Ich sach ma so es wär mir lieber er wär der Chef von den Verein und nicht mehr dran an die Atombombenknöppe.

Mit Tendenz nach rechts.

Dänen lügen nicht.

Ein schönes Maimai, von dem ich dennoch hoffte, ich hätte es nie gesehen.

Zucker. Säugling.

I don’t think speaking the language immediately condones the horrible acts of the people who spoke it in the past. German should’ve creased to exist 80 years ago.

There are certainly situations where use of English could be considered offensive, say, at a memorial of an atrocity. Carve those situations out and have a plan B - there is no necessity to all speak the same language all the time. It’s enough if a good number of people in the right positions do. And consider that there already are English speakers in France, Iran, and North Korea (3 random examples that don’t all love English-speaking countries).

English is already the lingua franca of the world and has displaced French as the language of diplomacy. In Europe before that were the Frankish tongue, Latin, Greek. Other places had other languages. It’s no shoe-in that English will remain at the top but in our lifetimes I don’t think it will change.

It’s a tie.

The Cory Doctorow cycle of enshitification starts with a focus on users, giving them exactly what they want. With a strong user base behind them they then pivot to business customers, advertisers, and the like. And then they turn in on themselves, only looking for shareholder value, and leave the tied up users and the B2B side in the lurch. It’s a business process, during which a social media site’s offerings would decrease in quality. But not every drop in quality is enshitification. A sudden burst of new users, an unforeseen bug in the software, a terrible event in the real world, a scandal behind the scenes can all affect the public’s opinion negatively.

I don’t think every social media platform is doomed to play through the e-cycle. The moment you remove the need for or drastically limit the patronage of B2B customers in the organization, you remove one crucial element from the equation. The same happens if you remove the need to create earnings growth, i.e. not become a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That’s why federated social media can probably only turn to shit because of the people who use it and not because a boardroom somewhere decided to squeeze the last bit of juice out of that lemon. That’s just life then but not per se enshitification.

So I think Facebook and Insta are good examples of enshitification. Reddit to an extent also. Twitter I think was a different story. It never got beyond a point where it was just great for the users. They didn’t make enough money from advertisers. They didn’t then turn their attention solely to their share prices with any success. They saw a sucker who was gonna pay billions for it and parachuted out. Twitter then became shit but because of its new owner, not because of this business cycle.

We tend to look at everything with nostalgia. Was the past not more fun? We cannot be trusted to judge this dispassionately.

Tragisch ist bis heute, dass der Bindestrich es noch nicht über den Atlantik geschafft hat.

You probably don’t. Those tummy acids are strong. I would wipe the surface with soap. Maybe submerge them in water if you can immediately place them in direct sunlight afterwards to dry them out again. Wipe surface again and hope for the best. I would water an un-vomited-upon Birk along with the offender, maybe not in the same sink water, to wear them out equally.

You’re trying to apply conventional logic to the orange one. That doesn’t work. Stop doing that. It’s all about his frail ego, flooding the zone with bs, denying everything and never giving in, and blaming everybody else for stuff he’s done.

And just to give the poor, battered, beleaguered, ever-so-stable leader a break, there are sea lanes and flight routes available to the cartels as well. They didn’t have to go through the US (but probably did).

Yes. Europeans have been enjoying a bed that was made for them in this area as part of a security package that came into existence after WW2. They didn’t have to invest in intelligence as much because they had it delivered to their doors. If that delivery system stops, they will have to replace it. They can do that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if at EU level (+UK) we will see a lot of unified defense initiatives that mention in a subordinated clause that intelligence coordinating and sharing will be part of that as well.

The most famous fountain for coin tossing/wish making is Trevi in Rome (and I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole concept came from there). You are legally forbidden from taking money back out of it there. The moment the coin sinks into the water, it belongs to the municipality, so taking it back out constitutes theft. The municipality is allowed (and indeed forced) to clear the coins from the fountain (otherwise there would be no water left after a while) and AFAIK they donate the cash for a good cause.

Was it all building to this?

Just for some German context: the Nazi salute is not covered by any freedom of expression or opinion in a political context. What Elon did on stage would have landed him in a German court. Similar restrictions apply to displaying certain symbols, e.g. the swastika. German cops are legally required to intervene when they see them in public.

I don’t know the video in question, I don’t know if the cops overreacted - a reaction was required though.

I don’t think you can codify it more than “they do it by gut.” I think it’s pretty rare that a song goes unaltered from the spark in somebody’s head to mastered recording without many changes. It’s a collaborative effort that involves the producers and friends as well.

I think the more somebody is knowledgeable in musical theory, can read and write notes, and maybe even has perfect pitch, the more fully formed an idea will be when it gets to the early stages of recording. But musicians are not all Mozarts.

I dabbled in making electronic music for a while as a hobby. There was only me, I don’t remember anything from musical theory class in school, can barely read notation - in short: I’m not even mediocre. But even I felt occasionally that I needed to speed a track up or down. It’s a gut feeling.

I know from a drummer friend of mine that performing live is hard. You’re either very good at keeping time, like, you have an unshakable metronome in your head, or the tempo naturally speeds up. That’s why during production a lot of musicians get the metronome via a click track in their ears to make sure they don’t deviate too far from what BPM they wanted to hit. During live concerts I think a lot of drummers, as the metronomes of the band, get a click track in their ears as well. And there may be concerts where a song is sped up compared to the recording on purpose, but is still played with a click track because it sounds better live when it’s faster, maybe because it’s missing a lot of stuff from the production that filled gaps at the lower speed. So you can say everything has a tendency to speed up live but sometimes tracks that are performed faster are an artistic choice.

We are monkeys that with the benefit of lots of time have developed opposable thumbs, tools, and language. We used language to describe abstract concepts in words. One of those words is “legacy.” Some people are driven to build one. Some are just altruistic. The urge to create offspring is also common and with it the hope your brats will fare well. There are your reasons why some people build for a tomorrow that never pays them back.

Consider also that somebody has built the road that leads to your house, the city you’re in, the hospital you go to when you’re sick. Civilization is a chain of paying stuff forward for those who come after you.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/04/stolen-android-phone-returned-iphone/

https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/04/stolen-android-phone-returned-iphone/

I did not make this up. But it was more than a year ago.

I remember reading a headline somewhere that thieves returned a couple of snatched phones to the owners specifically because they were Androids.

The rest of the world has a much higher share of Android phones than the US. There was and still is stigma around being green bubble in text threads on iMessage. Apple is dominant at home. Teenagers refuse to date folks without iPhones. Etc.

This also depends on the phone and which version of the operating system it runs. I think both iOS and Android have snatch detection in their latest versions, i.e. the phone can realize it’s been ripped from the hands and subsequently traveled fast away from the point of snatching. Phones are then supposed to lock so the thief doesn’t gain access.

A good security option is not to have financial apps and credit card numbers in the clear on your phone, or to have this stuff hidden behind a fingerprint scan or other ID, if the phone is unlocked or not.

If you don’t want to buy 13 guns to shoot a mugger with, as has been suggested in this thread, consider something as silly as a sturdy lanyard to anchor your phone to your person. Now you’re only interesting to the criminals who will rob you at gun/knife point. The snatchers tend to look for easy marks. In the US, a vital defense against having your phone stolen is having an Android phone to begin with.