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Tariffs won’t help because while they’re losing across the board, the most important market for VW, and also the one with the most drastic losses, is not Germany but China. They bet a lot on expansion into China and once reached ~20% market share there, but that has since dropped to half. For BEV specifically it’s abysmal, so the outlook is also bad: BEV has rapidly risen to nearly 60% of the Chinese retail market but VW’s share is in the low single digits.

I don’t know about dumb. First off, she lives in Switzerland with her wife and children, so she can mess with German politics as much as she wants and it won’t affect her private life that much. Might have to finally start paying taxes there though if she has to flee Germany.

Secondly, she lived in China for years, speaks Chinese fluently and probably is more popular on Chinese social media than in Germany. So there is another option why she might be interested in breaking Germany other than just stupidity.

We can put it in a new EU state. A second Netherlands. Let’s call it Overseas Nether Regions or something like that.

The situation in the US is a bit different though because the US has been doing this for over a hundred years and only turned around “recently” (in my lifetime, in particular via NALA in 1990 for native American languages). The US famously went as far as kidnapping native American children, and the path to any kind of protection has been a long struggle that people still remember. Non-native languages also were systematically eradicated (e.g. famously German after WWII).

At the same time the Civil Rights Act requiring equal access is still interpreted to mean that everybody needs to learn English, state laws still require grading within an English based framework, etc. As a result Americans who grew up in the US can generally speak English, and most people probably consider that a good thing too because in theory it means young Americans are not blocked from climbing the social ladder on grounds of their language.

In contrast, China has 20-30% of Chinese born in China who can’t speak standard Mandarin. There are large differences between more urban and more rural areas. For example, in Shanghai virtually everybody speaks Mandarin and nowadays it has more speakers there than Shanghainese has. But e.g. in Kashgar in the Uyghur AR, around 50% can’t speak Mandarin at all.

In the US you basically have to go to Puerto Rico (which is less integrated than a Chinese AR, e.g. with no voting rights in US elections) to get anything close to that, and even there English is mandatory in schools. Otherwise, Hawaii is the only actual state with two official languages, but Hawaii has very high English proficiency regardless. The same goes for other areas where some other language than English is dominant - the US has areas with >90% Spanish as a first language outside Puerto Rico too, but people there generally also speak English.

So basically if we’re judging these laws by US standards we’re looking at it a bit differently than it looks from a Chinese POV because the US has previously already put significant effort in suppressing languages other than English, which we still remember, and as a result there also is no problem of children of minorities not speaking English and thereby not being able to work and live in most of the US. For the US it would be a regression, but for China it’s also progress in terms of integration and equal rights.

In theory a summary is a good idea, in practice Google’s is catastrophically wrong often enough to produce news like this, and can trivially be shown to be wrong in other cases. It stands to reason that it’s likely also often wrong in ways that we don’t notice, which makes me not want to rely on it.

I remember some issues with international Visa cards a few years back, but not sure if they still exist. Nothing specific to mobile Suica, just Visa in general.

Japan has been doing cashless forever. Most local/regional transport operators use IC cards. The tech is Sony’s FeliCa and the major ones are compatible nationwide. It’s also built into modern smartphones, although it’s only generally available on phones sold in Japan except for iPhone, where all models worldwide support it. If you’re on iPhone, even as a tourist you can just create a virtual card in Apple’s Wallet app and charge through Apple’s payment service.

JR East’s card is called Suica and exists since 2001. It covers basically anything in the Greater Tokyo area where they operate, not only their own stuff (trains, metro, subway, trams, the airport monorail, buses, some ferries, …), and can be used for payment at many shops, vending machines, restaurants, and even some parks and such. Billing for transport is generally simply by shortest distance. E.g. riding the Yamanote ring line one stop in one direction costs the same as going all the way around the ring in the other direction.

Shinkansen (bullet trains) don’t use the cards for payment, but you can link online ticket purchases to them and then you buy cashless online and only tap in and out for the Shinkansen too.

Recently some train operators have started supporting credit cards too, so for some trains you can just tap a credit card at the ticket gates.

They display it on the shelf (though some stores still display both before/after tax because the final price is only required since 2021), but registers calculate it separately and the tax appears on receipts.

There were concerns that if the tax rate is zero they have to check everywhere that nothing is ever divided by the tax rate or the computed tax. If it’s 1% they just have to change the number everywhere. And then I guess a significant part of the “months” that takes is also just testing, certifications, etc.

Unfortunately the tax is added at the register and paid by the consumer, so if they just do nothing the companies end up with extra money that they can then just not pass on to the government relatively easily, while consumers still see a tax on their receipts that should not exist.

The 500 series Shinkansen trains were built in the 90ies so it would be more like 30 years.

Well she literally reported anxiety, and a cough a few days prior that went away, according to the article…

I’ve witness people being racist because someone is from another village

We have this in Germany too. Traditionally, the area where I live hates the area where I was born. These two places are maybe an hour apart and in the same state. All because they were governed by different nobles ages ago who had different ideas about Christianity. Tbh though it was much more of a thing in my parents’ generation.

US citizens who were also born in the US and vote in US elections should stay out of US politics?

The Vatican does have the highest crime rate per capita in the world.*

* Because there are a few hundred inhabitants but millions of tourists each year

No, they want to leave Germany instead of making someone defend them there.

According to the article, he was hiring Americans at first. However:

“They would call five minutes before milking time, and say, ‘I’m not going to make it,’” Tim said. “Well, who’s going to milk the cows? We’re trying to run a business. It just wasn’t working.”

Then he switched to Mexicans.

Yes and no… you’re basically saying that with support from China and Russia, they got to a point where they can build WW2 tech invented more than 80 years ago using pen and paper. There’s definitely newer tech that they can’t build (e.g. computers are imported).

I’ve had some products that use ChoViva (fake chocolate made from sunflower seeds and oats) and they were ok. On the other hand my only memory of Hershey’s chocolate is just pain, even 30 years ago (last time I was in the US). So maybe it’s not replacing cocoa as such that’s the problem.

The rapture already happened, that’s why people are calling themselves Christians but never actually following Christ’s teachings. The actual believers are long gone.