boomzilla

The one on the left will probably become the next german chancellor as this party CDU (Christian Democratic Union) will nominate him at the next federal parliament elections. A popular magazine (IIRC it was Financial Times) called him the german Trump years ago. He was a long-time chairman of the supervisory board of BlackRock.

He is famous for stating that he and the CDU will be the firewall against the far-right (and often straight-up nazi) AfD party who recently won german elections in the state of Thuringia and were 2nd place in Saxony and Brandenburg (all 3 are ex-GDR states). Recently Merz denied his firewall statement (as in "We never said that") and that it was imposed on them from other parties.

He's also famous for voting against the criminalization of rape within marriages, not wanting to raise taxes for rich people and flooding the zone with shit against the Green Party (part of the currently ruling coalition) who had a big influencr on the facts that Germany is not dependent on russian gas anymore, the energy prices are currently at pre-Ukrainian war level, Germany has one of the most stable energy systems in Europe, inflation is on pre-war level, renewables were ramped up immensively and the internet is finally getting modernized thanks to their broadband initiative.

Nevertheless the current government is often titulated as the worst in a long time. Mind you we had 16 years of standstill with the CDU before that, apart from the Merkel initiatives: federal-wide exit of nuclear energy after Fukushima and the abolition of mandatory Military Service and the "Wir schaffen das" refugee politics because of the War in Syria. The latter was the beginning of the radicalization of previously non-radical parts of the population as far-right parties and other groups painted a grim picture because of the refugee situation.

The bad rep of our current traffic light coalition (red labour SPD, the Greens and the yellow neoliberal and corrupt outlier FDP) is the work of a the biggest newspaper publisher Springer with it's magazines Bild (Germans The Sun), Welt (The Sun for intellectuals) and other mags like Politico. They're pushing aggressive propaganda against The Greens. Specifically against Robert Habeck our economy minister, an ex children book author, the architect of the green revolution here and responsible for cutting of the gas supply chain from russia. Bild basically published multiple articles against the Greens over more than 2 years every day, especially against their heat pump initiative for private homes and the exit for combustion car engines after 2035 which are both EU regulations and will come anyway.

Back to Merz. He is one of many politicians from nearly all parties in Germany whose main job in the opposition is to do the same as Bild. He doesn't diffamate the main party SPD and surely not his buddies from the soon Niedrigverdiener of the FDP (who fucked up the political processes over the whole 3 years of the gov which even angered the EU heavily) but his target ofc was nearly solely the Greens. The main reason: Ties to the fossil industry and probably ties to The Heritage Foundation who want to take over the US.

There recently was held a conference in Berlin organised by The Republic who was the main think tank behind the Bild campaigns against the traffic-light government. The Heritage Foundation took part in it and it was a meet and greet for CDU politicians with MAGA folks. Merz is said to have a good connection with Mr. Petschner-Multari the CEO of The Republic, which he denies. After open CDU-party intern critical voices from the liberal wing he cancelled his visit to the conference.

https://www.rnd.de/politik/berlin-trumps-maga-republikaner-konferieren-mit-der-cdu-QLQTLIJQBZB2BLA2CMHBSAPJFA.html

Adding to all this Merz is repeating AfD talking points e.g. with his famous "Refugees are the reason why germans don't get dentist appointments anymore because they all come here to get their teeth fixed". Another recurring beast of a topic regarding Merz is the similarity to Fritz Von Papen who basically enabled Hitler in 1933.

The guy on the right is Merz's 18 year old grandson Phillip who was an intern for him at BlackRock. Merz gave him the nickname Smithers...No not really that's Phillip Amthor, another possibly corrupt CDU politician.

Now your up to date about the FUBAR situation in Germany.

I just yesterday tried Wayland under Arch with a 1070 after a long time. Single WQHD monitor though. Although X11 is really performant, Wayland was more smooth regarding KDE desktop effects. Witcher 3 (via Heroic) showed fewer microstutters and I will try some more proton games and other applications over the weekend.

I recently had to downgrade nvidia drivers from 560 to 550 because wakeup from sleep and hibernate would coredump. I read that this is fixed with 560 but only under Wayland. The developers definitely progressed on the nvidia front.

Not going back to cables. Hated it when I yanked them out accidentally.

These ones were my best buy for an item around 20€:

https://www.amazon.de/Xiaomi-Earbuds-Basic-Freisprechfunktion-Aufbewahrungsbox/dp/B08GSQ7B9Z

Pretty sturdy. Much bass. Very good connectivity and fit.

Fishing industry is evil and sucks big times. They just dump their gear (e.g. nets and longlines) in the open water and it's a bane for turtles, sharks, whales, sea birds, seals etc. It's not an accident. The gear seems to be deliberately dumped as the expensive stuff is removed. Read this article if you want to know why they do it. In addition those trawler/fish factory vessels are often part of ghost fleets where 75% of them kill every living being within a miles long radius for weeks on end without any controlling instance.

If you're now under the assumption that it would be better to buy fish from fish farms. It also sucks tremendously. At least when farmed in open pen sea cages out of multiple reasons:

• Pesticides and Antibiotics are released into the sea
• Viruses and parasites escape into the sea
• Salmons escape and alter natural biodiversity
• Excess food and waste lead to oxygen deprivation in the surrounding waters (dead zones)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/farmed-salmon

In addition (and I don't know why WWF isn't calling it out): Whales are essentially hunted because of farmed fish. That's my own conclusion. They don't openly admit it but because whales need tons of krill they are a direct competition to the omega-3 supplement market and feed for salmon farms. The culprits are Norway (they are real eco terrorists if you look behind their green facade at home), Ruzzia, Japan & Scottland. Not only whales but also penguins and seals depend on krill. And those animals are already suffering from H5N1 (with animal agriculture being the culprit again).

What the greedy bastards don't get is, when they kill off the whales, they kill off the krill too. As so often humans disturb eco systems developed over millions of years. In this case it's the poop loop.

The intention of my wall of text is to move the people who have a modicum of interest left to save the oceans to consider to ditch any fish caught in the oceans or bred on salmon farms (btw they are feeding them chicken bones too). Humans need Omega 3 DHA & EPA fatty acids. You can easily get those via algae capsules. That's where fish get theirs from essentially.

Only we the consumers have the power to break the vicious circle but we're to uneducated and complacent. As long as there's a market they'll ruthlessly plunder the ecosystems till nothing is left. Some say we're already nearing that moment with parts of the oceans.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ul6mQSO0UA

Shut up bird!

https://mstdn.social/@SteveBologna/113099259001934443

In fish it would immediately expand to dir2.

If you have "Dir1" and "DIR2" and you type "cd d", your prompt will look like in the next picture. Fish automatically transforms "d" into "D", because there is no dir starting with the lowercase "d".

On a subsequent you'll get a list of dirs matching your prompt so far in which you choose an entry with the cursor key and enter it with the enter key.

https://programming.dev/comment/12049449