The pace at replacing books at libraries is so painfully slow you stand a good chance to find an environment that’s nearly free of LLM influence at your local one.

It’s faster than a transaction via QR code. Also, the chip isn’t just restricted to handling payments. It can be used as key fob for your car or on your smart lock at home or at the hotel you’re staying at.

That tends to be the case though. Even in Europe that’s true in many cases. I think so far only France has legislation on the books that makes it illegal for airfare to beat trainfare under a certain distance.

The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn’t come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.

Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that’s not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it’s really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.

And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That’s a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.

You can help stop your elected dickheads. Protest, general strike, a constant barrage of your elected officials with dissent. They were bombing schools in your name.

Iran has been under the longest internet blackout in history (if you don’t count North Korea). The things that trickle out from there are scarce and that little bandwidth may be better used to collect evidence of atrocities, ironically committed either by the regime or the US/Israel coalition. The current top 40 may be less important at this point in time. So there is a pretty high chance that you won’t get a good answer to your question.

If nothing else helps, imagine how you tickle them on the tip of their dumb nose with an imaginary, invisible feather. Imagine the surprised look when they don’t know what’s happening. It’s so annoying and they don’t have a clue where it’s coming from. They have fucked with the wrong person with an overactive imagination! By now, you’ve zoned out far enough to ignore any jabs coming your way. You wear the self-satisfied smile that only imaginary feather ticklers know.

Are they possibly romantically interested in you? Just drop a casual “you’re just in love with me, aren’t you!” when they’re annoying and see how flabbergasted they get.

I definitely cannot.

I have never heard of him. In general, I don’t find YouTube a reliable source for anything controversial. I think the CIA falls under that umbrella. So I would be very skeptical.

Thanks for the correction. I’m positively shocked to learn about this.

A British person with a German passport is also a German citizen. So they can’t not help them if they have the means.

I don’t know about the Brits. The Germans have some tight rules about dual citizenship. It will be an exceedingly low number of people who qualify legally on both sides for dual citizenship of these two countries.

As the revolutionary guard troops surround Dubai, this probably would not matter. They would try to get people out and I’m sure both Brits and Germans would evacuate each other’s citizens if it meant death if they didn’t. But if the situation allowed for more thorough investigation, I probably wouldn’t mention my other citizenship to the Germans at least.

Many folks of Turkish descent but born in Germany used to take up German citizenship and had to renounce the Turkish one in the process. But they were able to get it back once the German passport was done, which could be grounds for revocation by the Germans if they knew about it. (No longer true) In Japan it’s even harder to have two passports; kids of mixed couples often have two passports but they’re not supposed to from the Japanese side. So they wouldn’t make this known to the Japanese embassy who would care about this if the revolutionary guards were still far enough away to have a closer look.

I would not be surprised if there was a bit of horse trading going on between the embassies. So if a dual citizenship holder was rescued unconscious in a drone attack, it’s probably the first delegation on the scene who takes charge of the case. Until the victim regains consciousness and possibly decides something else - if they can without causing more trouble for themselves.

I have no experience with this so my guess is really just that. If two consular outfits arrive on the scene to help our unconscious victim at the same time, they would probably try to figure out: what’s the country of residence for the victim? If it’s not a third country, residencistan trumps the other one. If it is a third country, then where are the next of kin. If there are none, probably country of birth. If that doesn’t help they do a game of paper, rock, scissors.

(Edited, I evidently missed a major revamp of German citizenship law)

Gasoline.

I mean, come on.

It’s FIFA. Handing out a peace prize. They didn’t do it because they love peace so much. It’s one narcissist painfully realizing that the success of running his organization’s biggest money grab depends on the whims of another narcissist. Because that’s still true, nothing will happen until after the world cup finals. Then, they will work up another shortlist for the next one (Kim Jong-Un, Benjamin Netanyahu, whoever is still alive in Iran and in charge, etc.) or, which is more likely, there will be a press release issued on a day when the world burns with bigger news that the prize is on hold indefinitely.

Lemmy is part of the fediverse. On the fediverse you are your own algorithm. So either you have curated your feed to be very political or you’re on the local feed of your instance, which has a lot of political posts. But you signed up there.

Either way, you’re there by choice. Curate your own feed. I get lots of stuff that isn’t political. Just keep in mind you don’t get reddit user numbers over here so not every niche nonpolitical subject has found a viable community. Yet.

Calling it one law may have been oversimplifying it on my part. It’s more of a concert of laws and case law. Here is a summary with sources.

You’re criticizing capitalism fundamentally, which is valid. I wasn’t going that far. I didn’t think revolution was within the scope of this imaginary protest agenda we’re setting here. So baby steps. Reining in unbridled capitalism wherever possible (and necessary) is better than nothing.

As a bit of a left field addition to other good suggestions already in this thread:

Rescind the fiduciary duty of any officer in a corporation to increase shareholder value no matter what. Exceptions must be made for cases where it would hurt the environment (anywhere on the planet and judging by the strictest state laws in effect), cause excessive loss of jobs, or hurt consumers.

I think a lot of problems of late stage capitalism are downstream consequences from this stupid law.

Is there something wrong with making a new account to make a discussion post about a video?

If the video is from a platform whose algorithm thrives on controversy, is presented in a context of controversy, on a new account, it’s at least suspicious here on the lemmyverse.

So you’ve been thinking about joining the fediverse but it was this video you wanted to share with us that finally made you pull the trigger? It’s a sequence of events I find inherently sus.

Is this not a forum website?

Yes, it is. And as such it is sometimes abused by people with ulterior motives.

This is ridiculous behavior.

That is both your prerogative to think so and a matter of opinion.

I’ve been respectful and open to every single person I’ve responded to. I am not creating drama or name calling.

Your eagerness to engage virtually any comment on this niche subject is what I find suspicious. It’s the eagerness you also see by people who abuse Lemmy for rage bait.

If there’s drama being created on this post, it’s because people can’t stand Mutahar. And I agree with them! But as someone who refuses to be an ideologue living in an echo chamber, I watch content from sources I don’t agree with too, and I discuss it. I don’t get what problem you have with this.

I don’t know who that is and don’t care enough to find out. I refer you to my criticism of the source of the video. My suspicion, which I have to say your comments have not diminished, is that you created this account and this persona to generate more views to feed the algorithm on YouTube and not because you wanted to have a serious discussion about the subject.

Correction: so you made a new account on this instance and then posted it.

I’m just spit balling here. Is it possible that the intent of this post is not to have a discussion about OSs but to boost the YouTube views? It’s just a vibe I’m getting. New account, very eager to reply, posting this out of the blue.

If the video is on YouTube, they make a thumbnail pulling a dumb face, and it gets presented in a forum like this with a whiff of controversy about it, personally, I’ll refuse to look at it.

Has there been a feature film starring somebody who came up through the influencer game that enough people here would have heard of to be able to answer this question? I can’t think of any. Can anyone else?

Talent is not necessarily a prerequisite for a long acting career. Exhibit A: Arnold Schwarzenegger. So maybe some TikTokers who act out silly mini one-person plays have a leg up on some established names in Hollywood.

Also, TV and the movie industry are in trouble. Receding commercial revenues and the age of streaming and not going to the movies are hurting them badly. Going after some influencers may be more of a fight for survival, to make money off of younger demographics, than a veritable search for acting talent.