I heard he was well hung....

Wink, wink! Just because there is a law, doesn't mean it won't happen. Just buried a few layers deeper.

Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

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.

I'm not denying anything about Republican stupidity. Trump is a grifter, a stupid man who does however understand the art of the grift, telling people what they want to hear. They FAFOd. The Democrats were being equally stupid, just in a different direction while feigning superiority and following a group of far left misandrysts. I present to you the DNC produced "Men for Kamala" ads, which used Feminist stereoypes of White males, including a morbidly obese white male, bragging about eating carburetors for breakfast. protip: Not much uses carburetors any more, other than lawnmowers and small engines

And they were feigning the that Republicans were anti science, while they were riding the back end of the Trans movement, which ended up in stark denial of biology and science, to the point of not being able to tell the difference between man and women. Rejection of DNA and biology at a level that would be approved by ideology driven Soviet Union scientists and their Lysenkoism.

They supported schools aiding students who were transitioning, and allowing the schools to keep that fact that the students were transitioning a secret from the students parents. Note - this is not Trump's idiotic claims that Bobby can go to school Monday and come home as Tina, or whatever claim he made. The matter has been going back and forth for a while.

They largely declared males irrelevant, believing a blue estrogen wave would suffice, and with an undercurrent of #metoo stirring the pot.

They declared that the working class was not needed in person and bluntly, when Harris told the head of the Teamsters, that she was going to win with or without Union support.

Finally, they came to understand what the years of feminist attacks on males brought forth, the concept of male toxicity when ended up morphing into it's final form - that being male was in itself toxic. You may to my not agree, but they lost the young male vote, once quite reliably a liberal vote. I guess when you are told almost from birth that you are evil, you might not end up voting for that accusing demographic.

And the Republicans could point to documented evidence of all this, didn't have to even make shit up. All of this has been diagnosed by smarter people than I. Fortunately, it appears the insanity has calmed down. I believe that the Dems have learned their lesson. We've seen the results of following a half-wit President and his rubber stamping minions in power. Ain't good

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.

That’s what I was going to say... What’s to stop some piece-of-shit cop from planting whatever evidence he wants on your phone, if you make the mistake of giving him access to it - along with your passwords?


Nothing.

And anyone who responds with "the law prevents him" is naive...