SPEAK

I mean if one reads his stuff it’s rather obvious he must have had a German governess.

From their early childhood the Wilde boys had a French nanny and a German governess, so that they grew up speaking German as well as French.

Beiguß: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781351198714-3/oscar-wilde-germany-germany-oscar-wilde-patrick-bridgwater

TIL about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. From Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Oddly enough, this guy Wolfram Weimer is a die-hard right-winger. So I was quite flabbergasted when I first read the headline, and still am doubting whether he really intends to follow through with this or rather is only floating this idea in order to introduce another bargaining chip in the trade negotiations with Trump.

For a simple distraction-free control via Linux’s command line, you can install mpg123 and add the following script files to /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/:

/usr/local/bin/soma:

#! /usr/bin/bash
kill $(pgrep mpg123)
mpg123 -@ http://somafm.com/nossl/$1.pls

/usr/local/bin/somaoff:

#! /usr/bin/bash
kill $(pgrep mpg123)

Make them executable for everyone by running sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/soma /usr/local/bin/somaoff.

You can now run from your console (or from KRunner on KDE, or via :sh from within helix):

# Tune into station "Lush"
soma lush 
# Turn Soma off
somaoff

Works fine from a tty as well, even with bluetooth on my OpenSUSE at least.

The specific station names to enter after soma are the ones in the URL of each station’s webpage, e.g. “folkfwd” for Folk Forward, as its URL is https://somafm.com/folkfwd/.

Corporations hate this trick.

AI incorporates the biases of its training data…

The last paragraph does address his motive:

Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above.

Interesting question. This is what I found.

What happened to the shaggy-haired freedom fighter, many asked [in 2015], and why has he taken a sharp right turn? But that is the wrong question, shaped by Western liberals’ erroneous expectations of post-communist central Europe. A better question is, why wouldn’t he?

(…)

He graduated [from law school] in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group, which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz. The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media. They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists. They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.

In the early 1990s, Orban decided to reinvent the party as a conservative and moderately nationalist movement. Many of Fidesz’s original members left in disgust. Others stayed loyal and were rewarded with ministerial posts in the first Fidesz government from 1998 to 2002. That laid the groundwork for Orban’s later slide toward centralizing political and economic power. It was based, say those who know him, on two pillars: ideology and electoral mathematics.

Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above. Nationalism, and increasingly, populism, provided the ideological underpinnings. The left of the country’s political spectrum was crowded with liberals and socialists of the post-communist variety. There was a large gap on the right, where, it is now clear, a majority of Hungarians naturally sympathize.

“The facility will open in 2028 in Saint Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana, a French overseas territory situated north of Brazil, Mr Darmanin told the JDD weekly.”

Interesting, and concerning, that this is an article by the dominant German news agency DPA. The clarification that it’s about members from the BSW, rather than Die Linke, first appears in the third paragraph of the text.

I bought a T5xx-Thinkpad from nbwn.de (=notebookswieneu.eu) many years ago. It was an extremely good purchase. They ship to the entire EU for free if your order is above 200€. They specialize in selling demonstration laptops, i.e. devices that companies tried out and then returned, so they are essentially new.

However, I highly recommend to wait for the Windows 10 EOL to really hit around winter time, because then thousands if not millions of used and unused laptops that are sorted out for not supporting Windows 11 will flood the market. (Even if you’re aiming to buy a laptop so new that it will probably also support Windows 11, the flood of older devices could well bring down the prices for such newer devices also.)

Obligatory reminder to all Linux users to help every Windows user interested in switching.

Not telling people is a heck of a lot different from being about to blow the whistle on a major corporation and telling people “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”.

I suspect though that there are already a lot of applicants, given that Ireland is the only remaining country in the EU that has English as its main language, so the competition may be especially hard. But that’s not to say it’s impossible.

Generally speaking, the best bet is French due to the large community of speakers (including also Belgium, Luxemburg and Québec), the relative ease of getting French to a usable level, and its usefulness and sought-afterness even outside of francophone countries. Next up would be German with its even larger community of speakers in Europe and economic relevance but higher difficulty. Third I’d say is Spanish, since learning it will also make Italian intelligible to you.

If things get worse in the US, some people who are affected particularly gravely (e.g. trans people) might even be eligible for asylum, which would remove the language requirements (but I’m only speculating here).

Whether language proficiency is needed beforehand depends a lot on the precise European country (and on the profession(s) OP would like to work in, and on what other skills they possess).

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