germany that clause has never been triggered: Practically speaking the federal constitutional court would first have to have its authority ignored, and then work out how that article actually works in detail because it’s unspecific AF.

IIRC with EU citizens they have to argue threat to public safety. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this thing stops at some district-level Berlin court, Berlin’s courts are way saner than its administration. “Threat to public safety” can be incredibly low-bar or quite high bar, this would be a high bar case. Low bar would be stuff like “you’re unemployed and homeless, go back to your home country and file for welfare there”.

Can’t really bonk the federation for this it plainly doesn’t have the authority to give orders to Berlin’s immigration authorities, this is the state of Berlin doing shit, not the federal government.

Berlin currently has a black-red government. I have no idea what your map there is showing. State elections wouldn’t show a federal map and the last federal elections don’t match, compare e.g. SH’s districts (northernmost state).

Berlin is kinda notorious for being a police state, and of the “IDGAF” nature, not “stickler for law” one.

“obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power”. Which is far above what being in NATO requires states to do. Which just btw also covers Greenland. Only ones off the hook are Ireland and Austria due to being neutral, the treaty still covers them though.

You can’t call a ship a boat. Shippy McShipface would’ve been a different topic. Or maybe Chipper McShipface?

The going rate is 1:1027 for an NCO.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

but Brazil was just not being competitive.

That’s quite the understatement: It was so bad Brazilian fans started to cheer for the German team. Which, under usual circumstances, only happens when we’re not playing against each other.

All in all it could’ve been worse for Brazil: It could have been Argentina. And it could have been better for Germany: It could have been the Dutch.

May be the case, we’ll probably see when the dust has settled. OTOH, it’s still a war crime to abduct non-combatants so my point stands. And no, reservists aren’t combatants.

The hostages aren’t even particularly valuable because the Israeli government couldn’t give less of a fuck about hippies who do things like protecting the Palestinian olive harvest from settler interference. Nab an in-service right-wing IDF commander off the street and you have something much more valuable and it’s a legitimate prisoner of war.

Or, differently put: Don’t get your strategic and tactical advise from the Russians of all people.