I’m from Belgium, but the requirement for an EPC is part of a EU directive, so all EU countries should have something similar going. A page about the directive: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/energy-performance-buildings/energy-performance-buildings-directive_en

In southern Europe AC is common. In northern Europe floor heating with a central heatpump system seems to be the most common solution for new builds (in the part of Europe I know at least), but it was unfortunately seldom installed with cooling ability. New builds in northern Europe are very well insulated, and double glazed glass with a low solar transmission factor is common, as are built-in blinds. Proper ventilation was an issue when we first started with insulating and sealing everything up, the rules have since been made more humane, but imo still too focused on mechanical solutions.

Every new build/renovation has to have an energy + ventilation study done and meet certain minimum standards. The result of that study is prominently featured on any immo platform, so renters know what to expect.

But when it’s 35+ °C outside for several days in a row, those new builds without active cooling still get too hot. Our legislation simply hasn’t caught up yet. When it gets that hot, people now often make due with mobile airco units to keep a few rooms livable, which is silly for a home that’s only a few years old imo. We should have been prepared for this, we knew it was coming :)

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/en-masse

The generally refers to the exceptions where no consent is needed. Had the ladies been committing a crime, then no consent was needed to start filming. Had they been filming some landmark and the ladies walked through the frame, again no consent needed from them. But generally speaking, consent is required before you may start filming a stranger.

In Belgium people do have an expectation of privacy in public, what they did is straight up illegal under Belgian law. If they want to film or photograph a person (not as an accidental passerby, but as the subject as was the case here), then they need to get consent from that person. If they want to share that footage online, then they need consent for that as well.

I’m neither an astronomer nor an astrophotographer and I do this. The sun always rotates in the same direction, it’s not exactly rocket science.

But if I were to ever visit the southern hemisphere, then I’m practically guaranteed to pick the worst possible sitting spot at least once.

There is no direct adjacency needed to spread seeds from one plot of land to another, that’s one of your made up hurdles. Small seeds naturally get blown far in the wind. Larger seeds still get carried large distances by animals, which was why I specifically copy pasted the bit about birds carrying acorns …

To claim that it would be difficult and expensive to let a wild forest grow in those meadows is absurd, that’s what this was about for me. It’s a convenient excuse to do nothing, but it’s not a very good excuse.

To give another example:
…
Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. “Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort,” says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate.
…
Chazdon, who has studied natural regeneration for more than 30 years, questions the commonly held assumption that trees need to be actively planted to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. “There’s a perspective that humans did this damage and it’s our job to fix it, and that we should govern the process, and just let nature help when it can,” she says. “Another view is that forest restoration is fundamentally natural, and that humans can assist it, but ultimately it should be governed by natural processes.”.
…
Proponents are arguing for natural regeneration to be taken more seriously in national and international efforts to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises. Recent research has shown that natural regeneration can potentially absorb 40 times more carbon than plantations, and provide a home for more species. It is also significantly cheaper than tree planting, with different studies in Brazil showing costs reduced by 38%, or even up to 76%.
…

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-reason-wild-forests-beat-plantations

I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.

And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/

Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.

But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.

They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.

In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.

The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.

Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it’s almost guaranteed to have errors.

99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.

Loads. Indonesia comprises thousands of islands spread out over 5000km, which will have given rise to very different cultures + limited genetic exchange. Indonesia also only became unified for the first time as a Dutch colony in the 20th century, so whatever cultural and genetic blending is going on now, it only started happening relatively recent.

Poland in comparison is much smaller, the only natural barriers are rivers, they’ve been a nation for a millennium, and they had population expulsions/exchanges after ww2.

“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

It’s what Amazon, Walmart, etc want it to mean. They want the profits, but none of the responsibility that comes with selling goods. So they did some legal linguistic gymnastics and thus according to them, stuff that is bought in the Amazon store, with a % markup by Amazon, with payment to Amazon, and with shipping by Amazon, is somehow not Amazon’s responsibility.

The USA government had gone after the large platforms for selling defective/dangerous goods, but that was in 2024 under Biden, so I expect that investigation to be dead by now. The EU is still going ahead though: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-make-temu-shein-amazon-liable-unsafe-goods-ft-reports-2025-02-01/

I’d say stupid. I live in a country where most houses are brick walls + concrete floors, and smoke detectors are still common + since a few years also mandated by the government.

The government mandate came after it was found that of the dozens of people that died every year from house fires, 95% suffocated in their sleep.

Some numbers for my region: ~7m population, 70% of houses had smoke detection before the mandate, on average 63 died per year from house fires.

Some incorrect approximative math: Lets assume that the amount of dead could have been halved if those 30% houses had 2 smoke detectors per person (lets say 2 cheap ones for 2x20 euros per 10 years): 7m x 0.3 x 2 x 20€ /10 /63 x2 = a cost of 267€ per year per life saved. Imo that’s a no brainer, it’d be stupid to not invest in smoke detection.

I expect the €799 to include vat, while the $699 will be without. $930 /1.25 = $744, which is a lot more reasonable. Sony using the same sale price for the whole eu when each country has different vat rates, is probably because of profit maximization. Too many people only look at the first digit in 799.99, so no matter if after currency conversion + vat the price is €720 (20%) or €762 (27% in Hungary), they’ll just slap on the sale price of €799.99.