I personally know a person who was charged and convicted of the Crime of Libel (in what for my country was an incredibly speedy legal process) for accusing a local politician of Corruption.

Curiously, about a decade later said politician was convicted for Corruption. Lets just say it only happened because that Libel conviction really pissed of that person who had time, brains and no fear of their professional life being affected, so they worked tirelessly behind the curtains to push an earlier report into “irregularities” in his City Hall all the way into and as a case against him, including digging evidence even from abroad and having to threaten with exposure in the Press at least 3 public prosecutors who on different occasions were quietly holding the case so that it didn’t get to court before the deadlines for prosecution expired (and even then that politician actually got away with a number of crimes because the deadlines for prosecution did expired for those). In fact that was the first politician ever in my country convicted of Corruption.

Libel having been made a Crime in my country (which is quite unusual in the World) was done exactly so that people can be punished for openly accusing the powerful of malfeasance without the powerful having to bare the costs for a civil court case and actually prove damages (so it mainly helps politicians in the big parties who have the connections to get the local Public Prosecutions Office to take the case to court) and that’s exactly how it has been used.

By an amazing coincidence my country is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe and last I checked was the one most behind in implementing the EU advised anti-Corruption measures.

Well, for merely commissioners that moved from the commission to those positions, the first example that comes to my mind is the head of the EU Commission during the 2008 Crash and it’s aftermath, who went to Goldman Sachs afterwards and is still there today as a non-executive president.

During his time in the Commission they were very pro-Finance in the way they handled the aftermath of the Crash with him personally pushing frequently for measures were EU money was used to unconditionally helped the interests of large Financial Industry companies, and Goldman Sachs is one of the largest companies and massively benefited from, amongst other things, near-defaulting Greek Treasuries being bought from the private sector by the EU, which subsequently forced the Greeks into Austerity to as much as possible pay those Treasuries.

There’s even a scandal with him were, whilst working at Goldman Sachs, he broke the EU rules on lobbying by using his access card to EU buildings - which he was entitled to have as an ex-Head of the Commission - to simply enter into those buildings and waltz over to the offices of sitting EU officials to lobby for Goldman Sachs. The EU ended up revoking his access privileges, the first and only time that has happened for an ex-EU Commissioner.

Legally there are no Corrupt EU Commissioners. To be deemed Corrupt there would have to be actual evidence of Corruption (such as recordings of meetings were they explicitly promised to use their power in a certain way, in exchange for some form of payment, which normally only the Police has powers to obtain), them being subsequently charged and a Court Of Law convicting them for the crime of Corruption.

None of them was ever just investigated for Corruption, much less convicted so pointing fingers at any one of the them explicitly and saying that they’re Corrupt would be Libel, which in my country (which by the way, is pretty Corrupt, with actual ex-government members convicted of Corruption) is an actual Crime prosecuted by the local Prosecution Office, not merely a civil lawsuit for damages.

So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel. Obviously I’m not going to do that.

What there is are various coincidences of EU Commissioners which acted in very positive ways towards certain industries and then after leaving the Commission went to work for those Industries making a lot of money, even thought they had no background in them (never before had worked in said Industries, no Educational training for said Industries).

Since the police never investigates it, all there are are such coincidences of commissioners ending up in gold plated gigs in the industries they helped whilst they were commissioners.

I’m not going to put my head of the nose for you by naming names (I’m not a Legal expert so don’t want to risk committing the Crime of Libel by doing so). I suggest you start by looking into were the EU commissioners during the 2008 Crash (during which the commission was very pro-Finance) ended up working afterwards.

True.

That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.

If you’re drowning now you don’t put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn’t even visible yet.

Sounds like the problem is lack of enforcement of the existing laws rather than the existing laws being bad.

To provide an extreme example, just because there’s a wave of murders doesn’t mean murder should be made legal.

I believe the EU Parliament has to approve this so they can block it, and that’s elected by Proportional Vote and we all have MEPs there who, unlike national parliamentarians in countries without Proportional Vote (which are most of them) have to worry more about the public opinion in their nation turning against them.

