Minister of Health of France, Mr. Veron: "the vaccine is of low effectiveness against mutations of the virus and protection against the spread of the virus of the vaccinated is questionable. Also, vaccinated people are most susceptible to severe forms of the COVID disease and even death if the vaccine is ineffective or the vaccinated gets sick immediately after vaccination.

Nice to know.

As it became known to CNews, Russian government agencies and state-owned companies will no longer be able to use the Zoom videoconferencing service. The American company Zoom Video Communications has withdrawn from its partners the authorization to sell its service in an organization of this type in Russia from March 31, 2021. This information was confirmed by three sources in the market.

According to the Zoom website, its authorized partners for the sale of licenses to Russia are the Moscow company Rightconf, the company Rokada (Rokada LLC) from Dubna near Moscow, as well as the international corporation Unify Square with headquarters in the USA and with offices in Germany, Great Britain. Switzerland, Singapore, India, Lithuania and Australia.

It will end bad for Zoom.

As it is already known for long that startup is used by large US and Eu based corporations to record and analyze meetings of their competitors and clients.

I already wrote about WeChat in China and how they and AliPay are making big infrastructure that Western companies can't get.

Also lot of Western companies do not understand Xiaomi and their huge disruption with umbrella strategy and infrastructure approach. But Xiaomi now already makes around 200x more products than Apple and most of them are of consistent good quality and designed by EU designers mostly. Each year this number rise around 1.5-2x times. Xiaomi now attack huge number of US, EU and other countries domestic brands who used to order Chinese products (of bad quality mostly) and had good margins. Note that it is Chinese bureaucracy that stands behind this and allows such big structure to thrive.

In Mordor we also have so called Gosuslugi site and infrastructure that also use umbrella approach were different branches of bureaucracy are turned into controlled system and use more or less standard protocols of informational exchange, of course they also fight back, but pressure and progress are easy to see. Usually people who move to EU or US are shocked that they live deep in 20th century style with extremely inefficient communication and heavy real mail usage.

Also in Mordor Central bank pushed free transfers system (free up around 2x average salary amount per month per account) using phone number and central database. Big banks fought hard, as transfer fees are nice and no work is required. It is also fastest system, on average transfer is completed under 5-6 seconds. But central control and transparency had been considered more important compared to few more exotic meals on banks managers table.

China registered a total of 9.66 million motor vehicles in the first quarter of this year, a new all-time high, the Ministry of Public Security said Tuesday.

There were 378 million motor vehicles in China as of March 2021, including 287 million vehicles, according to the ministry.

The number of drivers has reached 463 million, of which 425 million are car drivers, the ministry added.

Use of oil and coal jumped significantly compared to 2020.

Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005.

Yahoo, which is now part of Verizon Media Group following the company’s sale to the telecom for nearly $5 billion in 2017, announced the change at the top of the Yahoo Answers homepage. The message links to an FAQ, which details the timeline of the shutdown. Starting April 20th, the platform will no longer accept new submissions, the FAQ explains.

Users will also have until June 30th to request their data or it’ll be inaccessible after that. That includes “all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images,” Yahoo says, but “you won’t be able to download other users’ content, questions, or answers.

Note how amount of any sites and platforms allowing user input in text form is shrinking and this is quite fast process.

The European Environment Bureau (EEB) said: "Power doesn't always equal performance, though the misconception has become widespread. Some efficient models maintained high standards of dust pick-up while using significantly less energy - due to design innovation."

Well, yes, but it is not the case in 95% of all real vacuum cleaners.

Real innovations are very rare and usual improvement is in the range of 1-4%.

The EU's own website says: "With more efficient vacuum cleaners, Europe as a whole can save up to 20 TWh of electricity per year by 2020. "This is equivalent to the annual household electricity consumption of Belgium. "It also means over 6 million tonnes of CO2 will not be emitted - about the annual emissions of eight medium-sized power plants."

Same guys are promoting crypto scam now 24/7. May be they used this limits to free energy for this shite?

Also idiots never actually provided calculations on how more energy will be consumed by making new "more energy friendly" cleaners.

Another very real reason - big copper shortages and price inflation, as we constantly have periods of fast rise of all metals prices. By limiting engine power you reduce amount of copper it needs.

And the UK Climate Change Committee says that since 2008 electricity demand is down 17% (despite all our gadgets) and gas demand is 23% lower, thanks to tougher standards on energy efficiency in homes and appliances. This, it says, has helped keep bills down.

Actually nope, they are lower because of constantly rising prices that people have hard time to pay.

And always remember - ANY saving measure promoted by capitalist is made to hike the price of energy to make you pay MORE, not less.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.09000.pdf