The Security Dilemma of international relations: Keeping your own country safe requires doing things that will make your neighbours feel less safe.

Sovereignty returned to individual countries

Guess he didn’t catch the part where any country is free to leave if they feel like the EU infringes on their sovereignty. UK recently provided a great example of how that’s done… and how it turned out.

(Never mind that the implication is daft to begin with)

This stupid, evil piece of shit. There are people all over the place trying to combat voter apathy and get them to the ballot to at least try to staunch the worst, and there she goes pouring more oil on the fires of defeatism.

That’s how doubleposting has worked in all apps and forums that I know of since the birth of unreliable Internet and incomplete transaction verification.

I mean, hitting someone with an object, whether solid or fragile, is violence. Mild violende is still violence. Justified violence is still violence.

It should be up to a court to decide the severity of the assault and whether it warrants punitive action. In a fair and just society at least.

And in a fair and just society, the decision should be a reprimand because judicial encouragement of violence is a bad idea, but no further action.

Pelt him with grapes: not big enough to do much damage, but in the right quantities, it’ll get the point across

They also said their special operation would be done quickly, and we all know how that turned out

I can’t say I’m too keen on funding Ladybird, given the shit the lead developer is getting up to (to save you a click: defending white supremacy and transphobia).

Hope they fix it the same way spaying or neutering dogs is called fixing: Prevent it from propagating further.

That’s the reason I put up with a lot of FOSS issues: “I’m not paying you for this, so it’s still a better price/result ratio than paid services”

Fun fact: pushing things into the sun is really difficult. Short version: imagine spinning a pendulum, then trying to slow it down, except the pendulum is 100kg (200lbs) and moving at 87 Mach.

Long version:

Anything launching from earth will have a significant orbital velocity around the sun by virtue of starting at the earth’s own velocity (~30km/s, about 67000 mph). That velocity makes it hard to actually reach the sun.

Consider that even the sun’s gravity isn’t enough to pull in the earth at that speed. Simply applying thrust towards the sun would have to amount to a significant portion of the sun’s gravity to make a noticeable difference.

So to reach the sun, you’d ideally have to get rid of that excess orbital velocity instead. That requires a lot of force, to put it mildly. That kind of force requires powerful boosters and a lot of fuel. Of course, getting those engines and that fuel up there also takes powerful engines and a lot of fuel. But the larger the rocket, the heavier it’ll be, so it’ll require even more fuel…

There’s a phenomenon dubbed the “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. It describes the problem that, at some point, the extra weight required to make a rocket more powerful is greater than the extra power it provides. That basically puts a limit on how strong a given engine can get. There’s a lot of work being done on getting them to be more efficient, so that limit is getting higher, but the bottom line is:

It would require an immense amount of resources to slow an object enough to toss it into the sun, and more resources to get them to that object in the first place.

Physics is a cruel mistress and a mean spoilsport.

I’d argue you cna never fully escape the problem of enshittification, unless you produce and maintain everything you use by yourself. Given how much of what we need today requires specialist labour and how impossible it is to be a specialist in everything, chances are you’d be trading enshittification for plain shit.

But using Debian at least shuts down one source of enshittification. Just because perfection can’t ever fully be attained is no reason not to try and get as close as you can.

Me when I get a request for PII pertaining to a suspected corruption case: Have one of our corporate lawyers give me a written and explicit statement of what data I’m supposed to send to whom or get bent. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole and gloves unless I have a legally solid affirmation that what I’m doing won’t come back to bite me, and that our workers’ council knows about it and will back me up.

I’m reluctant to even confirm that I can get that information in the first place. I mean, I’m the one with full access to the audit tool, so I probably do, but I’d have to access that data in the first place to check. I don’t think that anyone would notice or care so long as I don’t share that information, but as you said: dangerously radioactive; don’t touch if I can help it.

Not against someone backed by the US

Intersex is a biological rarity wherein a person exhibits sexual characteristics of both sexes. They’re neither strictly biologically male nor strictly female. Hence, if they’re supposed to use the bathroom matching their sex, they’ll need a separate bathroom.

(There’s a lot of complexity and unpleasantness I’m omitting for brevity, but the point is that they don’t fit into simple binary assumptions like the one underlying the headline)

Well, the German government has. It’s just that some people think “It won’t happen to me” until it does.

Eurydike I was a boss bitch. Not only was she unusually prominent in politics for a queen, she also engaged in foreign policy on her own, successfully negotiationg with a foreign general to have him protect her late husband’s throne against a pretender, apparently without any participation from her son-in-law, who served as regent at the time.

The youngest of her sons, Phillip II, would go on to reform the military and secure hegemony over Greece, laying the groundwork for the invasion of Persia that he never got to carry out. After his assassination, that invasion was instead performed by his son, Alexander III, later dubbed “The Great” for this feat.

It should be noted that, with Alexander being on campaign for basically all of his reign and generally not too interested in domestic rulership, his mother Olympias of Epirus was the de facto ruler of Macedonia. Behind the successful general are two powerful women that first protected his father’s throne, then took care of the actual ruling so that he would be free to hunt glory.

Unfortunately, the German bureaucratic clusterfuck does tend to hamstring good intention with stupid regulations carried out to the pedantic letter. It’s a bit of a lottery at times whether you’ll find yourself dealing with a human or with a relentless rule fetishist, and the more complex a process is, the more people it involves and the greater the chance someone will obstruct.

I’d hope things have improved and I hope they’ll improve further. Shame that it’s too late for you.

Ich spreche nicht für alle, aber ein “dummer einsprachiger Amerikaner” der nach Europa abhaut verliert (meiner Meinung nach) zumindest das erste Attribut und mit dem zweiten kann ich ganz gut leben.

I don’t speak for everyone, but a “dumb monolingual American” that to Europe runs off loses (in my opinion) at least the first attribute and with the second I can quite well live.

The awkward word order of the translation is intentional to more closely mirror the German word order. I promise you, I can also good English speak ;-)

India? You mean the “+05:30” timezone? I’d rather not deal with that :30 tbh. I like having my timezone arithmetics quite simple, just adding and subtracting hours. A half hour offset is worse to me than having to switch which offsets to use when. (Still better than Australia Central Western with its +08:45, but that’s a low bar to clear.)