FriendOfDeSoto

I see your point. I was thinking about fining just the assholes who obstruct sidewalks beyond the tolerated minimum. I think there is a middle way to make that work and maybe even turn a profit. But that’s not a great additional argument from me. It might need a federal regulation change. They could introduce a hefty fine for parking in such a manner that a wheelchair user could not safely use the sidewalk as a result. One can dream.

I don’t follow your relaxed law logic. The law was not enforced before and would be more tightly enforced under this plan.

I would argue the space on the sidewalk has already been reduced and this plan would just limit punishment to those who truly deserve it. And if this is policy it should include the staff hours for parking inspectors. They could take note of areas where sidewalk parking often reduces space to below 1.6m and then have bollards or other barriers installed in these hotspots.

And, as I’ve also already mentioned, there should be more policies to encourage giving up on car ownership. I suggested free public transport for former car owners. New developments should include the need to build its own parking faculties on the property. Parking fees should be raised slowly but steadily. Resident parking only schemes could maybe push visitors to the area into public transport. There are more tools in that toolbox.

BTW I’m not a fan of this plan. My sense of what is possible, i.e. politics, just forces me to grudgingly accept this as a compromise. If you reduce the space for parking, say, by planting trees or other physical obstacles (which will probably cost more than this), you’ll be voted out. Politicians are more pragmatists than idealists. Nobody will stay in office long with radical anti car policies - as much as I would personally support that.

In the context of small Munich alleys where space is scarce, where exactly should they build additional bicycle lanes that can be used by fire trucks? The shining examples of fuck cars infrastructure like Amsterdam and Copenhagen tend to be on flat land or the great infrastructure doesn’t actually extend into the narrow capillary alleys that have been around since the middle ages. They also took decades to implement policies in increments to get to where they are. Munich is in my estimation probably at least a decade behind that.

I don’t think I’m leaning too far out this window when I say: no, there isn’t an optimal size. It depends on so many factors. How many people? Is this urban or rural? What’s there neighborhood like? Facilities, public transport, doctors, grocery stores, etc.? What’s the crime rate like? How long is the commute to work? People have different priorities and make different choices as a result.

In principle, I agree with you. And do you know why hardly any city government can put this rigorous approach into practice? Because they will be voted out in the next election. Because car ownership is still high. Realpolitik applies here.

Germans love a rule, love pea counting, and they will measure.

Your insane argument doesn’t quite work for me when the mutual benefit of the practice was to provide ample space for fire trucks and ambulances on the roads. This is not a matter of the city just not giving a shit. They weighed their options.

Another aspect that wasn’t touched upon in the article will also play into this: parking fines are a great way to get money into the city coffers. So it will probably pay off to get members of the Ordnungsamt - or the office of public order - who handle these things out in force armed with a tape measure and a camera and chi-ching for Munich’s revenue.

It’s not that clear really. His official titles would’ve been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title “der Führer” was basically a google translate from “il duce” in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don’t always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I’m concerned. The Ockham’s razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won’t make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.

I was also looking for a word other than ‘honorific.’ I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.

Two things: this is an accepted practice all over the country and the traffic code has its own traffic sign for it when it is permitted. And the suggested amendment would only make it legal in situations where there would remain 1.6m of space for pedestrians, wheelchair users, and strollers. So the car parked in the image would remain illegally parked.

Munich has made a mistake of tacitly allowing this parking practice in areas where there isn’t enough space, motivated by keeping roads accessible to first responders, which is not nothing. They have clearly made a mistake if everybody still owns a car when there s above average public transport. And people will still park like assholes. Under these plans (they haven’t been approved yet according to the article), the assholes could be punished though. It would just not give fines out to everybody. This is a compromise solution in a bad situation.

I would amend the plans in two areas: the grumpy people of Munich should be allowed to smear dogshit legally on every car that doesn’t leave 1.6m of space on the sidewalk (the article mentions a similar occurrence). And giving up car ownership should be rewarded with free public transport for a suitable amount of time.

Trusting judges is not uniquely American. You’ll find similar processes on the continent across the channel. The hurdles of who can sue and under which circumstances may differ. The appointment of judges is often less politicized. I think the UK is the unique case here and I believe that’s because by and large there isn’t a written constitution, at the very least not in the same way as in the US or France or Poland. Supreme courts are there as a check on whether or not laws conform to constitutional values and have the power to overrule a legislature when it passes laws that don’t. It’s not an “upper hand” deal, it’s checks and balances.

The American legal system is not great. I don’t know the details of the case you mentioned. One bad decision doesn’t mean the whole system needs to be abolished. If that were so I’d like to have a word with the UK’s highest court on what constitutes a woman.

Which part is infuriating here? The law that will be difficult to enforce and probably has all sorts of unintended side effects? Or that lawyers, and indeed layers funded by big internet companies, are suing?

