FriendOfDeSoto

I see your point. I was thinking about fining just the assholes who obstruct sidewalks beyond the tolerated minimum. I think there is a middle way to make that work and maybe even turn a profit. But that’s not a great additional argument from me. It might need a federal regulation change. They could introduce a hefty fine for parking in such a manner that a wheelchair user could not safely use the sidewalk as a result. One can dream.

I don’t follow your relaxed law logic. The law was not enforced before and would be more tightly enforced under this plan.

I would argue the space on the sidewalk has already been reduced and this plan would just limit punishment to those who truly deserve it. And if this is policy it should include the staff hours for parking inspectors. They could take note of areas where sidewalk parking often reduces space to below 1.6m and then have bollards or other barriers installed in these hotspots.

And, as I’ve also already mentioned, there should be more policies to encourage giving up on car ownership. I suggested free public transport for former car owners. New developments should include the need to build its own parking faculties on the property. Parking fees should be raised slowly but steadily. Resident parking only schemes could maybe push visitors to the area into public transport. There are more tools in that toolbox.

BTW I’m not a fan of this plan. My sense of what is possible, i.e. politics, just forces me to grudgingly accept this as a compromise. If you reduce the space for parking, say, by planting trees or other physical obstacles (which will probably cost more than this), you’ll be voted out. Politicians are more pragmatists than idealists. Nobody will stay in office long with radical anti car policies - as much as I would personally support that.

In the context of small Munich alleys where space is scarce, where exactly should they build additional bicycle lanes that can be used by fire trucks? The shining examples of fuck cars infrastructure like Amsterdam and Copenhagen tend to be on flat land or the great infrastructure doesn’t actually extend into the narrow capillary alleys that have been around since the middle ages. They also took decades to implement policies in increments to get to where they are. Munich is in my estimation probably at least a decade behind that.

Germans love a rule, love pea counting, and they will measure.

Your insane argument doesn’t quite work for me when the mutual benefit of the practice was to provide ample space for fire trucks and ambulances on the roads. This is not a matter of the city just not giving a shit. They weighed their options.

Another aspect that wasn’t touched upon in the article will also play into this: parking fines are a great way to get money into the city coffers. So it will probably pay off to get members of the Ordnungsamt - or the office of public order - who handle these things out in force armed with a tape measure and a camera and chi-ching for Munich’s revenue.

Two things: this is an accepted practice all over the country and the traffic code has its own traffic sign for it when it is permitted. And the suggested amendment would only make it legal in situations where there would remain 1.6m of space for pedestrians, wheelchair users, and strollers. So the car parked in the image would remain illegally parked.

Munich has made a mistake of tacitly allowing this parking practice in areas where there isn’t enough space, motivated by keeping roads accessible to first responders, which is not nothing. They have clearly made a mistake if everybody still owns a car when there s above average public transport. And people will still park like assholes. Under these plans (they haven’t been approved yet according to the article), the assholes could be punished though. It would just not give fines out to everybody. This is a compromise solution in a bad situation.

I would amend the plans in two areas: the grumpy people of Munich should be allowed to smear dogshit legally on every car that doesn’t leave 1.6m of space on the sidewalk (the article mentions a similar occurrence). And giving up car ownership should be rewarded with free public transport for a suitable amount of time.

Trusting judges is not uniquely American. You’ll find similar processes on the continent across the channel. The hurdles of who can sue and under which circumstances may differ. The appointment of judges is often less politicized. I think the UK is the unique case here and I believe that’s because by and large there isn’t a written constitution, at the very least not in the same way as in the US or France or Poland. Supreme courts are there as a check on whether or not laws conform to constitutional values and have the power to overrule a legislature when it passes laws that don’t. It’s not an “upper hand” deal, it’s checks and balances.

The American legal system is not great. I don’t know the details of the case you mentioned. One bad decision doesn’t mean the whole system needs to be abolished. If that were so I’d like to have a word with the UK’s highest court on what constitutes a woman.

Which part is infuriating here? The law that will be difficult to enforce and probably has all sorts of unintended side effects? Or that lawyers, and indeed layers funded by big internet companies, are suing?

