The city has half a million residents and the oblast has a million residents. There's restaurants, museums, grocery stores, car dealerships, parks, zoo's, malls, stadiums, factories, train stations, an airport, ports etc etc. It's a real place.
I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.
The big LAN parties also had a fat internet connection at a time when the best you could have at home was INSD. But even more important was that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP. Good times.
Eh. A new EV can drive 400-700km on one charge. It takes 20-60 minutes to charge on public chargers depending on the charger. Except that charging on public charges is more expensive than charging at home I don't really see the practical issue. I know many people without charging options at home that will never go back to ICE.
There was a push in the cinema industry a few years back to get more into live events, concerts and stuff like that, but seems like it didn't really take off like they wanted.
A lot of the electricity is gobbled up by a few aluminum plants, but in addition to that Norway is a very electrified country. We don't use gas at the consumer level at all (except for grilling 2 months of the year, lol) and are rapidly moving transportation to electricity.
In a normal year we are a net exporter of electricity, but it's only around 10% that is exported.
Should also compare with total energy consumption. Lots of countries have good electricity generation numbers, but use gas or oil at the consumer level for heating (and cooking) and oil products (diesel, gasoline) for transportation. Electrification matters.
Norwegian electricity prodcution in February this year was 98,8% hydro and wind and 1,1% thermal (mainly gas). I guess the last 0,1% might be the diesel powered generator on Svalbard (the coal one was turned off 3 years ago).
Do you not read the news? Israel was bombing Lebanon DAILY and occupying parts of southern Lebanon throughout the so called ceasefire. All without Hezbollah firing a single shot in retalliation until Israel and the US attacked Iran DURING NEGOTIATIONS!
Low bandwidth is a bigger problem than high latency. If it takes half a second or even a second for your clicks to register it's not a big deal, you learn to work around it. But if the bandwidth is so low that it takes 5-10 seconds just to write the screen it really sucks.
I think OP was talking about the political side, not the technical side. How one company with the blessing of a regulatory body in one country could put thousands of satellites in LEO with minimal international coordination/deliberation.
I'm thankful I live somewhere I can pay $300/month for daycare. I think it's even cheaper now and capped at like $400 no matter how many kids you have in daycare.
We tried to have them at home while WFH a few months during covid when everything was shut down. That didn't work. lol.
Sure, but I still need a Microsoft account of some sort to play Minecraft? And parental controls still exists inside Microsoft or Xbox (is that the same account??). I spent a couple days just trying to make it possible for my daughter and her friends to be connected on Minecraft. And then you need to figure out what a launcher is, that Prism even exists. And you get a completely different experience on iPad where Prism doesn't exist. It's stil a hassle compared to Downloading free Roblox and start playing and having the same experience across devices.