I think there are still _a lot_ of use cases that are currently prohibitively expensive for which increased efficiency will immediately induce matching demand.
What exactly does it mean to invest 3.2B€ in Germany? Does it mean this is actually spend in Germany - as in for goods and services produced in Germany, or does it mean they order an astonishing amount of GPUs at Nvidia and put them into the Frankfurt region because that's just one of the most popular regions latency wise to serve Europe?
Majority of the bytes? Yes.
Majority of the requests? Usually not.
Majority of the caches miss bytes? Probably not.
There are probably exceptions, but even the most graphically heavy sites have a decent amount of HTML, CSS, and JS content. This is probably due to Google bot not appreciating excessive image use. Marketing folk typically listen very closely to whatever Google dictates.
Do you really think these things can be solved by surveillance? I doubt people like you are describing are deterred by that and I don’t think DHS will start hunting possible homeless beggars because they have recordings.
What actually increases safety and one of the reason public transport was / felt safer in the past is more personal. If there are train guards on the ride or platform managers at the station, they can actually intervene. No surveillance necessary. But that obviously requires way more public transport funding.
> Hard to imagine how to solve it without surveillance.
Really? Hopefully not
How about giving support for people who need it? How about giving teens options to do something else than roam the streets and gang up? How about giving support to stop generational drug use? How about showing these kids that they have a brighter future ahead if they choose to act on it? How about figuring out how to fix the massive polarisation of opinions, beliefs, income, opportunities etc.?
according to that article, the train and station already had surveillance cameras. the current post and comment thread are about surveillance microphones; how would that help with the investigation in your article, where we can reasonably assume that the robbers were shouting things like "open your bag" and "give me your wallet", and interview witnesses to confirm our assumption?
Sure, but I think what OP was saying is that this says a lot about the US. For example in Germany, denying man made climate change is a fringe position. We just fight about how to stop it and at what cost.
> 10 years ago you would have bought a family van.
Fellow European here, we don't have kids but we were thinking at maybe getting a second dog, which made me look for a possible car replacement (we now have a 15+ year-old small hatchback). After some searching and calculating I found out that the "usefulness" of cars for my purported task (to transport two dogs in the back) can be summarized like this (in decreasing order): vans -> station wagons/estates -> SUVs/CUVs.
Unfortunately vans are on their out, I can't really understand the reason why (the VW Sharan will cease production this year, Ford C-Max ceased production back in 2019 etc), station wagons are also not feeling good, almost every car company is betting the house on SUVs/CUVs, which is a trend I don't like at all, because you get to pay more money for less utility.
I don’t know what kind of van you have in mind but there are plenty of vans in the US that are actually more powerful and heavy than a SUV. A Chrysler Voyager has 100 more hp and weighs about 900 lbs more than a Forester.
The vans don't pretend to be built for off-road, so they have better steering and lower gas mileage (both due to lower suspention and to lower weight).
Is this true? The van mentioned, the Chrysler Voyager, gets about 22mpg. The Subaru Forester (mentioned elsewhere as an example SUV) gets about 28mpg. The Forrester is about 3600 pounds, vs. 4300 pounds for the Voyager.
The vans made by US companies for US markets are gas guzzlers, but the ones made for other markets are better. For example, Ford S-Max sold in Poland gets 37 mpg, and is larger than the Forester.
Looked into this a bit. S-Max is a hybrid minivan, so gas mileage won't compare with Forester, but otherwise, they seem oddly identical.
S-Max vs. Forester
Curb weight: 3626 lbs vs. 3620
Mileage: 44 mpg vs. 30 mpg
Cargo: 77.69 cubic feet vs. 74.2 cubic feet
So about 6 pounds heavier and 4 cubic feet more space than the Forester. It would be interesting if we had a hybrid Forester to compare with, but that doesn't seem to exist (yet).
Also looked into U.S. vans being gas guzzlers. A comparable vehicle in the U.S. is the Toyota Sienna, since it's a hybrid minivan. It's 4700 pounds, gets 36 mpg (vs. 44 for S-Max), but has 101 cubic feet of cargo space, which is 1/3 more than the S-Max. Seems to correlate well with weight, which makes sense.
Based on this, my (current) take is that mid-size SUVs in the U.S. are equivalent to these smaller minivans elsewhere, and U.S. minivans are a bit larger and heavier than that.
