u/golli

I'd imagine that "school" in that context is used more broadly and encompases stuff like kindergarten.

A look at their website shows that they seem to also have a preschool and elementary school. It even currently says that you can enroll your kids born 2023 now "even if they don't start in 2026", which implies that starting 3 seems to indeed be a reasonable time to join their preschool program.

Considering her future job as queen will involve a lot of diplomatic and ceremonial functions it does kind of make sense to me that you'd want her to gain some international experience.

Also on a personal level i'd imagine it is much easier to have some resemblance of a private life in a foreign country, especially at a prestigious institution where plenty of others share notable backgrounds, compared to going to a local university where everyone knows who you are. In a small country like Belgium you probably don't even have much choices as to which university even offers a good program in your chosen field.

Edit:

Elisabeth initially studied at St John Berchmans College in Marollen, Brussels from September 2004 until August 2018. This marked a significant change in Belgian royal tradition, being the first time that a future Belgian monarch's education has begun in Dutch

In May 2020, the Belgian Royal Court announced that Elisabeth would undertake military training. On 31 August 2020, Elisabeth entered the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, studying social and military sciences

- wikipedia

Really seems like the worst candidate to make this accuse against

To me this news seems more targeted towards european audiences, which couldn't vote for Trump anyways.

Normally you'd expect someone like her to be the last one affected by something like this, if at all. So this drives home the point that it can literally happen to anyone, not just certain groups.

That depends on whether you believe that a ban leads to an overall reduction of such problematic imbalances, rather than just shifting shifting the whole industry into illegal markets that are unregulated and hidden, where they might actually get amplified. By banning it you are also giving up your opportunity to regulate.

Prostitution presents a similar dilemma, which countries handle in various ways. Some ban it completely, others like sweden have the "nordic/swedish" model where only the buyer gets penalized, and in some contries like Germany it is legal (either with or without additional regulations in place). Based on a brief search i think it's still up for debate whether the nordic model has the desired effects, with the opaqure nature of illegal markets making it hard to properly study the subject.

As others have already answered he lost because he didn't get the required votes, despite his coalition having a majority. Which is why this was expected to be a formailty and no one in a similar situation had ever lost this vote.

However i would add that unlike some other votes of parliament this one was a secret one, so we will never know who voted which way. Since everyone was present we can deduce that people of his coalition broke rank in the first round and voted against him. But we likely will never know who and why, since i doubt anyone would reveal it (which would be political suicide).

Since they changed their votes for the second round that immediately followed, i assume they wanted to voice their disapproval of Merz, which they succeded in. But (again as already mentioned) Merz is not really well liked.

He left politics for a while during most of Merkels reign and only crawled back out of his hole after she left. And even then he wasn't the first choice (he failed to become the CDU candidate in 2021). So there might be quite a few people that just dislike him enough in general to do this.

Other more recent reasons might be his 180° turn on the debt brake (ran his campaign on not changing it, just to immediately do so after the election) or his attempt for harsher migration rules just before the recent election, where he won a vote in pariament with the help of the far right AfD (ofc he distanced himself from them, but you only bring stuff to a vote if you plan to win, and the only way to win that one was with the far right).

Agreed, the correct way to handle yellow cake is with special napkins

Sadly I think Airbus is already busy as is. As far as I understand it, they were already supply constrainted before this and have their order books filled for years. Otherwise Boeing's most recent quality and safety issues would have had a larger effect.

I don't know if they could increase capacities even if they wanted to, or if a volatile situation like this would allow for the investments that would be necessary to do so.

Imo this just accelerates China's own ambitions to build up their own rival with Comac. This development makes the transition less gradual and they'll have to eat some losses, but that's something their system is capable of.

On the other hand it's actually worse for the US, because they'll miss out on those sales and might not be able to sell them somewhere else. With Boeing already struggling and this being a key industry, this will mean that it might require more subsidies in the future to keep them going or succeed in the turnaround.

That definitely sounds like something we'd do. I think I read somewhere that the difficulty with painting blades is that (especially with dark colors) it leads to them heating up more from sun exposure making differences in thermal expansion a potential issue.

If it's am unsolvable issue particularly with larger birds, then I guess it can't be helped. But to me it seems like this is one of those times where we overemphasize easily countable direct environmental impacts, whereas the diffuse statistical damages of fossil based power plants get ignored.

It might be next to impossible to calculate the impact one individual coal power plant has and how many birds (and other animals) die due to its carbon footprint. But that doesn't mean those aren't happening just because they don't die from flying against the building.

On that note they should also finally stop using it. If every politician, institution and public broadcaster would stop using Twitter and start using mastodon it would easily gain enough momentum to replace it as the default platform in Europe.

As i understand it most of the money they are investing goes into new datacenters. So when a model gets outdone by a new one they still have those, unlike e.g. OpenAI that use other companies resources (i think microsoft and oracle mostly?). In a way companies that use those external clouds to train their own models are financing the investments needed for the big players.

AWS, GCP and Azure are all growing 30%+ yoy, are profitable and if anything supply constraint in that they can't build more capacity fast enough to meet demand. So it seems to me that to some degree they are already recouping some of those investments. I don't see a drop in demand for compute, and even if using/training ai would become less resource intensive, Jevons paradox would just lead to more demand.

