barsoap
The creator favoured speedy feedback on everything. And it's not like you can't make things look gorgeous in EEVEE, why go for fidelity when you can make things look nice.
They also have warehouses in the EU which means that as a customer you don't have to deal with duties and import VAT at all.
In Germany the threshold is around 200 Euro, more precisely up to an import VAT of 10 Euros, where the state can't even be bothered with the paperwork. 150 for import duties, though that doesn't apply to alcohol, tobacco and perfume, unless everything is under 45 Euros and both sender and recipient are natural persons and no money has been exchanged.
You don't want to completely abolish thresholds as you don't want to spend more money on collecting taxes and duties than you collect. The general strategy of the financial police seems to be to make paying duties as inconvenient for private citizens as possible, they'll hold back the parcel and you have to go to them, probably a couple of towns over, and fetch it in person. The smart thing to do when buying from alibaba or such is to choose shipping from a EU warehouse as then all the import stuff has been dealt with by the seller.
We still do have duties within the single market, btw, because different taxes on alcohol, tobacco, etc. Relevant mostly for ølvikingar.
We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you're watching dams (that doesn't need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.
In Germany, if 14-18yolds make nude selfies then nothing happens, if they share it with their intimate partner(s) then neither, if someone distributes (that's the key word) the pictures on the schoolyard then the law is getting involved. Under 14yolds technically works out similar just that the criminal law won't get involved because under 14yolds can't commit crimes, that's all child protective services jurisdiction which will intervene as necessary. The general advise to kids given by schools is "just don't, it's not worth the possible headache". It's a bullet point in biology (sex ed) and/or social studies (media competency), you'd have to dig into state curricula.
Not sure where that "majority of cases" thing comes from. It might very well be true because when nudes leak on the schoolyard you suddenly have a whole school's worth of suspects many of which (people who deleted) will not be followed up on and another significant portion (didn't send on) might have to write an essay in exchange for terminating proceedings. Yet another reason why you should never rely on police statistics. Ten people in an elevator, one farts, ten suspects.
We do have a general criminal register but it's not public. Employers generally are not allowed to demand certificates of good conduct unless there's very good reason (say, kindergarten teachers) and your neighbours definitely can't.
“gridlock” happens in non-grid layouts too, the english name is just taken from american road patterns.
I said something about road hierarchies, you ignored it.
“show me…” no. YOU made a claim (that local information suffices, which is a VERY bold claim), so it’s on you to prove that local information suffices.
These systems are in operation. You claimed they lead to gridlock. What I get from the Chinese experiment here is that they collected data, threw an optimisation algo on it, and then adjusted local parameters, "err towards giving more green time in this direction" type of deal. They're still going to use the same type of adaptive, local-control system that's becoming increasingly common in the last decade.
roads are absolutely NOT “like wires”; they are like pipes. which is why civil engineers commonly use fluid dynamics to simulate traffic.
Vehicles travelling on roads constitute information travelling over roads. Are you trying to deliberately misunderstand what I'm saying. You do not need to look at the app of the parcel carrier to know that your parcel arrived, it's right there on your doorstep. That's information. Metaphorically, thus, package delivery trucks are wires.
“all the information is there” is not enough information to verify the claim; it’s a wild guess without evidence to back it up.
if shit where THAT simple, we’d have it figured out 50 years ago… it’s almost like this isn’t the simple problem you desperately want it to be…
50 years ago we neither had the sensors we have now, nor did we have the processing power to use it. Traffic light control was often still done electromechanically. "Adaptive" means a lot more than "pedestrians have a button and there's an induction coil to detect a car". Those systems actually solve the local problem optimally which, in the case of traffic management, means that the global problem is solved optimally because the problem has optimal substructure. Don't ask me for a proof of optimal substructure I just sat on a municipal traffic committee, I don't actually design those systems. Got annoyed at stupid NIMBY questions so I drowned them with smart ones. When you observe those kinds of lights in low traffic situations they're green for everyone because they switch as soon as they see someone arriving and noone else needs to be let through. In higher traffic situations they prioritise throughput, but make sure to not let waiting time for others get exceedingly long, or allow large backups.
this completely ignores larger traffic patterns like arterial roads.
with your idea you are guaranteed to get massive gridlock all along the major roads.
How. Seriously. Show me an adaptive traffic light dumb enough to cause gridlock. Not to mention that gridlock and having arterials, road hierarchies in general, are kinda incompatible with each other and most of the world doesn't use grids in the first place.
And it's not like we don't have central control over here -- it's that all the information necessary to make decisions for a single traffic light is available right there, at the traffic light, because it is impossible to have traffic (or the absence thereof) and that not carrying the necessary information. Roads are wires, so to speak. Central control could make those decisions, but as local information suffices, why would it, regarding traffic lights it's generally only monitoring. Central control can override things, things like ambulances influence traffic lights in a non-local manner (which is a luxury problem because they are allowed to cross on red anyway), but for basic operation central control could vanish and you wouldn't see a difference, when a light loses connection but not power it just keeps on operating. Things like information systems telling people where to park need non-local control because they need non-local information.
one intersection influences others down the line,
And gets data from them, in the form of how and when cars arrive, and that's all you need, at that point it's a simple problem: When an individual traffic light regulates local traffic optimally based on that local information, then it does not cause undue problems for other traffic lights. Evolution does decentralised factory shop-floor planning just fine with just local information (have a look of how the genome assembles itself into bodies), and traffic flow is vastly less complex. "Acting on local information" does not mean "blind to global concerns", that local information includes what's necessary to know about the global situation. You can have every traffic light talk to the one down/upstream ("I'm seeing this many cars from you, I send you this many cars) but that's just another way to do the local sensors.
Traffic routing can make use of global information, but we were talking about deciding the length of light phases, not figuring out where to build a metro line, narrow a street, whatnot.
It's not an extremely large amount of data at all, you can get perfect efficiency by having lights act on completely local, real-time, sensor data, as in "how many cars are in which direction". AI is useful to recognise who wants to use the light but that's the end of it. You don't need to predict traffic patters as you don't need them to see what's the state of the streets right now, worse, such predictions are a source of BS. Lots of patterns happen all the time that have no precedence as construction sites shift, sportsball games get cancelled or not, whatnot.
When the bear thing went around there was a tread made on 196 specifically to talk about not the content of the meme, but its impact. I argued that someone interpreting the thing as "would you rather choose me or a bear", and answering as such, instead of "would you rather choose a random man than a bear" should not be construed to be somehow misogynist or anything, really. I ate a permaban (on 196, not blahaj), reason "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEN".
Mods with with giant chips on their shoulders exist also on blahaj.