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There is this concept of the "Four stages of competence":

- unconscious incompetence

- conscious incompetence

- conscious competence

- unconscious competence

At first you are unable to do something, but you don't even know it. Then you learn about your incompetence and begin to work on it. Eventually due to conscious effort you achieve conscious competence. Doing it long enough you don't need to spend conscious effort to be competent - you just do it, and you do it well.

I think this unconscious competence is very similar to Wu Wei.


This tracks roughly with the 4 categories of unknown and know, as in the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns". To me the most interesting is the "unknown knowns", those ephemeral things you know but don't consciously think about that knowledge until it's pointed out, like the ability of native language speakers to stack adjectives in just the right order (e.g. "big old yellow ball"). For most people this is one of our unconscious competences, though I'm not sure it ever passed through a period of conscious effort to get there.


That official identity documents requiring a smartphone is the "smallest imaginable amount" is questionable. With this proposal I can not even go on vacation without a smartphone.

Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I still think humans should be able to do basic life actions without a smartphone.


Right not you cannot go on vacation without having all your info on a government DB shared with 100 other governments. In future the same will be true but instead of a paper receipt you will get one on an app. That is all that is changing.

And you can still do all this with your paper work. It will just take longer, and be more expensive and if you lose it you're screwed.


I read the pie chart as this:

Only 11.5% barely notice them or can completely tune them out. 88.5% are annoyed by them with varying degrees of annoyance.


They believed the scurvy protection came from the sourness of lemons, so they switched to lime which is even more sour than lemon, but contains less vitamin C.


It is estimated that the full electrification of all railway tracks in Germany will be completed not earlier than 2070.

But maybe I am confusing "Deutschlandtakt 2070" and the electrification of the tracks.


yeah, you are; however given the zero amount of interest shown on focusing on the train system by the department for mobility, doesn't give much hope it's going to happen before 2070... they want to build more and bigger high ways such that there is less traffic jam, thus less emissions, which is just hilarious.


Problem is, Germany is in a central location in Europe. Lots of east-west and north-south transit going through. That transit has to use the autobahn, for various reasons.

One is the EU: forcing them to use railway loading (such as in Switzerland) isn't possible due to the EU demanding free transit. Making transit on the autobahn prohibitively expensive by fees isn't possible, because the EU can and will veto higher fees or special transit fees. Changing status quo in the EU isn't possible, because all Germany's neighbours will veto.

Second is technical: Railways aren't standardized. Track width changes towards the east. Train station platforms and tunnels are different width and height per country, your load will bump into stuff unless you do lowest-common-size (which is smaller than a normal 20ft/40ft container crosssection, so non-viable). Signaling is different in each and every EU country. Rolling stock for goods transport is usually decades old and doesn't support any of the necessary modern safety standards like ECTS that are used on new tracks and cross-border. So you would have to have huge reloading terminals on each railway track and each border. Or you would have to modernize the railway system across Europe. Huge costs and lack of current demand create a chicken-egg-scenario here. Also, reloading creates delays, which the current just-in-time logistics are allergic to.

Third is domestic: There is also non-transit traffic, where origin or destination is somewhere in Germany. Those will still have to use roads, because the country doesn't have a dense-enough railway network. And building a sufficiently dense one would take forever, if at all possible. New construction is usually extremely expensive, delayed or stopped due to environmental/noise/landmark protection reasons (usually NIMBYs successfully abusing those regs). Only possibility is small extensions, such as "make this road/track/... a little wider", because it is already there which makes arguing against it on the aforementioned grounds harder.

So we maybe will debate if railways ever will take off and then just extend the autobahn. Because there is actually no other choice.


Deutschlandtakt has nothing to do with electrification. And full electrification isn't planned for any point in time, there will (if it goes as planned) never be a fully electrified railway network. They are planning to either shut down small branches or use locomotives with batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.


Well as of 2021 54% of German tracks are already electrified and have a 75% 2030 goal, so to claim it's going to take 50 years to do the other 46% seems wildly off base.


Never heard that "Deutschlandtakt 2070" (lol) depends on electrification of all railway tracks, to be honest. Would be interesting to read up on that, so if you have a source, I'd be glad to read it!


Maybe we need to integrate the AI golems as persons into society, so they can learn and interact with us as individual persons, like us.

But remembering Battlestar Galactica, cutting the interconnectivity was the prominent defense against cylons.


In Germany they decided to make the EPA (electronic medical record) opt-out starting by 2024. Managed by "gematik GmbH", a company with limited liability. Because why should the entity responsible for all medical records have some liability. It is a joke, a bad one.

They don't even say how to opt-out.


> Managed by "gematik GmbH", a company with limited liability. Because why should the entity responsible for all medical records have some liability.

