Maybe we should turn this idea around? I know tons of healthy rich old people that have nothing better to do than bicker and complain, how about we force them to do a free full year of community service? Why is their time and energy considered more valuable than the youths’?

And maybe it would humble those wealthy nepo pieces of shit, and likely resolve the social issues that people complain about.

Currently, just barely under half of Germany’s population is overweight.

That’s only ten percent less than the USA, which sits at 57%.

And yes, it causes massive health problems, staining the healthcare system.

I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.

I’m curious, why are you “happy it’s been done”?

I live in a country where we don’t perform this procedure out of tradition/religion, or at least not in the majority. I’m only aware of it being done for specific medical pathologies such as phimosis.

Because I kind of agree with the sentiment that performing unwarranted surgeries on someone that is unable to voice his (non-)consent is an ethical problem. Even more so with excisions, which always are drastically and usually irrevocably diminishing the body.

My intent was just to provide a viewpoint from someone that loves and uses Linux aplenty, but spends a lot of time with Max quality gaming, using high end hardware.

And while things have improved massively over the past years and probably will get even better in the next years, nvidia’s monopoly on top performance GPU means I’m being bottle necked by their shitty Linux support.

Sure, I can play almost any game out there on Linux, but not with the performance and sometimes not even the same quality I can achieve with Windows. I know this is no fault of Linux, but it’s the pragmatic reality I’m confronted with.

Still a couple deal breakers for me, though most stuff otherwise runs fine. No HDR support. Sucks if you have a great monitor but can’t use it. No nvidia broadcast. Necessary for my mic+speaker setup, common alternative such as noisetorch are convenient, but don’t even come close to echo filtering quality from the speakers. Yes, that’s super subjective obviously. Performance tends to be noticeably to only slightly worse on max settings with nvidia on highly specialized, very demanding games. Some anti cheat tools struggle with compatibility modes.

We’re getting there, but it’s tough with nvidia not caring. :/

How do you think they would verify or sanction an invalid ballot? Given that voting is secret and therefore there’s logically no personal information on the ballot, this would be rather tricky - or extremely worrisome for democracy. ;) So no, it’s definitely not illegal in any somewhat democratic nation. And yes, most countries do count invalid votes separately. This can be an important indicator that something went wrong. Eg if suddenly all districts report much higher numbers of invalid ballots, something might have gone wrong in the counting process or just the ballot design might be too confusing. Definitely worth looking into, though. And if a single district shows an unusual count of invalid ballots compared to others, that also is worth looking into.

Many that intentionally vote invalid claim to do so to show their frustration with all party options. However, this hurts democracy. Even if do not love or even like any of the parties/candidates, you still should vote.

Vote for the “least of the bad”. A vote for a democratic candidate that has a boring mix of policies planned that you don’t fully support is still a lot better than anything on the other end of the spectrum, with radical extremists working to undermine society or democracy itself. By voting invalid, your missing vote ends up being “shared” by everyone, and I’m certain there’s some on the list that you really don’t want to even have the tiniest shred of your vote.

You go to vote and invalidate the ballot. Mark none or all of the boxes or write ‘fu’ on it. It’s not that hard.

Which is fine

But that’s boring. Just close your eyes, grab any packet or bottle at random and apply with gusto. This way you will always be surprised at new and fresh taste combinations!

Kind of a bad example, because mankind very clearly stems from ‘humankind’. And people are lazy and prefer using short words. The unfairness is rather that women got stuck with the words requiring more characters. But that is a phenomenon of the English language and not present in others.

However, in most languages the words for man/male are closer to human(kind) than female/woman, which very clearly shows the historic patriarchal influence, coming back around to your point after all.

I do. I do not understand why this tiny delivery bears mentioning compared to all the other, much larger deliveries.

And I want to highlight how little all the billions of aid will mean if the West now just stops delivering, simply because the public is bored of the war. War is expensive, but sometimes there’s no alternative. And cynical at it may be, supporting a proxy to fight for you on their ground is still hell of a lot cheaper than your own people dying on your soil.

250 artillery shells, wow. That’s gonna last a whole three days.

Interesting, will have to read up on how that works in Brazil. We also have a separate tax id here ( which is also used for pension and social security ), but that one is even more secure/private than the passport ID. We only provide that to our chosen medical insurance provider ( bc they need to register it with the ministry of finance ) as well as employers ( because 50% of the insurance has to be paid by employers).

It’s explicitly not allowed and intended for generic identification purposes, because it makes it too accessible for identity theft and associated scams.

Where do you live that providing your government id to a business is standard? In Germany, the only one outside of a judge to be allowed to request that is law enforcement ( even then only with proper cause ). Of course, some businesses are legally required to request and process your ID number ( e.g. when booking international flights, medical insurance companies etc), but these are under tight federal control and supervision to ensure data safety.

Age verification sometimes is a thing for purchasing 18+ things ( media or drugs like alcohol & smokes), but even then businesses will only ever perform a visual check of the date of birth on your ID. Technically they can never demand to hold your ID, not even for a short time just to better read the date. You only have to show them your ID. And actually recording and/or storing any of that information would be insanely illegal.

Germany / Europe might have its issues, but we at least try and take our freedom and data privacy serious. I would never dream of handing my ID to a generic business like a club for anything more than the age check.

Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?

And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.

I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.

Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox

We factually know that China is committing (at least cultural) genocide, possibly more such as forced sterilizations and relocations against Uighurs in Xinjiang, and we still deal and trade with them. Not only some big evil corporations, many individuals knowingly buy Chinese products all this. Because they are cheaper. Money talks now, money talked back then. Yes, everybody is to blame for their part in not speaking and acting against injustices of the world, but there are different levels of “helping” someone commit evil.

Back in the 30s and for decades after, many in the US could not share the same bathroom or attend schools/education based on the color of their skin, and many in the general populace were fine with it.

Pretty much. RCS just defines the protocol. That is basically how messages are formatted, how recipients and senders are labeled, how timestamps are formatted, how messages are compressed, transferred and possibly stored and resent in case of inability to deliver (e.g. recipients phone is off) and a lot more technical stuff.

To use this, you need a network of servers that can actually receive messages from phones/ cell network, then possibly transfer them to a server/ cell tower near the recipient(s) to have it broadcast there, making sure only the intended recipient can decrypt it, and possibly storing it for an unknown duration and a number of attempts to deliver it if the recipient is unreachable. And possibly sending a receipt or failure-to-deliver message back to the sender as well. And all of this has to work reliably 24/7, because people will not accept downtimes.

And then you also need client software on the phones to send/receive messages using the RCS protocol as well, hopefully handling true e2e encryption as well.

It’s a lot of hardware and software engineering to actuallyimplement such a seemingly fundamental standard.

“Help” is a inflammatory hyperbole. IBM had good financial relations with Nazi Germany, and its tech was heavily used in many bureaucratic endeavors, just like in many other nations. This included holding a census, organizing many of the fairly recently federalized infrastructure systems such as railway, telephones, etc. Remember, Germany was only merged a couple decades before from a mix of dozens of highly individual states with history going back almost a thousand years. So it was a lot of work to do in short time, and Germany was never before and never since(!) as centralized as it was under Nazi rule.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that IBM as a company was even aware of, much less actively and intentionally “helped” the Holocaust. With that logic, everyone that did any business with Germany in the 1930s “helped the Holocaust”. I think a more nuanced view is beneficial for all. Don’t dilute the blame from those that truly deserve it.