It’s a step, but trying to limit how money itself is spent will always create loopholes your opponent has better lawyers than you to exploit. Imho the better way to discipline billionaires would be to change tax code such that borrowing money against securities or anything like it (such as stock) is counted as realizing their value, which would trigger capital gains tax obligations.

It’d have somewhat similar effects to a wealth tax with way less administrative load for the state. The only exception I would grant is when you’re buying a single-person/single-family residential property you’re going to be living in yourself.

I’m not talking about British exceptionalism in any way. Clearly lots of people in this thread don’t like the UK. Fine. That doesn’t mean you should twist my words though.

Your words are not being twisted as I’ll lay out below.

Multiple EU countries haven’t adopted the euro and don’t show signs of adopting it. So clearly the EU already practises “flexibility” on the euro, to some degree.

These countries enjoy the things the UK decided to reject when leaving: Special privileges for joining early enough.

New countries joining do not receive any such privileges anymore and neither should the UK. That is being treated fairly. Any position that wants the UK to be treated better than other new countries wanting to join is what I called British Exceptionalism.

If EU citizens decide they don’t want the UK in the EU, okay. I would like good UK-EU relations, but I can’t control what EU citizens think of the UK.

I’m fine with them joining on the same terms as every other new country. If they don’t want to join, there are plenty of ways to cooperate without that. Finally: I generally don’t tend to think of the UK at all (neither negatively or positively), unless it comes up in political topics.

But if the EU just wants to punish the UK for Brexit then that is going to go down badly with many Brits, so closer relations will become less likely.

Being treated like every other new country wanting to join isn’t a punishment. The “British exceptionalism” mentality imho causing these thoughts is one root of the problem.

A punishment would be if the EU were to demand reparations for the economic damages the UK inflicted on it. Which, you’ll note, nobody is asking for.

Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.

People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.

The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.

Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.

Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.

Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.

True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.

My two cents:

Creating a monetary union without a fiscal union was a grievous macroeconomic mistake. For example, it allowed countries like mine (Germany) to abuse the shared currency to artifically lower the cost of exported goods, with the downstream effect of allowing it to “move” parts of its state debt to others, like e.g. France.

There really are only two ways towards eventual stability: Create a fiscal union (which for all intents and purposes means turning the EU from a confederation into a sovereign state), or breaking up the monetary union.

The latter, however, would destroy large parts of the export-dependent German economy almost overnight. It would almost certainly lead to economic suffering not seen since the Great Depression in the short-term. To steelman the argument for a moment, it could theoretically be a (state-)controlled burn to purge all those ailing German big corporations almost exclusively dependent on fossil fuels that have been refusing to innovate for more than 30 years now and be the catalyst for a rapid green transition. But there’s 0% chance of any far-right party desiring this, let alone being able to pull it of.

So that means either we create a fiscal union, or we’re screwed with a monetary system that will continue to amplify existing problems, instead of being a tool capable of addressing them equitably.

Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

The Budapest Memoranda do not contain “If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you”, which would be the requirement for the “the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes” claim.

I’m not a fan of the USA’s foreign policy, but there’s no need to claim they promised something they did not.

So the US agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia of they gave up their nukes

No, the USA never agreed to protect Ukraine - it was an atrocious deal for the latter.

This not being in a nuclear umbrella is the reason why Russia was willing to risk invading them.

I don’t get why people are saying there should be a punishment.

Being treated exactly like every other country outside the EU is not a punishment. A punishment would be demanding reparations for the damages the UK inflicted with Brexit, which you’ll note neither me nor anybody else here I could see asked for.

[…] Why not just let them leave and then realise it’s wrong when it happens and come back?

This is what that looks like: Accept the same terms as anybody else or don’t join. There are plenty of ways to have constructive cooperations without the UK joining the EU.

Like if a family member that I know and love hurts me and leaves, I’d eventually welcome them back and let bygones be bygones, because we are a team. But if it’s some coworker I don’t care about, I’d want to be made right for the troubles.

“We” are not a family. The EU is a confederation. If we were a family, I would require both contrition and some form of reparations, because breaking such a much closer bond has more severe consequences.

It’s good to let the leavers feel a taste of how bad it is to do it, but joining should always be a good thing and not a punishment.

If the UK thinks joining on the same terms as anybody else is a punishment they are free to not join. We have way too many grandfathered-in friction-causing privileges already.

I’m all for constructive cooperation moving forward, as long as the UK never gets its special privileges back.

We don’t.

Here in Germany one of the few good things that came out of our previous federal government was the SBGG, which - among other things - allows you to delete the entry. And before anyone points it out: I’m aware it isn’t perfect.

I’ve corrected my previous comments w.r.t. the terminology, thank you.

That being said, assuming those two spectrograms are using a comparable frequency scale, they show quite a bit of a difference: The upper spectrogram shows a near complete “black” stop across all but the lowest frequencies, while the lower spectrogram does not: The 2nd-lowest frequencies continue virtually unchanged, the mid frequencies are only reduced to a dark purple, not completely dark, and only the upper frequencies are truly dark. Those are not the same sound.

Yes, there’s a stop of exhalation between the s and the K. If there wasn’t, it would sound more like the sk of the English word sky instead.

EDIT: He does not, however, stop between Kindern and werden and not between werden and Leute, which does sound weird to me. Less like standard German and more like a dialect.

I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you’re talking about in the example above, though?

In the voice changed output for “Das Kind”? It’s not perfect, but yes. If you’re interested in the “biomechanics”: It’s the difference between a miniscule stopping of the continuous exhalation from your mouth for the s before starting a new burst exhalation for the k vs doing both as part of the same single exhalation that directly changes from continuous to burst.

The entire new testament is fan fiction. Iēsous of Nazareth didn’t write any of it, the first assumed author never even met him.

The “biblical canon” of today seems to be more or less just whatever was later dictated when Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion. Who knows how much other, potentially more accurate reports about Iēsous were lost during that dictatorship?

Now, I agree that Paradise Lost does not have any claim to veracity. I would just also say any claim the new testament has is null and void.

If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.

“Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I’ve grown up with. I’ve never heard anyone any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.

In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There’s a reason why it’s in the IPA. It’s also e.g. the basis for the “gender not-really-neutral” dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).