Hey, we’ve got social media and all that now. The memes and all the valuable info from whoever will surely take care of it.

I’m afraid there is no business model that can finance quality journalism. We are currently seeing the consequences of this.

Yes, in principle, but unfortunately there are many politicians who do not act in the interests of the people. This is evident simply from the fact that the richest of the rich are getting richer and richer, even though this is by no means in the interests of a country’s citizens.

While there are neo-capitalist approaches such as “trickle-down economics” even after decades of pursuing them, what they postulate has never come to pass - instead, exactly what was to be expected has occurred: tax revenues are plummeting, resulting in a lack of funds for investments in socially vital sectors and infrastructure, and the standard of living for citizens is steadily declining.

The result is that a kind of new monarchy of billionaires has emerged, who use their enormous influence through corruption and lobbying so ruthlessly that today there is hardly a capitalist-democratic state left that still serves the interests of its citizens.

Yes, I agree, especially since selfishness, ruthlessness, and greed are traits that promise profits - and (short-term) profits are the only, or at least the primary, measure by which most managers’ performance is judged (Shareholder Value, Quarterly revenue figures, and such). It is therefore quite likely that current managers also exhibit these traits and thus fill positions with people who are similar to them. It appears to be a systemic vicious cycle that allows for hardly any exceptions.

It’s kind of interesting that most people here seem to assume that attending college is synonymous with education or knowledge. It would be nice if that were the case.

However, there are also quite a few people who went to college but didn’t learn a thing there - especially in countries like the U.S. or England, where a college degree costs an absurd amount of money, this happens all the time. It’s especially common there to find children of wealthy people who are as dumb as a box of rocks, yet still manage to buy their way into high society with a college degree - they’re guaranteed to get it, regardless of whether they learn even the slightest thing at university.

The current U.S. president is a good example…

I recently attended the wedding of a friend who married into nobility. Most of the bride’s friends, who had all attended Eton or Cheltenham, worked in some capacity as estate or property managers.

Edit: The whole event had a pretty satirical feel to it - there was even the mentally unstable, rich daughter who, later in the evening, threw herself at you while drunk and went on and on about how awful her mother was, how boring her friends were, and all that. Oh, and there were quite a few rich old perverts as well who were constantly making lewd advances toward the much younger women in attendance. All in all, it was quite a strange wedding.

I’m sure they can read. The store is in Germany and the text is in English, but I’m sure they realized that this is complete nonsense. I think they just ordered some cheap wrap material from somewhere and didn’t pay much attention to what was written on it.

They probably just don’t want to throw it away - which is fine. I just found it somewhat amusing and maybe a little infuriating, which is why I posted it here.

Yes, that could be the case. My guess was that templates like this were collected by image-generation models, which then turn them into complete nonsense on demand. But OCR could also be a good explanation, of course.

Phew, good question - maybe in Ankh-Morpork?

Here’s a map:

That could certainly be the case, but it seems like a lot of effort to me to produce something like that.

Either way: Apparently, the people at the kebab shop didn’t notice what was written on it when they placed the order. They may have saved a little money on quality, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly flattering, especially since they actually pride themselves on freshly prepared food, which tastes great.

It’s probably because of the “bunec for spreading.”

That could very well be the case. I hope that I’ll never find out, though…

Sometimes I even sing…

Yeah, that’s true: Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of SpongeBob, and his team certainly had some socially critical intent when they created the show and its characters - after all, there are often deliberately exaggerated everyday situations and the like which address social issues in a humorous way.

But also yeah, exactly: I added /s because, while the underlying message is at least somewhat recognizable, I presented it in such a pretentious way. I was just lazing around in bed and thought I’d have a little fun with some kind of pseudo-intellectual silliness.

So /s - mainly so no one here thinks I’m some completely out-of-touch political theorist or something who actually takes this exaggerated view all too seriously :)

Mr. Krabs’s relentless emphasis on profit -expressed through wage suppression, obsessive cost-cutting, and the conversion of social relations into transactions - renders him a concentrated embodiment of profit-driven logic. SpongeBob’s boundless cheerfulness and dutiful labor on the other hand present the idealized worker who performs emotional compliance as part of his job; his behavior makes visible the moral contradiction at the heart of an economy that prizes surplus extraction over workers’ wellbeing. The Krusty Krab’s daily rhythms - timed shifts, commodified leisure, scripted upselling, and constant attention to margins - show how extraction becomes normalized through routine rather than force.

The rivalry between Mr. Krabs and Sheldon J. Plankton further highlights the system’s subtly coercive nature: their ceaseless competition is less about innovation than about maintaining status atop the same extractive order, a ruthless free market theater in which two capitalists conserve and contest power while workers absorb the costs. The comedy works because it literalizes these dynamics - affection as account entry, friendship as transaction - so that the satirical clarity of the show forces viewers, even while amused, to recognize how profit as an organizing principle reshapes everyday life and renders cheerfulness itself a technique of compliance.

/s

In that case, the orange mob boss has nothing to worry about…

Lately, I’ve been wondering more and more often what it would take for the American people to oust this regime from office.

That’s true, but this misunderstanding may be due to the fact that what is sold as AI today is by no means what movies like Terminator are about.

Yes, it is unfortunately becoming increasingly clear that even in the EU, billionaires and their companies are above the law. The legal situation should be clear here and there should be consequences - but there apparently aren’t any.

Unfortunately, this applies not only to Twitter, but to most US tech giants in particular, to meta, for example. I have already stopped counting the massive violations of the GDPR that meta and others are constantly committing, because nothing happens anyway. If anything, the fines are so low that violating the law brings these companies far more revenue than it costs them.

So unfortunately, the same major issue that brought the US to the brink of a straight up dictatorship also applies in Europe: even the most blatant violations of the law have no serious consequences for the richest of the rich – and that is why billionaires are becoming more and more powerful.

The situation may be better in the EU for now than in the US, whose legal system obviously no longer even maintains the appearance of fairness, but even in the EU, the enforcement of the law is miles away from anything that could even remotely be called justice.

The reason seems to me to be the same as in the US: concentration of power in a tiny billionaire class that asserts its influence through corruption.

I think that if things continue like this, and I see no indicators that they will not, it will not be long before even the appearance of justice is abandoned in the EU as well.

Edit: Here is an example of how this is possible - it’s just plain old corruption, but in the highest ranks of our institutions: From Meta to the EU Parliament: Former chief lobbyist negotiates data protection (German article)

Aura Salla was Meta’s chief lobbyist in Brussels for many years. Her task: to convince politicians to weaken EU digital rules such as data protection in order to generate even higher profits with Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms.

Only a complete idiot like the orange pedo in the White House would believe that a autocratic regime that has been in power for decades and has also been engaged in a “cold war” with many of its neighboring countries for decades would fall immediately because its 86-year-old leader was killed.

But hey, it speaks volumes how the US is acting together with its genocidal allies: Congratulations on the murder of an aging despot in violation of international law, and my expression of utter contempt for the murder of the many innocent little girls that these two criminal states committed as if it were not the most despicable war crime.

Fuck off with your self-righteous remarks, you goddamn monsters. Nobody except your Nazi henchmen wants to hear that.