In the real world, sanctions happen for a variety of reasons. They have wide-reaching consequences, and you can't expect everyone to always fight every single goverment policy they don't personally approve of; an Iranian citizen is no more obliged to revolt against the Iranian government, than a citizen of sanctioning countries are to revolt against their governments for imposing those sanctions.
If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:
A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.
B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).
C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.
We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.
A. We handle dankelflaute's now, and as long as we don't decommission gas peakers, we'll still be able to continue to handle them.
B. Europe has lots of natgas storage. 100 days of storage isn't enough for independence from Russia now, but if we're only using gas for dankelflaute's 5 days of the year, thats ~20 years of storage.
Batteries are extremely cost competitive today for overnight storage, and are marginally cost competitive for weekly storage. That's enough to handle everything except for a dankelflaute. In which case see above.
perhaps, but the other way around is a possible scenario as well, because it may still be cheaper to have inefficient storage when the way you store the energy is expensive (e.g. some batteries may have very high efficiency, but you need difficult to obtain materials)
Rural Finnish driving culture is insane, to the extent that drunk driving often is considered socially acceptable, and something every kid does. Luckily, the bulk of the incidents dont involve drivers hurting others.
The country road rally drivers are rarely as bad as busy hatchback-drivers on a main road though. Especially the ones with kids in the back and on their way home during rush hours.
Not after Meta tried to circumvent GDPR by attemtpting to sell access to their services and let users pay with money OR personal data. If it's only the payment medium that changes, then charging VAT is logical.
That depends on jurisdiction, I guess. Here, paying with goods or services doesn't excempt the other party from paying VAT. I fail to see how that can't be applied when paying with intellectual property.
That would only be if the income is VAT-taxable, or at least in the UK anyway. I am also not a lawyer but they appear to be defining the fairly nebulous "data value" as being VAT-taxable now. There's no rhyme or reason other than "country got power; country want more money",
Exchanges of goods and services are taxable here. I fail to see why it should be applied to everything else, but not personal data. It's just intellectual property exchanging hands, no?
A beautiful vision, but not practically viable. The average user isn't ready to handle private keys -- many can barely be trusted with their email passwords.
This means you either need centrally issued certificates for each domain, or face situations where legitimate users fail to obtain certificates, while cyber criminals send S/MIME-signed emails on the users' behalf.
Once a few generations of users have been trained to use passkeys then we can consider letting users handle key pairs.
If Lets encrypt sets up an automated system then MUAs could automatically request certificates for you. So the user wouldn’t have to deal with the issue.
There may be a need to distribute your certificate if you read and write mail on multiple devices.
Based on my personal experience providing support for s/mime setups, you'd need:
1) A centralised solution for managing keys and certificates, connected to a login that the customer will be able to recover in pretty much any situation.
2) Email client support for fetching keys/certificates from the centralised solution.
3) A massive focus on usability and end-user support, because most email users have no idea what a certificate is, or how to use it.
Denmark actually has something similar to this (Sikker mail) but it's mainly aimed at businesses. Based on what I've seen, this resulted in a market for services that bypass the E2E aspect of it because business users can't figure out how to use it. It is also noteworthy that despite this s/mime being available for everyone, Denmark has a public digital mailbox for all citizens and businesses in order to ensure availability.
S/mime is great. It is also not suited for people who barelly know what it is.
