> Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
Such a bullshit reason though, the real reason is that the church don't like women deciding over their own bodies, and the church wields real political power in Spain.
Using a VPN, and trying to use that website to "order abortion pills" today to Spain shows this error:
> You live in a country where there is access to safe abortion services. We don't provide services in your country and we therefore are unable to assist you.
You haven't been able to get abortion pills from them for years, yet the same reason for the block remains, even if that's not actually true in practice.
The block is being escalated to UN though, so it's still an ongoing issue, not like nothing is happening, just frustrating to see people complaining about minor censorship when there is so much more important censorship happening all the time.
> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
Maybe a bit out of scope for this article, but seems like in every country “Younger millenials and Gen-Zers” are turning to gambling online while traditional gambling (like Vegas) dies.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
In practice La Quiniela works more like a lottery than betting, though. No immediacy, no lights and sounds, no adrenalin rush. I don't think there's much risk of people falling into severe addiction by playing that.
For some people it becomes more like a ritual, some groups of friends do it together as something social to talk about football, I think it leads in some degree to people paying attention and talking about lower rank matches :D
I've played a couple of times solo and in group but never sticked to me.
No related to the point, but what it did stick to me for one season was La Liga Fantástica from Marca ( a fantasy league on paper) when I was a child, because it had the data component, you had a budget to pick players etc, This was before we had internet broadly, if I remember correctly the paper would publish huge lists with the teams ranking or the players stats. But what I do remember was some of my best players like Zalazar :D
Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting.
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
It's lower than it sounds: this time includes even relatively gentle exercise (a brisk walk) and although it's not explicit here most other uses of similar metrics I've seen generally count hard cardio minutes as 2x, e.g. the NHS guidelines (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...) this references are 150 mins moderate exercise or 75 mins vigorous.
In my experience lifting weights helps you grow enough muscle to actually be able to do 600 minutes of cardio.
With small/insufficient muscle size, you simply run out of stored glycogen before you get tired cardiovascularly.
> Because if you need to fit 560 minutes of cardio and then also fit weight lifting 3 times a week that's a lot of time working out
Proper exercise is absolutely a lifestyle change and a big commitment. Not only do you have to exercise several hours a week, but also eat healthier macros and fix your sleep to make sure most of the benefits stick and aren't wasted.
People try to half-ass it all the time by doing weird diets or going on 15 minutes walk during their lunch break, and yes it's better than nothing, but not by much.
I don't understand how walking in the study is considerate moderate.
Like my heartrate for sure goes higher when lifting weights than when I walk.
If I walk fast, it might get closer, but I am not that confident.
300 minutes of HIIT per week are equal to 10 HIIT sessions per week, I would argue that's outright impossible, the body cannot handle that, I don't think even an Olympic athlete can handle more than 3 times per week HIIT.
Vigorous might be possible, that's still 5 times 1 hour cardio sessions, on top of which you have to add 3 sessions of weight lifting for bone density, on top of which you have to add balance training and stretching.
There isn't enough time in a day to do that if you work, let alone if you have kids
Vigorous would be Z2/3 cardio, so like 120-160 BPM for most adults. Moderate would be Z1 90-120.
Once you are capable of doing cardio consistently in Z4/5 with HIIT and tempo training you really don't need to worry about "am I doing enough exercise."
I mean, according to this study I would still need that. I can average 165 BPM (because I'm trained, used to average 175) and max 180 in a session. But that's all the cardio I get. I walk 20 minutes per day to bring the kids to school, and lift weight.
Weight lifting doesn't count, but I tested yesterday and I average 110 bpm during a workout (it's constant ups-and-downs). Based on that, it would count for moderate exercise.
The time investment is steep if we cannot count weight lifting, there is no escape.
>With small/insufficient muscle size, you simply run out of stored glycogen before you get tired cardiovascularly.
You can eat carbs during cardio ("fueling") though it's unlikely an issue doing 600 mins a week. Muscles store 15g of glycogen per 1kg (more for trained athletes) , which amounts to 60 (k)calories. In aerobic process with COP ~ 25% these nicely convert to output energy of 60 kJ. To produce this much output over 90 minutes you need to push power of ~11 watt. Elite athletes have FTP (functional threshold power) around 6 w/kg. It's over the entire body mass, not just muscle, but even if you are pushing 50% body fat, you can be pretty confident you have enough glycogen for 90 min of aerobic exercise at your FTP (also liver holds/can produce on demand quite a lot of glycogen and aerobic process will use fat for energy as well). Even if you do 200 minutes 3 times a week instead of doing 90 minutes every day you can get by staying in under 3 w/kg power zone, which is still greater than most people's FTP (and even fewer people can hold this power over 3 hours).
