And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

It’s usually not a question of legality, but efficiency.

It’s easy and efficient to bust someone for seeding, but busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.

Of course, but most governments are allowed to mostly be sovereign.

Sweden or Australia play ball on their own, no need for a coup here.

The US tried to invade Cuba as well, and tried to kill Castro, several times. That’s ultimately why he did align with the USSR - choosing the bully that’s slightly more on your side.

That’s actually the really sad story here.

Every “experimental” regime was either toppled (Chile) or had to align with the USSR (Cuba) to survive. There was never a real attempt at democratic socialist politics without interference from superpowers.

You do consent often enough.

At least in Germany, there are at least two companies (Schufa and Experian) who will analyze your account data/money transfers to calculate a score.

Technically, this is legal because they claim to have a legitimate interest in the data and you do have to tick a checkbox.

Are there ways to say exactly this kind of happy? I’m pretty sure, happy and gay didn’t mean exactly the same. Synonyms rarely are drop in replacement.

But yes, there is a gap now. That might get filled with another word, or people get better at discerning ironic and unironic meaning. Or maybe people stop using it in this way - groovy or rad aren’t exactly common today either.

That’s how language works.

Many words shifted meaning over time, some gained connotation, some lost it, some turned to something completely different.

Just look at the word “gay”, it shifted from “happy” to “haha homosexuals are outwardly happy, so we call them gay semi-ironically” to “homosexual”. The homophobic connotation was added, then the original meaning got lost.

You can complain, sure, but just read an old text from the 17th century and try to find a sentence that means exactly the same today as it did back then.

I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.

A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.

You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.

A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.

When it became clear that working from home won’t go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.

Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked “sooo, I’m in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he’d get West wages”. Management didn’t address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.

I worked for a company that handled a ton of personal data. Pretty much every person in Germany, including addresses, bank account details, etc.

On my first day there (fresh from university) I was given literally full read access to the entire database. And as I later found out by accident: they did not track any data exfiltration at all. I copied several gigabytes of data without anyone noticing.

Your data is only as secure as the least motivated data broker sees fit. And that’s not very fit.

Not even one generation, the entire runtime is not even 10 years, and you’d have to be in a rather small age bracket to get the full brunt of the “cultural” impact. My parents’ generation watched it, but it wasn’t really all that different from everything else for them.

It’s actually super interesting to see the fall of GoT. It fell into oblivion almost immediately after the last season finished.

It’s interesting how often Microsoft managed to bring truly innovative products a few years too early to market and then just silently fails.

They had tablets in the early 00s, ARM laptops, folding phones, media centers.