Senshi

Id2 is the actual successor. It's planned to be the first VW "affordable" EV with a starting price below 25000 euros when it releases in 2025. At least they now try to target the budget market, but I'd never recommend a VW. They have done so much bad quality cars since the late 90s...

Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

And sure, Alaska definitely it's expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it's only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it's pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.

You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.

Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.

Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².

USA have 35 inhabitants per km².

What's your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn't been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it's a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there's a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

That alone sadly is not even the issue. Only when stealing from the government comes in, you can expect to actually get prosecuted.

Trying to pawn off the expenses on your company balance and committing tax fraud, then paying off people to not tell about your tax fraud, that's what gets you.

I was about to say... What does "suitable" mean? I grew up in the 90s, and "suitable games" ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

There is no need to over protect kids from the "simple" evils: when I was very young, I didn't want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and "unsuitable". But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn't infect every part of our lives.

Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.

Not getting caught is less important than always having a scapegoat ready. A successful office worker is just like a politician: talk a lot, confuse the issue as much as possible, and in an emergency, deflect blame on someone else. The actual work delivered matters very little, and ideally you can just appropriate the work of someone less well spoken anyway.

Your bosses will praise you for your open communications and dealing well with trouble.

And this is a global truth, not just in the US. I have encountered many a successful worker that contributes nothing to their company or society. And while more noticable at boss and manager levels, this goes all the way down to minimum wage line work, although there it's more difficult to hide.

Still, cheating to some extent exists everywhere. This just weeds out the real lazy or stupid cheaters. Which is also some kind of quality check, I guess.

To cheat properly, I've has to be a bit clever and shrewd, which is a valuable character trait. Maybe not the most moral one, but real life isn't all moral either. 🤷‍♂️

Sometimes the best and most efficient solutions are created by just cleverly combining the work of others.

Which is fine

Kind of a bad example, because mankind very clearly stems from 'humankind'. And people are lazy and prefer using short words. The unfairness is rather that women got stuck with the words requiring more characters. But that is a phenomenon of the English language and not present in others.

However, in most languages the words for man/male are closer to human(kind) than female/woman, which very clearly shows the historic patriarchal influence, coming back around to your point after all.

You underestimate how little money such a dlc makes. It's the same reason why the promised SP addon for GTA 5 was cancelled. Return of investment is magnitudes higher for any GTA online content. Making a new car model is little effort and brings in millions of dollars.

Having to deal with story, level design, voice actors and possibly animators or even Mocap: soooooo much more work. Sure they could do it, and even Earn good money with it. But online pay dlcs are so little effort for so much more payout , why even bother?

Rockstar hated what FiveM did, even threatening them at the start because they were afraid it would compete with their own online service. And now they bought them up, but only after realizing how much more people ( or rather their wallets) they can possibly reach.