Sounds really cool! Concert films in the cinema is an incredibly underrated format - of course nothing compares to the real thing, but cinema is capable of capturing a lot of the energy and the music tends to sound as good as a concert hall and better than a stadium. Adding 3D to the mix sounds like great fun, unlike with ordinary cinema where it’s arguably a complete gimmick.

Thanks for the review!

It has been different from instance to instance at least for a while. I think maybe it’s a local setting in Mastodon on how to handle long form content.

Investors tend to be rich, they’ll manage. Who ends up suffering is people who recently bought a home and are knee deep in debt once the economy tanks and everything goes to shit. If they can’t service their loans and they live in a country that doesn’t give a fuck they’ll be thrown on the street, and suddenly you have a homelessness crisis where the only thing people did wrong was to attempt to have a life. Meanwhile the people behind the AI bubble will just install taller fences around their private islands and face no worse consequences than that of being even more hated than they already are.

It fails to capture the difference between a conservative German not approving of Merz because he’s a bit of a dull bore and a marginalized American disapproving of Trump because his rule is literally threatening their life. You won’t see no king protests against Merz. He is not so unpopular that he might realistically put an end to Germany as we know it.

It doesn’t show that threatening the entire working class will make you lose elections. It doesn’t have a class dimension at all, it just says how many people actively like their leaders in a handful of countries. Neither Macron nor Merz were particularly popular when they were last elected, they are just strategically positioned within their political systems.

It measures what it measures. We have seen again and again that leaders can be democratically elected and re-elected while fucking over the working class.

US President Donald Trump ranked just ahead of Erdoğan in 10th place from the bottom, despite launching military operations in Iran. Some 38% of Americans said they were satisfied with his work, while 57% were dissatisfied.

If the survey was to indicate anything, it’d be that Germans, unlike Americans, are not absolute tools.

Nobody approves of Merz, but few people disapprove of him as much as reasonable people disapprove of figures like Modi and Trump.

This is measured as the percentage of the population in the country who disapproves of the leader. So Trump comes out alright because a bunch of Americans still approve of him. That doesn’t really reflect badly on Merz. It reflects badly on America.

That said, if Merz started saying he would deport non-ethnic Germans or some shit like that his approval might grow by this standard because he would at least have some sort of base. Right now he appeals to nobody.

So in short, it’s a bit of a shit indicator.

The survey is conducted by Morning Consult, who received $31 million in funding from James Murdoch in 2020 and another $60 million from some group named Advance Venture Partners in 2021. I don’t think they do bullshit research by accident.

I had missed the announcement of PineTime Pro - looks pretty promising. I’m still on the edge whether I actually want a smart watch, but having an open source watch on the market that supports GPS at least makes it a possibility. If the battery life is good it could be nice to keep a record of hiking trails.

Did the james_bond1 account post other things that were since deleted? All I see on the account is one comment that appears to be written by a human - it has a typo and is asking a question rather than acting like a smartass.

I’m so tired of open source developers being treated like public persons of whom relentless criticism for any character flaw, big or small, is fully justified. I’ve been guilty of this as well.

We’re talking about a bunch of highly qualified nerds who have decided to give away their work for free. Of course many of them will have some quirks. Everybody has bad days, and on the internet a few moments of weakness will haunt you forever.

It’s of course worth keeping the questionable things in mind, but the FOSS community also needs to get better at letting people enjoy things. Most of us are only human.

I think the user you responded to misread “piracy” for “privacy”. I did too at first.

Can’t rally add anything helpful, except that if I were to do piracy I would want privacy. The way the wind is blowing it’s a matter of time before windows starts snitching on its users.

You’d think this was a safe prediction, yet here we are.

Cool! I always love keeping up with GIMP, thanks for working on it!

Apparently it was added in GIMP in 1999 to sample that bitmaps could be used as brushes, and nobody bothered to remove it. At this point I guess there would be an outrage if they did.

