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The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...


> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.

The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.

(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c


[flagged]


They want to undo the protestant reformation?

They are just a bit confused about which Martin Luther they hate.

So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?

I’ve never understood this mentality that people who read and watched handmaids tale, caused some done kind of weird obsession built on a literal fiction story, a made up story… especially since the reality is not only the polar opposite, but in no place on the planet have things ever been better for any people relative to all other places of their time than in the very European societies and cultures that you types are so suicidally fixated on being destructive of.

The irony of the handmaids tale types from my experience is that they/you are, in their/your suicidally manic self-harming obsession, advocates for the spread of Islam in the very western countries that have provided all of humanity all of its freedoms and comforts, which would ironically will lead to an actual handmaids tale type scenario you constantly warn of.

Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did? It makes the handmaids tale sound like a wholesome family dynamic.


> Have you ever heard of what the Ottoman Empire did?

Pertaining specifically to women? No, actually. Any chance you'd elaborate for the curious?


Not what he means but the ottomans and women have an interesting history…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Women


> So turn back the clock to when Hildegard von Bingen was only one of many extremely powerful and influential abbesses that were polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators of women in Europe?

Who were the other female composers of her generation?


It is a bit disingenuous to jump from

> polymaths and prolific artists and writers and educators

to composers. Even the male composers of whom we know the names are few and sparsely attributed. Just look at the Notre Dame school and how little we know except two names with no attached biography and some beautiful music. And even only that by 'lucky accident' since a single, anonymous student wrote them down.

You'll definitely find abbesses like Herrad von Landsberg who did write and educate in her generation.


It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.

Sometimes, books which claim to be real like “night” by Elie Wiesel are full of bullshit/lies/fraud too!

His book sowed the seeds for holocaust denialism in GenZ.


It's laughable to paint Islam as the enemy of Western liberty when it is masked agents of a Christian nationalist regime who are terrorizing the streets of my city and cities across the US.

> a thousand years...

less than a hundred?


So native American tribes and no white people? That would make a change.

The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6

>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit

Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.

This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.


You can only move so 'fast and break things', when failure can land you and your family in jail or get you killed.

That being said, the timeline is remarkably short for such a hardware project.


They originally wanted to make a helicopter. (Not kidding)

More like a ultra-light plane / helicopter hybrid or so, isn't it?

Sounds like an autogyro, indeed one of the lightest and cheapest ways to build a plane. They are basically planes with a free-spinning helicopter rotor for lift.

The private mechanics and electrical hacking culture that is the base for German engineering . Tûftler in jedem Schuppen..

I enjoyed learning about the town of Bad Kissingen

As a German, that name makes me think of pillows (Kissen).

Completely agree - although the shine has rather worn off the ‘move fast and break things’ approach.

SpaceX is doing fine woth that approach?

Great example.

But when Musk took that approach to DOGE, chaos.

And some of the approach hasn’t always gone well at Tesla either.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/06/01/elon-musk-wan...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/24/elon-musk-...


Rapid prototyping works well in engineering, because you can test for faults quickly.

But transferring engineering practices into politics - which is not really new, "social engineering" has emerged again and again since the Enlightement Era - is usually a disaster.

In social contexts, people often cannot agree on what even constitutes a "fault" and how to measure outcomes. Individuals will adjust their behavior (unlike, say, a valve in a rocket engine, which can't consciously decide to sabotage the flight) and the systems tend to have long feedback loops.


This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.

Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets

A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.

A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.

The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.

Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.


I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!

Yes, https://www.projectceti.org/ is working on whale translation!


Nice that the back button works.


The app reopens to where I am reading when I open it, unless I've manually quit the app. If I quit the app, the it still frequently opens to where I was last time, although there may be some reset period after which it opens the 'your library' page. In that case, an icon representing the book I'm currently reading is visible in the bottom left, and I can open it with one tap.


Wonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve.

[0] https://scrollprize.org/


I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.


It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.


Tangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA


Why not?


I figured it would be a biosecurity issue - looks like I'm wrong though which is good!


This barely works for me because it seems like stuff always gets cached either at the browser or the OS level.


The best giveaway is that the sentences are short and punchy. If it were made by the character it claims to be made by, it would actually devolve into a long ramble, and nobody would make it to the bottom of the page.


This is exactly the stuff that prevents innovation and drives entrepreneurs out of those economies. Physical address?!


It can be a letterbox. The point is that there needs to be a way to contact a company in such a way that message delivery is provable and legally binding.

AFAIK no universally adopted modern form of communication fulfills both.

