At least you can be sure that Germans won't "adopt" them, e.g. you can often read "the german architect Hundertwasser" or "the german author Kafka" :-/
On the other side: most classic composers are from times when there was no Germany. E.g. J. S. Bach is from Sachsen-Eisenach :-)
> This push on every wall is pressure, and we will measure it in atmospheres, multiples of the ordinary pressure of the air around us.
No, don't do that. Because the pressure of the atmosphere isn't constant. It varies with weather and how high you are.
Instead use Pascal (Pa) or Hectopascal (hPA). I really pays back to use SI units for physical things. Suddenly you have formulas without weird constants, like 1 Pa = 1 N/m^2
It's a sad thing that new articles still propose units that are (since many, many years) outdated: the metric system is from 1793, the SI is from 1960.
BACK then people didn't knew better and used the varying atmosphere as base. But today ?!?!?
Well, I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is. Basically everyone has some idea, see how often many different people here on HN comment "this is pure slop".
Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.
Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.
But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.
And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.
There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
The thing is that a society does not always do only ONE thing. You mentioned that there are better ways to protect kids. But maybe they cost more (e.g. banning firearms is dead cheap, while setting up a structure with lots of psychologists specialized in teenager problems is really expensive).
Also you can do one and the other ... at the same time. E.g. suicides of kids/teenagers (<= 19) in Germany in 2025: 216. That is, compared to the population in this age group, 1.38 per 100'000. In the USA that ratio is 9.4 in the age-group 15-19 and 2.3 in the age group 10-14.
And keep in mind, the total deaths by firearms in Germany in 2024 was "just" 168 (we have 1/4th of the US population, in the US police forces alone killed more people ... the total number of 44'000 firearms deaths in USA/2024 is even more staggering). Even if I multiply the 168 by 4 for the population difference ... then 672 vs. 44'000 is still a point of shame for the USA.
So in Germany, we do BOTH better regarding firearms AND regarding health services on kids. And if the USA truly would try MAGA they'd actually copy good results from other countries. So a real-MAGA-person must be against liberal firearms distribution AND for better social health work with teenagers.
BTW, the USA ideology of "the population needs arms to fight a corrupt state" is laughable. When you had your armed religious sects clash with the state, then the state always won. They still have more and better weapons and armor. On the other side, if you look how east-europe shed off their socialist regimes 40 years ago, than nowhere was an armed general population involved. So one can conclude that private firearms may as well be highly regulated and diminshed.
> maybe there’s a bunch of Python code running inside a transaction
Basically, this article has no substance. The author didn't bother to learn anything, didn't look things up. And is then wildly guessing, sometimes wrong.
This is BTW the reason why (as a Debian user) if I search something Linux related and a Ubuntu forum pops up, I don't even open that anymore. Sure, Ubuntu is similar to Debian, but the amount of wrong guessworks in these forums is hefty. I however usually open the Arch Wiki pages, despite Arch very != Debian. But the articles there are written by knowledgeable people.
Requires no technical understanding. At least not more than e.g. a WIFI router.
> devices randomly disconnect for hours even when they are 2ft from the coordinator,
You present this like a fact. But it is at most an anecdote. I present you a different anecdote: I have ~30 zigbee devices, in two different houses (first a house with concrete floors and cellar and level 1..3) and now one old woodwork structure house with 2 floors. Nowhere did I had even half an hour of disconnection.
> all around-horrible
... excellent experience even for my ex-spouse, which is/was non-techie.
However, that you present Zigbee here at all is weird. Zigbee doesn't have any way to transport a camera stream. It's mean for low-powered battery devices. My temperature sensors got a 1500mAh AAA chargeable batteries and they lasts now for over one year. Note that I have sensors from ~ 15 different brands. Mostly battery powered sensors and mains power switchable plugs.
I also enjoy that these Zigbee devices are by design completely disconnected from any IP traffic. This, and their (intentional) low data rate make them almost impossible to misuse. E.g. as denial-of-service originators or amplifiers.
It's like you present WIFI as long-range thingy but actually you'd want LORA for that. I'm not assuming that knowing for what kind of usage a tech was designed as "needing technical understanding". After all, no one would claim "you need technical understanding" to know that you better use a truck instead of a Porsche Cayman to transport 50 cubic meters of sand.
> I think we should default to "information control is bad"
I actually don't. I live in a country that was twice wholly or partially under a dictatorship (Germany, once "3rd Reich", and once the socialist eastern part). Both governments tried to control political information ... and quite successfully so. So from that point of view I should be against what you call "information control".
