The Netherlands being called a “narco state” by some elements, while in essence has a core of truth in it, comes more from the lack of punishment on hard crime, not the tolerance of soft-drugs (harddrugs are still considered highly illegal and criminal to traffic afaik).

The Netherlands has closed many a prison in recent years, not because there was no crime but no properly paid staff to fill them. And a lot of the criminals that do end up in prison get, in the public’s view, extremely lenient sentences or just house arrest with an ankle bracelet.

Even high profile criminals who shot political candidates (for prime minister?) or very public figures, were given a short prison stay and then house arrest with privileges as long as they played nice.

Also, from what I heard, a lot of the narco-criminals that do get caught are often not of Dutch origin and for some reason that is considered to give a lot more trouble on giving them a hard sentence. The bigger boys will get extradited to their country of origin with no real continuous followup if they’re still fulfilling a prison sentence.

And for example drug-runner teenagers, who break into shipping containers in the large ports grab the goods and try to get it to their bosses, are often barely punished.

It just seems The Netherlands punishes crime from the view of the person, (ie. you’ll be locked up for 5 years of your coming ~55 years of life) not on what society deems appropriate for the crime committed.

Apple airtags I found annoying and on a few rare occasions they did not work properly …
Airtag clones, the cheap ones, never worked for me, go with originals or the more expensive clones.

The Samsung tags on the other hand have been solid and functional for me, without hassles.

I use the tags to find car keys (on rare occasions they fall from my pocket in some grass for example) they worked for luggage as well as finding a car and bike in parking areas.

For constant tracking in general I am not impressed with none of them

Uhm … is this perhaps for the android browser then?

The desktop browser has had this for a long long time, though in recent builds a bit hidden. I still use various profiles, very handy.

I was going to suggest CoD as well … the whole series is mostly a carbon copy of the previous version. Let alone the gameplay is "run for 30 seconds, die, respawn and repeat.

It’s not so much that they down- and upscale the video of shorts, their algorithm changes the look of people. It warps skin and does a strange sort of sharpening that makes things look quite unreal and almost plastic.

It is a filter that evens the look with images generated by, say, grok or one of the other AI filters.

In a year people will think that “AI-look” is a normal video look, and stuff generated with it is what humans can look like. We will see crazed AI-fashion looks popping up.

Adding to that: Star Wars 1313

Would have been amazing to get a gritty Star Wars game with a good storyline. Star Wars Jedi:fallen order leaned a bit towards it but is not so gritty/dark.

Bah, each time I want to do the manual upgrade from 23h2 I have to postpone it again due to some stupid bug or annoying feature that makes me reconsider doing it.

It kind of sounds like the beginnings of star trek’s replicators…

But that aside, somehow I doubt those are the exact only “ingredients” they use.
And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the end product contains all kinds of trace elements of various not so healthy chemicals used to get the parts to combine into the actual butter.
Like the process to get the glycerol or lecithin in a state they can use.

Ofcourse a lot of our dietary ingredients are contaminated in various levels anyway.

The water and its reflections are what solidified it for me.

“Wearables” but they forget to mention it’s about government mandated trackers in a closed ecosystem.
They will track which bad (health or otherwise) groups of people one has come in contact with and make deductions based on that.

Ofcourse it’s also extra business for the ice teams. And the deluxe wearable also tracks payments.

The European Covid tracking app back then already was very scary in its early setup … and this mandated wearable idea will be far worse.

So, let me see if I get this straight:

Books are inherently an artificial construct. If I read the books I train the A(rtificially trained)Intelligence in my skull.
Therefore the concept of me getting them through “piracy” is null and void…

I learned a long time ago that in the USA the packaging is always far greater than the content.
And it seems to apply to everything, be it political, to personal conversations (example: greeting someone with hey how are you, but actually getting an answer to that question is not interesting, just reply with “great, you?”). Or from people praising their city … but totally glossing over the very large populace of homeless living under bridges.
“We have the best medical care system in the world” … but that it’s only for the top 5% and the rest actually get to see/pay the insane bills is quickly ignored.
And in movies/television it is also very much present. So, yeah, I don’t expect much from the folks shouting about their amendments or hugging their guns under the pretense of fighting off a dictatorship…

^This …

I have seen a few places now where devices drop randomly if they’re two “hops” over from a gateway. It always appears to be that the missing device thinks it is meshed in but the device it meshes with is saying nah, too far I can’t understand you. Adding a mains powered zigbee gateway or device solves it promptly.

You’re right … but I think it currently is the wrong argument to make that it’s been going on so long…
The (extreme) situational corruption of this sitting ruler is what needs to be halted now and make it the final drop to setup regulations against what happened for 40 years.

He needs as much propaganda (read lies) to stay standing…
For example when he decides to nuke Ukraine because he can’t conquer it, he must have the Russian population convinced it was because of defending/retribution for a nuclear attack by the west. The only way to do that is to minimize information coming from outside.

Look at random interviews with Russian people on the countryside and some in the cities, they are deeply brainwashed and indoctrinated from only hearing state messaging about how the west is outright evil. Those people are unable to revolt.

They did more than influence the past election, and have plans to do the same in the upcoming ones… so ofcourse any regulation against these plans must be taken away.

Sea Of Thieves has amazing ocean effects. The fog sometimes also is very atmospheric with how it seems to occlude sounds etc.

I am a bit curious to where this will go, I agree it looks to be what you say, an opportunity to throw the case and get a ruling that will fortify things against a breakup.

On the other hand Musk despises the Zuck and is petty enough to work towards breaking up Zuckerberg’s empire behind the scenes. He would love to buy up chunks of it.

What really needs to stop is the obscene bonus culture. It is quite disgusting to keep reading a company needs to lay off 500 people only to then give some CEO a bonus of 15million. Or banks running a deep 9 digit number loss in a year but still the higher ups get a bonus for some reason or a vague years old contractual promise. The top should feel loss first before it “trickles down”, and honest pay for honest work should include the top as well.

And while I am at it, senseless management jobs should be allowed to be contested, no more “manager toiletpaper” who only shows up once a week to make an order, yet makes 5x the wages of people under him.

Hahaha

This whole presidency is raised for maximizing CEO income and no taxes for everyone at the top.

It will be interesting if Trump actually manages to pull it off, because he’ll make the US swap places with China:
No one trusts the country anymore, but if it has low enough wages and proper production capability it will produce everything cheaply just to export it all overseas where the luxury goods will be sold. Of course all profits will be made overseas, not in the US because hardly anyone can afford the luxury items no more.

Meanwhile the production states will get deep smog clouds and intense small coal particle pollution in return. And the need for face masks will be back…