On the European side of the pond, single packaged industrial ice cream is also gone to shit.
A Magnum or Cornetto used to be a well sized very tasty snack. In Italy the "cucciolone" (an ice cream sandwich) was literally marketed as being "10 bites".
All of those are now tiny bland things that nobody should buy.
The Magnum Company (neé Algida/Walls/etc) is a fucking disaster and everybody should stop buying their products, but other single packaged ice cream snack makers have been following suit and it's basically a meme that every one of those ice creams now looks like a mignon version of the original.
Alas, small kids still like them and have no frame of reference.
I think it's also worth noting that China today is not China from twenty years ago. The communist party ran the country but there was some form of "internal quasi democracy" and leadership changes happened, with term limits.
This changed under Xi Jinping and no one knows what the effects will be.
I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
I play dungeon crawl stone soup (think nethack,but with web tiles), and most of the servers are struggling because of AI crawlers downloading the morgues.
Real users are already suffering.
If (big if) the AI labs can be made to pay for the abuse, actual users win.
Yes, It is also sold in every supermarket in soluble form, there's a Nestle owned brand (orzoro) and a few smaller ones (orzobimbo) which are quite popular.
I should avoid caffeine for health reasons and I usually drink milk with barley, it's quite a decent replacement for caffelatte
I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.
We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
> These "age verification" laws are - by design - identity attribution systems. They attribute digital identities (accounts) to physical identities (SSN, ID, etc..
No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.
This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.
@steerpike on HN coined the "time to sheep" metric, a measure of how long you have to travel before you're surrounded by sheep[0], which correlates reasonably well with quality of living.
Alas, doesn't work very well outside of britain, but it's a good metric :)
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