Your comment is only technically correct, so I am gonna add to that:

Alfred Nobel did invent dynamite and was also a believer in mutually assured destruction, BUT: those two facts are not directly connected.

Dynamite in itself was not intended for warfare, but for mining. It was still relatively unstable so not really suited for warfare. (TNT, which came around 1900, solved that problem.)

Nobel did invent smokeless powder for warfare and he transformed Bofors into an arms manufacturing company though.

https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-thoughts-about-war-and-peace/

Sadly they have not issued them yet. The prosecutor recently requested them and the court has yet to decide.

urning off GPS and LTE ruins 90% of the features in the car.

The main purpose of a car is “driving”, which you can do. Unless you cannot start a Tesla without LTE, which would be very stupid.

You can also always strip a car for parts. Teslas are not magically safe from that.

I think most country’s police would be pulling out warrants to search your house when you’re advocating for violent terrorism.

I would certainly hope so

First: fuck Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

Second: this article is extremely biased, to the point that it is basically misinformation. The people they are talking about are Yasemin Acar and Salah Said, infamous protesters in Berlin. Here is a translated part of a german newspaper, video evidence is linked in the article:

Speaking at a demonstration in January, she literally threatened: “If violence is the only option, we will use it.” She then celebrated the attacks by the Islamist Houthi militia: “Yemen, Yemen we are proud, turn another ship around.”

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/die-stimme-des-israelhasses-wenn-gewalt-die-einzige-option-ist-werden-wir-sie-anwenden-11284348.html

Of course the police is searching the homes of people that threaten violence themselves and encourage terrorist attacks on civilian ships.

How is a diverse opinion a threat to democracy?

If the opinion is that there should not be a democracy, then that is a threat to democracy.

Excluding a portion of the population from the polls

They are not excluded. They are free to vote for a party that is in line with the constitution.

its almost exclusively a phenomena specific to the left…

I don’t even know what to say. In which world are the far-right, fascists and nazis known to value opposing views? Are you serious?

I found the original source of the photo: It is an article by “The New Yorker” from 2019 that confirms and explains the situation.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-guided-tour-of-hebron-from-two-sides-of-the-occupation

[…] Hebron, in an area where about thirty thousand Palestinians—a fraction of the number who used to live here—live under direct Israeli military rule, which protects fewer than a thousand Israeli settlers. This part of the city is freely accessible to Israeli citizens and foreigners, but most Palestinians can enter only if they’re residents.

[…]

For a second it felt like we were in a covered market, but this was because the street is fenced in from the top, with a sort of wire net intended to protect the Palestinian traders and their customers from rocks, bottles, and trash thrown by Israeli settlers who live on the street just above. Amro pointed at metal sheeting placed over a section of the net; it is meant to guard against acid that settlers pour down, to destroy the goods sold here.

[…]

In 1997, as part of the Oslo peace process, Israel and the Palestinian Authority drew a line splitting Hebron in two. The area designated as H-1 is controlled by the Palestinian Authority; in H-2, the Palestinian Authority has civil administration over Palestinian residents and the Israeli military controls everything else. H-1 is far larger, and in the past two years its population has roughly doubled, while H-2’s has dwindled because settler violence and I.D.F. restrictions have made life unbearable for Palestinians. But H-2 contains the city’s historic center, its most popular square, and its wholesale, vegetable, spice, and other markets—all of them now hollowed out. The market street through which Amro leads his tour hits a dead end at the border between H-1 and H-2. Here, though, the border is also vertical: the market street is in H-1; the street directly above is in H-2. This is why the protective net and metal sheeting are necessary.

I can’t speak for the rest of Europe, but in Germany there was a major reform in sexual assault laws in 2016. You cannot compare before and after at all, because the laws are much stricter now. Things that were not considered rape or sexual assault before, are now. I would assume the same happened elsewhere, too. In 2017 “Me Too” started, which also led to much more awareness on the subject, so more people report on it since then.

Violent crime in Germany, while being higher than in the last few years, is still lower now than in 2010 or any year before. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153880/umfrage/faelle-von-gewaltkriminalitaet/

Theft is roughly on the level of 2019 in Germany and way lower than 2016 and any year before that. Grand theft is lower than ever (excluding 2021).

Source: German Federal Criminal Police (page 36), https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/2022/FachlicheBroschueren/IMK-Bericht.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=5

The “increase in crime” is only really there if you compare today to the unusually low pandemic numbers. In general, we are just back to the normal (higher) pre-pandemic crime rates.

Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.

This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.

It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.

Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.

Just today there was a great comment by @[email protected] on why this does not make any sense.

1. When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.

2. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
3. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
4. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.

Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4855307

They did in fact do that in the English translation of some Arabic bios:

He had written in his bio that he was Palestinian, followed by a Palestinian flag and the word “alhamdulillah” in Arabic - which translates to “praise be to God” in English. However, upon clicking “see translation”, viewers were given an English translation reading: “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom”.

The linked article in this post is a cut down version of the original BBC article below, except it somehow lost all of the important content in the process: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67169228

My question was more specific than that. I absolutely understand why it is important to sanction high-tech products and stop Russia from exporting their goods.

But western companies selling non-critical goods inside Russia felt more like russian economic dependancy to western companies to me, which (for me as a layman when it comes to economy) seemed preferable to Russia having an independent economy. Thats where my question came from.

Now I realized that rather than “dependant economy” or “independant economy” the intended goal in this case is “no economy”, although i am doubtful whether that will really work.

Good point. Thanks for your insights.

If they imported some ingredients before and then had to switch to local suppliers after the pullout … doesn’t this also benefit Russia, since now all of the production is national and they require less imports?

It is not like making food or soft drinks is really high tech. At worst, it is just going to taste a bit different if the ingredients are different. Or other, already local companies might gain market share.

Maybe, but not without startup investment and knowledge. All of that isn’t free, and if an economy is unstable, no-one is going to commit money into it.

At least the knowledge is already there. Pepsi is not going to take the workers in Russia away with them. And as far as I know the investment is mostly the cost of buying the assets from the western company. For example the russian McDonalds branch just reopened with a new name at the same locations.

I have a genuine question that maybe somebody with more economic knowledge can educate me in:

How is continuing the sale in Russia helping Russia? As I understand Russia is gaining money on the sales taxes, etc. but the rest of the earnings will go to the US parent company, which cannot be taxed directly by Russia. If Pepsi backs out, wouldn’t operations just be replaced by a rebranded russian company, where all of the earnings would be under russian “sphere of influence”?

I genuinely do not understand why Pepsi backing out is considered bad for Russia. I thought countries generally prefer national companies over foreign ones.

The original contract with the company RWE was made in the 1990s and included destroying whole towns for the coal mine, which was planned to be in use until 2038.

What we see now is a compromise between RWE, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government to save the remaining towns and close the mine earlier (in 2030). The wind turbines are from 2001 and are nearing the end of their lifecycle.

I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities’ bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.

It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century’s worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.

The “medical exemption” is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a “lifeline” for disabled people.

The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.

No? Nobody thinks that?

My comment was just a response to the following:

Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)

…which for some reason suggests that the introduction of electric cars leads to premature scrapping of existing cars - which is bullshit.