So if this shit ever makes its way to the EU Parliament (were the EU Commission will try to make it pass quietly), contact your country’s MEPs and show you’re well aware of it.

Whilst I do not agree with the spirit of the message of the previous poster, I must point out that specifically the EU Comission - from were this came - is not elected but nominated, and the nomination is one big horse trading shit show several levels removed from voters, were everybody but the head of it is chosen by the Council Of Ministers (which only represents EU National Governments , not National Parliaments) so the whole thing is maybe slightly more “democratic” than nominations for the Chinese Politburo.

(If there is one thing that needs changing in the EU political structures, it’s the crooked, rotten shit show that’s the EU Commission).

That said, the EU Parliament which can stop most of this shit, is elected and it’s even via Proportional Vote so there is no mathematical rigging at all to make some votes count more than others (unlike in First Past The Post Power Duopoly countries like the US or Britain) and hence voting in the EU Election does matter.

Looks like somebody has been promised by one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated “consulting” gig when their time in the Commission is over…

Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of “favours” is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.

Being prepared for anything is why she lasted until she was 96 years old.

Everybody needs a goal to aim for, so I make sure to keep well away from reaching it so as not to lose it as a goal.

If it’s homemade (including the sauce) on thin crust of proper bread dough (again, homemade, without adding too much salt) and you’re generous and careful with the toppings (avoiding salty and/or highly processed stuff), the only inherently imbalanced thing is the cheese (which is excessive for something with such a high proportion of saturated fats).

Even the carbs in the pizza base if you go for thin crust are actually less than, for example, in a sandwish.

Then again, homemade pizza done from scratch including the sauce and the bread dough takes more than an hour to make, so people overwhelmingly buy pizza already make (or at least ready to bake), and then it’s loaded crap because you really can’t trust industrial food.

Also even for homemade there is a tendency to add as toppings tasty stuff like pepperoni, which is industrially made for example for preservation it’s loaded with either nitrites (which increases the risk of colon cancer) or salt (which increases the risk of cardio-vascular problems)

Lots of saturated fat on the cheese.

Beyond that with tin crust, homemade pizza tomato sauce (which is delish, by the way) and properly chosen and generously added toppings (avoid processed meats, especially with too much salt, and make the toppings be more by weight than everything else), it can be pretty healthy.

In the same spirit: “I’m a 2nd degree vegetarian because I only eat meat from herbivores”

TL;DR

QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.

In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, they need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).

So moving to QLC in cloud application comes with mid and long terms costs in terms of power usage and, more importantly, drive end-of-life and replacement.

–

Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.

Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide to which digital value that analog value actual maps to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain range aroun the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.

(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal - this by the way is why if you make the line between a sender and a receiver digital chip too long, many meters, or change the signals in them too fast, hundreds of MHz+, without any special techniques to preserve signal integrity, the receiver will mainly read garbage)

So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signal or due cell damage from repeat writes, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.

All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use causes that what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than when written).

Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what’s stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that’s mainly read only (for flash memory, writting uses way more power than reading), the endurance problem is much worse for QLC because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC for data that is frequently written (wear-leveling exists to spreads this effect over all cells thus giving higher overall endurance, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC so it does not improve the endurance of QLC).

Same here.

I wasn’t going to keep on paying through my taxes the pensions of the kind of people who detested me simply because of where I was born (the proportion of Leave votes was much higher amongst older Britons).

Also a hard-nosed analysis of the whole thing yielded the conclusion that Brexit would significantly accelerate the downwards spiral of the UK.

It’s thanks to such hard-noses analisys that most of my savings were protected from being hit by the fall in the British Pound when the Referendum vote yielded a Leave as result and in the subsequent years - I “smelled the wind” even before the vote and moved most of my money and assets out of the UK and the Pound in preparation for a “Leave” result.

Decoupling from the UK, including leaving the country, were some of my best decisions ever, as I keep getting reminded periodically everytime there are news of the UK government doing yet another highly authoritarian action (I don’t even follow their Economy anymore)