My two cents:

Creating a monetary union without a fiscal union was a grievous macroeconomic mistake. For example, it allowed countries like mine (Germany) to abuse the shared currency to artifically lower the cost of exported goods, with the downstream effect of allowing it to “move” parts of its state debt to others, like e.g. France.

There really are only two ways towards eventual stability: Create a fiscal union (which for all intents and purposes means turning the EU from a confederation into a sovereign state), or breaking up the monetary union.

The latter, however, would destroy large parts of the export-dependent German economy almost overnight. It would almost certainly lead to economic suffering not seen since the Great Depression in the short-term. To steelman the argument for a moment, it could theoretically be a (state-)controlled burn to purge all those ailing German big corporations almost exclusively dependent on fossil fuels that have been refusing to innovate for more than 30 years now and be the catalyst for a rapid green transition. But there’s 0% chance of any far-right party desiring this, let alone being able to pull it of.

So that means either we create a fiscal union, or we’re screwed with a monetary system that will continue to amplify existing problems, instead of being a tool capable of addressing them equitably.

The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It’s strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country’s workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.

Danke an die Durchführenden für die Arbeit. Ich bezweifle allerdings stark, dass dies Wähler von Bundes-SPD oder noch Illiberaleren interessieren wird.

Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

The Budapest Memoranda do not contain “If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you”, which would be the requirement for the “the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes” claim.

I’m not a fan of the USA’s foreign policy, but there’s no need to claim they promised something they did not.

Merz schon, der hatte mit denen als Blackrockchef zu tun.

Er war Vorsitzender im Aufsichtsrat der deutschen Tochtergesellschaft, kein Chef.

Niemand mit einem Restfunken an Verstand würde Merz operative Verantwortung für irgendwas geben.

So the US agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia of they gave up their nukes

No, the USA never agreed to protect Ukraine - it was an atrocious deal for the latter.

This not being in a nuclear umbrella is the reason why Russia was willing to risk invading them.

I don’t get why people are saying there should be a punishment.

Being treated exactly like every other country outside the EU is not a punishment. A punishment would be demanding reparations for the damages the UK inflicted with Brexit, which you’ll note neither me nor anybody else here I could see asked for.

[…] Why not just let them leave and then realise it’s wrong when it happens and come back?

This is what that looks like: Accept the same terms as anybody else or don’t join. There are plenty of ways to have constructive cooperations without the UK joining the EU.

Like if a family member that I know and love hurts me and leaves, I’d eventually welcome them back and let bygones be bygones, because we are a team. But if it’s some coworker I don’t care about, I’d want to be made right for the troubles.

“We” are not a family. The EU is a confederation. If we were a family, I would require both contrition and some form of reparations, because breaking such a much closer bond has more severe consequences.

It’s good to let the leavers feel a taste of how bad it is to do it, but joining should always be a good thing and not a punishment.

If the UK thinks joining on the same terms as anybody else is a punishment they are free to not join. We have way too many grandfathered-in friction-causing privileges already.

I’m all for constructive cooperation moving forward, as long as the UK never gets its special privileges back.

We don’t.

Here in Germany one of the few good things that came out of our previous federal government was the SBGG, which - among other things - allows you to delete the entry. And before anyone points it out: I’m aware it isn’t perfect.

I’ve corrected my previous comments w.r.t. the terminology, thank you.

That being said, assuming those two spectrograms are using a comparable frequency scale, they show quite a bit of a difference: The upper spectrogram shows a near complete “black” stop across all but the lowest frequencies, while the lower spectrogram does not: The 2nd-lowest frequencies continue virtually unchanged, the mid frequencies are only reduced to a dark purple, not completely dark, and only the upper frequencies are truly dark. Those are not the same sound.

Yes, there’s a stop of exhalation between the s and the K. If there wasn’t, it would sound more like the sk of the English word sky instead.

EDIT: He does not, however, stop between Kindern and werden and not between werden and Leute, which does sound weird to me. Less like standard German and more like a dialect.

I would be interested to know still if you hear the glottal stops you’re talking about in the example above, though?

In the voice changed output for “Das Kind”? It’s not perfect, but yes. If you’re interested in the “biomechanics”: It’s the difference between a miniscule stopping of the continuous exhalation from your mouth for the s before starting a new burst exhalation for the k vs doing both as part of the same single exhalation that directly changes from continuous to burst.

The entire new testament is fan fiction. Iēsous of Nazareth didn’t write any of it, the first assumed author never even met him.

The “biblical canon” of today seems to be more or less just whatever was later dictated when Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion. Who knows how much other, potentially more accurate reports about Iēsous were lost during that dictatorship?

Now, I agree that Paradise Lost does not have any claim to veracity. I would just also say any claim the new testament has is null and void.

If you provide storage to upload four audio .wav files (each about 400 KiB), I can send you samples generated by me speaking, then cloned with w-okada using a generic voice I believe is freely usable. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough for me to clearly tell which is which just by listening.

“Das Kind” is /daskınt/ not /dasʔkınt/.

It absolutely is /dasʔkınt/ in the standard German I’ve grown up with. I’ve never heard anyone any native speaker pronounce it as /daskınt/.

In German, just the same: there is not generally a pause between words written separately: there’s no gap that you can find on a spectrogram of a recording of someone saying, say, “brauner Sack” between the two words.

At the cost of appealing to authority: As a native German speaker, I can absolutely hear the glottal stop a stop between two separate words. It exists. It can also often be found between consecutive vowels within a word, but not necessarily between consecutive consonants like in your example. There’s a reason why it’s in the IPA. It’s also e.g. the basis for the “gender not-really-neutral” dialect of German, which injects an additional glottal stop into a word (like Bürger:innen, which is pronounced like Bürger innen, not like Bürgerinnen).

Mundhirnverbindungslatenz.

Mostly true, but in standard German one would normally vocalize “Schlafsack” without any audible pause between the f and the s.

If you were to pronounce “Schlaf sack”, there would generally be an expectation of a glottal stop an audible stop between the f and the s (dialects excluded).

So while, yes, compound words in German are written without spaces, that’s not just a writing difference.

Be more interesting than a documentary?

“Rechtsbraunversifft ist vorbei!”

(Naja gut, bissel rechts hat man mit SPD und Grünen noch, aber die sind wenigstens moderat)