Don't let reddit idiots gaslight you. There are aot seriously deranged people running around on reddit, who are eating up mainstream corporate propaganda and lies without any questioning at all. I some subreddits they are the majority and paying attention to what those clowns thing can only be a negative for your own health.
Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is... fully state-owned means it isn't privatised at all.
The issue is one of legal status. In most countries you can be a commercial company or essentially a branch of the government (leaving aside coops and charities).
So in general you have companies (legal status) but they are fully owned by the state, hence "state-owned company". "Privatized" means the government decided to sell most or all the shares to the public.
Counter example is the USPS in the US, which is an agency of the Federal government.
> Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is
Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
Now I get it, thanks for the effort of clarifying. I thought it was a misunderstanding of a niche meaning of "privatized" but it turns out, english and german do not share that meaning. Unfortunately I can't edit the comment to change the word anymore.
It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization
I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.
Its still a private company, well 245 of them, billing each other while trying to cooperate.
This company structure was the result of the neoliberal thinking of having as much free market as possible, with the beneficial side effect of creating many highly payed board chairs for former politicians.
Today, the problems, mainly caused by cutting cost on maintenance, are so close to the surface, that even the most head-in-the-cloud establishment politicians cant spin it anymore, so the new DB ceo (Palla), tasked with "fixing it", came up with a long term plan. For decades, from every side, DB/german governments was critized for not having an articulated goal of the minimum public service that should be provided. The german governments were not directing, so 100% state _owned_ is technically true but obscures the complexity. The former ceo Mehdorn, that started this down trend did exatcly what any short-term-gain ceo would do and is, despite this blatantly failing infrastructure, still well regarded.
Today, one primary goal of this plan to fix it all, is to "reduce delays". Cuting schedules and lines will make this number up too! And so the next round of ceo bonus payments are secured and the shit show continues.
What else could you expect? A solution to fix vital infrastructure and strengthen trust in politicians and governments to cost money?! Haha.
Non-German here. What’s the point of this setup? I guess in some ways this isn’t too different than USPS, which is self-sufficient and doesn’t face tax dollars nor give its profits to the Treasury, but in our case they didn’t bother going as far to separate it as it sounds like DB did.
It is typically midway to full privatisation. It goes from being a public company (not as in publicly traded but actually of public interest) to being for-profit company but state owning all the shares. Then the state sells the majority of the shares and it becomes actually private.
Typically, on the way, there is also a separation between the "good piece" and the "bad piece" of the company, ie the company that operates the trains (and makes profit out of the passengers etc) and the one that maintains the infrastructure. The state then can sell the profit-generating part of the company to the private sector, and continue operating the non-profitable one itself, so the private capital can enjoy the best of both worlds (having a privatised train company, but still having the state eat up the economic burden of maintaining the infrastructure that the former operates on). Not sure where germany stands in this roadmap, but this is what has happened in other places (and no it did not improve the experience of passengers to any degree).
The plan was to sell the DB after privatizing but something (if I remember correct financial crisis 2008) went between it so they (politics) decided to keep the stocks.
After reunification there were two railway companies, and they got reorganized into an AG. At least later, when they restructured the company into a holding and subsidaries, they planned to privatize them completely and disolve the parent company. They never did go through with that however.
Yes I am. I prefer the window placer thingy in win11.
As I use an ultra wide monitor, having the menu centered works better for me, too. Win11 seems more performant and snappier to me, but that might be an illusion. Other things I amnot sure exist in win 10, as it has been a long time since I ran it on my personal hardware: Passkey support with windows hello.
In the end, the chances seem so minimal, I am surprised how much disdain people have for win11, when it feels nearly the same as win10 to me.
> people still use and even prefer their non-cloud products at home and enterprise.
You can still buy office as single-purchase standalone versions. I think the most recent version is 2024.
I worked on a project migrating away from office 2003... in 2022. In my opinion, people use outdated versions of Office because they want to, as it fulfils their needs, not because they can't buy standalone versions.