However, I'm not really naive, because things can also go the other way. Both dictatorships also used heavily propaganda. Carefully fabricated lies, if you so will. In Germany, we now have a paragraph "§130 Volksverhetzung" -> instigation of people. So if someone comes around and say "They Jews poisoned the wells" (or modern variants of it) ... then you might say "Let them say this, we don't want information control!". But I say that there are enough dumb people that actually listen to such persons. And therefore I'm very well AGAINST a naively free flow of any "information". I think the core idea of anarchy is dumb, since people are power hungry and manipulators.
BTW, even countries that claim to be full of "freedom of speech" limit it. E.g. the USA, whose inhabitants arrogantly claim they are the epitome of freedom of the world ... they highly regulate sexual "information". Why is that? Partially because of religious prudism. But also partially because they think that this could harm weak people --- e.g. kids.
And here we're back to one of the core freedom idea of Germany: my freedom MUST have it's limits as it targets your freedom.
So, should I be allowed to tell lies about you in public forums, with full anonymity? Like "dTal is sleeping with kids"? Should I be able to start some slander campaign, the online form of bullying? Would you be happy to grant me this full freedom, this full flow of information control ... even if it harms you? Nope. We should protect weak people: people went into suicide because of such things.
I'd even say that things like 4chan, that don't regulate at all, are failing to reflect the interests of humans. Like e.g. the love of harmony and peace.
Na, it's just that people these days aren't that educated anymore.
A censor was a government employed entity where you had to present your text BEFORE you could publish it. Book, newspaper articles, things like. It was in heavy use in the European kingdoms and republics (e.g. during Napoleons reign).
You had no choice there: would you not censor and publish, then hefty fines would be one you. Sometimes even leading to death, e.g. look up "Der Hessische Landbote" from Georg Büchner, a tract against monarchy and feudalism.
So censorship has two keys: mandatory prior check, fines if you publish a text without that.
Moderation however is to keep your channel in a sane tone. It is something you do out of your own will, e.g. to cut down on flaming. And there is no government entity involved that checks the text in question. It is, after all, not identical to censorship.
My guess is that anarchist minded people, that (wrongly) believe that human groups develop organically in a nice way, have a problem with moderation. And then they seek some word with an extremely bad connotation and just use that instead. Just like some politicians use these days "terrorist" in plethora, even when "murder" would describe it better.
IMHO users of "censorship" term often want to manipulate us.
As if that would matter. Heck, what is even "israel friendly"? No one speaks about "french friendly" or "lithuania friendly".
In any case, you must first demonstrate that numbers from an organization you allege of being friendly to X (whatever X is) are automatically wrong.
That said: numbers on the deaths in the recent massacres are very wide ranging. The thing is that the government itself doesn't publish then. So they have to gathered by other entities. Or revealed by espionage.
In a german TV media https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/totenzahlen-iran-fak... they analyze "where do we get the 12000 dead people from" reported in January. First they list 4 human rights organizations (HRANA, HRANA, Hengaw, Amnesty International) that all reported considerably lower numbers. Keep in mind that most of these numbers aren't claimed to be correct, but to be lower bounds, e.g. HRANA said "at least 2615 civilians got killed and at least 153 security people".
Still, the article goes on and say "So where do we get the number of 12000 people". Then they tell about a Iranian TV station "Iran International". It's privately owned, sits in London. And they claim the have unpublished numbers of the Iranian Revolution/Oppression Guard (IRGC). They also say that therefore this number is difficult to verify.
Then they go on and analyze if 12000 dead people by January is unrealistic and based on dead people the see in videos they conclude that this isn't unrealistic at all.
In any case, if you don't acknowledge that even one dead person due to an oppressive criminal regime is too much because "someone is israel friendly" than I need to question your compassion.
BTW, as a German I have also other sources of quite high reported fatalities of the regime, e.g. from Red Cross or even the german government itself.
Oh, and Amnesty International also points out the cruelties the Israel government, the "settlers" and the Israel military conducts. Could be the case that there is more in the world as "100% friend" and "100% foe" ... and nothing of the cruelties of them make the cruelties of Hezbollah, Huthis or the Iranian mullah regime any better. You can't ink out one cruelty with another one.
The thing is: today (!) there is no such thing as a "german critique on Pennsylvania Dutch". Most germans aren't even aware that such a thing exists.
Also, this one citation is just anecdotal. You cannot conclude of any mainstream thinking about Pennsylvania Dutch. In the end, journalists often use items in their stories that create the highest emotions, not necessarily what reflects reality the most. So the writer of that citation might not have outright lied, but he might not reported about the general mindset about this.
