People have gotten very creative about the topic .. also.. the UN actually uses a north-centered view of the world to compromise on this.. it’s really cool
I remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other ..
At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!
We always called this “monetizing the brand” and it’s been annoying me since at least when Sperry when private equity and the shoes stopped being multi-year daily drivers
I think you forget to take into account how centralized Japan is. Tokyo is not only the biggest city in the world. It’s also extremely centralized in terms of its infrastructure and as much as other Asian cities have developed similarly, they have also developed more recent and with a different urban model. It’s unlikely that the hub system used in Japan will be replicated somewhere else on that scale.
I believe this refers to the fact that, before Jupiter, the most powerful computer in Europe was HPC6, which is owned by Eni S.p.A, a private company, and the following most powerful computer was the Alps system, located in Switzerland.
So, in this context, this new supercomputer is owned by Europe, “the public” and it’s located in the European Union sovereignty within Europe, the continent.
Edit:
I found the full quote in the website of the Jülich Development Center and I guess it makes sense why it was editorialized for the eu-wide website.
“This is a historic milestone. With JUPITER, Europe is reaching the highest level of high-performance computing. JUPITER is also a testimony for Germany's long leadership in HPC. Today, it became the home of the most powerful computer in Europe and the fourth most powerful in the world. From European perspective, JUPITER is a pioneer. It shows that when we combine national vision with European cooperation, we can achieve global excellence.”
Germany actually uses their own card system .. or cash. They are very much against visa/mastercard due to their “high commission fees” and “privacy concerns”
You're comparing a regional debit network to an overarching network that includes lots of different fee structures. The USA has debit networks (STAR, etc) with similar cost structures too - Germany is not unique in this regard.
That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards". "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically dead and I don't see it coming back without state intervention.
There's a few holdouts in stores here and there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet for example), but it's on the decline there, too.
"Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles for police/security services/etc coming from certain political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost them many more of their global customers.
It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method of transaction they currently rely on.
> Payment service providers shall not offer or request a per transaction interchange fee of more than 0,2 % of the value of the transaction for any debit card transaction.
So does Russia, Denmark, Belgium/Netherlands, Iran, China. I’m sure there’re others. I know someone working on unified payment platform for games in Africa. They have dozens of different payment systems instead of the two.
It’s a fascinating rabbit hole ^^
Inspired by
This map is not upside down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292694