Another is Kalmia latifolia, the mountain laurel, the state flower of Pennsylvania. According to records at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History [1], "Benjamin Smith Barton (an American botanist in the late 1700s) wrote that in the autumn and winter of the year 1790, many people died in Pennsylvania from the effects of wild honey, collected from Kalmia plants."
Iceland is already in the EEA and Schengen. The only upside I have read about would be access to adopting the Euro which has a lower inflation rate than the ISK.
The main downside and likely what steered the vote to no are conflicts with Iceland's fishing industry x EU regulations and becoming more vulnerable to foreign ownership and fishing rights.
Fishing represents 40% of Iceland's total exports according to Wikipedia.
My guess is most voters in Reykjavik have near zero exposure to fishing as an industry.
>Iceland's economy depended heavily on fishing, which still provides ~20% of export earnings and employs 7% of the workforce.[77][152] [...] Iceland's economic dependence on fishing is diminishing, from an export share of 90% in the 1960s to 20% in 2020.[153][152]
>[The fishing industry] provides 40% of export income and employs 7.0% of the workforce; therefore, the state of the economy remains sensitive to world prices for fish products.[
One benefit would have been that Iceland would have got to vote on EU Single Market legislation, which it currently has to incorporate into its laws without any say.
Iceland would also benefit from trade deals with non EU countries (currently it is excluded).
It also would have joined the Agricultural policy, which would have meant better access for its farm produce.
Realistically, how much sway would tiny Iceland really have on those regulations since most are covered by qualified majority voting? The ones they care about are precisely fishing, which is unsurprisingly a sticking point. Considering they literally had 3 Cod Wars with the UK, I don't think Iceland will blink first.
Adopting the Euro is the worst part of what joining the EU would entail. While it may have some convenience benefits, and is perhaps less inflationary, it removes one of the fundamentals of the what a government is there for: monetary sovereignty. You can no longer define your budgetary limits,m, you are always being pressured for austerity because the (mostly) Germans don't understand money, and so it is a constant struggle to get anything for the people done. What you get is a constant "management"-style government, barely scraping by..
> The only upside I have read about would be access to adopting the Euro which has a lower inflation rate than the ISK.
Strictly speaking, Iceland could do this unilaterally, anyway; Kosovo and Montenegro have done so, and Denmark and a bunch of African countries peg their currency to the euro.
Maybe you are not familiar with the EEA. Iceland already has access to the European single market. Just like Norway, who doesn't seem motivated to join the EU, either.
It is unclear to me how changing from EEA to EU membership somehow protects Iceland (a founding NATO member) against being 'forced to limit their business dealings with Russia'. That is how it relates. Feel free to help me connect the dots.
It's in an inherently awkward place. National politicians will tend to represent popular EU policies as "look what we did" and unpopular as "look what THEY did". It's really very difficult for the EU to deal with this.
What is amazing is that this goes so much against the concept of the EU. The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital.
The EU even have a SME Test to maker sure small business are not overburdened by regulations.
Also there are thousands of lobbyists fighting for small businesses. Yes, this law will probably eventually be thrown out for small businesses but after how many years is a big question, and how many small businesses have lost there businesses.
And the law was devised by Ripa di Meana, who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party and the green party.
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The EU was founded on the principles of four freedoms, Free movement of goods, Free movement of persons, Freedom to provide services, and Free movement of capital.
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If you take a look at first paragraphs of the EU contracts, they sate above all these:
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Article 3
(ex Article 2 TEU)
1. The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.
2. The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime.
3. The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.
It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men, solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child.
It shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States.
It shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe's cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced.
4. The Union shall establish an economic and monetary union whose currency is the euro.
...
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So its only about free movement of people in the beginning, goods and services are much later in the docs
It’s hard to overthrow actual free markets. Small business is too sympathetic.
But if you pass enough well-meaning regulations and strangle all the small businesses with good intentions, it’s much easier to overthrow a crony-capitalist oligopoly of megacorps, which is exactly the end game.
For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.
The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.
Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.
I hate the ‘product’ word. In the 90’s I was involved in a travel startup, and the software people would be talking about ‘product’ meaning the website that we where building, and the travel people meant what we where offering in the way of hotels, insurance, flights and excursions.
The word ‘product just left everyone confused.
If one uses a word like platform, application, prototype, offering, ‘products’ this makes it clearer than just the generic ‘product’. It’s even better if goal is applied as well. For example Flight finder Application, or Video Playback Platform.
> I hate the ‘product’ word. In the 90’s I was involved in a travel startup, and the software people would be talking about ‘product’ meaning the website that we where building, and the travel people meant what we where offering in the way of hotels, insurance, flights and excursions.
In that case (but IMO it applies to almost everything that's not selling a software or technical solution per se) the product IS the hotel/insurance/flights/excursions package. There is no other way. The website was never the product, it was just a channel. The difference is that especially back then the only way to use that channel was to build it by yourself. And that's something that actually happens for big enough brick&mortar stores: they do have an internal department that manages the stores, buy/rent the spaces, furnish and decorate them etc.
> There is no other way. The website was never the product
I find that quite often teams responsible for part of the infrastructure speak of their part as the “product”, with the consumer of that product possibly being a different team in the same company, not necessarily outside of it. I can totally see how for the website team, the website is “the” product under most circumstances.
Kinda reminds one of the evolution of the air war during WWI. Planes were used as observation platforms to gather intelligence about enemy fortifications and activities. They were more mobile than balloons and could gather more timely information. Both sides flew past each other just doing their jobs until someone thought they could drop a grenade or small bomb as they surveilled the other guy. Then aerial bombing started to become popular. Around the same time pilots armed themselves and would take pot-shots at enemy pilots, usually with sidearms. Before long machine guns were fitted to planes and synchronized with propellers and pilots were able to dogfight.
I think the next natural step in Russia's defense against Ukrainian drones countermeasures like this, shooting them down with shotguns, will be to arm the drones. Then it will be up to Ukraine to counter that threat and the cycle continues as always.
The advantage of using a drone is that it is cheap to produce, but it needs to be really simple to stay cheap. Arming it with a machine gun that can target an airplane trying to shoot it down would be very expensive.
Or B that the ideas are there but are not get released as the code is ai slop?
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