Ultimately it’s because of corruption. When chancellor Kohl was incumbent it was clear that fibre optics is the future. He instead pushed for the technically inferior alternative of cable internet to satisfy his business buddies.

That being said, Germany’s not only lagging behind in connectivity but in digital infrastructure in general. Many businesses and especially the administration are still stuck in the previous century. Plus there’s a considerable lack of IT knowhow (and herhaps interest) in the general populace. Travellers from countries like Estonia or Finland must feel like having traveled back into the past 20 years.

I’m still using a fax machine to send messages to the local government cause they can’t properly handle email yet, lol. Called the hospital the other day due to some info missing on their website. Had a very confusing convo with their staff cause the lady genuinely didn’t understand the difference between a website, a browser, Google and a search bar widget and kept confounding them. That’s where we are at 🤷🏽.

Sure, a skilled human is still better at the job. But you don’t always need to capture every nuance. And AI does it at the fraction of the cost.

I see this with lots of German product descriptions on big store fronts like Amazon. They often seem entirely machine translated. It’s not great, but “good enough” and serviceable.

Machine translation also increasingly shifts the process from the sender of the message to the recipient. It used to be that the web page of a Vietnamese company was inaccessible if you didn’t speak Vietnamese or they specifically had an English version. Nowadays a visitor can choose to get the entire site translated automatically (by the browser, for instance). Is it as good as the translation by an expert? Of course not. But it costs the company nothing at all and the visitor a negligible amount. And it works for a plethora of languages.

That’s another (invisible) way that the world needs less and less translators. I wrote this post in English but for all I know someone could be reading it in French or Bengali. No further input required from my side.

Always thought of the noise channel giving the Gameboy a unique character among low bit rate music. Glad to see you make use of it (I like Thunderking arena for instance).

I mean he’s not the first to claim this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book

It’s unlikely tho that the Kreml ever foresaw him becoming president. No-one did really.

Search engine optimization ruined the web. Change my mind!

¿Where is the hat coming from tho?

According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.

There you have it folks.

Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).

Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.

Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!

As the saying goes: listen not to what politicians say, but watch what they do.

By his own previous public proclamation anyone cooperating with the extremist AfD is to be expelled from his party. If he had decency he would now self-expel.

It’s crazy to think that while we now live in a globalized, interconnected society with billions of peoples yet Dunbar’s hasn’t changed from when we formed tribes and harmlets thousands of years ago.

A lot of the structures and institutions of modern society essentially center around somehow overcoming or side stepping Dunbar’s number: to reliably interact with strangers, ease tensions and achieve greater things (from credit scores to spelling dictionaries to standard sized clothing to electing representatives to online wikis to opening hours, calendars and time zones; the list goes on an on).

p 698 of project 2025 document:

The federal income tax system heavily taxes capital and corporate income and discourages work, savings, and investment. The public finance literature is clear that a consumption tax would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues.

more riches to capital and corporations, consumers will pay for it. it’s all in there

I think in that scenario it’s more likely that they would “buy the dip” then that they would up and leave. Some of the billionaires also want to found their own techno-fashist fiefdoms. This could be a good catalyst for that.

Saw a policy expert say it’s a mixture of 3 things really:

1. Trump likes to blame outsiders for problems and this is well received by his loyal base and gives off strongman vibes
2. long term plan to switch from income tax (scales the more you earn) to consumption taxes (the poorer you are the more you pay for for consumption, relatively speaking) which benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. this wealth transfer is easier to sell when the populace is focused on outsiders
3. Trump doesn’t understand basic economics

source: https://youtu.be/2I1L1fXaYDs

Fun fact: the monikers used for these children in the book are used in coloquial speech to describe children that misbehave or exhibit behavioral discrepencies:

• shock headed Peter: an unkempt, filthy child
• fidgety Philip: ADHS or hyperactive child
• Johnny-Head-in-the-Air: daydreaming, absent mindedness
• wicked Frederick: cruelty to animals (sociopathy, lack of empathy often reveal themselves this way early on)
• Soup Caspar: eating disorder, perhaps
• etc

The original book was written by a medical doctor dealing with children, go figure!

This feels quite politically motivated. Trump appointment aside, the CIA specifically uses the words “low confidence”, so even if they deem it the most likely, it’s still only the most likely from several low confidence options.

But look at how lawmakers exploit it:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton said he was “pleased” the CIA concluded in the Biden administration’s final days that the lab-leak theory was the most plausible explanation of Covid-19’s origins, and commended Mr Ratcliffe for releasing the conclusion.

“Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, said in a statement. BLOOMBERG

Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/cia-now-favours-lab-leak-theory-to-explain-covid-19-origins

So reportedly this guy got caught in a right-wing echo chamber of conspiracy Youtubers. That’s why his coup came so out of nowhere:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/inside-south-koreas-right-wing-youtube-world-openly-embraced-by-yoon

Yeah,

1 + (1*5000%) = 51

Honestly I prefer just writing “51 times more frequent”.

It’s not like you couldn’t say the same thing about Donald Trump. Yet here we are.

yes

He made a post using command line lingo too, but anyone with even basic knowledge of those commands can tell you that both the syntax and the way he alludes to them are wrong.

It’s the equivalent of slinging a guitar in a picture to look cool but pressing the side with the strings against your belly.