My review came with an asterisk. I mainly wanted to point out how to get it free so you can make up your own mind.
The short answer is no but the long answer is yes. You can fight like the old guy from Up! but in the end you'll probably lose (YMMV because of location).
Municipal planning though often involves spaces allocated for roads and stuff. So the plots of land don't all border each other but imaginary roadways have already been drawn up if not built already.
It might be helpful to know where this is.
The easiest answer regardless is become active in local politics, try to get into the municipal government, and allocate funds to building up infrastructure in your area.
I don't remember if I bought it on Google Play so I don't know if you would need to. You can though test drive it guaranteed for free if you sideload the F-Droid app store and get it from there.
I stopped using it about two years ago because it felt it took forever loading feeds and switched to Tusky, which has less functionality (e.g. no post scheduling) but loads faster, I think, and works well for my limited needs. Fedilab's menus never put me off. But I never went back.
So that's a review that needs a pinch of salt or two.
I think it is possible but not very likely. And I think scale and economic prosperity may have something to do with it. I'm thinking of Singapore, which isn't the most democratic of states but also is tiny. Monaco falls into the same category. What those two very roughly have in common is economic strength and that seems to sort of compensate for lack of democratic liberties. I would drop the theory that a state the size of other countries' cities can establish an authoritarian leadership that doesn't rely mostly on fear mongering (but probably will here or there).
I question your sense of smell.
I don't think there is any example of an autocracy in the last 125 years where the media completely resisted the establishment of the regime. The reasons there can be twofold. Media needs to make money. Not aligning your business with the strongman (or woman) spells out economic decline so blind eyes are turned until blind eyes prevail. The other reason is that most autocratic regimes don't come fully formed on the day of the coup etc. There is a period of incremental changes that can silence critics or get them to censor themselves while gaining support with the less critical part of the media (and alternatively jailing people who say something bad). Like the frog in the pot the media is stuck in the hot water. Or it jumps out into a show trial or other instrument of repression.
I would say in the days before newspapers, a power base had to be established to take over from a royal. Those were the people with power, the aristocracy. You didn't need all of them but a substantial portion. It's only since we've pulled the silver spoons out of dukes and barons, the power base has shifted to include people who didn't just inherit a title and most of the shire. That, I would say naturally, includes selfmade industrialists as well as selfmade media moguls. They have become a necessity today when it was much less important before (or much easier to control the narrative with fewer resources). Additionally, as any revolutionary will tell you these days, you have to of course capture the broadcasters with military might if you can. But even that will seem quaint soon when all you'll need is an online media presence that you can control 100%. Trump shows us that way.
Tl;DR? It used to be possible. But we are in a transition period from a time when having the media on your side was a necessity to where you can easily create your own media to drown out the establishment voices and that might do the trick.
The Cory Doctorow cycle of enshitification starts with a focus on users, giving them exactly what they want. With a strong user base behind them they then pivot to business customers, advertisers, and the like. And then they turn in on themselves, only looking for shareholder value, and leave the tied up users and the B2B side in the lurch. It's a business process, during which a social media site's offerings would decrease in quality. But not every drop in quality is enshitification. A sudden burst of new users, an unforeseen bug in the software, a terrible event in the real world, a scandal behind the scenes can all affect the public's opinion negatively.
I don't think every social media platform is doomed to play through the e-cycle. The moment you remove the need for or drastically limit the patronage of B2B customers in the organization, you remove one crucial element from the equation. The same happens if you remove the need to create earnings growth, i.e. not become a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That's why federated social media can probably only turn to shit because of the people who use it and not because a boardroom somewhere decided to squeeze the last bit of juice out of that lemon. That's just life then but not per se enshitification.
So I think Facebook and Insta are good examples of enshitification. Reddit to an extent also. Twitter I think was a different story. It never got beyond a point where it was just great for the users. They didn't make enough money from advertisers. They didn't then turn their attention solely to their share prices with any success. They saw a sucker who was gonna pay billions for it and parachuted out. Twitter then became shit but because of its new owner, not because of this business cycle.
We tend to look at everything with nostalgia. Was the past not more fun? We cannot be trusted to judge this dispassionately.
Ich🚧iel
Tragisch ist bis heute, dass der Bindestrich es noch nicht über den Atlantik geschafft hat.
You probably don't. Those tummy acids are strong. I would wipe the surface with soap. Maybe submerge them in water if you can immediately place them in direct sunlight afterwards to dry them out again. Wipe surface again and hope for the best. I would water an un-vomited-upon Birk along with the offender, maybe not in the same sink water, to wear them out equally.
You're trying to apply conventional logic to the orange one. That doesn't work. Stop doing that. It's all about his frail ego, flooding the zone with bs, denying everything and never giving in, and blaming everybody else for stuff he's done.
And just to give the poor, battered, beleaguered, ever-so-stable leader a break, there are sea lanes and flight routes available to the cartels as well. They didn't have to go through the US (but probably did).
Yes. Europeans have been enjoying a bed that was made for them in this area as part of a security package that came into existence after WW2. They didn't have to invest in intelligence as much because they had it delivered to their doors. If that delivery system stops, they will have to replace it. They can do that.
I wouldn't be surprised if at EU level (+UK) we will see a lot of unified defense initiatives that mention in a subordinated clause that intelligence coordinating and sharing will be part of that as well.
