There are other countries than the US of A.

Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest

Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.

Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.

Android & IOS have an emergency alert system that the government can use if they want to.

Yes, I'm totally over it.

Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/256 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?

IAEA's estimate is that Nuclear fusion, if successfully researched and demonstrated at full capacity within 2036 at ITER (which is already lagging behind schedule) will result in commercial availability in 2050. So yes, we are still decades away from putting it to use.

Source

Your lamp shade is driving me crazy!

Sound more like the U.S. than Germany - Germany has the €49/month public transport ticket, relatively good public transport offerings and a green party that has the best election results of the western industrial countries. Of course shutting down nuclear power plants didn't do them any favours regarding pollution.

~~tweet~~

X'cretion

It's a WEBP file, not a GIF.

Yes the current leader is a generic russian politician/stooge, but the previous leader was a real firecracker! He claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have visited their planet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsan_Ilyumzhinov

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty for a basic rundown - in short, empiric data over the last 250 years show that unregulated capitalism concentrates wealth at a rate that is larger than the economic growth.