Interesting Links for 21-09-2025

[andrewducker]

1. EU Data Act — What Businesses Need to Know (no more lock-in!)

(tags:Europe data regulation )

2. Troubles legacy: Mixed reaction to UK-Ireland deal on addressing cases

(tags:UK Ireland )

3. Visa holders on vacation have 15 hours to return to US or pay $100k fee

(tags:USA migration OhForFucksSake )

4. Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime (a headline from 1939)

(tags:nazis censorship society history )

5. We have invented the vibroblade! (The World's First Ultrasonic Chef's Knife for Home Cooks)

(tags:Technology knife video )

Comments

[nancylebov]

Following up on the anti-Hitler comedians:

Werner Finck: Stayed in Germany, kept performing (I don't know whether he softened his satire) joined the Wehrmacht to avoid imprisonment, continued to be a satirist after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Finck

Peter Sachse: I can't find anything for him. Perhaps he is mispelled, perhaps that is a pseudonym.

Searching on The Three Rulands, they did some pro-Nazi propaganda, making light of Kristallnacht.. https://keydocuments.net/article/gruettner-ruhlands-eck

"In fact, the trio fell out of favor only a few months later, in early 1939, when it mildly ridiculed the gigantomania of Speer’s and Hitler’s plans to rebuild Berlin. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who considered their program an “impertinent mockery of both the state and the party,” saw to it that Dlugi, Meißner, and Buth were excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture , which amounted to an occupational ban."

[juan_gandhi]

As to H1B visa holders, I was sure, when I was a holder, that it would be a very stupid idea to leave the country before we had our greencards. Besides, it's a large country, a lot to see.

And even with the greencards; one case was when we went to Mexico, September 11, 2001, and the other was in 2005, when, in Canada, I lost my wallet with my green card. The obvious next step would have been to go "back to Russia". Except that I had a job offer from Google, so... Luckily, we found the wallet, lying on the side of the road. But I got the idea of my status in this world.

[anna_wing]

That knife looks amazing. I wonder if that technology could be applied to things like woodworking or stoneworking tools?

[andrewducker]

It's an interesting thought. If so, I expect it will go mainstream quite quickly!

[movingfinger]

My thought is medical applications...

[redbird]

When I first read about the new fee for H1-B visas, I thought it was for new visas, not people who were already working in the United States with an H1-B, and that the employers were going to be paying the fee. That would have made some kind of sense: those visas were supposed to be issued to people filling jobs that nobody already in the US wanted. In practice, sometimes there are qualified people in the US, but they don't apply for the job at the deliberately low salary the company is advertising. Charging the employer $100,000 per visa could in theory mean that it's no longer cheaper to hire a qualified person from India than an equally qualified US citizen.

With this regime, I suspect it's mostly about posturing, and they'll probably make a big deal about turning a few people away at the airport, then go back to business as usual.

[andrewducker]

They now *do* seem to be saying that it's just for new visas. Which may still bite them badly, but is definitely less catastrophically stupid.

Data Format ?

[bens_dad]

1. No information there about how the user's data is made available.

Eg my fit bit measures me and sticks the numbers in the cloud. The fit bit app presents that data to me. Is that sufficient, or are they required to give me a dump or feed that I can give to some third party app ?

Google bought Fit Bit. Is it OK for them to stuff my fit bit data in with all the other data Google have about me, so that I need an app that can read "Google data dump version X.Y" to access my historical fit-bit data ?

If the likes of Google do have as much data on each of us as web articles say, who will be able to read the encyclopedia describing what is in "Google data dump version X.Y" and make it accessible before version X+1.Z makes it obsolete ?