The most famous fountain for coin tossing/wish making is Trevi in Rome (and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole concept came from there). You are legally forbidden from taking money back out of it there. The moment the coin sinks into the water, it belongs to the municipality, so taking it back out constitutes theft. The municipality is allowed (and indeed forced) to clear the coins from the fountain (otherwise there would be no water left after a while) and AFAIK they donate the cash for a good cause.
Is cops being evil/lazy/incompetent a USA specific thing, or is it the same everywhere in the world?
Just for some German context: the Nazi salute is not covered by any freedom of expression or opinion in a political context. What Elon did on stage would have landed him in a German court. Similar restrictions apply to displaying certain symbols, e.g. the swastika. German cops are legally required to intervene when they see them in public.
I don't know the video in question, I don't know if the cops overreacted - a reaction was required though.
I don't think you can codify it more than "they do it by gut." I think it's pretty rare that a song goes unaltered from the spark in somebody's head to mastered recording without many changes. It's a collaborative effort that involves the producers and friends as well.
I think the more somebody is knowledgeable in musical theory, can read and write notes, and maybe even has perfect pitch, the more fully formed an idea will be when it gets to the early stages of recording. But musicians are not all Mozarts.
I dabbled in making electronic music for a while as a hobby. There was only me, I don't remember anything from musical theory class in school, can barely read notation - in short: I'm not even mediocre. But even I felt occasionally that I needed to speed a track up or down. It's a gut feeling.
I know from a drummer friend of mine that performing live is hard. You're either very good at keeping time, like, you have an unshakable metronome in your head, or the tempo naturally speeds up. That's why during production a lot of musicians get the metronome via a click track in their ears to make sure they don't deviate too far from what BPM they wanted to hit. During live concerts I think a lot of drummers, as the metronomes of the band, get a click track in their ears as well. And there may be concerts where a song is sped up compared to the recording on purpose, but is still played with a click track because it sounds better live when it's faster, maybe because it's missing a lot of stuff from the production that filled gaps at the lower speed. So you can say everything has a tendency to speed up live but sometimes tracks that are performed faster are an artistic choice.
I don't think they know for sure where it will end up but no matter what it will be, it will be brilliant, it will be the greatest, and it will have been the plan all along.
Rich people like to keep their money. So the only objective right now is to dismantle the oversight within government. It's not government efficiency they're after but removal of impediments to big business interests. That's the Melon side of the plan. It's his ROI. It's also is MO. Tabula Rasa everything and then build anew. It didn't work for Twitter. I don't think it will work for a federal government. We've already seen lots of unintended side effects. Oops, we fired the guys who look after the nukes. Lives will be lost here and there but, cynically, not enough to mobilize the masses.
It is of course worrying that Trump said as much as wanting to enlarge the US again. I'm not sure yet if that's just a dead cat he's thrown on table to distract us from Melon or if that's really the plan. It worried the US NATO ally Denmark enough to massively increase their defense budget over Greenland. Trump likes to be contrarian. He feeds off the stir he causes. He never built the wall, Mexico never paid for it. But he reveled in the reactions. Greenland could be a similar thing but I'm not sure yet.
It's worrying me the amount of sh!t the lgbtq+ community is getting, especially the T. There is danger there. I don't think Trump cares an awful lot about this issue, he just likes it as a way to unite the sleepy, the anti-woke behind him. But there are people behind him and with power now that do care, that do want to please their leader. And that creates a maelstrom of zealous a-holes trying to one-up each other with cruelty to score browny points with the boss. When I think this through, I fear citizen liberty is most under threat here.
I don't believe a world war with nukes is what they're after. You cannot really prosper as a corporation if the planet is barely habitable due to the radiation and the nuclear winter. It would be bad for Wall Street. But they wouldn't mind a few conflicts comparable to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. While nukes have been threatened, they haven't been used. So it's a conventional war and that's good for arms manufacturers.
In simple terms, Trump's cozying up to Vlad actually decreases the threat of a world war III, at least in the short term. It reduces the number of trouble hotspots. There were big ones between the US and Russia (until January 25) and between the US and China. Trump parroting Kremlin talking points and showing the rest of NATO the middle finger reduces hotspots with Russia. Russia is on relatively friendly terms with China and could probably meditate issues between China and the US. At least in the short term, that's not a bad thing. But it isn't stable. It remains to be seen if Europe plus Canada plus X can fill the vacuum and that would reignite hotspots with Russia again.
I do agree that climate change poses a threat. I don't think the billionaires worry so much about it beyond buying New Zealand and blanketing it with villas with bunkers. But it is a threat to maintaining order when the people get hit with more severe tornados, droughts, etc. Best way to maintain order is an authoritarian government.
We are monkeys that with the benefit of lots of time have developed opposable thumbs, tools, and language. We used language to describe abstract concepts in words. One of those words is "legacy." Some people are driven to build one. Some are just altruistic. The urge to create offspring is also common and with it the hope your brats will fare well. There are your reasons why some people build for a tomorrow that never pays them back.
Consider also that somebody has built the road that leads to your house, the city you're in, the hospital you go to when you're sick. Civilization is a chain of paying stuff forward for those who come after you.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/04/stolen-android-phone-returned-iphone/
I did not make this up. But it was more than a year ago.
I remember reading a headline somewhere that thieves returned a couple of snatched phones to the owners specifically because they were Androids.
The rest of the world has a much higher share of Android phones than the US. There was and still is stigma around being green bubble in text threads on iMessage. Apple is dominant at home. Teenagers refuse to date folks without iPhones. Etc.