It depends on the region. The US has shale gas which is genuinely cheaper than coal. Europe doesn't want to use coal for political reasons. China and India barely use gas since it can't compete with coal.
Gas prices vary across the world, mostly depending on if it's only LNG imports (high prices) or local sources (much cheaper, e. g. the US) or a mix (e. g. Europe but since 2022 it's heavy reliant on LNG which pushes prices up). Coal prices also vary. Guess we cannot compare gas and coal prices globally, only withing a specific region.
Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
The original release was a proof of concept. That proof of concept is currently being developed into a fully-fledged proposal. Once that proposal is accepted, and legislation is ready, the first actual implementations can begin.
I don't think you can call it a "delay", the project just moves at a glacial pace.
The entire project was never going to finish before 2030. Some banks are upset about it, for sure, but others are in favour.
Wero's Dutch predecessor, iDEAL, has been an established part of online payments for 20 years now.
As barely anyone has a credit card and very people want to deal with the faff of manually entering billing codes or account numbers, iDEAL usage is near universal for online payments. I don't recall fees ever going up as an end customer.
Card fees aren't paid by end customers either. The Swedish iDEAL equivalent, Swish, is more expensive than cards for smaller transactions (below 15 euros). Wero will be like Swish, not Pix.
Yep. The new thing is that you can pay your groceries with it in the supermarket early next year.
What I was reading, you're supposed to be able to send money to people with it this summer, pay in internet shops late this year and supermarkets and restaurants will follow in 2027.
As is the dominant e-ID platform, because our politicians are fond of bank cartels.
It kind of works and Swish does too, unless they're down which happens every now and then, but there is room for improvement that would be easier realised as a public sector endeavour.
Of the big tech companies, Apple is definitely the one that has embraced America First the most. If you live outside the US, you get features later (if at all) and have to pay more for that privilege.
The US is the only market where Apple's blue bubble iMessage empire exists, so its makes sense that they'd try to make Apple Maps tolerable to use for users there.
The benefits of living in an authoritarian state. The CCP says "we will provide for cheap electric trucks" and it happens, no matter if that displaces tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers in ICE car manufacturers.
Xpeng, Wayne, aiMotive to name three. Probably many others, who claim to use LIDAR but don’t actually rely on it. Because LIDAR is perceived as a prerequisite for autonomous safety, admitting to not needing it is a bad PR move — for now.
There is a massive technical difference between Vision first but with LiDAR redundancy vs No LiDAR at all that is Tesla approach. Those are not the same architecture. So claiming XPeng, Waymo, or aiMotive validate Tesla is technically misleading.
XPeng system is sensor fusion. It is not camera only. Waymo is even clearer. For them LiDAR is not optional. aiMotive has now started to market camera only, but its experimental, no production deployments.
Xpeng is abandoning sensor fusion. aiMotive has never bothered with sensor fusion. I never mentioned Waymo; unfortunately the AI gods at Apple auto-corrected me typing Wayve, as in Wayve Technologies Ltd.
Tesla FSD is not accurately described as a "no LIDAR at all" approach, if you're attempting to contrast it to other LIDAR-trained systems like aiMotive, Xpeng and Wayve.
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
Hungary still uses it, and it's not helping (aside from potential kickbacks):
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/char...
China also stopped importing electricity from Russia since it couldn't compete with China's own coal, renewables and nuclear.
The truth is that Germany was bound to struggle as it decided to phase out nuclear and coal but keep gas.
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