Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.

I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).

Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.

You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.

(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)

Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.

IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

Just live in a country which refuses to acknowledge cell broadcast exists, then you’ll die in peaceful silence in the next national emergency while operators take several hours to to send 11 million unicast SMS.

Taps forehead

In 2022 she announced she was diagnosed with a neurological disorder (SPS) and hasn’t performed in public in 4 years. She delivered such an incredible vocal performance against all expectations.

Neither are a problem in the European countries that I’m aware of yet young voter turnout is catastrophic there as well. Some parties definitely have a hard anti-Israel line. I’d be happy to see a counterexample but I think only bitter disappointment lays ahead.

Young people are increasingly disengaged from the “traditional” democratic process, globally. Less voter turnout, but also way less participation in traditional politics (which 25 year olds have a party membership card anymore?)

Interestingly though, Gen Z isn’t necessarily politically inactive; they are still being activists, engaging in political discourse, and are donating a larger average percentage of their income than Gen X/Y IIRC.

That’s not to excuse the extremely shortsighted decision not to vote, but the problem is a lot larger than some practical barriers. I truly think there are strong and multifaceted cultural elements to the youths increasingly not responding to the traditional representative democratic systems in the way that generations who grew up on TV did. Gerrymandering is bad, but don’t expect a hypothetical fix to bring zoomers to the voting centers.

The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

You: Nooooooo it’s religious!

The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we’ve always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.

Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn’t pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

To complain about “religious persecution” of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is… certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.

Uh, they originally weren’t paid. They were paid for.

There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

The kind that rails on “anti authoritarianism”? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of “authoritarianism” that is somehow compatible with democracy?

I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.

Please, go ahead and develop. What part of my comment leads you to believe that?

Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.

What kind of non-agile bottom-up software projects have you experienced? Bottom-up waterfall? I guess it’s possible in theory but that would be a sight to behold.

My only point is that in most situations, upper management are fools that should be left to their devices and should never get a say in development methodologies. By definition if upper management imposes Scrum, it’s a self-defeating prophecy.

Your average tech company should be somewhere in the bottom-right, but bad managers are trying to pull the needle upwards to justify their existence or make up for their incompetence. But they still call that “Agile” (which can be true by some definitions of the word) or “Scrum” (which that isn’t, by definition).

Good software does not come out of companies without a bottom-up approach to software development. Top-down approaches are either terrible or extremely expensive.

Agile development is something that at my company we fought for, not against. It’s literally impossible to fight against actual agile development since it has to come from the workers. Agile is not scrum, and neither are a collection of ceremonies. It’s just a framework to give agency to developers.

Scrum is not the be-all end-all, but in organizations that cannot implement scrum effectively, no system could hope to achieve anything meaningful either.

Scrum aims at empowering workers to remove power from clueless MBAs and meritless CEOs, if they don’t want to play ball then the idiocracy will win every time regardless.

I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.