Deutsche Bahn (DB), a state-owned company under control of the gov of #Germany, is telling me when i try to buy a ticket or to log in (!) that "Your browser's behavior resembles that of a bot."
Suggestion is:
- change browser (!)
- change network (!!!)
or
"If you are using a VPN client, anonymization tool, [iOS stuff], or third-party antivirus software, please temporarily disable it."
#German gov. suggests giving up on privacy protection?
-> DPA complaint?
Last night, right before going to bed:
Me, to spouse, who knows some basic German and who also took linguistics classes in college: So, German is a compound-happy language, and also has grammatical gender. What is the gender of a compound noun made up of nouns that have different genders?
He didn’t know, so we had a speculative and silly conversation about it that I mostly don’t recall, and then I tried looking it up. Apparently the compound noun gets its gender from the noun closest to the end of the word. (Germans, please feel free to correct me, as my research was brief and shallow.)
After more silliness, I remarked that I was feeling punchy, then stopped and speculated that punchy is derived from punch-drunk (answer: yes, which is sobering), after which spouse remarked that individual body parts can be described as being asleep in English, but what other things can they be? (I’ll put some things I thought were interesting about this in the next post in this thread.)
More silliness ensued, and then I said:
Where do compound words come from? Well, when two morphemes love each other very much…
(A linguistics professor from my college said that English is almost as compound-happy as German, which isn’t surprising as it’s also a Germanic language. We mostly don’t recognize it and don’t spell most of them that way.)
1/2
Last night, right before going to bed:
Me, to spouse, who knows some basic German and who also took linguistics classes in college: So, German is a compound-happy language, and also has grammatical gender. What is the gender of a compound noun made up of nouns that have different genders?
He didn’t know, so we had a speculative and silly conversation about it that I mostly don’t recall, and then I tried looking it up. Apparently the compound noun gets its gender from the noun closest to the end of the word. (Germans, please feel free to correct me, as my research was brief and shallow.)
After more silliness, I remarked that I was feeling punchy, then stopped and speculated that punchy is derived from punch-drunk (answer: yes, which is sobering), after which spouse remarked that individual body parts can be described as being asleep in English, but what other things can they be? (I’ll put some things I thought were interesting about this in the next post in this thread.)
More silliness ensued, and then I said:
Where do compound words come from? Well, when two morphemes love each other very much…
(A linguistics professor from my college said that English is almost as compound-happy as German, which isn’t surprising as it’s also a Germanic language. We mostly don’t recognize it and don’t spell most of them that way.)
1/2
Look, #JDVance is the guy who married a woman who is a #US citizen because of the 14th Amendment. Which he opposes.
The guy who endorsed a #German political party that considers Vance’s children less than racially pure.
So we are dealing with a very strange and fucked up dude. But still, not knowing how WW2 ended is a special level of humiliation.
Look, #JDVance is the guy who married a woman who is a #US citizen because of the 14th Amendment. Which he opposes.
The guy who endorsed a #German political party that considers Vance’s children less than racially pure.
So we are dealing with a very strange and fucked up dude. But still, not knowing how WW2 ended is a special level of humiliation.
Du coup ils vont commander des armes pour perpétuer l'occupation de la Cisjordanie...
L’Allemagne ne livrera plus d’armes à Israël pour perpétuer le génocide à Gaza
Colleges in 1930s Germany thought giving in to government demands would save them…
What made the #German university capitulation so devastating wasn’t just the individual policy changes, but how quickly institutional autonomy collapsed once the principle was breached. Columbia’s agreement follows this same pattern: transferring disciplinary authority from faculty to administrators, adopting government-mandated speech definitions, submitting to external monitoring, screening international students for ideological compliance, and reviewing curriculum content. The university justified each concession as necessary for survival, just as German institutions did.
The agreement effectively allows the federal government to dictate campus speech policies, disciplinary procedures, and academic content through funding leverage, fundamentally altering #Columbia’s institutional governance structure.
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-trump-deal-00eef5dca9f003e593d2cb151f5cce17
Colleges in 1930s Germany thought giving in to government demands would save them…
What made the #German university capitulation so devastating wasn’t just the individual policy changes, but how quickly institutional autonomy collapsed once the principle was breached. Columbia’s agreement follows this same pattern: transferring disciplinary authority from faculty to administrators, adopting government-mandated speech definitions, submitting to external monitoring, screening international students for ideological compliance, and reviewing curriculum content. The university justified each concession as necessary for survival, just as German institutions did.
The agreement effectively allows the federal government to dictate campus speech policies, disciplinary procedures, and academic content through funding leverage, fundamentally altering #Columbia’s institutional governance structure.
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-trump-deal-00eef5dca9f003e593d2cb151f5cce17
A German court has ruled that Meta must pay €5,000 ($5,900) to a German #Facebook user who sued the platform for embedding tracking technology in third-party websites — a ruling that could open the door to large fines down the road over data #privacy violations relating to pixels and similar tools.
#surveillance
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
