In some of these countries, nationality is a weak proxy for what actually matters for name order; ethnicity. Take for example Malaysia. Yes, ~70% of the population are Malay Muslims who (mostly) follow the convention mentioned here. But you also have 20%+ Chinese, ~7% Indians (with considerable ethnic diversity!), and an assortment of native peoples, all who follow their own conventions.
If I’m mostly writing Finnish text, then the native Finnish layout (with separate keys for Å, Ä, and Ö) seems better. And if I’m coding, I personally prefer the US English layout where [, {, ;, etc. are more easily accessible. But I could see this layout being a better fit if I’d need to frequently swap between multiple different languages and still have convenient access to the most common symbols used in coding.
Even that statistic vastly overstates the risk of hydro. From elsewhere on the ourworldindata site:
> This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.
The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.
Neither bbc.com nor medium.com are blocked in Malaysia (source: I’m there presently), and I don’t recall either being blocked in Singapore or Indonesia. The sites blocked in Indonesia (e.g. Reddit) cannot be accessed by using an alternate DNS (e.g. Google’s) but are available via VPN.
Ah, you’re right, Medium was blocked in Malaysia for a few years for hosting Sarawak Report, a publication that shed light on the 1MDB scandal. Wikipedia tells me the ban was lifted in 2018.
I think they're just going with the list of official EU languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...). That list does not, unfortunately, include Catalan, even though the Spanish government pushed for adding it to the list (along with Galician and Basque).
In my experience, the size of the collection in any given library building is never much of an issue as you can always order books for very low fees from any library in the country. Because of this, the other facilities are a much bigger value-add than a larger on-site collection.
While “herbal tea” is indeed a very loosely used term, botanically speaking “tea” refers to the species camellia sinensis. Hongyacha is, to my knowledge, the only known case of a caffeine free camellia sinensis.
The Finnish news sources I follow paint this as a pilot initiative trialed primarily in Helsinki, and even then limited to a few courses. A country-wide scrapping of subjects seems still a long way off. The following passage from The Independent article seems the closest to the truth:
"Finnish schools are obliged to introduce a period of “phenomenon-based teaching” at least once a year. These projects can last several weeks. In Helsinki, they are pushing the reforms at a faster pace with schools encouraged to set aside two periods during the year for adopting the new approach. Ms Kyllonen’s blueprint, to be published later this month, envisages the reforms will be in place across all Finnish schools by 2020."
Did some more research and it seems that the subjects are not gone but there will be more project based learning that combines multiple subjects. The changes are already implemented.
Which source is this? There was a big change starting from this semester. It might not be as dramatic as the article says but it's still considered to be a huge change.
I think you're right in that this won't have much immediate impact on the service providers.
But think of this as a step towards commoditization of services. It's a small step from "Hey Siri, get me an Uber" to "Hey Siri get me a ride", whereupon an Apple bidding algorithm gets you an Uber, a Lyft, a GrabCar, etc. based on e.g. price, wait time, and reviews. As a user, I wouldn't necessarily care which platform got used as long as it meets my need.