I think it doesn't really matter in what form the government appears. It's still the government and so its rules apply.


> I think it doesn't really matter in what form the government appears. It's still the government and so its rules apply.

If it's a "limited company", that means it's liability is limited to shareholder capital. It's going to have to have an awful lot of capital if it's going to be able to compensate the entire population for mishandling their data.

Also, if it's a limited company, then the shareholders can sell their shares; the company can change hands, often to owners in a different jurisdiction.

A limited company is not an arm of the government, and I can't hold a limited company accountable in the same way I can the government; especially if my personal data has left the jurisdiction.


https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...

Translation using Deepl:

Leasts on the Judgment of the First Senate of February 22, 2011 - 1 BvR 699/06 - Mixed-economy enterprises controlled by the public sector in private-law form are subject to a direct fundamental-rights obligation in the same way as wholly state-owned public enterprises organized in private-law forms.


> GmbH

This is apparently the German equivalent to an LLC.

Pretty sure you misunderstood what "limited liability" means. Pretty much all organizations today have the same legal status: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability


> Pretty much all organizations today have the same legal status

Thats exactly the issue


Limited Liability is a GREAT thing. It allows us to build businesses that serve society that we wouldn't otherwise. Would you start a company or invest in one if you could lose all your personal wealth? Few would.


You're missing GPs point. GP is not arguing to remove the concept of LLCs.

GP is arguing that the entity in charge of all your medical information should not be an LLC. LLCs in general are great.

This company probably shouldn't be LLC.


Most companies are limited liability. All companies that would bid on project would be limited liability. Why do you think this project is special enough that the owners should be liable?

Also, LLC in US is kind of company. It is mostly used for small sole proprietorships and partnerships. Technically, public companies are “limited by shares” where shareholders are liable up to value of their shares. But there is no difference in terms of protecting owners from liability so they are called limited liability.


If their lability was not limited, the company would not have been started.


Why not? As long as they don't do anything that causes harm then the company isn't in danger. If they think it's likely they would cause harm, well then obviously they shouldn't exist.


If the liability is so great that an LLC is necessary maybe it shouldn't be done in the first place.


The potential liability for any company is big enough that limited liability is necessary. No one would start company if they could lose all their assets not just ones invested in company.

Are people confused that limited liability limits the liability of the company? Because limited liability means that the liability of the owners is limited to their investment. The company can go bankrupt from losing lawsuit.


For certain things the individual owners shouldn't be shielded from liability. Medical privacy is one of those.

Otherwise you end up with people who can create as many harmful businesses as they want and just walk away when it explodes, ignoring everyone caught in the shrapnel. I'm 1000x more concerned about the effects of harmful companies than whatever friction it creates for starting new companies. Everything already moves too fast, it would be far preferable to have fewer corporations if it meant they were of higher ethical behavior.


> No one would start company if they could lose all their assets not just ones invested in company.

Companies operated before the concept of Limited liability was even invented.

We have records of successfull companies from year 578, like Kongō Gumi, in Japan.


> The potential liability for any company is big enough that limited liability is necessary.

No, that's what insurance is for.


> Limited Liability is a GREAT thing.

Limited Liability is a double-edged sword. It does reduce the risk of starting a company. But it reduces some mechanisms to protect society from misbehaving companies.


FYI, all liability is limited...


Eery, this song performance reminded me of the ending song of Portal.


The magnetic north pole is wandering pretty fast. Currently magnetic north pole is at coordinates 86.146, 146.826 [1] - right in the arctic ocean. It is not in Canada for quite some years.

[1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml


The geomagnetic north pole is the relevant one. It is located in northern Canada, around 80.7, -72.7, and moves much slower.

Your link mentions this, too:

> Based on the WMM2020 coefficients for 2020.0 the geomagnetic north pole is at 72.68°W longitude and 80.65°N latitude, […] Although geomagnetic pole positions cannot be observed, they are arguably of greater significance than the dip poles because the auroral ovals (approximate 5° latitude bands where the spectacular aurora is likely visible) are closely centered on the geomagnetic poles.


Oh, yes indeed. Thanks for pointing out my confusion and the difference between those two!


Yet another etymological curiosity:

hǫfn is "old norse" for harbour or port. Now going to wiktionary and following the etymology:

hǫfn: From Proto-Germanic *habanō, *habnō (“harbour, haven”).

habanō: From Proto-Indo-European *kh₂póneh₂ or *kh₂pnéh₂, from the root *keh₂p- (“to take, seize, grasp”).

Other germanic words (like german "Hafen") for harbour/port also have a very similar lineage and derive from this "to take, seize, grasp".

So basically the harbour is the place you go to, when you are going "to take, seize, grasp", like when you invade other countries by sea.*


"heaven"


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