• 3 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2024

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  • Super-condensed version: Based on current polls we are almost guaranteed to see the next government shift to the right hard compared to the current one. And the guy most likely to lead it could be described as “Trump light”. I am very worried it will get even worse 4 years later.


    Slightly longer version:

    CDU looks like it will be the winner of the election, but not big enough to form a government without a coalition partner. They used to be considered center-right, but have been shifting more towards the right for a few years now (since Friedrich Merz - “Trump light” - took over as their leader). So the very best one could hope for with them in power would be an overall center-ish government.

    Possible partners:

    • SPD - historically center left, with a long lasting tradition to be easily pushed over on basically all their principles in coalition governments, especially towards the right

    • The Greens - historically slightly left of SPD with more focus on environmental topics. Drifting more towards being SPD 2.0 in recent times. Even they recently had some relevant figures try to gain favor with voters by blaming things on immigrants and demanding a stronger stance against them. Least horrible option, but will lose ground among their own followers if they enter a coalition with CDU, worsening chances to get something less horrible next time.

    • AfD - literal Nazis, and I mean literal in the original sense without any exaggeration. CDU used to have a strong stance against working with them, but that has been weakened over time. And a few months ago the leader of CDU started spreading the blatant lie that that was never a thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary.


    Silver lining:

    The party of selfish libertarian assholes (FDP) will most likely not make it into the next parliament after very blatantly sabotaging the current government from within for several years.


  • Germany will never do anything about Israel

    True.

    because they would hate to stop another country doing a genocide.

    In the 1990s Germany sent troops to Serbia to stop a genocide. That was the first German military mission on foreign soil after WW2 (excluding missions where the German military just provided disaster relief on foreign soil).

    Germany decided a long time ago that supporting Israel to a near-unconditional degree is part of the state interest of Germany, as penance for the holocaust. No politician smart and ambitious enough to get into a position of power would dare challenge that, because it carries a big risk of being branded as antisemitic without any serious potential political gain.

    Edit: Mods, should I delete this because it quotes what was probably the reason for deleting the post I answered to?







  • A typical project manager will get a range, take the lower bound and communicate it as the only relevant number to every other stakeholder. When that inevitably does not work out, all the blame will be passed on to you unfiltered.

    Depending on where you work it may or may not be worth giving someone new the benefit of the doubt, but in general it is safer to only ever talk about the upper bound and add some padding.



  • But is it USB-IF’s fault manufacturers tried […]

    Yes, it absolutely is USB-IF’s fault that they are not even trying to enforce some semblance of consistency and sanity among adopters. They do have the power to say “no soup certification for you” to manufacturers not following the rules, but they don’t use it anywhere near aggressively enough. And that includes not making rules that are strict enough in the first place.


  • They are not bad at this. You are bad at understanding it.

    I work with this stuff, and I do understand it. Some of my colleagues are actively participating in USB-IF workgroups, although not the ones responsible for naming end user facing things. They come to me for advice when those other workgroups changed some names retroactively again and we need to make sure we are still backwards compatible with things that rely on those names and that we are not confusing our customers more than necessary.

    That is why I am very confident in claiming those naming schemes are bad.

    “don’t even bother learning it” is my advice for normal end users, and I do stand by it.

    But the names are not hard if you bother to learn them.

    Never said it is hard.

    It is more complex than it needs to be.

    It is internally inconsistent.

    Names get changed retroactively with new spec releases.

    None of that is hard to learn, just not worth the effort.