Zyklon B wasn’t really an I.G. Farben product, it was developed (as a pesticide) and primarily produced by Degesch, a subsidiary of Degussa, now Evonik. I.G. Farben bought 30% of Degesch shares in 1930, increasing to 42.6% in 1936, that’s the connection. Degussa also processed tooth gold. Ultimately the people hanged at the gallows for Zyklon B were none of the producers but (aside from the ones doing the poisoning) the distributors, in particular for supplying Zyklon B without odorant. The inventor got an aquittal after sitting six years in remand.

I guess the whole Zyklon B to I.G. Farben connection is very much influenced by the high-profile process and forced breakup of the conglomerate. Judging by current evilness I’d definitely put Bayer on top. Back then as now, I guess: No, not Nazis, but profiteers without scruples: Plundering industry in conquered lands, forced labour, that’s mostly what I.G. Farben executives were sentenced for. Not guilty verdicts on the bringing Nazis to power part, being SS members, and preparing for war of aggression, though they certainly made money off producing for the war.

And then there’s the whole scheme language. With PLT Scheme’s main dialect of the language sufficiently deviating from the standard, they renamed themselves to Racket.

Because it’s not illegal to bill you extra for it.

“We don’t need a special invitation to honour the memory of the Soviet liberators and the victims of Nazism … in publicly accessible places,”

No, Nechayev, you’re Russian. Germans and, to a lesser but significant degree, EU citizens enjoy freedom of assembly and movement in Germany, everyone else is merely tolerated.

tl;dr they’re Trots. Trotsky central, in fact, I mean how nostalgic do you have to be to call yourself the “International Committee of the Fourth International” in currentyear while having like, what, 2k members world-wide.

…of course, every Trot org is Trotsky central they’re the absolute champions of splintering. Germany has at least three different Trot parties each accusing the others of being Stalinist, all are cults, and all are irrelevant. Best to just ignore them.

It’s not an agent with its own goals so in the gamedev definition, no. By calculator standards, also not. But just as a washing machine with sufficient smarts is called intelligent, so it’s, in principle, possible to call a calculator intelligent if it’s smart enough. WolframAlpha certainly qualifies. And not just the newfangled LLM-enabled stuff I used Mathematica back in the early 00s and it blew me the fuck away. That thing is certainly better at finding closed forms than me.

I don’t have a leg to stand on calling anything “barely AI” given what us gamedevs call AI. Like a 1d affine transformation playing pong.

It’s beating your ass, there, isn’t that intelligent enough for you?

well, the guys who happen across her comics should recognize that it’s a comic equivalent of TwoXChromosomes from Reddit: it’s by a woman, largely for women, and you should either skip it or read it for a glimpse of a perception you normally don’t experience, not something to argue over.

So, to cite the devil, as men should not interject in women’s spaces when misandrist tropes are being normalised there, so women should not interject in men’s spaces when men are normalising misogyny.

I don’t know about you but I don’t think that’s the solution to society’s issues. In fact, we should have a standard of both sides policing their own spaces against harmful tropes.

Well, it’s sufficient. Using larger calibres for the opening salvo would increase the risk of companies succeeding in fighting fines before court, and companies generally have some kind of creative interpretation of the law at the ready to justify what they’re doing. Fining companies into bankruptcy or out of competition for a first offence is rather hard to justify, for repeat offenders, though? Companies continuing their behaviour after having received a warning fine have no excuse, now the gloves come off otherwise you’re perceived as a paper tiger.

EU fines generally have a bad track record when it comes to stopping companies from trying to get away with stuff, but they do have an excellent track record when it comes to making them stop.

Differently put: You won’t see the EU levy another fine against Apple for this because Apple doesn’t fancy getting slapped with a 40bn fine. If your main armament is big enough all you’ll ever need is shots before the bow.

Yeah there’s a couple of millennial shitheads but all in all, and especially in comparison, we’re the goat. Not trying to put anyone down or such just stating facts.

I don’t doubt the possibility but current AI tech, no.

Oh this is beautiful and reinforces the result that actual AGI will have to be able to develop its own encodings. In the sense of rather yellowstone relying on a fixed network creating a mapping, decide on a network to create mappings that make sense. Here’s the whole system-theoretical background, papers at the bottom.

Crimea voted for independence from the USSR just as other oblasts did. There once was an independence movement but it lost itself between “It’d actually be quite hard for such a small nation” and “Ukraine treats us fairly”. No talk but among fringes of the fringe about joining Russia. Good relations with Russia, sure, but that ship now has sailed.

…and that’s with the USSR shipping lots of Russians into Crimea over the centuries, diluting the Tatar population. They did even more of that now and those new arrivals will probably, and rightly, be considered illegal immigrants down the line, and deported. Which is mild treatment because settling in occupied territories is a war crime.

Heavily depends on whether you’re backpacking and staying at hostels or expecting all the usual vacation bells and whistles. But yes unless you become a digital nomad it’s not sustainable into adulthood, this is probably a gap year kind of thing. Saving up a couple of thousand working while in secondary education while still living with parents can get you quite a ways.

Also, there’s still tradespeople going on journey, with actual work visas. Tough luck doing such a thing abroad without a guild with the right contacts into state structures, staying within the EU is significantly easier.

Because every regular citizen who owns their house or appartment will lose half their wealth or more when the housing market goes down.

Which is of no consequence when you’re living in it.

The limiting factor is not construction crews but plots and approvals.

[citation needed]. There’s plenty of land left and right, it’s almost trivial to re-designate agricultural land as residental, but who the fuck is going to build all the streets, tram line, all the houses. A stroke of a pen on the one side, actual training and logistics on the other.

The problem is that the market is supposed to stay high.

It’s not. Unless you’re someone with multiple properties trying to profit off it, then you want it to raise. Otherwise, everyone benefits from low prices.

As you can imagine the populist right would rather work together with the far right than with the populist left

Ah fuck it let’s give the Churches money to build apartments, then. They don’t believe in anything anyway so let’s just capture a vague sense of conservativeness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network

It’s an umbrella organisation for neoliberal thinktanks coming up with such brilliant takes as the nanny-state rating where you’re getting freedom demerits for taxing tobacco. They’re also the ones (well, the UK branch is) behind Brexit, due to incoming EU regulations on tax havens.

Anything connected to the Atlas network too, please, while we’re at it.

It’s not entirely unwarranted, they WERE planning to work on a tourist-visa

[citation needed]

They said they wanted to travel spontaneously. That is, they had their first hotel booked, then would’ve booked another hotel, or left the states early.

Maybe Americans just don’t understand travel that’s not an organised five-day trip.