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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • This seems like a great idea and i wouldn’t mind it getting expanded to become an EU wide norm.

    That said it only adresses part of the problem. Another way consumers get tricked are recipe changes to substitute expensive ingredients for cheaper ones. And this one also subverts the mandatory kg/€ (or litre/€) price notices, which in a way already help with identifying shrinkflation. Although prominent warnings would help a lot fighting the psychological tricks involved in shrinkflation.

    Personally i would also like laws to go even further and make it mandatory for companies to maintain public databases with product sizing and ingredients. Although i assume it wouldn’t be easy to fight against companies trying to subvert such system and claiming that near identical products are something new rather than just a new worse version of something existing.


    On that note i also miss the more standardized portion sizes we had here in Germany for a lot of products. Actually something that sadly had to be abolished due to eu regulations, which at the same time at least seemed to have given us the already mentioned kg/€ price labels.

    I had to jog my memory with this article (in german) from 2009 when the change apparently happened. An example it gives is that e.g. sugar (up to a size of 1kg) could only be sold in portions of 100, 250, 500, 750 und 1000g. So no trickery with random inbetween sizes. Obviously not a huge problem with something like sugar, but it similarly also applied to something like chocolate bars. Which nowadays come in the most random, constantly changing weights.

    Maybe a bit heavy handed, but i wouldn’t mind fighting shrinkflation in some areas by simply forcing standardized sizes.










  • Here in Germany we have a concept called “sabbatical year”. I think it actually comes from the US, where it was/is a thing for university professors.

    Rare in the private sector, but I think civil servants that work for the government have a right to it, if they so chose. Especially “Beamte”, which is a special form of lifetime appointment. That for example also includes teachers in some states, which is one of the professions where it is more common.

    One model how it may be structured is that the person either works more or takes a pay cut for a number of years and then has 1 year free. For example taking a pay cut of 1/7 for 6 years and then have 1 year free at the same pay. That also means that you take a pay cut during the whole period. But that is definitely doable.

    The upside of this structure is that you have a job to go back to. And since you also count as employed during the sabbatical year it doesn’t mess with things like health insurance


  • That depends. I don’t think Intel actually wants to be in the market for whole (or barebones) systems. they probably would much rather just sell the processors and leave the rest to others. The NUCs were just a tool to kickstart the market, which seems to have worked quite nicely. The only issue being that now both AMD and Apple are strong competion.

    So under that assumption this withdrawal makes a lot of sense, especially now that they need to focus all of their resources to catch up in their main business segment.


    Didn’t Valve make similar comments for the steam deck? That they see it as a tool to create a new market and hope that others follow.

    Even if someone else were to make a much better handheld. As long as it runs Proton/Steam Valve would still win.