As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

Looks like both bookworm and trixie are fixed as of about 3am UTC last night.

Sync your mirrors if it's off cycle. Luckily mine sync around 9am, hopefully the buildbots were busy..

For bookworm you need 8.2.35-1~deb12u1 .

Thank you, Guilhem.

That does not follow. Germany especially is an export-oriented economy that relies on cheap energy to be profitable. It competes directly with asian countries that have far lower costs. You might not grasp the magnitude: Gas was 2.5 cents per kWh a decade ago. It jumped to 30 and more after Ukraine, USA or a combination of both blew up North Stream 2. Granted, it came down again, but it's still over 6 cents today. (exact numbers depend on your market, location, yada yada )

Russia is suffering a slow-burning blow to its compound growth. I honestly don't think that the damage to Russia is worse than the damage to Europe.

Russia's army also took a beating AND would be needed to keep control of Ukraine, half of which (the western parts) are intensely anti-russian. Controlling an occupied territory can be as demanding if not more than conquering it.

It's not just you.

I've lived most of my life in Germany and definitely got its best years. It's been going downhill for the past 20 years or so. And a lot of the why are very similar to the ones you list, and while I saw them early and left the country for that, it's only been coming to a head in the past decade.

True, but there's a saying that capitalism won the competition because communism failed first. Meaning capitalism will fail 2nd and we might be seing that.

Yes, but by what measurement? Being able to destroy the competition might mean you are better, or it might mean you aren't playing fair. Microsoft dominates the OS market, but not by offering the best OS.

And your example of Kuwait is more spot on than you think. The USA also was handed a cheat code - it was the big winner of WW2, with no damage to its infrastructure while Europe was in ruin, Russia had lost 10% of its population and insane amounts of infrastructure, etc. - and while everyone else involved was busy rebuilding basics for a few year, the US could pivot its wartime industry to productive industry and jump ahead.

Worse than that, it's an entire circle-jerk. Many of these people were at consulting companies, then were placed into their positions, while still being loyal to their consulting company. The biggest one whose entire modus operandi is placing their people into positions where they can give the company future business is McKinsey. This isn't even news.

Yeah, but that's not how that works.

The CEO these days is one of the bad apples, and his real-world experience consists of a cozy upper-class childhood, a business school that exchanges money for degrees, a few years at McKinsey or such and a placement as CEO somewhere. He has barely even MET a working class man in his life. His primary concern are quarterly numbers and getting his bonus. The fact that quarters are very short periods in the business world alone doesn't allow him to focus on anything else, unless he wants to explain to the wife why they can't buy that nice mountain chalet she wanted this year.

Buffet is exceptional in many ways, he's not a good example here.

He didn't, though. He gave an officer a couple numbers. This action did not destroy any data. The phone could still sit in an evidence locker, all data intact, even after this action.

The officer entering that number into the phone is what destroyed the data. You could argue that he aided in the destruction of evidence. But in that case you need to put the officer on trial as well for destruction of evidence.

Now the officer will claim "I didn't know". In which case you'd ask "then what the fuck were you doing there, not knowing? Does procedure not require you to handle evidence with care? If you didn't know what you were doing, how does that constitute care?"

But, of course, this isn't what's happening. Considering the actual facts, I mean. What's happening is that the government wants the right to spy on you and this dude defended his privacy. And we can't have that, can we? So my money is on the court siding with the police, because they're all part of the same system whose primary purpose is to keep itself intact.

And you aren't. There's the problem. This is why they pretend that it's a friendly interaction when actually it's a hostile one.

We need a right to not just remain silent, but to lie just as much as the cops do. This would also get rid of the whole "anything you say can and will be used against you" bullshit, you'd just say "I lied" when they bring it up.

I understand that a society needs police. I don't think we need THIS police, the amount of fails it has is dramatic.

Oh, did they have a warrant signed by a judge?

Illegal searches can be resisted.

Of course you risk being murdered for your rights.

Which appears to be the cost now.

They shouldn't want us to know that; bad chess.

They've gone from being infamous for offering no support to pretending to offer support?

I guess it will help people who haven't yet tried everything on their own before they figure out there is no support.

Happy to be proven wrong and learn that the chatbots are empowered to fix things.

They did things like this at the end of Rome.

P.T. Barnumus.

They can easily be downloading and using it locally/airgapped to get an open weights and measures system.

But that's the problem - an organization as big as the DC regime needs to control what its agents think to maintain discipline.

Marc Andreesen spoke about this when the Biden admin told him to not invest in AI startups because they wouldn't be allowed.

Controlling the Big Three is much more manageable but with hundreds you can't maintain an effective hivemind.

What's good for the country isn't usually what's good for the government.

Buzz has spoken on more than one occasion about a radio source and a structure on Phobos that is being kept hush-hush.

Then he stopped talking about it and won't say why when asked.

"I got bad information from a dope playing a practical joke on me" would have been easy.

Maybe Japan will show something interesting. Maybe the probe will mysteriously fail at an inopportune time.

I'll be glad to see the question resolved if it can be.

Mysteries are fun but discoveries are more interesting.