Aceticon

Reading your post and looking back makes me realize that some of my best travel experiences were when, for some reason or other, things got out of control.

Also there are generaly very specific requirements on how things are made for them to fall under a Protected Origin, so for example in the age when pretty much all industrially made smoked meats are filled with nitrites and other preservatives, Parma Ham is literally still only made with pork meat and salt, nothing else (so the quality is far greater than the modern version of similar products which do not have that Protected Origin, many of which even have chemicals added to them to "accelerate the cure" so that they can be made faster).

Another example: Manchego Cheese isn't just cheese made in specific area of Spain, it's actually has to be made in a certain way using the milk of a specific breed of sheep called Manchega (hence the name of the cheese).

Doubt it.

They're not actually handy to put a grilled beef patty inside, since they size is all wrong and they get soaked and mushy with the juices.

Sorry but we in Europe don't want chicken raised up in filth so that it must be chlorinated and even then still has much higher levels of salmonela, beef with hormones affecting the growth of young people (and making the meat shit) or chemicals allowed into public use under the principle of "it can be sold until proven bad" rather than the principle "it has to be proven not bad before it can be sold".

In other words, we're fine with our higher life expectancy and better health outcomes and don't want to suffer the consequences of shit American-style "regulation".

Dropping European trade borders would be horrible, especially with America: stuff isn't more expensive to produce in Europe because Europeans are shit at growing/making them, they're more expensive to produce here because we actually have consumer protection standards which have costs to be obbeyed rather than the Free For All of America (and to a lesser extent of most other Anglo-Saxon countries) were pretty much everything goes for maximum profits for corporates even at the cost of fucking everybody else.

Yeah, well, there's no Oil in Europe either, so ICE cars are even worse for a self-sustaining Europe (at least Lithum is only consumed once for an EV car, whilst Oil is consumed all the time for ICE cars)

If Europe can constantly source Oil from abroad to keep ICE cars going, I'm sure it can also source (a far lower quantity of) Lithium from abroad to make cars that can then run on electric power produced right here in Europe.

Your entire "argument" is one big cherry picked excuse.

In my experience, how many people think like that really depends on the country of Europe: my own native Portugal is far more shit when it comes to Environmentalism in general - especially around cars as the country has a very 1980s mindset on them and a car is still seen as symbol of status - whilst for example The Netherlands is almost the the opposite.

Well informed people knew that it wasn't safe already for quite a while.

Most people did not, most companies did not, most public institutions either did not or could make believed they did not.

That's changing (as are lots of other things) because Trump is being far more loud about how Europe is an adversary of America than previous administrations (it was too for Democrats, though only on business and trade terms)

There was quite a lot of fighting against treating America as a safe haven for the data of Europeans from people in the know in Tech and IT Security in Europe but we lost, but now crooked politicians can't make believe America or American companies are safe for the data of Europeans anymore.

Explanation

Mullvad just gives your machine an IP address from a range reserved for internal networks and which is not valid to use as a public IP on the internet, and then does NAT translation like your home router does.

NAT translation just uses a gateway/router as a front on the Internet (thus, with a public IP address) for a bunch of machines with non-public IP addresses: if a connection comes from an inside machine to a machine on the internet it just replaces the source IP & port address on the outbound connection with its own public IP and available port so that if the external internet machine connects back, it knows which internal machine is supposed to receive that connection.

So if you machine on the internal network side connects out to another machine on the Internet, at least for a while (until it purges than information from memory because it's not being used) the NAT server will treat connections from that machine to it (remember, the NAT server is the one with a valid public IP address) as actually meant to go to your machine.

However if a connection comes from a machine outside which your own machine has never before connected to (which is the case when you start seeding and you machine ends up in the list of seeders of a torrent), since your machine never connected to that one in the first place the NAT server doesn't know which internal machine that connection is supposed to go to, so it never gets to that machine.

The way to have your machine reachable by any random external machine when you're using NAT is called Port Forwarding which is a mechanism to reserver one of the IP ports on the NAT server so that any connection to that port is always forwarded to a specific internal machine.

Mullvad doesn't support port forwarding, hence the problems with seeding.

TL;DR What you can do

After downloading a torrent, leave it seeding. Since during the download stage your machine connected with pretty much all machines in the swarm (even if just to check what they have available) the NAT server has them associated with your machine in its list so that if any of those machines tries to connected back the connection gets forwarded to your machine, hence requests from any of those machines to download blocks come through and get served by your machine.

However new machines that join the swarm won't be able to reach your machine because Mullvad's NAT server doesn't know them hence doesn't know it should forward their connections to your machine.

This is the same reason why if you just start seeding from scratch nothing ever manages to connect to your machine - none of the machines outside trying to reach yours is in the list that the NAT server has of machines your own has reached earlier so their connections to the public IP of the server don't get forwarded to your machine.

In my experience just leaving it seeding after downloading is enough to have at least a 2:1 seed to download ratio in most torrents, so if your objective is to give back to the community as much or more than you take, that's enough IMHO.

If however you just want to seed for other reasons, then you won't be able to do it with Mullvad. Either get a VPN provider that supports port foward or rent a seedbox and use that.

Europe just did a 180 on the commitment for no ICE cars to be sold from 2035 onwards under pressure of just a handful of big automakers.

And when I say Europe, I actually mean crooked European politicians rather than the public in general.

I mean, even if one puts the aside the whole strategical point of Europe delaying even more commiting to the first big tech revolution of the 21st century so that a handful of large automakers make a little bit more profit, there are actually lives as stake: fumes for diesel cars are estimated to kill more than 10,000 people a year in Europe.

Corruption in politics is both killing people and fucking up our future prosperity.

Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country's lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.

The Dollar went down.

Convert that S&P 500 to Yuan and it's a whole different picture.

There's a lot of Economics in Economics.

For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they've actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it's pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.

The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, "Economists" in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they're actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.

The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics "Nobel" Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank "in honor of Alfred Nobel" which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn't give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, "donate organs when you die" - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).

All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the "Economists" in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.