Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

The depth of the reduction and all the built-in escape valves show that this was an extremely tough compromise, but hopefully we can use this landmark deal to boost the fight for the 4-day work week as the new norm. I think that’s something IGM made a priority, but many sectors represented by ver.di are also ideal sectors for this.

I think the idea is that the funding might come with conditions to reach a significant % of the audience. E.g. often public broadcasters have a remit of 99% of population coverage with their broadcast technology, while private stations have much lower or no legally obligatory reception target.

I don’t think that’s a big obstacle in this case though.

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

Ich wohne in Berlin, also ist Umarmen üblich. Ich frage trotzdem immer kurz nach - wer die Frage peinlich findet, ist sowieso kein gutes Match zu mir.

Es liegt an einer Mischung aus wenigen Kassensitzen sowie hohen Aufnahmehürden.

Ich helfe grade einem Freund mit dem ganzen Prozess - hier ist meine bestmögliche Strategie.

Und da es kein englisches Wort für verschlimmbesserung gibt

https://www.linguee.de/englisch-deutsch/uebersetzung/disimprovement.html

We are back, baby.

I’d say for me it would depend what the monument stands for.

The problem with this is that there’s often multiple interpretations. Is it a monument to the celebrate the defeat of Nazism, or to glorify the paternalist role of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries? You can’t really say it’s only one or the other - you can only decide which one matters more to the society at a given point in time.

I think that when there’s no consensus about an interpretation in a society, a good place to start is with contextualisation. A high-profile but contentious monument should come with a small open-air museum that provides the context of what the monument was intended to stand for, what where the motivations of those who built it, and how it came to be seen as the time passed.

Then, time will tell if the society decides to interpret it one way or the other. At some point it will be clear if it should stay or go.

I probably didn’t express myself well. What I meant to say is that with an area so spread-out, any placement of the bus stop would make it extremely unreachable from some other adjacent destination.

This kind of makes me feel that the problem starts one layer before: this are is so spread out. It really doesn’t look like there’s any visible reason for buildings to be so far apart.

There’s so few buildings that yeah, I think one bus stop is enough to serve them as far as amount of users is concerned. But the green could have been around the built up area, not between the buildings. Parking could also be compacted, maybe multi-floor or underground to reduce the surface area.

One can hope that the store operators will also be heavily fined for their apparent failure to protect their customers’ information from infosec threats. Show them teeth, GDPR.

Germany: shock

Cyprus: anger

None had any discourse around what the PISA scores measure and if there’s any problematisation warranted around the methodology etc. So, in the end, it just serves as a regular outrage topic for the news cycle, but because no-one understands what the scores mean, no-one can do anything about them.

Massive parking lots at the edge of the city. At least this was the recommendation of the Berlin Autofrei initiative.

Extensive summary also here

income-proportional fee structure for government services?

This is income tax.

And if the strike spreads to Germany, which it very well could, it could mean the cease of operation of the Model Y factory in Berlin, which would be devastating to them.

A big problem is that Germany’s labour laws do not allow sympathy or political strikes. A strike can only be legally called in association with a collective bargaining agreement negotiation/dispute.

Germany will be the weak link in this cross-country wave of strikes.

For clarity, I’m in favour of changing the terminology to highlight the historical injustice.

I just thought it’s important to admit that it’s a recent change of linguistic preferences even in the most official Greek publications. Indeed, up to the last couple of years, the adjectival “Elgin” was used in Greek as an accusation of theft, not a recognition of ownership.