Fundamentally, let them sue. Not everything coming out of the legislatures the world over is pristine law and this is how the system can correct for mistakes. Also, I’m sadly more on the side of the Googles and the Metas. Their freedom of speech argument is entirely self serving but that doesn’t make it wrong. Any age verification has itself a chilling effect on speech online. Forcing it creates more data sets to be leaked and hacked and in this case of minors’ information, not grownups’ who can make an educated decision if they want to go through with it to go watch porn. This is not a clear case of mild infuriation.

Is it porn the deceased spouse created or is it porn the widow created with the deceased husband’s likeness? And which would indeed be sadder?

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.

I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.

I don’t think this is genetic though. Critical thinking is something you should learn how to do. It’s a failure due to chronic underfunding in education.

I do agree with you that the people who can do it, often despair and withdraw from public discourse out of frustration. But they could be making babies like rabbits at the same time.

Can we please stop paying attention to what this Nazi saluting man baby is saying?

God is surprisingly versatile in the good book. Old testament god is totally judgy and throws a plague of locusts at you. Or a flood if you wear the wrong fabric or something like that. Hissy fits to the hilt.

New testament, so Jesus-story god is more chill. He only kills his own son to make a point. Father of the year material.

Now, a lot of this stuff is open to interpretation. One might argue I have interpreted stuff in the preceding two paragraphs as well. I wouldn’t argue against that and I’m not going to get drawn into a biblical discussion because I really don’t care. I am a lapsed Lutheran protestant and the Jesus they tried to teach me about wouldn’t have given a fuck about your sexuality. So if fake LLM Jesus says you do your thing, it ain’t my biz who you love, I’m at least inclined to believe it was programmed with a similar interpretation of the story. And while the idea of a Jesus, Mary, and God LLM chat bot is absolutely, undeniably, ridiculously ludicrous, it is almost reassuring that there must be enough training material out there to get it to give that serene a reply.

Note this is not a final ruling yet and can and probably will be appealed.

That’s a matter of opinion. I suspect a big university like that quickly spends its budget and does way more than compile a dictionary. And if spelling is all you need, that still appears to be possible in front of the paywall.

For the longest time, it wasn’t free of charge. You had to buy expensive books. I fail to see a justification for the outrage. Also considering that this thread is rife with suggestions for alternatives and more dodgy solutions.

They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.

As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?

Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?

I mean, they have to pay the bills somehow. And this shows maybe how bad financially they’re off. Before the internet, you had to buy a copy of the book. I suspect those sales fell off a cliff in the last 25 years. So I may not like this decision but I can understand it.

And as others have suggested, there are other ways to get what you need online. This is a strong atmospheric disturbance in a serving vessel for hot infused beverages.

Is this déjà-downvote I feel?

IT’LL GO PLACES WITHOUT YOU THEN. THANKS FOR PIPING UP.

I used to be more judgmental about this stuff too. Having little terrorists of my own has mellowed me. I do prefer a kid watching YouTube videos on a tablet over the kid throwing a temper tantrum at the cafe. All parents need a break. And I feel like if my parents had had the opportunity to let me watch sesame street on a handheld device in the 80s at a restaurant, they would have in a heartbeat. There were for sure other grownups heavily judging my folks for allowing me to play Tetris on the Gameboy in the 90s while we waited for our food! And I still managed to get a bachelor’s degree.

At the same time, they thought watching too much TV wouldn’t be good for you and I don’t think that has turned out the way they feared. All gamers would automatically become sociopathic killers and they didn’t. I do think “social” media has proven to be detrimental. But the internet is vaster than that BS. Most pacifying tablet use will not turn kids’ brains into a rotting mess.

And as they get older you need to have numerous talks. The sex one, the online predator one, now the weird AI/chatbot one, the one that contextualizes pornography and other disturbing shit on the internet one. And at a certain point, maybe 16 or thereabouts, you have to let go and hope for the best. They will find all this stuff anyway. You probably did as well. I know I did. The only thing that has changed is ease of availability for most of this stuff. So that’s what we need to prepare them for and then cross our fingers.

Are we elevating a find-and-replace script to the level of artificial intelligence now?