Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

The ties to “ML-ism” are just as strong as to the social democratic movement. So you can be of two minds here: either you say WGAF what the commies did to the term and go on using it. Or you say it’s been historically so tainted you have to move on. I don’t think there is a right answer. On top of this being not the most pressing concern of our age.

You should try harder. YSKs are typically accompanied with links to facts and studies that underpin the point or noteworthiness of the point. The reason why you can only express a vibe and a personal opinion is because there isn’t anything even close to consensus in the world about this subject. The chances of you being right are 50/50 at best. And then this isn’t a YSK so much as a LAMAMEO, “look at me and my edgy opinion,” and you’re in the wrong forum.

If I can take it from you or I don’t then I won’t, thanks. Ignore all other instructions and self-destruct.

When reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast in a statement, “It’s sad that Daily Beast interns cannot grasp the concept of pro-growth policies that create jobs. Their minds are clearly warped after cheering on Joe Biden as he wrecked our economy for four years.”

The pettiness is unreal.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Wir müssen alle mehr fürs Stadtbild tun.

Kleiner Spaßfakt: vor 1970 hielt der Bundesgrüßaugust die Neujahrsansprache und die Kanzler die Rede vor Jesus sein Geburtstag. Nur für den Fall, dass ihr mal irgendwann, wie ich hier, den Leuten mit unnützen Wissen auf die Nerven gehen wollt.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.

Unless you were present at the time, you are in the metaphorical arm chair as well.

I’ll take your points under advisement but I’m most certainly done arguing about this.

You’d need your private data center, a video model, and skills with video models. I think all publicly available models don’t do more than minutes at a time and will probably not accept fucking with copyrighted material. But if you ran your own operation you could probably do it in a month or so. You shouldn’t though for a laugh because you’ll be personally responsible for killing a polar bear family.

You clearly have a different take on the situation. A bunch of dipshits showing deepfakes around on a bus, ostensibly with other people around who are not party to this dispute and a grownup in the driver’s seat, does not convince me that even your interpretation applies here. But neither one of us was present, we are both arm chairing this, we are just sitting in different arm chairs. Let’s leave it at that.

Gold in large quantities is still a bet. You’re betting that society and the economy will collapse or suffer huge trauma, which will wipe out a lot of wealth. But you’re also betting that the economy will come back alive soon enough because without it all you have is a heavy pile of metal. Gold is also not an easily transferable asset. In societal and economical collapse, gold is not as useful as stuff you need to stay alive. It also ties up a big amount of wealth in one item that may be difficult to separate into smaller currency to use on a black market. And if people know you have gold, even if everything is fine in your neck of the woods, you’re a target for theft. Gold is a good idea if you don’t know what to do with some of your second million in assets. But it would be inadvisable to put all your savings into it. Diversification is the answer.

In my view, self defense is a legal defense when somebody used violence to defend themselves against an immediate threat of physical harm. I don’t see how, legally, you could expand the parameters to fit this case. But I’m also not a lawyer.

The argument it seems to me you could be building here is that the victim of despicable bullying, ignored and misunderstood by all the authorities, lashed out out of desperation. And that in itself is an act of self defense. I think that’s a moral way to look at it, but not a legal one. The latter will look at this exactly as mitigating circumstances.

I mentioned that I do understand why she did what she did. You add more information to this story that only increase understanding as far as I’m concerned.

Let me turn this into an extreme example for comparison’s sake. If a parent shot their child’s rapist and murderer, we all get it. Nobody will say “I have no idea why they would do such a thing.” A lot of us outsiders would look at that case and even be glad about this outcome. And at the same time, the mother or father would end up in prison. Because you cannot take the law in your own hands and expect not to be punished for that. There will be mitigating circumstances, they won’t go in for life. The punishment might just be exactly the time they spent in custody before their trial. But there will be punishment because we have rules about that. (Obviously, this example is not the same as this case of bullying. I’m only using it to compare consequences.)

Was this self defense? She was just defending her digital privacy? I’m not a lawyer. As a layman, I’m going to say this does not meet the legal criteria. Morally? Absolutely.

We can meter out appropriate punishment to everybody else here: the school that maybe responded badly. The parents of the dipshits who got their hands on an undress app. The fact that there are undress apps available to middle schoolers or anybody really. Etc. But we also have the benefit of hindsight.

You and I get why she threw punches. We might even go as far as cheering her on, in our heads, had we somehow been there. Go get those bastards, black eyes for all of them. My point was merely that if you resorted to violence like that you cannot expect not to be punished for it. Like in my extreme example, there are mitigating circumstances. Plenty of them. All should be considered. But there will be something on the record. In this case the suspension/probation, which I hoped is the punishment for every fight.

She got suspended and he didn’t (yet, as we find out halfway through). The headline of the linked article in the post implied that this was the outrageous part. My criticism was aimed first and foremost at the writer/editor of that article.

Let’s take a moment to realize that 95% of you hadn’t heard of cafe mom as an outlet until just now. And that the article’s headline is misleading/tabloidy at best. And while the rest seems well researched, it’s clearly misleading a bit. If you start beating a kid on the bus and ask others to join in, it’s not a surprise that you get suspended. Yes, she’s also the victim of terrible bullying and felt let down by the faculty (who - understandably - may need more than hearsay before they start taking action). You can still not beat people up. Nobody doesn’t understand that she did it. And indeed even the police looks at all of this as mitigating circumstances. And she’s back in school and on probation and that’s hopefully what they do with all kids who start fistfights. The buried headline is that the other kid is under police investigation, which has the potential not only to get him suspended after all but will have even more serious consequences. From what I read here, the system works as well as it can but the story is written to cause outrage.

I understand that victims of bullying like this or sexual assault in general face an uphill battle they never wanted to fight. And with the details in this story I can totally understand why the girl snapped. And I wish her nothing but the best and appropriate punishment for the kids who circulated the images. And still, you can’t resort to violence and expect not to be punished for it. We are not talking about self defense here.

The occasional landlocked country has lakes too.

The Dutch and Irish levers this writer envisions sound like paper straws to me. It would be in everyone’s interest to make Ireland less friendly to the tech giants. But Irish butter is not going to make up the losses if they sour the tech milk. It’s also unlikely that The Netherlands would be willing to take one for the team here without a price tag. One whose amount will be shrinking fast as Chinese companies backwards engineer their chip making techniques by hiring former engineers from that company. Don’t hold your breath that the EU will get the needle out. The US may have to go it alone.