up to and including a CDU/SDP left-right grand coalition.

Wasn’t the CDU talking about revising their “under no circumstance, ever” attitude towards Die Linke. Not terribly relevant right now with Die Linke’s numbers but it’s notable they’re even talking about it.

The current state coalitions are rather… diverse. In case Die Linke uses its new-found freedom from BSW types to turn itself around it could actually become relevant.

Article 3 (3) TEU:

The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

Emphasis mine. In a nutshell a social market economy is a Realpolitik compromise between capitalism and market socialism, where private ownership of the means of production is tolerated but said ownership doesn’t entail complete power over it, through e.g. co-determination laws.

To make this more concrete, and maybe blow some Yank’s mind: Volkswagen’s employees elect 50% - 1 seats on the board. Together with shares held by Lower Saxony (usually run by a socdem government) they run the place, no matter how many shares the Porsche/Piëch clan and the Saudis have. It’s why VW itself worked towards unionising its own plant in Chattanooga, to the bewilderment of many. Sadly can’t unionise the plants in China the CCP hates it when workers have a say.

GP without doctor is just a consequence of the vast majority of doctoral thesis in medicine, for ages, having been slop without academic value. You don’t need to be a good researcher to be a good healer, to know what you’re doing, and if you want to spend your career setting bones then there’s probably not much to research to be had in that area, anyway, so why force practitioners to come up with random stuff to investigate.

Did you know that you can become Heilpraktiker with Hauptschulabschluss, though? The only real requirement is the Gesundheitsamt judging you to not be an active hazard to patients and you can practice medicine. With or without scare quotes, from martial artists doing off-brand physiotherapy to complete but “studied” quacks like homeopaths.

You can also do work+university, best I can tell there’s actually no pure university option.

It’ll be a question whether you have 9/10 or 13 years of primary+secondary education: The latter qualifies you to study anything, while the former qualifies you for trade school, which then qualifies you to study anything remotely connected to the profession you learned.

If you want to bee-line for say a Doctor in physiotherapy starting with trade school might actually be faster, while with less hands-on medicine the route directly to university will likely take less time. On the trade school route university won’t really be teaching you the subject, any more, but focus on how you can turn your experience into novel research.

This “just a trade school” thing just doesn’t really make sense in the German context. You can study metallurgy and still not be able to weld for shit, or you can become a welder and then study metallurgy (skipping some courses) and be somewhat lost when interpreting Goethe because you didn’t spend three additional highschool years on a generalist skillset.

Chances are that any new large commercial platform will enshittify, sooner or later prompting another exodus, and each exodus will at least have some people choosing a community platform.

The step from single to multicellular life forms is a metasystem transition, and those don’t roll back, and are amplified by branching growth at the penultimate level¹.

Or, more concretely: A strain of cells learns to communicate with each other, to coordinate, giving all a fitness advantage in other words they create a control system to regulate the lot of them and apes together stronger than apes apart. The emergence of that (usually distributed) control system is a metasystem transition. Because that kind of cooperation has advantage over not cooperating like that, evolution never goes into the other direction (in that sense it has a direction, similar to how time doesn’t really exist in physical microstates, only in their relationship to macrostates: It’s not like genes can’t drift in the other direction, it’s that if they do they get culled at a much higher rate).

And because our critters now have an advantage, they have more resources to develop, to multiply both in absolute number, as well as to specialise into different functions. That’s the branching growth at the penultimate (that is, below the control system) level, and it makes them even more fit. Branching growth is one of those cybernetic laws that happen again and again and again and again and you’d think “surely this can’t always be the case” and yes you’ll find exceptions but by and large, yes, once there’s a metasystem transition you get that effect, again, because it’s very regularly beneficial to the whole.

If that got you consider the evolutionary step from soup of chemicals over the first feedback systems made out of simple molecules creating environments benefitting their own replication to actual cells. Which is explainable by chance alone, but once you take metasystem transitions into account suddenly it doesn’t take an eternity, any more, only aeons.

¹ I should, possibly, at this point warn about Principia Cybernetica just as people warn about tvtropes. It’s a rabbit hole.

At least there’s only a single way to tell the computer “ok, execute this command”. And you see the command written in plain text before you.

