What would happen if someone were to detain a group of marines (with the minimal force necessary), in the wrong assumption - honest mistake - that they were about to execute illegal orders?

Never read one completely nor watched a full movie, but it always felt cheap and written from the unenlightened perspective of a simple mind to me.

The fantasy books of my generation, such as The Neverending Story, Momo, The Hobbit, Jim Knopf were a whole different level. Life experience and a touch of wisdom in a great story for children.

But I also think that it might be just my perspective, since my mind has been imprinted like that. I’m not judging anyone for being a Harry Potter fan and try to think of it as different, not worse.

I’m no expert, but I would think that the best way for this to work is to go all-in with the first strike. Every following strike will be SO much harder to succeed.

Could be a “phase 2” like: Expecting all parked trucks and sheds in a 10 km radius of any military airbase to be inspected, so make traps. (Or any other phase 2 that takes advantage of the reaction.)

The far right doesn’t even need to win directly. Even within conservative parties, such as Germany’s CDU, the populists make it to the top. They have good people with real solutions up to a state level, maybe more than any other party, but the new chancellor and most of the ministers from his own party are populists.

Conservatives with a real vision and plan might soon suffer the same fate as McCain and Romney.

This has a whole chain of consequences. Problems are not solved and increase, the far right gains.

Also, the current government coalition of the two formerly major parties didn’t even get half of the votes, resulting in less acceptance of the democratic process and legitimacy of the government. Not a big difference to the electoral college problem in the USA.

Or 50 and 29 - eww

One insanity in the following years was how they thought people still wanted their next generation diesel.

I’ve been working for them in the 2010s with the department to organise the staff car fleet. We ordered many electric vehicles years ahead from production and planned it all around electric vehicles: Charging stations, operating distance, some hybrids for long distance, software to calculate trips etc.

Then a few months before we needed them, they said: We overproduced on the latest diesel generation and can’t keep up with the demand for electric vehicles, so we have to sell the ones you ordered. You can either go with a Tesla (for official Volkswagen business trips!) or have the diesel for free.

It felt like there was a hysteria: Decision makers got it in their heads that the “hype” for electric vehicles was ideology-driven and not something people with buying power actually wanted today or in the near future. Bit like the republican administration thinking that “woke” is our main problem. Meanwhile, huge research and development departments did come up with the electric vehicles they sell today (and fully working hydrogen prototypes you won’t see in a store, just to be safe) and must have been quite frustrated that so few were produced.

I thought you were referring to Monty Python like op did and I thought: what the heck is he talking about?

I tried Gemini before. The problem was reliability.

E. g. I say “add an event to my calendar: tomorrow 2 p.m., doctor visit”, and it parses the voice perfectly. The regular assistant would then just create the entry.

But Gemini sometimes goes like: “Adding an entry to your calendar is easy! Do you have an iPhone? Then these are the steps: …”

His tone is quite different with Kim Jong Un and Putin.

A 2000s Garmin GPS with OSM is neat and durable like a Nokia. Still use it even though I do keep my smartphone:

https://www.garmin.com/de-DE/p/8703

My initial understanding was that it’s the cat that really got to go but the human did shenanigans with the toilet paper

• One important metric: m³ / (hour*$), so how much it can filter for how much money
• Also the volume on the setting that gives the filtration power needed. Often it is best to get a bigger one, run on middle or low level, especially for office or bedroom.
• How much m³ / hour overall? When it is against dust, allergens, pm2.5 etc., filtering your room volume once per hour is decent. To protect from viral infections, e. g. at a dentist or doctor, 6x the volume of the room is ideal. For private use, it’s nice when it can do once per hour on a lower setting, and for occasional parties 6x of that on a high, loud setting to avoid spread of viruses.

Pretty good for your money is the Corsi-Rosenthal Box mentioned already. As for things that don’t require assembly, Trotec beats all prices in Germany, e. g. the 250E or 350E: https://de.trotec.com/shop/design-luftreiniger-airgoclean-250-e.html That would provide more than you need for typical home use already. For a single room such as your bedroom, you can get something really decent for less than $250.

The ones that are below HEPA standard are not as bad as somebody mentioned, imo. Against many things, such as dust or allergens, they should be fine. I’m buying only HEPA filters myself, though; doesn’t really save much otherwise.

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

Just my last two orders:

• expensive quality Covid test -> get the cheapest, which stopped working properly at Alpha / Beta
• 3M respirators for $ 4 a piece -> a literal fake, hard to see, but it breaks already when putting on. 1 hour in support chat to convince them that something is wrong, but only got my money back, no investigation into the seller or product

I will stay there for now though, because it’s still a great software, easy to use

Well pet me like one of your dogs

Covid has already been proven to be a contributor as well: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16966