FriendOfDeSoto

Yes, they are. Me thinking something in the early 90s and it being objectively so at the time are not the same thing. I’ve already let 90s me know that you think my opinion was wrong.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

I’m sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn’t they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.

You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.

There is enough crime happening on either side of this 15-year divide to care about.

Zufallsbegegnung, chance encounter, is as close as we can get to it, I think. Germans don’t dress to impress. Look at us. I mean, look at us. Norm core to the max. If you are caught wearing the same shirt twice on different days, people tend to think you are merely handling limited resources responsibly.

I’m gonna go out in this limb: without more detail you won’t get any good answers.

It’s not just the SS, the Wehrmacht also “suffered” from having to shoot all these people. Read up on Babij Jar, Ukraine. Even Himmler is on record expressing sympathy for his killers. That’s why the bullet based plan turns into a gas based one. Because it’s “easier” to flip a switch on a room full of people than to shoot naked people to fall on other corpses already in the ditch.

I think what’s standing between us today and the bottom of the genocidal slippery slope is the (relatively) free media. There are too many ways to check up on them today. Commercial satellites, FOIA requests, people with smartphones. If ICE were building a death camp or digging mass graves now, we probably would find out.

So it’s important to look at how CBS gave in and how the pentagon restricts coverage in exchange for accreditation - those are your first dead canaries in the news coalmine. When commercial satellites are suddenly forced to blur or not cover ICE camps …

I would be surprised if they hadn’t killed more people in detention already. The aim of ICE is to be state terror, their people are of questionable character, poorly trained or vetted. A duty of care is probably not first and foremost on their mind. There probably is a way to brush some cases under the carpet. Deaths by “natural causes,” “misplaced” death certificates, “corpses” on repatriation flights. The spotlight of public attention needs to be on these motherfuckers constantly.

Let’s hope then that I’m right and even out of towners of the armed forces will not want to shoot.

Regicide is a Latin lego word created at a time when people had long stopped speaking proper Latin. It combines “of the king” with “killer.” It followed an established pattern like fratricide, killer of the brother. Note that we slightly perverted the Latin grammar over time by using these words to speak of the killing rather than the killer.

My Latin is shit. I’m not aware of a snappy expression that encompasses “Head of state or government” so we can add -cide to the end like all political scandals since Watergate get -gate at the end.

You are more supporting my gut feeling here by invoking Kent State. A handful of people died there; hundreds+ died in Beijing.

A situation like Kent State is very possible but they will have learned the lesson and it won’t be NG or other armed forces opening fire. It’ll be the obese SA or a right-wing militia that opens fire from a sniper’s nest.

Neighbors, countrymen - choose your own metaphor.

I’m no expert on the people’s army. I don’t think they had any way to refuse an illegal order. The US armed forces do have this. I think there are enough people in the US military that would refuse to shoot on protestors. Supposed drug smugglers are the out group and scruples are sadly low enough not to refuse that illegal order. Sending in the tanks in Minneapolis or Boston to shoot on their in group would be crossing the line. Not a good, sterdy, moral line but a line nonetheless.

First of all, I don’t think the Anerican military would follow that order. Shooting supposed drug smugglers illegally and shooting your neighbors illegally are two different kettle of fish for us humans who want to belong to sonething.

They would have to turn off the internet including satellites and then destroy all camera capable gadgets, maybe with an EMP. I think this is too much hassle. There won’t be a Tiananmen Sq in the US. The Chinese could control the narrative internally and didn’t give af about the rest of the world - in 1989. As we see in Iran today, the world is but a village and footage travels fast. The risk is too high.

But keep looking at ICE or “proud” militias. I would not be surprised to hear about these bastards sniping at protest leaders or even rando participants to discourage more protests. Look for fat guys on roofs.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t take the time to read a long article like that but will have a quick glance at the comments.

Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining).

This is a thought experiment more than a plan.

Would it be acceptable in a conversation to talk about the I.C.E ?

I don’t see anybody getting thrown out of the house for daring to spell out an acronym that is usually pronounced as a word. What kind of people do you hang out with? It might cause confusion but context normally helps.

If you were speaking of I.C.E. to me I’d punch you in the face. Also if you referred to them as ICE. That’s because I refer to them, correctly, as the SS.

To be fair to the lad, he didn’t peddle his wares. He just says if there isn’t a European strategy to develop their own models it is very likely that Europe would run on Chinese made ones that are more open source, whereas American ones become increasingly closed source and expensive to license. Now, that’s his prediction and I don’t really believe him. But this article at least doesn’t make it seem he wrapped his doom and gloom prediction in a Gemini sales pitch.

First of all, they did not pick any language at founding. They refused to settle on one. And I don’t think they ever changed that (although I wouldn’t put it past the current administration to do something like that because 47 has the best words as we all know). English is de facto the language of the US like Bern is de facto the capital of Switzerland but it isn’t set in stone.

German was briefly seriously discussed. That would have been funny.

I think the influence of the British Empire has done more to make English the lingua franca. But I think it is conceivable that we would be conducting a lot more diplomacy in French or Spanish if they had won out. But there are still huge chunks of Africa and Oceania that speak English. And Hockeyland. And big business hubs like Singapore or Hong Kong - the language of trade would still be English.

Why would Americans elect a serial bankruptcy business man, narcissst, and convicted sexual assault felon to appoint this loon?

Because there are no simple answers.

47 wants to disrupt and cause chaos in everything. The department of health is just another area for chaos, hence the appointment of this guy. I think it’s fairly safe that most Americans - and that includes many nominal supporters of the current GOP cultish clowncar - do not take their health advise from worm brain. It’s just unfortunate that he’s in a position of power where he will cause harm that will prevail long after he’s retired, or dead.