Keep in mind that in 1780 germany itself was a mishmash, hundreds of counties, fiefdoms, kingdoms, self-governed city and what not. And even the language was much more a mishmash than today. Sure, Luther's work already started a bit a common way of writing. But we still didn't have some "high german" definition, e.g. no Duden. The Grimm Brothers, not only collectors of oral stories, were just 5 and 6 years old!
I guess during that time someone from Emden (very north-west) looked down at someone from Passau (very south-east) --- and the other way. Each one claiming that the other is uttering an unintelligible gibberish.
Oh, and EVEN today people from the center of Germany thing that speaking a strong german dialect (e.g. Bavarian, Swabian, Saxonian) correlates generally with low education / lower class. Because in THEIR region it is actually so. However, in Swabian it doesn't correlate. There was even the pun that in order to climb the carrier ranks at Mercedes or Porsche, one had to speak Swabian ...
It's really fun: I read so many propaganda on Lisp here that by now we should all be coding in it. Don't we get perhaps weekly posts like this?
But ... somehow almost everyone simply ignores this propaganda --- that's actually the way we ought to handle propaganda! Funny that it works with Lisp, but not with many political topics where it can be shown that propaganda really works.
My experience with Lisp is somewhat special-cornered. I only know Emacs-Lisp, and that not great. And for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing.
I don't know ANY other programming language that elected assembler mnemonics to be "high"-level expression: car and cdr.
While I love Emacs, they claim all the time that is has 100% discovery through build in doc. But that is only 70% true. It doesn't exist in Lisp like it does in other languages. For example, I have an association list. Now, what functions exist that uses them? I can't use the equivalent for (dir alist), alist.dir(), or use some LSP for that. I can't even look in the symbols, because operators are written like assoc or assq with not logic. And then there are either prefixes to them (rassoc) or postfixes (assoc-string).
That there is no namespace is soooo 1970. I mean, even Turbo-Pascal had namespaces.
Typechecking is nonexistant.
At least we have byte-compiling.
And note that I don't croak about the parenthesis. While I find it mildy weird that I as a human program in almost-AST, Emacs has superp support for the parenthesis. So people croaking about them just had never had a good editor IMHO.
Now, one can argue that Emacs Lisp != Common Lisp. But these propaganda articles don't tend to promote one specific Lisp, they only talk in generals. So I can apply this general principle and compare it to the tiny corner of these awful language family.
Fun fact 1: Switzerland (a major provider of GPS chips via u-blox) never signed or ratified CoCom. But they still followed it mostly, for fear of retaliation. They even had an allowance of "sell list 1 goods for up to 35 million Schweizer Franken" that they never reached, they only went up to 8 million Schweizer Franken. They however are a member of Wassenaar.
Fun fact 2: Russia is a member of Wassenaar. But I guess they now give a shit on it and give to North-Korea whatever NK wants, for all of these nice North Korean cannon fodder soldiers.
Yea, like the water in San Diego. Water tastes bad in plenty of USA. Not only due to clornination.
In in the fracking counties it isn't even drinkable.
Also note that I actually used the term "western europe" in my post. I was in UK, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Czech, Romania, Hungary, Poland ... and everywhere was tap water totally drinkable. In Mallorca (Spain) it didn't taste that nice, but it was drinkable. Germans travel a lot, and when you book a travel, you get some information about your host country. And never ever did I read "don't trink the tap water".
So of all places I've been, "tastes bad" only was once true. "Can't drink" was never true. Your "plenty if parts" is definitely hallucinated.
However, I've not been in many places in south-east and east europe, like not in Albania, Moldavia, Slowenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, the Baltics, Belarussia, Slowakia, Ukraina, Russia etc etc etc. So I have no idea on how their water is.
That is because EU is everything ... but not something homogenous entity. Living in Austria is very different to living in Spain, is different to living in Greece.
There are countries in EU where it is almost impossible to get out of public healthcare, for example. And then some like yours, where this seems to be quite common.
But I guess "rent is higher than minimum wage" isn't true for all of Spain. Spain is extremely centralized, everything is in Madrid. But if you somehow can get away with living in the middle of nowhere, then I don't expect rent to be higher than minimum wage.
These extremely expensive metropoles exist all over Europe (London, Prague, München, Madrid, Paris, ...) but also in the USA (New York, and probably 40 others).
That migth be true in some cases, but there are glaring cases there this isn't the case.
Look at the conflict on clorinated chickens between USA and EU. The USA insists on not-so-clean production environments and to get rid of the bacteria with clorine. While the EU insists on a clean-from-the-get-go approach, where clorination isn't necessary.
(Fun fact: "the customer is always rigth / drives the market" isn't applied here. The USA farmers want to export their chicken to the EU, but never ever did they consider to produce them according to what the EU standards are and what the european customers want: chicken without a clorine taste).
