throwaway_20357

Wasn't that acquisition announced in December 2025 and closed in March 2026? Hard to imagine it created a sudden spike in the share price only in late May.

Flat compared to 2 months ago. Chart looks like a pump-and-dump. 50% up and back. Is there any precedence in history for a swing like this over a two month period for the IBM stock?

It's the continuation of a process that is going on for 25-30 years. As others have noted, Germany's industrial base is eroding due to high energy costs and Chinese competition. Its political decisions over the last two decades have been questionable, accelerating the decline and any true reform is unlikely to get a majority in the current gerontocratic society. There is no need to attribute this to malice, I think it can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?

Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?

Doom was released end of '93. In 1992 most of us were in the 286 -> 386 upgrade wave and a 486-33 was easily at $2.5k+ ($5.5k in today's terms). The 486 DX2 66 was a good choice even 1994-1996.

There surely must be some BBS backup tapes somewhere that at least contain some of the boards?

Has anyone captured a Fidonet forum archive anywhere or is this form of human communication forever lost?

Problem is: this list gets shorter every year, without any new additions in the recent decades (!)

What would the appropriate strategy have been after realizing China had decided to squeeze foreign cars out of the market? The "obsolete business model" still sells many cars world-wide.

They are on par or better than their Chinese counterparts but they are a hard sell being 30-50% more expensive.

It's 24 months at the moment, which is way too long. A buffer period for companies to allow for necessary adjustments should be one quarter, max two.

How can manufacturers fight EV adoption? If an EV is a superior offering it will find its market. Germans are free to buy Teslas, BYDs or domestiv EVs. There are reasons why the EV market share in Germany was still only 4.1% in 2025 (most likely: high electricity prices, relatively low gasoline price) but manufacturers "fighting adoption" is not one of them.

There must be more to it. German automakers did belong to the top 10 (for some periods even top 5) R&D spenders world-wide. It seems they just did not spend it wisely. Similarly, the claim they "kept wages down" seems to require some nuance. VW workers are known to be very well paid. From the outside it seems like these companies became large behemoths who were not able to spend their R&D money wisely and their outsized pay packages forcing them to offer their products at uncompetitive prices.

I see where Simon is coming from with these patterns but I wonder where large software companies stand regarding their agentic engineering practices? Is Google creating in-house code using agents against its monorepo? Has Microsoft outsourced Windows source code advancements to a dark factory yet?

This is going on for decades and I wonder what the actual business model for the EU economy is in the future. With all factories soon gone, will Europe rely on agriculture, tourism and some services only? Back to a "developing country" economy?

If news sites opt out of being archived by the Internet Archive, are their archives available anywhere or just lost? Will there be no way to access the headlines of a certain day or the reporting about a certain topic in the past even for research or scientific purposes?

Not sure what you're talking about. The last "forward facing" government was about 50y ago, the last one at least driving meaningful reforms almost 25y ago. To me it seems the more Europe got integrated, the more Germany lost the plot.

Like London? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ

Wasn't all this early TV experimentation based on Nipkow disks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk)?

Why "abundant cheap energy is a key requirement to survive in today's globalized markets" has not made it into the EU leaderships' mindset is beyond comprehension.

What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?

Yes, what I think happens is the following: User A's price ceiling is $10, User B's $12. When both reveal their max price early, the item will go to $10.50 ($0.50 increment over A's max price). User A then has plenty of time to notice the item being valued at $10.50 by someone. In many cases users then adjust the value they assign to the item and increase their bid. The result: User B has to pay more than $10.50 they would have paid when sniping the item seconds before auction expiration.

Indeed. As the US abandons it, the EU seemingly has no other choice than to find ways to align with Russia now.

Can shops not just embed Schema/JSON-LD in the page if they want their information to be machine readable?

I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.

Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:

* is well designed

* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing

* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability

* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit

If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.

Energy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?

As far as I understand, the VW Amarok is based on the Ford Ranger, the VW T7 Transporter (their Commercial vehicle) is based on the Ford Transit Custom. The T7 Multivan and California are still built on their own VW platform.

It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.

Borland => Roland