Yupp, that’s why I added (succesfully) to my plea. Unfortunately, I think you are very right.

From the little that seems to be available at the time of this comment, it feels like someone confused and disturbed, not like a properly planned-out-attempt at anything.

The Secret Service received information from local police about an alleged “suicidal individual” who was traveling from Indiana and found the man’s car and a person matching his description nearby.

“As officers approached, the individual brandished a firearm and an armed confrontation ensued, during which shots were fired by our personnel,” the Secret Service said in a statement.

The man was hospitalized. The Secret Service said his condition was “unknown.”

Oh, please, oh please, I hope it won’t be (succesfully) used for even more repression.

I understand concerns about fragmentation, but recently, I have been more and more in favour of “why not both” as an approach. Basically: One de-facto “central” community, and many local communities. Main reason being, that this will help the Fediverse grow without losing it’s “soul” so to speak. Where - hopefully eventually - there will be those central communities with a reddit-like experience for the topic, and then also local ones, where smaller communities around the topic, without the traps of large, “mainstream” communites, can form.

archive.ph - link without registration wall

The investments are being placed through opaque structures known as special-purpose vehicles, which have the benefit of concealing the investors’ identities, to avoid the ire of US authorities and companies wary of Chinese capital during a nadir in relations between the two countries.

Asset managers behind the deals have told investors that the entities are specifically designed to avoid disclosure. The use of special-purpose vehicles in financing is commonplace and there is nothing illegal about the arrangements.

Still, it raises concerns about the potential for undue influence and conflicts of interest at a time when Musk has unprecedented involvement in US policy, politics and business.

Funnily enough, to me personally, there are more questions about what this means concerning Chinese politics and conflicts of interests in the future. The country is not without its own tensions, after all.

The inflow of Chinese capital into Musk’s business empire is primarily profit-driven and has little to do with technology transfer or influencing public policy, according to people involved in the transactions.

With a sluggish domestic economy, wealthy Chinese are looking abroad for investment opportunities.

To me, personally, it serves as a reminder that no amount of red flags waved or social-democratic laws saying “wealth is going to serve the interests of the working class” makes a country communist, only material realities can.

Besides that material interest, there is also cognitive dissonance because of ideological distortions. If you believe things were fine before Trump, you were already adept at closing your eyes to problems. Including very fundamental problems, which helped to put the clique of billionaire grifters and outright fascists into power.

Sadly, as I’m not from the US, it would not really help me (in fact, make it harder). Funnily enough, Iceland was actually occupied by the US during World War II - which they did pre-emptively, worrying the Nazis may pull off another stunt like with Norway and endanger shipping from there if they don’t.

God damn, if I had the money, I’d escape to Iceland. Has been a dream for a long time now, but it just gets more and more desirable.

It’s a simple choice, really, considering how many hours I managed to invest as a kid:

For me, as a kid in the 90s, the nostalgia candidate is U7 - which is the “lame” popular choice, I guess. III is definitely the best of the first “trilogy”, though, IMO.

It’s nice to see that the series is being rediscovered as the influential pioneer in PC game design that it was. Sadly, the great retrospective series by Majuular will probably not be on PeerTube any time soon.

Literally viewing the world like a EU4 map painting player would

That’s understandable and fair enough - main reason I pointed it out was because your comment made it seem like the video was one of the watchtime bait ones, that only reveal the answer halfway through or even only at the end, potentially keeping even people interested from even trying to watch. Thankfully, its right at the beginning, and the rest is just details about development, context, gameplay and such.

Funnily enough, he reveals that quite early in the video, so you saved them maybe 5 minutes at best. EDIT: It’s actually at about the 1:15 mark

I see you talk about EU regulations in your instance. Is it hosted in the EU? If that’s the case, I’d love to join it! :D

Yupp, hosted in Finland over a German provider (Hetzner)

By now: Yeah, there are some nice creators on PeerTube. Overall, it feels a bit more like old YouTube, many more people just creating because they want to, instead of chasing fame, as well as bizarre and weird little videos here and there. One advantage of it: It has much better native embedding into Lemmy (at least on newer versions)!

Much like in other fedi-places, it’s work to curate your own feed instead of having algorithms feed you. I have ADHD, so usually, I have some video or something running on my second screen while working on other stuff, and whenever my attention is spent, I switch to there and scour the recent or trending feed (or new vids from subscribers) for something interesting to share and watch.

For anyone interested - I am always happy to plug [email protected] - we recently hit 200 subscribers and have been steadily growing. If you are looking for an instance to join, I am still tinkering with it, but mine is open to new applications for as long as the server resources allow.

I’m currently busy setting up my own Lemmy instance and PeerTube instance. Before the Fediverse, YT and Reddit were basically the only things I used, I was never a big fan of twitter-like social media. So those slot in nicely into those itches to scratch. (although there are still some creators I follow on YT, I have been watching it a lot less after getting serious with PeerTube)

I think it is a mix of narcissism and related impulsivity, grifters in his circle influencing him so they and he himself can speculate on a recession and market manipulation from his policies, ideologically indoctrinated people that drank their own cool-aid about libertarianism and finally, indeed, him also declining after he was never all that bright to begin with.

I tried, years ago, I think their federated approach to building a database and crawling are cool - but at least the last time I checked, the actual search algorithm was just too bad. It often gave me completely irrelevant results and seemed very susceptible to spam sites gaming Search Engine Optimisation.

The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.

And that’s just not bloody true.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

I think there is one more piece to the situation: Ultimately, it would be down to the executive to actually implement those things. Now, even where they haven’t been replaced by loyalists, they have to face one more thing: What are the consequences if they defy the court vs what are the potential consequences for defying Trump.

As long as there is no determined, organised opposition, that makes it clear there will be a new status quo after Trump and crimes will be punished, they have many reason to fear Trump’s cronies, and little to fear the courts.

And I mean an opposition that is actually capable and willing to take power, not some sort of “moral opposition”.

True, I’m actually German myself, and I have to admit - it was a bit of an intuitive, emotional reaction. Really: My worry is about their wealth. Even as old people, where not giving them harsh prison sentences is understandable, what’s keeping them from further supporting fascists in the future? Even if they are monitored, I don’t have a lot of faith in our police and the Verfassungsschutz to properly monitor flow of finances, especially when it comes to hidden gold transfers at meetups, or Monero or similar loopholes.