It's not great but considering where they started from, and the progress they have made, they deserve some credit.

Heavily subsidized nuclear power, built by the communists. They pay much more than 13c/kWh for it, they just hide the cost with taxation.

Depends where you public charge. Tesla is usually the cheapest for some reason, and it's much cheaper than petrol.

There is also work place charging, but yes laws need implementing to make home charging mandatory for everyone.

Can confirm, it was an issue when charging was free in the UK. A small fee soon freed them up for people who actually need them.

More than that, Germany is democratizing energy. A lot of people have balcony power plants and rooftop solar. There are micro grids even.

As an investment over decades, it has paid off with jobs and economic activity.

The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect. Better to spend the money on transitioning away from non-renewable sources.

Remember that Germany used to be split in two, with half of it communist. The transition was a huge economic project that involved a lot of redevelopment in the east. The grid alone needed major upgrades.

They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.

The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.

I guess they need to use Yandex for that.

I'm wondering about that, because for years Google has had better resolution, but not 97% coverage.

Maybe that's the worst case, and it's better in areas with better satellite photographs available. I think Google uses aerial photography too, to get views from different angles.

Many developed economies are based on there being infinite growth. Without it, pensions, healthcare, society in general will collapse.

Either we go cold turkey and charge the whole basis of our socio-economic systems, or we have some immigration to ease the transition.