The choice of windows 8 as comparisson seems deceptively disingenious to me. It is well known as an unpopular OS, that has been skipped by many. Windows 7 is much more in the position of windows 10.
Taking [1] as a source, win 7 in 2025 has a marketshare of about 2%. In 2020 it had 20%. If we look at 2016 specifically [2] win 7 is still at 47% at the end of the year (and win XP at 6%, while this source gives win8.1 at 10%).
Running unmaintained Windows releases is a tradition.
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
> the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookies
This is only an option if you limit tracking to using cookies. But neither tracking technologies, nor the current EU law, are limited to tracking via cookies. It also kills functionality for many web applications without also accepting all tracking. Some browser-flavors went to extreme lengths to prevent tracking through other means (eg fixed window size, highly generic header settings, ...).
Maybe I am mistaken, but it seriously frustrates me how much people within the relevant field make this mistake of conflating tracking and cookies and come to this "it would be so simple" solution.
A welcome update to the law would be to allow a header flag to opt out/in (or force the do-not-track header to have this functionality) preventing the banner from showing.
The pessimist in me thinks a legally enforced header and corresponding browser setting (so that the user wouldn't have to make an explicit choice per website) would have met enough pushback from businesses for the EU to back down to something with the infinite stupidity of the current solution.
Maybe we could move towards that end in small steps. The EU should start by banning irrelevant non-sequiturs like "We value your privacy" and other misleading or at best distracting language. It can then abandon the notion that users are at all interested in fine-grained choice, and enforce that consent and non-consent to non-essential statekeeping are two clearly distinguished and immediately accessible buttons. No one wants to partially block tracking.
It seems as though the EU is operating under the notion that this is all a matter of consumer choice, as though any informed consumer would choose to have tabs kept on them by 50 trackers if not for the inconvenience of figuring out which button stops them.
I know it'll be considered a hot take, but I'd argue that people don't even know what "tracking" in the Internet context even means enough for their supposed "preferences" about it to be valid.
90% of non-tech-nerds have this simple of an opinion about it:
1. Retargeting ads are "creepy" because ... "they just are"
2. Retargeting ads either annoy me because I think they're dumb in that particular instance ("I already BOUGHT a phone case last week, it's so dumb that it keeps showing me phone cases all day!") or because they're too good ("I gave in and bought the juicer after I kept seeing those ads all around the web") and I don't like spending money.
The rest of "tracking" they don't even know anything about and can't verifiably point to any harms.
Data brokers acquire data from thousands of different sources - many of which aren't stemming from Internet usage - and most of the browser data relevant here isn't tied to their actual name and permanent identity (and doesn't need to be to serve its purpose which is usually "to show relevant ads" and the more specific case of "to get people to come back and buy things they saw").
Honestly, just like people are annoyed by pushy car salesmen, and being asked for a "tip" at a self-order kiosk counter-service restaurant, they are going to be annoyed about aspects of the commercial Internet, and it doesn't automatically mean that they're being victimized or that they need regulations to try to help.
The law isn't there to make you less annoyed, but to protect society and the people. What gripes uninformed individuals may or may not have with the practice based on their surface level understanding are irrelevant to the effects it has on society. That someone uninformed about it can't point to any harms is not a useful observation.
In my opinion this is not true. Writing is a form of communicating ideas. Structuring and communicating ideas with others is really important, not just in written contexts, and it needs to be trained.
Maybe the way universities do it is not great, but writing in itself is important.
(And I am aware of the irony in failing to communicate when mentioning that studying writing is important to be good at communication.)
Maybe I should have also cited this part:
> writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.
In my opinion, writing is important not (only) as a proxy for thinking, but as a direct form of communicating ideas. (Also applies to other forms of communication though.)
That's the response I got on from quite a few people on german speeaking reddit, also calling me an idiot :)