How do the US solve this problem ?


I'm not so sure it can be a letterbox. When registering companies with the Handelsregister in Germany, I think there is a legal requirement to have a physical address. At least from my experience.


In the US, most (all?) states require a local registered agent with a non-PO box in the state. A lot of companies do good business as registered agents for out-of-state and foreign companies, where they file the paperwork and forward mail to the desired recipient.


In Australia, all companies must have a registered address, available on the register of companies (which isn't quite as open as I'd prefer, it isn't nearly as good as the UK's Companies House, for instance). This physical address must then have a plaque showing the registered company name roughly at the door.

In reality, just like in the Paradise Papers leaks etc, an individual accountant's office might have 4000 of these lined up next to their door.

Of course, for the vast majority of businesses, this is not much of a hurdle, and for most consumers it isn't all that helpful either, but end of the day, scammers are gonna scam, whatever the obstacles are. Even those that aren't outright scammers, will be paying accountants to have a plaque on their door to show that this is their "physical office" ...

Hopefully such efforts at least help courts assign some blame when the time comes.


It cannot be a letterbox. You must provide a real address that has capabilities to receive mail.

Luckily for a few euros per month you can rent quite nice addresses and the relative mail forwarding services (e.g., once a day, once a week, etc.)


You are right, that what I meant when I said letterbox.

I should have looked up the definition, before using the word.


Given how easy it is to do e.g. DMCA abuse, or claiming random videos on YouTube, I'd say they haven't solved it. There's even a lovely weird expression for it, fly-by-night companies.


Why would you need to hide your company if you are not running a scam?


maybe your company is just home.


When I see an imprint and see that it's a home address, I have no problems with that. It lets me know that this person is either just getting started or simply doesn't want to grow into a bigger company, probably because he/she has a real job, which are both great things, but if they scam me, I know where to contact them.

Why would I randomly show up at their house and ring their bell?


The “a sane person wouldn’t do this” argument is really not that good.


Neither is the "criminals might abuse it so we should make things worse for everyone else" argument.


Many companies start in the "garage" and if you have privacy concerns, you can't use your home address as company address. This requires you to rent a spot in a coworking that allows you to use their address as company address. Also, you need to get a second phone.

Too many small inconveniences for a small unprofitable startup that you need to worry about, instead of focusing on finding product market fit.


Why do you think the company needs its right to privacy but the customers that deal with that company don't need the right to know who they're dealing with ?

For your startup, aren't you setting up your DNS, webhosting, etc? aren't these small inconveniences that you're doing instead of "focusing on finding product market fit" ?

Each company, nay, each person has to do some amount of "paperwork" in order to create society that functions. Why should your startup admin be easier then my filling of personal taxes ?


One isn't a customer until they decided to get something from the company. But the website is available to everyone.


At least here in Germany, you shouldn't use your home address for your business at all, because of Tax obligations, at least when you are not renting.

Because if you want to move your business later, when it grows, the tax office will regard your home as part of the business. Things will get complicated that way.


Dont start a company if you are so poor you cant afford a postbox.


Disagree with everything you said. These are all self-created non-issues.


Out of all things that prevent innovation, this is probably the simplest with a "pay to fix it" solution. And the amount is not even that high.. we're talking about a few euros per month.


Unfortunately, in Germany, there is a legal requirement for a business to have a physical address when registering it with the commercial register.


How is that unfortunate? What would we gain from letting businesses opt out you being able to contact them?


It not only prevents innovation, but it also enables fake industries, such as companies that harass and "fine" you (not legally binding) for not having an imprint even when not required, or otherwise coming up with irrelevant "problems" with your imprint and reporting you to authorities.


Something where you're reachable for any legal purposes- in Germany this sadly remains a physical address.

There are various service which offer a 'virtual' address with digital forwarding of letters for less than 10Eur/Month, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.


The same stuff prevents massive scams


Huh? Why would that be harmful at all??


Entrepreneurs hate responsibility


I imagine that most people hate random Internet crazies showing up at their homes.

When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.


It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.

That's probably most of what it does, because how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?


> It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.

Or think you scammed them! Crazies gonna crazy.

> how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?

I think that anyone who has dealt with the general public in any organisation (scouting, church, business, government) will tell you that a surprisingly large number of people (I have seen estimates as high as one in four!) are crazy to one degree or another.

I would very much rather not have my home address out there for every Tom, Dick & Harry who thinks that my software is making the aliens send radio transmissions to his teeth.


This type of tinkering with data and imagery is so satisfying. Wish I had more opportunities to chase stuff like this in my life!


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