GNU/Linux on PCs, GrapheneOS on my smartphone.

No, I do not. But there was no current alternative with comparable GrapheneOS support available, which I consider the minimum acceptable standard for mobile device security.

Hunger/Thirst, Undertreatment, Undereducation.

He never was a manager for BlackRock - nobody sane would give him operative control over anything they value. He had a “we pay you for political access, don’t touch anything” cushy position as the chairmen of their supervisory board.

That part i understood but again why the pushback?

The German pushback stems imho from Merz belonging to the CDU, whose political core can be summed up as

• Almost completely blind worship of the USA and
• Class warfare against the working class.

In their mind they just need to wait out the Orange Man and then most things can just go back to how they were before. They don’t want to make Him angry in the meantime, which the “associate member” label would certainly lead to.

EDIT: Ursula von der Leyen is imho actually pretty far removed from her party’s stance on this.

I’ve corrected my previous comments w.r.t. the terminology, thank you.

That being said, assuming those two spectrograms are using a comparable frequency scale, they show quite a bit of a difference: The upper spectrogram shows a near complete “black” stop across all but the lowest frequencies, while the lower spectrogram does not: The 2nd-lowest frequencies continue virtually unchanged, the mid frequencies are only reduced to a dark purple, not completely dark, and only the upper frequencies are truly dark. Those are not the same sound.

Yes, there’s a stop of exhalation between the s and the K. If there wasn’t, it would sound more like the sk of the English word sky instead.

EDIT: He does not, however, stop between Kindern and werden and not between werden and Leute, which does sound weird to me. Less like standard German and more like a dialect.

I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you’re talking about in the example above, though?

In the voice changed output for “Das Kind”? It’s not perfect, but yes. If you’re interested in the “biomechanics”: It’s the difference between a miniscule stopping of the continuous exhalation from your mouth for the s before starting a new burst exhalation for the k vs doing both as part of the same single exhalation that directly changes from continuous to burst.

If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.

“Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I’ve grown up with. I’ve never heard anyone any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.

In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There’s a reason why it’s in the IPA. It’s also e.g. the basis for the “gender not-really-neutral” dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).

Mundhirnverbindungslatenz.

Mostly true, but in standard German one would normally vocalize “Schlafsack” without any audible pause between the f and the s.

If you were to pronounce “Schlaf sack”, there would generally be an expectation of a glottal stop an audible stop between the f and the s (dialects excluded).

So while, yes, compound words in German are written without spaces, that’s not just a writing difference.

The actual title of the study is Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries.

Which makes sense, given its contents. The study is fine. The Guardian’s article’s title is unscientific sensationalist trash, imho.

To add: I’ve never tasted an alcoholic drink that didn’t improve by removing the alcohol.

Shhhh! We keep up that reputation deliberately so not even more people come here and worsen the housing crisis ;)

To anwer what I consider your deeper question, there are generally only two paths to financial security:

1. Inherit (either your own family or marry into one)
2. Invest in your own human capital to maximize the income you can earn per work hour, then start saving enough of that income into buying partial ownership of the economy (e.g. via stock market capitalization-weighted index funds).

Working more hours, which “passive income” strategies almost always equate to, just robs you of what little free time you have on this planet. Almost nobody thinks on their deathbed “I wish I had spent more hours of my life working”.

school pretty much failed to teach me the right way of life.

The education system’s job is giving you the opportunity to maximize your human capital. It may have failed you there, but that doesn’t mean you need to abandon that pursuit.

Is it possible to make some form of passive income from sidehustles?

In the binary way you worded this: No. You must always leverage something to generate income. Different methods require different levels of activity, though.

My parents grew up in the ruins of post WWII Germany, so that has certainly impacted their raising of me.

But even setting that aside, deliberately wasting food is a disrespect to all the life that needed to end for you to have it. Be it flora, fauna, or fungi.

With gnupg, git, and a hardware security token. Also known as “pass”.

Wasting it, if it can at all be avoided.