For my german work visa in 2022, I had to either give proof of sufficient german knowledge, or a letter from my employer confirming the job would be in english.
"People who don't speak english or native language" does not represent the people moving for work to germany. Most family reunion routes at least require A1 german as well (which is super easy to pass, but is scary enough for some anyways).
This isn't really true. I've lived in both Munich and Hamburg now, and you 100% need some amount of german to navigate life, many people do not in fact have conversational-level english. I often say that the common paths tend to be easy to navigate in english (e.g. booking a train ticket, getting a phone line), but the adjacent flows (e.g. filing a refund request for your unfulfilled seat reservation, cancelling your phone contract) often require talking to someone in german. A doctor may be marked as speaking english, but that doesn't mean that their reception speaks english.
Berlin may be a different story within Germany, and then there's the entirety of e.g. Netherlands, but I know that the situation in France isn't better than here.
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That said, B1 is a difficult level within german. Being able to converse fluently enough in not-quite-correct german -which is enough for getting through day to day life- is not necessarily enough to pass the test, and you really need to crunch through memorizing the grammatical gender of thousands of words, alongside getting really good at applying them in various grammatical forms (e.g. declensions vary for the same word based on how it's used).
It's worthwhile to remember that this is only true of Mythos/Fable and other future models of "similar or higher capability levels" (ant is treating this as a new tier of model above Opus). Anyone who's already been happy using Haiku/Sonnet/Opus on Bedrock will not be affected by this at all.
My speculation on this has been that it's potentially a factor against ai psychosis, as psychosis risk (of any psychosis) is significantly elevated with lack of sleep. If you read case studies of ai psychosis, many of them also involve people staying up way too long right before they fall on a bad path.
Having tried GLM-5 and Minimax M2.5, alongside regularly using Opus 4.6 (on default thinking): Opus is still much, much better at writing non-garbage code. I haven't yet tried GLM-5.1 though.
The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low.
Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.
I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.
There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.
Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.
We do actually. The German Girocards were, until Maestro ceased to exist, often co-issued as Maestro + Girocard, and global acceptance was pretty good under the Mastercard network.
There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).
If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.
The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.
A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.
*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.
fwiw: Discover technically goes through amex network in EU, and amex acceptance varies from pretty good (e.g. germany) to pretty awful. Completely incomparable to visa and mc acceptance ofc.
Where I live we have labor rights and if your job is delivering mail and you're given a horse for it, you'd only be expected to deliver as much mail as you can in your contractual work time, which is then limited by the legal limits (8 hours/workday, up to 6 days/week). So you'd be home for most of the day, but delivering less letters per day.
(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)
This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.
This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.
We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).
Strictly speaking, unless you do destructive actions, it's not stealing, but instead unauthorized access.
If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.
This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".
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But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.
I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.
"People who don't speak english or native language" does not represent the people moving for work to germany. Most family reunion routes at least require A1 german as well (which is super easy to pass, but is scary enough for some anyways).