FriendOfDeSoto

It might be helpful to know where this is.

The easiest answer regardless is become active in local politics, try to get into the municipal government, and allocate funds to building up infrastructure in your area.

I don't remember if I bought it on Google Play so I don't know if you would need to. You can though test drive it guaranteed for free if you sideload the F-Droid app store and get it from there.

I stopped using it about two years ago because it felt it took forever loading feeds and switched to Tusky, which has less functionality (e.g. no post scheduling) but loads faster, I think, and works well for my limited needs. Fedilab's menus never put me off. But I never went back.

So that's a review that needs a pinch of salt or two.

I think it is possible but not very likely. And I think scale and economic prosperity may have something to do with it. I'm thinking of Singapore, which isn't the most democratic of states but also is tiny. Monaco falls into the same category. What those two very roughly have in common is economic strength and that seems to sort of compensate for lack of democratic liberties. I would drop the theory that a state the size of other countries' cities can establish an authoritarian leadership that doesn't rely mostly on fear mongering (but probably will here or there).

I question your sense of smell.

I don't think there is any example of an autocracy in the last 125 years where the media completely resisted the establishment of the regime. The reasons there can be twofold. Media needs to make money. Not aligning your business with the strongman (or woman) spells out economic decline so blind eyes are turned until blind eyes prevail. The other reason is that most autocratic regimes don't come fully formed on the day of the coup etc. There is a period of incremental changes that can silence critics or get them to censor themselves while gaining support with the less critical part of the media (and alternatively jailing people who say something bad). Like the frog in the pot the media is stuck in the hot water. Or it jumps out into a show trial or other instrument of repression.

I would say in the days before newspapers, a power base had to be established to take over from a royal. Those were the people with power, the aristocracy. You didn't need all of them but a substantial portion. It's only since we've pulled the silver spoons out of dukes and barons, the power base has shifted to include people who didn't just inherit a title and most of the shire. That, I would say naturally, includes selfmade industrialists as well as selfmade media moguls. They have become a necessity today when it was much less important before (or much easier to control the narrative with fewer resources). Additionally, as any revolutionary will tell you these days, you have to of course capture the broadcasters with military might if you can. But even that will seem quaint soon when all you'll need is an online media presence that you can control 100%. Trump shows us that way.

Tl;DR? It used to be possible. But we are in a transition period from a time when having the media on your side was a necessity to where you can easily create your own media to drown out the establishment voices and that might do the trick.

The Cory Doctorow cycle of enshitification starts with a focus on users, giving them exactly what they want. With a strong user base behind them they then pivot to business customers, advertisers, and the like. And then they turn in on themselves, only looking for shareholder value, and leave the tied up users and the B2B side in the lurch. It's a business process, during which a social media site's offerings would decrease in quality. But not every drop in quality is enshitification. A sudden burst of new users, an unforeseen bug in the software, a terrible event in the real world, a scandal behind the scenes can all affect the public's opinion negatively.

I don't think every social media platform is doomed to play through the e-cycle. The moment you remove the need for or drastically limit the patronage of B2B customers in the organization, you remove one crucial element from the equation. The same happens if you remove the need to create earnings growth, i.e. not become a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That's why federated social media can probably only turn to shit because of the people who use it and not because a boardroom somewhere decided to squeeze the last bit of juice out of that lemon. That's just life then but not per se enshitification.

So I think Facebook and Insta are good examples of enshitification. Reddit to an extent also. Twitter I think was a different story. It never got beyond a point where it was just great for the users. They didn't make enough money from advertisers. They didn't then turn their attention solely to their share prices with any success. They saw a sucker who was gonna pay billions for it and parachuted out. Twitter then became shit but because of its new owner, not because of this business cycle.

We tend to look at everything with nostalgia. Was the past not more fun? We cannot be trusted to judge this dispassionately.

You probably don't. Those tummy acids are strong. I would wipe the surface with soap. Maybe submerge them in water if you can immediately place them in direct sunlight afterwards to dry them out again. Wipe surface again and hope for the best. I would water an un-vomited-upon Birk along with the offender, maybe not in the same sink water, to wear them out equally.

You're trying to apply conventional logic to the orange one. That doesn't work. Stop doing that. It's all about his frail ego, flooding the zone with bs, denying everything and never giving in, and blaming everybody else for stuff he's done.

And just to give the poor, battered, beleaguered, ever-so-stable leader a break, there are sea lanes and flight routes available to the cartels as well. They didn't have to go through the US (but probably did).

Yes. Europeans have been enjoying a bed that was made for them in this area as part of a security package that came into existence after WW2. They didn't have to invest in intelligence as much because they had it delivered to their doors. If that delivery system stops, they will have to replace it. They can do that.

I wouldn't be surprised if at EU level (+UK) we will see a lot of unified defense initiatives that mention in a subordinated clause that intelligence coordinating and sharing will be part of that as well.

The most famous fountain for coin tossing/wish making is Trevi in Rome (and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole concept came from there). You are legally forbidden from taking money back out of it there. The moment the coin sinks into the water, it belongs to the municipality, so taking it back out constitutes theft. The municipality is allowed (and indeed forced) to clear the coins from the fountain (otherwise there would be no water left after a while) and AFAIK they donate the cash for a good cause.

Was it all building to this?

Just for some German context: the Nazi salute is not covered by any freedom of expression or opinion in a political context. What Elon did on stage would have landed him in a German court. Similar restrictions apply to displaying certain symbols, e.g. the swastika. German cops are legally required to intervene when they see them in public.

I don't know the video in question, I don't know if the cops overreacted - a reaction was required though.