To be honest, Merz would probably do that with or without Trump in power. It is an issue, but it is another issue…

Yeah, totally. And there are many, many top scientists already in Europe.

The thing is that to do research, you need money. Not just your (and your staff’s) salary. Experimental research requires actual, material resources. Cutting-edge equipment and reagents. If more top scientists come to Europe, but the resources for research do not increase, it is hard to imagine more top research being done.

The UE spends around 2.2/2.3% of GDP on research and development:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=551418 (2021 for fair comparison) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20221129-1

Meanwhile, in the US, it was almost 3.5% (of the larger total GDP), and in China, more than 2.4%.

I believe we have a lot of amazing research in Europe. Possibly the best fundamental research in the world, amazing sustainability and climate-related project, growing focus on open access and reproducibility from funding agencies. We all know science pays off in the long term. Let it grow!

Very small, but good start. (Just the National Science Foundation in the US had the budget of $9BN last year, compared to €2.3BN of European Research Council, so it is not even close to filling the gap).

Not exactly what I was looking for, but very interesting. Thanks!

Yeah. I generally hope that the situation will move the consumer choices beyond: “I chose product A over product B because it was 0.1€ cheaper, and I do not care about all the rest.” or “I chose product A because everybody talks about it, I haven’t heard about product B, who cares about them?”. Like everybody talks about McDonalds, everybody knows it tastes awful, has awful nutritional value, and awful practices along the supply chain. And yes, it is c h e a p.

An alternative to Kindle would be PocketBook, originally Ukrainian, with its current headquarters in Switzerland, and manufactured in Taiwan. I’ve used their ebook readers for years now, great stuff.

Apart from Storytel, I also know Bookbeat, but haven’t tried the latter. Storytel was good though, reliable, decent selection, nothing special beyond that.

Thanks!

Paywall… Is there an archived version?

We should make an email/mail template if we want many people to contact their MEPs.

The heads are outside the EU’s jurisdiction. But I would like to see the EU showing it has the power to limit a company’s activities on the common market if they do not follow the rules (idk how exactly, I guess hard bans would be very, very difficult to implement in this case).

Can I blog there without putting up a paywall? (I could still accept donations if they really need that, not that I would expect many ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

Yeah, a d i c t i o n warning. The bar you buy is likely disappear sooner than you would have thought ;)

I’ll give that a try, thanks!

My case was convenience (since I have copilot, since everybody around me uses it, since it is integrated not only in VS but also in RStudio etc.) and lack of knowledge about the alternatives. Or laziness, in other words.

Poolside looks very cool. But it seems that atm it is available only upon request and only for companies.

For now, I use GitHub Copilot. They give it for free to students, but it would be great to have an alternative once I graduate or once they stop giving it out for free.

To the photos section, you can add Polish PhotoAiD (https://photoaid.com/). One of the cool features is that for some countries, you can get a photo formatted for a document application (e.g., for a passport) out of a selfie.

But it works only for recurrent donations, right?

I know that in Poland there patronite.pl works great, but it seems to be unavailable in other languages.

Check Vinted and Sellpy (or any other second-hand, but these have the widest choice of products). You might just get your favorite product second-hand with no profit for the original producer ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve used Pocketbook for years. Durable equipment, good battery, simple but robust OS. The company was first founded in Kyiv and then moved its headquarters to Switzerland. Production, to the best of my knowledge, is in Taiwan. Highly recommended.

https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch

Oh, I didn’t know about it! Thanks!