Or your eggs: you wash them for no real reason, That removes the protection against bacteria from the eggshell, and then you need to have a complete fridge chain towards the customer. Whereas in europe eggs aren't washed, keep their egg shell protection and don't really need to be put into the fridge. One could argue that here indeed the USA has "more strict controls" by requiring the washing phase. But this is faux security, as it worsens the product, mandating a more special handling of it.
However, things are really complex to compare. For some bacterias, e.g. Listeria monocytogenes, the US is indeed stricter (zero tolerance). Whereas the US has some "100 colony-forming units per gram". However, what is better? We know that the human body actually needs some amount of bacteria, lest our immune system isn't trained or turnes against ourselves. So it might be that a little exposition is actually tolerable --- and given that europeans have a higher live expectation than US-americans, that might actually be true.
Also the measurements is totally different. In the USA, they measure usually with a simple n=5 method, whereas europe has a n, c, m, M system based on ISO standards. That also takes in process hygiene.
"Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points" is mandatory in EU for all food, in the USA only for some (seafood, juice, meat, and poultry). So here the EU has a leg, albeit this isn't strictly bacteria related. However it relates to toxic metabolism products of bacteria and fungi.
And a fun fact: while many things in the USA differ from state to state, food hygiene in the USA doesn't. Their FDA and USDA work throughout the USA.
In the EU there is no central one for food. We have some FDA equivalent, but that is more for drugs & vaccines, not for food. And I'm not aware of something like the USDA at EU level. Instead it is usual that a EU regulation that the members agreed upon is then implemented in all member states ... and often slightly different. So any US legislation like the GPDR (and all others) have counterparts in national rights. And e.g. the german version might be slightly different to the estonian one. Thats for data protection as well as for food surveillance.
That being out of the way: drinkable water isn't really an achievement, we have it in all of western europe. Maybe even in all of europe. However, in the USA you have these places there the water is heavily poluted due to fracking. That is bad in itself. But even worse is that the political / judicial system in the USA is unable to fix this.
Being a country for 250 years is ... neither good nor bad in itself. And if you look at ancient egypt that had 4 digits here, then it is pathetic to bring this up. But also in the western world 250 years aren't that much.
Many wars ... yeah, the USA started and/or participated in many wars. More than european countries did during your lifetime. Out of my mind: Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia+Herzegovina, Irak, Irak, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya. And don't forget undeclared wars like lots of "Wedding seeking hellfire missiles" in Yemen or Somalia.
Oh, and that was just a selection. Look up Wikipedia on the full list of US wars and incidents. You'll be mind-blown how militaristic / violent they are.
And then don't forget all the coups it did in south america, I think more than 20 incidents. Or the awful Nicaraguan Contra thingy, where the USA paid death squadrons to terrorize just normal people, not just communists.
Depending on how old are you, all of the above happened during your lifetime.
Ah, and did we forget in these 250 years not about their civil war, about the enslavement of millions of people? Or of the genocide on natives? Never heard of the trail of tears perhaps?
No way the USA has a even a tiny bit more of morality on their side as other countries.
First, the EU parliament isn't a "fake" parliament. You just claimed this, without any reasoning, so I'm free to just claim the opposite. The members of this parliament are freely elected and they can decide out on their own whim, without consulting the executive. So really they are one of the 3 legs, the legislative.
However, the "EU is a fake democracy" is maybe correct.
The thing is that one should never confuse the EU with some sovereign country, like the Unites States of America. Or with a federal state like the Federal Republic of Germany. The origins of the EU aren't based in some idea of nationality. They are based in trade: how to make trade easier, how to create a common market. It's much more similar to the "Hanse" than than to a modern national state.
And as such, comparing the EU with a national state is futile.
It's actually astounding that this trade club got so many democratic institutions, like the EU parliament or the EU court of justice. A lot of other trade agreements only have fully undemocratic arbitration tribunals.
Also, "the EU cares about" is silly. The EU is a body of many members. The member states think not in unions (just think of "Visegrad members"). This list here isn't even complete:
- Council of the European Union headed by Antonia Costa
- EU Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen
- EU Parliament headed by Roberta Metsola
- European Central Bank headed by Christine Lagarde
- European Court of Auditors headed by Tony Murphy
- Court of Justice headed by ... no idea
So one part can "care" about a thing, while another part does not. One must have lived under a rock to not know how e.g. the Commission often wanted some Orwell-1984 laws, again and again, and the EU parliament or the EU court of justice dismissed them. So no, the EU isn't a uniform body. And any claim in that direction is therefore inherently false.
On the other side: most classic composers are from times when there was no Germany. E.g. J. S. Bach is from Sachsen-Eisenach :-)