Now there's a religious president if there ever was one, the kind that Americans claim to have wanted.
US presidents seem to have been authentically Christians, not just posing to get elected, for at least a couple generations. Biden is unusual in being a Catholic. Even LBJ seems to have been fairly religious in a kind of default way. Carter is probably the most Christian one, if we were to rank them somehow.
Trump is a trend-breaker here too as the first non-Christian president for a long while. There will be more in the future, but not in the near future. A likely future president like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be fairly radical in politics, but still identify as a Catholic. Same goes for the other candidates in both parties. That makes coming presidents and candidates increasingly at odds with the electorate.
I wonder how much of the last decade's descent into nonsense is financially algorithm-driven. It is more profitable to be an idiot and business suicide to be analytical and nuanced.
Johnny Harris is a good example. The Borders series he made for Vox was excellent. Now he and Vox both are effectively bygones. And take any other talking head that's been around a decade or more. They may not have been sensible back then either, but they are inevitably worse now.
However, given that Putin is 72 years old, Netanyahu is 75, and the time from committed crime to verdict is about 15-20 years with the ICC, it isn't likely that either is going to serve any time.
Different owners. Overall a good thing, but doesn't really solve the problem.
And there is another wrinkle. This process has been going on for a while, nearing resolution. And under whose administration will this happen? Trump's.
Alphabet is a 2 trillion dollar company. Whoever is in the position to set the rules, is set to make billions. You know what happens when a new regime takes over, well-connected to the old regime, and the US is facing a government of grifters, thieves, and cheats.
Old broligarchs, meet the new broligarchs. Did anyone mention Wildberries?
Only constraint to that grift is that Alphabet is a $2T company, they have the legal power to go on for years if the new administration goes too far.
I didn't notice. However, they also didn't do the original Twitter, at least it doesn't seem that way, where anyone can make their own (presumably Javascript-free) client. Guess we'll know when somebody tries.
In any case there are bridges, but they are fairly makeshift at this point. Mastodon and Threads now both use ActivityPub, with Bluesky using ATproto, and this brid.gy thing sometimes works. Not with X though, it's hunkering down more than ever.
Beginning to be tools to extract own tweets to republish (after downloading them from X/Meta) somewhere else, but of course you lose the interaction even if you want to republish all.
One advantage though with Bluesky over X is that it is federated. So you could have your username on some other domain than bsky.social, dndsanctuary.eu perhaps? There are rumours though that this is something Bluesky might want to monetise in time.
Assuming the above bridges start to work as intended, maybe it might be a future for this forum?
Bluesky may have its rise and fall, but yes it is becoming a Twitter 2.0, in many ways better than Twitter ever was.
Meta, not X, is the big gorilla. Youtube algorithm is optimised for profit, but as a user pretty weird. They have cut down search functionality so it is harder to find educational content, while the recommendations take you along a garden path. Slightly better than a few years ago, when with a blank profile it could take you from some wholesome video via five-six click-click-click would end up with bona fide Nazi content. Less outright Nazi now that I can see, but you are likely to end up with something extreme or conspiratorial on a pretty short path.
Anyway, X is turning out pretty unusable, so I too have jumped over to Bluesky. Twitter was kind of ridiculous, but had two major selling points, data and news. News are not really there (yet), but there is a growing group of data producers interacting.
Early Twitter was very open with its APIs. Bluesky is different, but is open in other and useful ways. And there is some interaction with Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, even though Bluesky doesn't (and won't) support ActivityPub.
Sweden is probably similar to Belgium in that regard, with an extensive work lunch at lunch restaurant culture. Norway is more of a canteen or bring your own lunch culture. So in Sweden lunch used to be pretty cheap, affordable for regular workers, and dining expensive. Still is, relatively speaking. But there also used to be lunchkuponger, which I have never gotten myself, nor seen used anywhere lately. People pay by phone or plastic.
I guess tax rules (and lack of convenience) killed them. Any economic advantage, including subsidised lunch, is taxable income. Which is reasonable, really.
The problem with rabbit meat, apart from the hind legs, is all the annoying little bones. I assume guinea pig is even worse, and that coypus are like large guinea pigs.
Schematics have their limits, as with the Tokyo rail map.
For the more complex cases you'd need something more dynamic and interactive, including switching between views, and particular your current needs. Do you want an overview, getting from one place to another, or something else?
Every aspect of recycling has improved greatly over the last 30 years, not to speak of the last 60 years. Ersi is griping for the sake of griping.
