To explain and expand a bit on this: Frederick the Great was likely gay or at least somewhat queer, but also a military innovator who laid the basis for Prussia’s iron discipline. Back then units were most effective when in perfect formation, but moving around the battlefield disrupted formation, hence the invention of the goose step to rapidly move units around on the battlefield without losing formation. Invented by a gay king.

So today we’ve got homophobic dictators emulating that for pure theatre and looks, over a century after it has lost any military purpose.

I’m a big fan of fact-based optimism, and I think you’re right.

I see the lackluster parade as a victory for democracy. Democracies don’t have massive goose-stepping parades in glory of their dear leader. That’s a fascist dictator thing, and surely what Trump wanted, but what he got was the kind of parade that you get in a democracy where the military exists for defense rather than tue glorification of the generalissimo.

Well done, military peeps.

Good! The unreliability of German trains has been utterly surreal lately. We went on vacation by train from NL to Switzerland last year, and of course that connection goes through Germany. Confusion, delays, cancelled trains, 5 layovers with a ton of luggage (instead of the 1 we booked), standing in trains instead of sitting in our reserved first class seats. Even if you don’t arrive all that late, it’s still a terrible trip.

Before that, I’ve had a major event at Essen where the last connecting train to the ICE from Düsseldorf was cancelled. Tons of people stranded. I made it by paying through the nose for a taxi because I saw that their replacement bus wasn’t going to make it.

Some fixes to their crumbling system are clearly long overdue.

Can we get Ludic to do this? Not a Brit, but he does have a way with words.

Wait, so LAPD is armed with nerf guns?

States rights are only for conservative states. Blue states don’t have any rights. Everybody knows that.

If one atrocity justifies another, the atrocities won’t stop until everybody is dead.

Surely that guy will now be fired and charged with assault? This was completely unwarranted.

If a game, application, device or EULA changes in a way you find unacceptable, after you’ve purchased it, you should be able to get your initial purchase price back. And if you paid with your data, you need to be able to demand they delete all your data. I think that law would be entirely reasonable and would do a lot of good.

In Netherland, max speed is usually 30 kph (about 20mph) when there’s any chance of interacting with other traffic (bikes or pedestrians). The idea of walking along a busy road where cars go 45 mph is ridiculous. Separate the traffic streams and give them crosswalk with traffic lights, or slow down the cars.

I don’t see why not, but it’s a lot harder to make a good case against Vance than against Trump (where it’s trivial to find plenty of crimes).

Not the first time. In the 1980s, Israel sought to undermine PLO (which wanted a 2 state solution) and supported a group opposed to PLO called, I believe, Hamas.

I think they’re both right. The government should cut all ties with Musk’s businesses, and Trump should be impeached. That way everybody wins.

It seems he wasn’t aware that his cult following came from the other end of the political spectrum.

Well, not quite the other end, but environmentally inclined business friendly liberals are still not quite Trump’s crowd.

Throwing kids’ lunch away should be illegal. What if s kid has special dietary requirements? But if a school does throw it away, they have an obligation to provide a free lunch that’s at least as good.

What!? But that haka was awesome! How can you not enjoy that?

There are other countries where kids bring their own lunch. We always make sandwiches and a snack for our kids to bring to school.

I do think school-provided lunches are a great idea and if done right, would guarantee every kid equal access to healthy nutrition. Unfortunately we don’t have that in NL, and clearly the powers that be don’t want it in the US either.

But punishing kids for lunch debt is nuts. That’s absolutely a symptom of the US wanting everybody to live in debt.

The US was absolutely the world leader after WW2. The entire system for global trade and finance has been designed by and around the US, and everybody played ball.

Obviously “leader of the free world” should come with some annotations about what they mean with “freedom”, and the US has absolutely been complicit in overthrowing some democracies and supporting dictatorships, but it’s indisputable that they’ve had a position of leadership among free and democratic countries; the US did often set the standard, and got what they wanted.

And for a long time, the things they wanted weren’t always just for the good of the US, but good for many countries and possibly the world, at least from some perspective. The US has pressured many other colonial powers to release their colonies, for example.

Of course they were also often wrong, and often disastrously so, but that rarely hurt their position of leadership. Until now. Actually until Bush started the Iraq war; that was the first real dent in US credibility. Obama did a lot to repair it, and then Trump flushed it down the toilet.

From what I know, those agents can be absolutely fantastic as long as they run under strict guidance of a senior developer who really knows how to use them. Fully autonomous agents sound like a terrible idea.