Did he claim that though, I remember them campaigning on eat shit peasants.

Austria has 23 of them.

Die Zeit found the perfect framing device in a young man the reporter just happened upon in front of the bomb crater south of Beirut, and apparently follows him around all night. He’s perfect for the story. Too perfect.

He’s looking for his family from one of the nearby damaged buildings (no worries happy ending). His father is Hezbollah, he’s Hezbollah technically, but doesn’t want to become a fighter against his father’s wishes. They had a fight and he’s the black sheep of the family now. He works at a hair salon and rather likes beautiful hair, no, beauty itself! He blames Hezbollah for this. He says there were of course weapons at the Hezbollah HQ next to his home. He thinks Israel is just too powerful; can’t be beaten. He just wants to live in a real country with a proper army and a president.

This conversation with a young man who lives and grew up in the heart of the Hezbollah movement, who, as he says, is of course a member, like everyone in this neighborhood, but is not convinced, who criticizes Hezbollah so bluntly amidst a crowd of irritated Hezbollah guards, is completely improbable - and perhaps only possible for this reason. Nobody pays attention to us anymore.

OK now they’re just fucking with me, right?

Youth org of Green Party Germany: The complete leadership council (10 people) quit job and party.

Link to the resignation letter (CW: reddit)

They say they have been in opposition to the party leadership/majority on various issues, like the 100 bn “special fund” for the Bundeswehr, that new brown coal mine, and when they took away the rights of asylum seekers.

Seems like they’re planning on creating a new radlib organization.

I have never heard them talk about wanting to overcome capitalism, not even through reform, and they don’t call themselves socialists. They don’t even call themselves social democrats but rather “left-conservatives”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

I mean all socdems are nationalist and BSW isn’t socialist, but I guess patsocs aren’t socialist either so that checks out.

Vinegar is nice to cut through fatty foods. But why mix the vinegar like 1:10 with oil, that kinda defeats the purpose?

Though I’m biased, I’m from the mayo-hating part of Germany, which is less based than it sounds.

Brandenburg (the state surrounding Berlin, but w/o Berlin) voted. Somehow the SPD (“socdem” i.e. neolib) gained seats and is slightly ahead of the far-right AfD. Greens and Left look to be below 5% and out. BSW (Wagenknecht; new socdem nationalist/bigot (aka socdem) splitters from The Left) get 13%. CDU (conservatives) at 12%.

By current estimates, it’s just enough for an SPD-BSW coalition, and not enough for SPD-CDU or AfD-CDU. This likely means we can all observe how the BSW is going to behave in coalition talks and government and that will be interesting/disappointing.

I saw something on “The Anti-Empire Project” and they said Hezbollah claimed something like 30 of the dead (which was <40 total I think) as their own martyrs and released their names and all. I guess this means they were Hezbollah.

One should keep in mind that Hezbollah is more than just a militia, not everybody there was necessarily involved with the military side of things.

Maybe? We don’t know that? You’d expect children to get hurt and killed even if literally everyone with the pager was Hezbollah, since Hezbollah members would wear them more-or-less all the time, even with children right next to them.

This is a terror attack either way, bombing people in their home while not engaged in fighting is some sort of violation even by liberal international law standards.

Don’t even know about X-rays, there’s like copper foil in the batteries. Some batteries come wrapped up in an aluminium also.

I mean let’s assume the shipment was specifically to Hezbollah, then Hezbollah presumably would be handing these out only to their own members and people they need to be in contact with, like that Iranian ambassador.

And manipulate the firmware obviously.

This is just my unqualified opinion, but from a practical standpoint of both pulling it off and not looking obvious, it would be whole lot easier to use the existing radio and hardware, together with manipulated firmware to explode these things. You’d have to put a whole second set of electronics in there otherwise, which would possibly look sus. I don’t know also why Israel would care if some of them didn’t go off when they are not in use.

Then about the explosives. If you wanted to hide the explosives, you might package them with the battery. That way, from the outside, it just looks like a chunky battery, and people are unlikely to open up the battery because it’s dangerous. It would be interesting to have a look at a battery from this type of pager. Batteries in laptops and phones actually already have electronics in the battery package, with digital data pins so you can talk to the battery and ask it about its state and whatnot. You could therefore produce a battery w/ explosives including a detonator which looked like a normal battery, and it could be triggered over the regular battery connector. You wouldn’t see anything, not even extra wires, unless you opened up the battery itself.

I don’t have personal experience, but from what I gather they work their employees to the bone. Everybody in there is expected to do all the jobs at a fast pace. The cashiers are expected to work incredibly fast, and if the register is slow, they close it down even for a couple of minutes and have the employees do something else. Pay (in Germany) is above average for cashiers, but there’s been some serious union-busting fuckery at Aldi and Lidl that’s actually quite shocking by German standards. Lidl (maybe Aldi as well?) are surprisingly in favor of a higher minimum wage, because they need less workers than the competition thanks to labor-saving procedures, and that would give them a competitive edge. It sounds alienating as fuck.

According to the founding myth, the original inspiration behind Aldi were military logistics. The whole thing was designed to be efficient.

Only stock predictably fast-selling stuff, for easier logistics and less warehousing. Don’t stock wares into shelves, just dump the whole pallet or box on the floor to save on labor costs. Sell only your own generic brands so you can dump your supplier for a cheaper one. No big advertising campaigns, just print some leaflets and distribute them yourself. And then they massively expanded to benefit from economies of scale.

In Germany, in response to this, the competition created their own Aldi-style discounters with mostly identical prices and on average roughly equivalent quality, which are now everywhere. The other successful strategy is what Rewe did: This supermarket chain copied some of Aldi’s approach to cost-cutting, and is now a bit of a hybrid between a traditional supermarket and a discounter. Importantly, they offer similar price and quality own-brand product for most things an Aldi would sell, while also selling more expensive alternatives and having a larger inventory. Why go to Aldi when you can get same price/quality as Aldi, but also this thing and that other thing Aldi doesn’t have? No need to go to multiple stores.

Meanwhile Aldi and Lidl have expanded their inventory and become more supermarket-like themselves (my guess is computerized logistics made this easier to do cheaply, and they have to compete with Rewe).

One other thing that happened is that these very large chains can squeeze their suppliers with their massive buying power. They basically suck all the profit from the supply chain for the benefit of just a couple of superrich families (though this also happened in other markets with e.g. Walmart in the US.) Oh and they are militantly anti-union, but again the whole industry is.

Tower just broadcasts all the messages, and every beeper receives them all, then filters out the ones that are for a different number. The tower does not know if you got the message.

Motorola is originally a US Company and was bought by Lenovo. Lenovo is bit of a special case for a Chinese company, it’s very international since they bought IBMs PC business. Lots of offices and employees outside of China.

I’m a bit worried they’re going to strike hospitals to finish off the injured.

Pagers can receive messages without producing radio signals themselves, so are impossible to locate.

Well in theory anyway, pagers that can also send do exist.