Of course they also burn a lot of money as anytime a new model gets trained and beats the older ones, it kind of renders the resources spend on the previous one worthless. But to me that seems like the cost of doing business.

The current investments they can afford. What would actually lead to shedding huge amounts of marketcap is, if they'd let a rival establish themselves. Similar to how the movie studios didn't get into streaming early (mostly to not hurt their cable business) and gave Netflix enough time to establish themselves.

__________

To comment on something you mentioned in another reply below:

I just don’t see a world where most people are coughing up more than $10 a month for AI.

I think the big money will be in the business world, where salaries for actual people are high enough that saving a person even a few hours/week or replacing a single employee saves so much money that even expensive subscriptions would easily be worth it.

On the consumer side as you say running smaller models locally will likely be the norm. But that means it would be free for both the likes of Deepseek and Google. And then it'll just come down to who has access to personal information and is better embedded, which would be likely be whoever also controls other aspects of a users life, such as Goole with Android, gmail etc. Money here will be made just as it is done with other free services.

The incumbents will go broke.

Who do you mean with that? Companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, or do you also include the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft?

With the former I can see it, but the later also profit from providing the infrastructure (and have other profitable business), so imo those will be just fine.

I am more surprised xAI investors approved. Especially for such a high price.

Twitter actually imo had (and still has) quite a bit of value, but that is only to further Elons ideological goals. As a business it is on a downward trend and was never a cash cow to begin with. Comparatively little room for speculation. It's a stagnating or declining business and doesn't generate large profits if any.

xAI on the other hand is pretty much in the same spot as most other ai companies. It has yet to prove to be a highly profitable business, but there is plenty of room for speculation. So as long as the bubble doesn't burst, it has a high valuation.

Which is all that would matter for any Twitter investor that wants to unload his shares. Although I doubt it would be via ipo, but rather in private funding rounds.

Solar panels and batteries in a shit ton of homes because of energy prices and older government incentives

Yeah, the rise of balcony and roof solar modules here in Germany probably helps us in a similar way.

10000L rain water tanks because government regulations now require rainwater hookups for future toilers and washing machines plus water is expensive here

That on the other hand i don't think is common and especially in cities i don't think that's a thing anywhere. So imo drinking water probably remains the most serious bottleneck, if it were ever compromised.

But don't you still have some staple stuff like noodles, rice, frozen or canned foods and so on in your house? Combined with the fact that you might buy food in larger quantities (e.g. not just 1 apple, but 6 or maybe 1kg), i'd also imagine that most people have enough food for 3 days in their house.

The imo more interesting thing would be fresh water.

I was under the impression that this was one of their demands at some point, but it didn't make it into the final compromise.

Von den zu berücksichtigenden Einnahmen aus Krediten ist der Betrag abzuziehen, um den die Verteidigungsausgaben, die Ausgaben des Bundes für den Zivil- und Bevölkerungsschutz sowie für die Nachrichtendienste, für den Schutz der informationstechnischen Systeme und für die Hilfe für völkerrechtswidrig angegriffene Staaten **1 vom Hundert im Verhältnis zum nominalen Bruttoinlandsprodukt übersteigen** [emphasis mine]

Source (german), pdf warning. This is the official text.

Additionally it's not even purely defense spending that they can exclude, but also some related costs. Making even more space in the regular budget for unrelated expenses.

You are right that low orbit satellites aren't in a stable orbit and eventually fail in a matter of years. I think it very much depends on what the intended useage would be for a european constellation:

• How much coverage do we want? Global or just the continent+ a bit more?

• Would it just be for critical systems or are we also looking for economic independence?

• What about bandwith and latency, how much do those matter?

All that would influence how many satellites are neccesarry and which orbits would be suitable. And also to what degree cost efficiency would play a role.

I'm not quite that optimistic.

Yes, things are happening, but imo these are still mostly reactions to external pressures. There is no structural change or politicians that have the quality to properly lead.

As an example here in Germany we recently approved a huge amount of new debt for investments in infrastructure and weapons. But the leaked contract negotiations for the coalition of our next government includes tax gifts in the form of lower tax rates for eating out, ev subsidies for the car industry, and higher pension benefits for mothers payed out of the regular budget (while we already have a unsustainable pension system).

Also in the above mentioned decision to take on new debt we decided that defense spending above 1% of GDP doesn't count towards the regular budget, but can be financed through debt separately. Which on the one hand might be nice, since right now we might invest more. But imo setting the limit at 1% kind of shows how much we actually value it. We could have set it higher and committed to sustained change, but this way leaves more room open in the regular budget for the gifts mentioned above.

The one issue that i see is that in a way (at least some) countries are on both the buyer and seller side. As long as there is still drive to favor domestic companies and keep know-how/capabilities rather than sharing them.

That's what usually hinders joint development projects e.g. between France and Germany. Both want as large of a share as possible to go to their own industry. Or i think it is partially why Poland went with korean tanks, rather than leopards (but i might remember this one wrong).

To me it seems like this will particularly be interesting to smaller countries without large weapon manufacturers, but maybe it could also help us here in Germany to finally fix our terrible procurement system.