Fundamentally, let them sue. Not everything coming out of the legislatures the world over is pristine law and this is how the system can correct for mistakes. Also, I’m sadly more on the side of the Googles and the Metas. Their freedom of speech argument is entirely self serving but that doesn’t make it wrong. Any age verification has itself a chilling effect on speech online. Forcing it creates more data sets to be leaked and hacked and in this case of minors’ information, not grownups’ who can make an educated decision if they want to go through with it to go watch porn. This is not a clear case of mild infuriation.

Is it porn the deceased spouse created or is it porn the widow created with the deceased husband’s likeness? And which would indeed be sadder?

If you are referring to the UK government, I’m going to guess no. They either don’t have the full version or they won’t be interested in releasing the files themselves. The brother of the current pointy hat wearer is up to his non-sweaty elbows in this mess and they don’t want to have to deal with this and damage the monarchy further.

If you’re referring to a UK publication, they will probably not be able to release the full dossier. They would have to carefully tread around any UK citizen or noble d-head involved because they don’t want to be knee deep in defamation lawsuits.

What we need is a country that no one thinks they’re biased or has an agenda or much to lose under a 250,000 percent US tariff. So not Russia or Venezuela. Or China or Iraq or Afghanistan or Canada or Denmark … Maybe Vanuatu will do. The only problem is that even if the entire dossier was accurate and unedited, you won’t have to wait long until reasonable doubt gets injected into the public debate that it was doctored before release. The effect of the release will not lead to immediate resignations, firings, arrests, etc.

I would guess that leading English speaking newsrooms probably have access to enough of it already and that what’s there is not enough for a spectacular release. And a possible kill order of the pedophile in prison will probably not have left a paper trail. And it will not clearly say Trump or Bubba raped teenagers although the smoke around the fire will be tough to ignore. Circumstantial evidence is not the same as proof.

Set alarms on your phone and pretend it’s phone calls from work, a friend in need, etc. Go hide in there bathroom and take a ten minute break.

Do you have allies in the family? Make a pact to take turns. Get them to lure you away on a pretense. Go help clean the kitchen.

If you can’t wiggle free, give yourself permission to switch off. You don’t have to fight every battle, you don’t need to set everything right. It’s amazing how long you can keep a conversation going if all you do is repeat the last thing they said to you back at them but you raise your tone at the end to turn it into a question. Make plans on how to compensate yourself for enduring this shit. Pat yourself on the back for maintaining peace in the face of adversity.

Nothing bores people more than showing them “a funny video” on YouTube. Or some really boring vacation pictures. Or have a non-controversial topic of your own and stubbornly steer conversation that way. Tell a story with no point. If you’re sitting in something comfy, like an armchair, pretend to fall asleep because you worked so hard. Praise the food and how good it was every time you’re biting your tongue and you really want to say fuck you.

It’s family, it’s the holidays. I’m not saying you should swallow all bullshit. But raise the bar in the interest of family peace. And remember that folks will blame the loudmouths, the ones who raised their voice more than necessary, and not the quiet one for any fracas.

None of these strategies will work by themselves. It’s the mix that does it. It’s better to go into the situation looking at it like a game you play. Not like: fuck! Uncle Bob is going to annoy me again. You have your armor on and uncle Bob can’t do shit.

That release was batshit if you ask me.

BatOS obvs

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

Yes, because my point is that your point doesn’t make sense.

That’s a remarkable statement in the context of a hypothetical, counterfactual scenario where we are attempting to interpret the possible thinking of a long deceased man displaced in time for the benefit of said scenario.

You may disagree with me. You haven’t changed my mind either. So let’s leave it at that.

You’re citing my text but cutting off just before the point I was trying to make. I think be would still side with the people who claim to follow his ideology (yes, piss poor efforts objectively speaking but that’s irrelevant to him because he would prefer them over the folks entrenched in capitalism on the other side).

Ideologs are a dangerous breed because they are surprisingly flexible under realpolitik conditions when the alternative is having to admit defeat. Or in Marx’s case admitting that his ideas didn’t work or the fact that they didn’t work as intended cost the lives of millions. Surely he wouldn’t like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China and well apoortioned crticism thereof (or of the GDR or wherever) would have eventually spent his good will capital (pun intended) with the local leadership and he would end up in a gulag or erased from history. Karl-Marx-Stadt would have been renamed sooner.

Trump doesn’t care about peace. Trump cares about Trump. And his mindset is reality television. He wants to be in the headlines. Hero or heel, he does not care.

Obama got the Nobel. That stings. He wants one so he can “equal” if not best the accomplishments of Obama, who openly mocked him during that White House “comedy” press gala. That personal vendetta drives him.

I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist. But they were his team so he would publicly support them. You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes. Not too dissimilar from the way the PRC sells its version of communism to its people: communism “with Chinese characteristics.”

Chances are though that he would have perished in one of the purges happening in whichever communist country he would have chosen to reside in. He would have enough clout to niggle at leadership openly about stuff going wrong and eventually be would deliver the straw that broke his camel’s back. He would be mind-holed and his legacy rectified so he wouldn’t be the lighthouse of the movement that he could only become because he died early. And he didn’t starve millions. And communism would become the thing created by the people through an arduous march and not a system dreamed up by some German philosophers.

Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.

I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.