The SPD turned into a third way economically liberal party around the same time Tony Blair did the same to Labour in England, and they haven’t really reinvented themselves since. They’re not necessarily evil but they’re certainly not a progressive force. Infuriatingly the SPD had already won their election on a traditional social democratic platform, and just decided to change course for shits and giggles. At least Blair won an election, making the whole fuckup at least democratically rooted.

The CDU is at its core classical Christian Democrats. Their voter base is not bad people, just normal folks who are not particularly progressive but not necessarily backwards either. Remember it was Merkel from the CDU (alongside Swedish social democrats) that was the biggest proponent of humanity and solidarity when a bunch of asylum seekers arrived in 2015 - “wir schaffen das” and all that. Ironically Merkel’s biggest mistake was her softness towards Russia, which is a stereotypical fault of left wing parties…

The leadership of the CDU has taken a turn to the right since Merkel, but there’s still plenty of reasonable people within the party. And there’s plenty of fools in the SPD. I wouldn’t trust either of them to do the right thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised when they occasionally do either.

You’d think the misguided appeasement policies of German chancellors reached its extreme with Markel’s foreign policy towards Russia, but Merz is here like “hold my beer”.

I don’t think it’s because the regime in Iran is evil, but because Germany considers Israel and the US to be their allies, and they don’t want to lose their support. So it’s more like opting not to protect children against paedophiles because you’re best friends with Epstein. Not that that would ever happen…

Oops, obvisouly, was thinking about the Muslim world and getting terms mixed. Fixed.

I think the advantage is that it reads partly as a FAQ, partly as a place to read whatever commentary on the situation people seem to agree with. It’s a place where people can discuss and ask questions more generally. Other threads tend to be more about specific breaking news and developments, maybe missing the bigger picture.

All fascists need a good enemy, obliviate one and you have to move on to the next. The only end game to this bullshit is total apocalypse. Which of course is what the evangelical Christian supporters of Israel has been cheering for all along.

Iran has been a headache for a long time. Much like in America and Israel, violent religious fundamentalists took control over society and installed a reign of terror.

This has of course been bad for the Iranians, but America of course could not care less about that. However, Iran has been a major concern for Israel, as they are an unreliable an aggressive neighbour. Again, don’t let the irony get lost on you. The threat of Iran maybe managing to develop nukes has been a particularly salient issue, and perhaps one of the driving forces behind Israel getting its own nukes decades ago.

In short, Israel just cannot feel safe with the current rule in Iran. Or so the Israeli far right has insisted for decades, anyways. Keeping this fear high on the agenda has been key to winning elections and to get in place the far right genocidal lunatics currently in the Israeli government. Along with the fear of Palestinians of course.

The US is of course loyal allies of Israel as their one true friend in a region full of oil. The Saudis are of course also good friends whenever they are not actively attacking America and killing civilians or journalists, but they are not quite as good at lobbying. So American interests and Israeli interests are pretty much the same, and the Iranian regime has been the face of evil for decades. Conveniently they are also super evil, so it’s easy to make propaganda.

Recently the Iranian regime has murdered a bunch of civilians who protest the regime. The US and Israel wouldn’t usually care about dead civilians in the middle east - they certainly wouldn’t oppose it at least - but right now it provides a convenient excuse to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Trump needs this because he needs support before the upcoming election- a successful impeachment might allow the opposition to grow teeth, and if they do he could end up locked away for life.

Netanyahu is in even deeper ship than Trump, with corruption charges at home and crimes against humanity abroad. Now that his genocide in Palestine is getting old he needs something new to keep him in power.

Iran responds to attack by sending missiles towards American military bases in the area. American military bases are located in the surrounding countries, which is why you see newspaper headlines making out as if Iran is launching a war on every country in the regioun. They’re not, they’re just trying to strike back against America and Israel. Just like the Americans and Israelis they suck at hitting military targets and often end up hitting civilian ones instead.