Here is a Swedish instruction video from 1964 how to responsibly get rid of garbage. TL;DR: you pack it in a box together with some stones and drop it to the bottom of the sea. (That was the responsible method to get rid of old cars as well, you drove it out on the lake during winter and let the wreck stay there until spring thaw.)
Sweden has spent 50 years cleaning up from the spills made in the previous 100. Not quite done yet, especially not the waterways.
Today, households produce dramatically less trash than they used to. And while I consider waste sorting at source a transitional stage, it is certainly way more convenient and efficient than it used to be.
While there is something to be said for the model of garbage collectors buying and reselling household garbage, it's not a viable long-term solution with increasing affluence.
We are far better at life-cycle management, and designing for reuse and recycling.
We hardly have a circular economy, but we're getting a few steps closer. Waste is turning into resources.
North Sea is North Sea for everyone. It may have had a different name for Vikings.
The Danes sometimes call the North Sea, or parts thereof, for Vesterhavet, the Western Sea. Haf is one of the Norse words for sea, together with sjó (sea) and marr (meer). Scandinavian mostly lost the latter, while West Germanic languages mostly lost the former, except indirectly in haven or in German Haff. Hav in Scandinavian is predominantly open sea or ocean, and that seems to always been the case.
Haven't found reference to origin of North Sea. All the Scandinavian wikipedias blame the Frisians for the name (without attribution), which would make a lot of sense.
Swedes also have Västerhavet, but that basically is the sea outside Gothenburg. Eastern Norway (the Oslo area) like Western Sweden (the Gothenburg area) is practically Outer Denmark in this context. For the rest of Norway, the North Sea is a southern sea.
Norwegian from Viking Age and earlier either travelled south past the west coast of Denmark, or did island hopping by Shetland and Orkneys to Scotland/Ireland (alternatively via Faroe Islands to Iceland). There was no specific name for this route as far as I can tell. Norway itself is the seaway to the north. Also, as far as I can tell, except as a crossroad the North Sea interior wasn't used for much until the Dutch got a craving for fish over Doggerland and neighbouring areas.
Norway also had a Western Sea, Vesterhavet, for the sea to the west of Norway, what's now called the Norwegian Sea. That can be seen on this 240 year old map (where the North Sea is also called the North Sea, though south of Norway and the map is printed in Copenhagen).
AfD is largest party in Thuringia, at about 33%, That is up from 23% in 2019, when Die Linke was on top, but still less than their 1933 results. It is second largest in Saxony with 31%, up from 28%. Biggest growth is Brandenburg, from 12% to 24%.
West Germany never managed to fix East Germany, and while they might revert to the old approach, throw money at them, hasn't really worked for 35 years (though the cities are nicer now). The split-up of Die Linke is a good enough example. The marriage between the DDR socialists of the East and a smattering of champagne socialists of the West wouldn't last.
Of course it is a problem, both that this reunification project has been the project of this generation, and that AfD has better chance with the Andrew Tate disciples of the West than the DDR socialists have of crossing the Fulda Gap without Soviet help.
However, the AfD is not going to take over Thuringia, never mind the rest of Germany. Not going to happen, never going to happen.
As a response, expect some loud handwringing (that has already begun), more wasted money (the stupid German debt brake might actually help here), and sure, some measures like "tough on crime". Most of these will achieve nothing, others will achieve a lot, but over an extended period of time.
The river flows, right? So why does the water stay dirty? Is the source itself contaminated?
That's what makes tributaries so valuable, they are refugia when something untoward happen upstream. Some care will have to be taken for that reason, not completely dam them off for instance.
Downstream, of course, you depend on all the streams being in good condition. That also goes for the sea we share that you call the Western Sea, we call the Eastern Sea, and the rest of the world call the Baltic Sea.
What is dropped there by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Germany tends to stay there. Getting that sea back into a healthy state is some challenge.
Telecoms regulator says it is proceeding with compliance
Saga stems from dispute over regulating online speech
Some Brazilians already report blocks on X, formerly Twitter
Top three carriers to start blocking X from 0300 GMT
SAO PAULO/BRASILIA, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Brazil's telecommunications regulator said on Friday it was suspending access to Elon Musk's X social network in the country to comply with an order from a judge who has been locked in a months-long feud with the billionaire investor. The popular social media platform missed a court-imposed deadline on Thursday evening to name a legal representative in Brazil, triggering the suspension. Musk has argued that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes was trying to enforce unjustified censorship, while the judge has insisted that social media needs hate speech regulations.
