The European Central Bank has been working on this for many years. The current crisis is not the cause but may significantly speed up resources dedicated and raise urgency of the process.

It’s been some time since I read thru the proposals of the European Central Bank. But a digital euro isn’t just a replacement for a credit card system. It’s a difference system altogether where transactions are directly cleared with the central bank (or a certified agent) online.

Ultimately it’s because of corruption. When chancellor Kohl was incumbent it was clear that fibre optics is the future. He instead pushed for the technically inferior alternative of cable internet to satisfy his business buddies.

That being said, Germany’s not only lagging behind in connectivity but in digital infrastructure in general. Many businesses and especially the administration are still stuck in the previous century. Plus there’s a considerable lack of IT knowhow (and herhaps interest) in the general populace. Travellers from countries like Estonia or Finland must feel like having traveled back into the past 20 years.

I’m still using a fax machine to send messages to the local government cause they can’t properly handle email yet, lol. Called the hospital the other day due to some info missing on their website. Had a very confusing convo with their staff cause the lady genuinely didn’t understand the difference between a website, a browser, Google and a search bar widget and kept confounding them. That’s where we are at 🤷🏽.

Using the official dock? Most of my problems were solved by updating the firmware. That does NOT happen automatically via the regular Steam Decker updates btw, need to trigger it yourself.

Ok, that’s helpful for providing alt text for images inside the body of a post.

Bus what about image posts? When using the web interface I don’t see any opportunity for entering the alt text. 🤔

OBS Studio should be able to to handle that. You can set up hot keys for saving the buffer too.

A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.

This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.

Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.

Hmmm, it seems the modern way for autocracies to deal with elections is to control the information space. I don’t see election being called off, but major social media platforms boosting one side while attenuating the other goes a long way. We know Musk is all in on this and the other big players like Zuckerberg & Co seem all too happy to oblige. Tiktok is an open ended question at this point.

According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.

There you have it folks.

Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).

Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.

Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!

As the saying goes: listen not to what politicians say, but watch what they do.

By his own previous public proclamation anyone cooperating with the extremist AfD is to be expelled from his party. If he had decency he would now self-expel.

Hmm this section sounds familiar:

The persecution drove hundreds of directors, managers and workers – including the author – into exile and/or imprisonment. In their place, the government appointed political operators, lacking knowledge and experience in the oil sector, who provided unconditional support to Maduro’s policies but damaged the company’s operational capacities, bypassing all control or accountability mechanisms.

That’s essentially what Trump admin wants to do. Fire civil servants en masse, replace with loyalists (proficiency for the job is optional).Then if something is goes wrong, and it will, just blame it on DEI, Biden, wokeness or something.

Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with career bureaucrats // civil servants per se. ¿Do you want to swap out every geologist, accountant, teacher, interpreter, ranger, manager, safety inspector, lawyer, technician, secretary every 4 years? These people literally run the country and by extension allow society to continue. And they are part of the idea that power and expertise are spread amongst many people.

Is it fair to criticize individuals, agencies, institutions. Yes. Is there corruption, mismanagement, incompetence? All the time, happens for any sufficiently large enough organization.

But no need to spin this into some bonkers conspiracy theory.

I’ve updated my initial comment.

This guy literally wrote a book about what he dubs “the executive branch deep state” including a list of high profile names he wants to target.

It’s all out in the open. Confirmation hearings are supposed to weed out people like him.

Edit: the way I previously worded my comment it might have been construed as me stating Patel was rightfully going after these people. Instead I meant to indicate that they rightfully resisted/investigated Trump.

tacking on: https://european-alternatives.eu/

These are all digital services. Europe has strong data protection and privacy regulation. The US tech billionaires throwing in their lot with the Trump administration gives them plenty of leverage if push comes to shove.

One of her arguments against the allegation of her spewing Russian talking points was that she doesn’t follow Russian Propaganda.

Truthfulness aside, that argument is not the elegant dodge that she probably thinks it is. Because that speaks against her informedness. As someone applying for this job she should be interested or better yet well versed in what current Russian propaganda is, how it is disseminated, who the target audience is, how well it is working, and how it relates to the wider goals of the Russian regime.

Strangely enough Robert Kenney also made use of a similar defensive veil a couple of times. Well I’m not a medical expert, so I really couldn’t tell you. 🙄 Bro, why are you applying for this position then?

There’s so many parts and pieces that all failed to get to where we are today. Each time you reflect a moment and realize that we shouldn’t be be here in the first place:

• The FBI // justice department shouldn’t be a tool of personal revenge.
• But wait Trump/Musk shouldn’t have become presidents to begin with.
• Voters should be educated and well informed enough to simply not vote for an autocrat.
• Merrick Garland should never have become attorney general and even so Biden should have pressured him hard to do his job.
• Trump should have been impeached multiple times already.
• But the democrats too should have had a better alternative candidate.
• The democrats should have had a real primary contest.
• Biden should have never announced to run for another term out of the blue.
• And his handlers shouldn’t have tried to hide his frailty for so long.
• If only Donald Trump should have been sentenced for his many crimes.
• And he shouldn’t have had the backing of the Republican party for this long.
• Arguably voters should have realized he’s inept the first time around.
• The media shouldn’t have sensationalized him as much when he first ran as a publicity stunt

The list is not exhaustive and goes on and on…

And in the background there’s all the systemic failures and problems that enabled this: terrible public education, ignoring a large chunk of the electorate for too long, citizens united, social media and outrage culture, rampant disinformation and propaganda disguised as news, the electoral college and de facto 2 party system, too few checks and balances being hard codified, obvious loop holes like presidential pardons, …

Petty sure historians will analyze this for generations. If we will still live in a world where historians are allowed to about their work freely.

¿Remember how much Trump administration bungled the COVID response? Imagine again, but this time with his guy in charge. I see dead people.

Fun fact: the monikers used for these children in the book are used in coloquial speech to describe children that misbehave or exhibit behavioral discrepencies:

• shock headed Peter: an unkempt, filthy child
• fidgety Philip: ADHS or hyperactive child
• Johnny-Head-in-the-Air: daydreaming, absent mindedness
• wicked Frederick: cruelty to animals (sociopathy, lack of empathy often reveal themselves this way early on)
• Soup Caspar: eating disorder, perhaps
• etc

The original book was written by a medical doctor dealing with children, go figure!

So reportedly this guy got caught in a right-wing echo chamber of conspiracy Youtubers. That’s why his coup came so out of nowhere:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/inside-south-koreas-right-wing-youtube-world-openly-embraced-by-yoon