And, no, no useful interface is intuitive because computers just have too many functions. There’s no intuitive appliance in the world with more than a temperature knob and a timer knob. Knowledge is always required, be that cultural or by RTFM.

Iran didn’t turn tribal and is still diverse AF. Don’t confuse the people and overall culture with the backwards government which isn’t exactly popular.

Iran only really fits half into the latter category because the people are vastly more liberal than their government.

And if you look at polls (can’t find them right now sorry) Iran is actually one of the least Muslim Muslim countries around when you drill down into dogma, e.g. belief in heaven, belief in angels, such things. The average Iranian is about as Muslim in their private faith as someone believing in reincarnation is Christian.

and questionable things regarding immigration laws

I mean… there have been some regrettable cases in Germany directly after the law declaring foreign sub-18 marriage to be invalid, like 16/18yold asylum seeker couples getting separated. There’s a difference between saying “we don’t recognise that, you’ll have to marry again under German law” and “we’re putting you in two different accommodations in two different states because you can’t possibly be a family unit and that’s how the dice fell”. You can’t just blindly assume they’re not heads over heels for each other, no matter how arranged and young the marriage was, you have to look at the individual case and if everything checks out treat them eg. analogous to siblings when it comes to accommodation.

The phase-out practically already started in the early 90s, latest when it became abundantly clear that building more reactors was not politically feasible.

The reason is distrust in anything being handled properly. See Asse (they just discovered irradiated water that they don’t have any idea how it came to be because it’s actually above the deposit), see plants running without functioning backup generators for decades, the list is endless.

IIRC according to the original plan the last coal plants would’ve shut down before the last nuclear plants. Certainly would’ve been possible without 16 years of CDU government.

How much of that is due to French nuclear reactors shutting down, both during summer (to not turn the rivers that cool them into fish soup) as well as all that maintenance stuff they had going on lately.

Germany is an electricity exporter.

Also: You’re looking at generated power. Not coal consumption. That doesn’t completely erase the bump but it’s quite a bit smaller, they shut down some very old plants and replaced them with more efficient ones.

The current biggest chunk is oil, mostly used in transportation, and gas, for heating. Those will need to be electrified and replaced with what 25% of their Joule-value in electricity production, gas will stay longest because it’s used for peaker plants and, once the grid is completely renewable, that will be done with synthesised gas.

Had the original plan to phase out nuclear and coal been followed we’d already be there but the CDU insisted on knee-capping renewables because the likes of RWE were asleep at the wheel and hadn’t shifted their investments fast enough, electricity production in Germany suddenly wasn’t an oligopoly, any more, can’t have that.

I’m mostly just sad when that happens. People do tend to consider me intimidating, but only very rarely scary, just as a roller-coaster might be intimidating but it’s not going to jump at you and strap you in so there’s no reason to fear it. On the contrary, I do tend to make people feel safe. Which then leads me to believe that those few people who actually are scared by my presence have completely fucked threat radars.

Then, OTOH, if you’re suppressing any urges to jump at people and strapping them in and looping them around yep people are going to notice that. You might not actually be doing it, ever, but the possibility is there and you’re going to be perceived differently, suppressed aggression is still visible in body language and at least their subconscious is going to pick up on it. People are going to be scared, at least a bit on edge, even if their threat radars aren’t fucked.

If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.

Nah they’re angry at themselves for not being at peace with themselves and projecting outwards, just as pretty much everyone else. SNAFU.

3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.

There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.

I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?

Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.

AutoCAD

It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but an SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?

OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.

Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.

…in Teheran, while the rest of the country was pretty much still tribal.

While it’s absolutely true that the average Iranian is vastly, vastly more liberal than their government let’s not turn around and glorify the Shah regime either. You don’t need to go back in time to show Iranians in a positive light.

EU fines are working. Not in the sense that they would prevent companies from trying to do shit, but in the sense that they shape up once it has been levied: Understand that those 800m are a shot before the bow. If the behaviour continues, there’s going to be daily punitive fines that very quickly become very unaffordable.

I mean, what is the money being used for?

Goes towards the EU budget, reducing the amount the member states have to pay in. In other words Berlaymont doesn’t gain anything from levying fines, their budget stays the same.