In my own experience, no. Strictly cardio. The number of squats you'd have to do to constitue even five minutes of vigorous activity is practicably impossible.
Lifting weights could certainly count/classify as moderate activity though, just without as much 'bang for your buck' as dedicated aerobic exercise.
It would depend on how high your heart rate goes and stays during lifting weights, because everyone lifts weights differently. I would say that it's not likely based on my own personal experience, and seeing others' time ratios for lifting vs resting.
No of course, but to keep bone density up as you age, weight lifting is your best bet, while 560 minutes of cardio is your best bet for the heart it seems
> Given EuroPA has done a token amount of transactions to date, I’m not sure anyone should hold their breaths.
The Spanish equivalent (Bizum) is merging into Wero is not a token use case, it's absolutely massive here. The absolute standard for peer-to-peer payments, more than 30 million users (>65% of the population), and they already launched contactless terminals for in-person commercial payments this month (https://euroweeklynews.com/2026/04/03/bizum-goes-contactless...).
Indeed Bizum is almost default now here in Spain, and for instance the equivalent in Sweden, Swish, is also almost default there. Went trekking into a national park, and the rangers will leave a number to Swish a bit of money if you want to use the fire pits; no other payment means.
I wouldn't say Swish is the default in Sweden because it doesn't support contactless payments. It is widely available though but many, many places only accept card/contactless payments. Of course, Swish is the default for person-to-person transfers, but not for payments.
Opposite is also true, some lower-value places (like fruitstands, street vendors) don't accept card/contactless because they don't want to pay visa mastercard fee.
I have no numbers but I would guess at least 50% of non-cash transactions are still card/contactless. I wouldn't be surprised if this number is 90%.
Wero does have recurring payments planned too (apparently for end of 2026), seems like they're well aware of PIX and racing hard to get into exactly the same space.
It's in theory already possible with iDeal from what I can tell (I've seen companies that use subscriptions set up an initial iDeal payment and then convert it into a regular recurring SEPA Direct Debit), but I'm going to assume that the process is kind of messy since I haven't seen many companies implement the system in that way.
Direct Debit is very nice, largely because your bank manages the subscription; companies have to declare the payment ahead of time and if you get balance mixed up for some reason, then the bank will just do the payment whenever your balance is correct if it happens within a week. I've had credit cards decline on subscriptions before because I didn't have enough loaded up on them. Never had that issue with SEPA.
Either that or "credit cards just work", so very few entities bothered until now.
This is begging for anti-competitive investigations, surely? It's explicit collusion between the largest mobile makers and key app-based services (e.g. gov services, communication tools, banking) to directly block any competing OS.
They're publicly agreeing that only users using their approved mobile devices are allowed to do banking, and competitors cannot. I'm not sure how much more clearly anti-competitive this could be.
Because (like every IoT product) Bambu want to sell a product with an easy app-powered workflow, and LAN device discovery and remote-access for home devices from mobile apps is flaky and terrible.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping telemetry en route, and it's convenient for them that using their app helps nudge you towards Makerworld (their ecosystem for 3d prints, which is presumably good marketing) but I very strongly suspect "make it effortless for non-technical users to use the device with just a phone" was the original & primary driver.
Not to mention the fact that some people think of WiFi and cellular data as "things that give me access to the internet". The understanding of what a private IP address is and why it can't be reached from a cellular connection is just not there.
Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if you're lucky enough to have access to your router and no carrier-grade NAT, but that's even harder to set up.
3d printer users are more sophisticated than most, but I can imagine some artsy types owning them, as well as the kind of people who are very comfortable with a drill, soldering iron and a jackhammer, but who treat a computer as "that God-damned machine I need to use to buy the parts I need."
I've tried to download a model from MakerWorld and it told me I need to create an account first. That told me what I needed to know about that service & was not really surprising from Bambulab.
As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access.
I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.
If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.
They're objecting to use of their cloud service, and they're also disabling local-only mode thus forcing use of their cloud service, and their software is required to be AGPL (because that's how they themselves received it) so they're required to allow you to clone it and modify it but they just don't want you to.
It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"
It's already gone. This whole issue kicked off in January 2025: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/qwL63 - your only options were to stay on older firmware (and even then, the T&C's are sketchy, it worries owners there's no guarantee Bambu won't change their mind) or, if you upgrade, you push everything through Bambu's cloud services forevermore, and no backsies. Only a handful of operations can then be done by directly talking to the device, from that point on it only speaks to its real owner, Bambu.
Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.
In theory, every EU state will have to support this soon so users can use it to verify age privately online. Still work to do to roll this out for real, but the technological part is very much already happening and I think the rollout plan is committed.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
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