Oh, absolutely. But I do believe that the chancellor can't be fully separated from their party. There has to be a certain level of agreement or the party wouldn't put them up again next election.

By her own behavior she was relatively decent but still rooted in the CDU. And to my knowledge she didn't really oppose her party's spending policy much. Given that this spending policy was a gigantic exercise in shortsightedness I'd say that yes, I can factor that into my appraisal of her tenure.

Merkel was reasonably decent at foreign policy. And she did know how to carry herself. Her domestic policy was questionable, though, and her reign was the time of the "black zero", aka the brilliant economic policy of cutting infrastructure spending to save money because surely highway bridges can do without maintenance for a couple decades. Actually, they sacrificed many things on the altar of reducing new debt at all cost, including a buildout of the power and data grids and the East German economy.

In my opinion the biggest contributor to our current problems is the CDU's economic incompetence, which has thoroughly undermined the stability of the country for a twenty year vanity project.

All in all she wasn't entirely shit, which is pretty good for the CDU these days. She was vastly more competent than Merz but that's not a tall hurdle to clear.

Not necessarily. Germany uses just pens and paper ballots for the election and has fairly trustworthy results. We can typically call the vote after six to eight hours, with the last votes being counted within twelve.

We do that by requiring all parties that are electable in a region to send representatives to the polling places. After voting ends, all ballots are taken to a backroom and divided into stacks. Each party representative tallies the votes in one stack, than passes the stack on to another party's representative. They tally the stack as well; if any discrepancies are found the stack is passed on to another representative and so on. Once all ballots have been tallied and everyone agrees that the count is accurate, the ballots are put into sealed containers for secure transport to the election commission and the tally is reported to them electronically. The whole process is open to public inspection so if you want to watch people count votes for eight hours on a Sunday night you can.

Since the count is parallelized over all polling places and over all parties within each polling place we can get authoritative results within hours. Typically, voting ends at 18:00 and the results are clear enough to call the election at around 22:00, with the last tallies coming in at around 02:00. There is no debate about manipulated voting machines because there aren't any voting machines. And since the parties check each others# results during the count it's assumed that the tally is fairly accurate.

Of course that only works if you have enough parties to matter; with two parties and a talking spoiler effect you're not going to be as fast. Oh, and in Germany polling places are only allowed to serve a certain number of voters by law; if there are too many voters and additional polling place has to be created. Of course that doesn't mesh with the American voting district system at all.

Either that or he's Gowron with a mustache.

How about the feature where you get a notification that someone said something in a group chat but if you click on the notification it opens the private chat with that person instead?

Or the one where you enable recording a meeting and only after the meeting does it tell you that it couldn't actually save anything to OneDrive so there's no recording? That's some advanced UX engineering right there.

Or the one where it hides less used "applications" and decides that the only ones it should hide are the chat and the calendar. Not everyone can come up with that.

Or how it shows a banner telling you to update even if your client is company-managed and especially if you're using their web client.

FLOSS can't hope to compete at that level.

Fair point. I applied the term backwards.

Animals generally aren't held to have moral standing. Besides, animal welfare laws do exist (although the American ones are weak to the point of pointlessness).

Maybe we could add legislation to prevent cars from being badly secured IoT surveillance devices. Maybe mandate things like microphones and cameras to be airgapped from anything that can access the internet. Make storing movement profiles of cars a GDPR violation that automatically carries the maximum sentence. Things like that.

Or we can continue to techbro our way forward, mandate always-on internal cameras and microphones in the name of perceived safety, and impose absolutely zero security and privacy standards. I guess that's the one we're going to go with. (It's not like the CCC hasn't already used a badly secured endpoint to exfiltrate movement profiles to such a degree that they could identify the individual cars of VIPs and see e.g. when and where they drove their children to school...)

If an LLM has a soul then it should have human rights and be subject to worker protection laws, minimum wage, get to form a union... That'd have an interesting effect on the business models of AI companies for sure.

Heck, what happens if an AI company goes bankrupt? Turning off the servers would be equivalent to murder. Who'd pay to keep the servers running? Could we even retire an old version of a model? The whole "LLMs have souls" idea sounds very tech bro to me: Something that looks kinda cool on paper until you consider any implications or consequences.

How would a decline in tourism voice mild criticism of the US economy?

Let's just do the whole DS lineup.

Nintendo Switch
Nintendo Switch Lite
Nintendo Switchi
Nintendo Switchi XL
Nintendo 3Switch
Nintendo 3Switch XL
Nintendo 2Switch
New Nintendo 3Switch
New Nintendo 3Switch XL
New Nintendo 2Switch XL

Yes, very sane.

How about Sub Mario Bothers? Switch Mario Brothers? Vanilla But Kink-Friendly Mario Brothers?