May your blanket become strangely lumpy every night,very shortly before you fall asleep and may it be weirdly bunched up somewhere close to your feet so that no shaking with your legs unfolds it and you have to get up to fix it, making you wake up again.
The pathetic thing is that -/innen is still legal and even demanded by law. It's just a ban under penalty to replace the dash with something else. It's so laughably minor.
I think we need to be a little more precise here since the debate this stems from is exclusively lead in German-speaking areas. This doesn't mean that there is a ban on language that includes all, this is a ban of a very specific grammatical device.
In German, Jobtitles etc. have a (grammatical) gender, as opposed to English. So there is a "Verkäufer" (male Sales rep) and a "Verkäuferin" (female sales rep). While just using the male term is possible in German, it is usually not done for historical reasons (feminism fought hard for the mere existence of female workers and all).
So, it has become common to address both (for example for job offers), usually with a dash: "Verkäuferin/Verkäufer ab sofort gesucht" ("looking for sales rep immediately"). For my German readers: yes, this isn't allowed anymore, it's just used as.an example.
Since that is a rather clunky solution,. especially when you need it multiple times in a text, shortened Versions of this have been established. Since the female version is usually just an -in suffix, it has become custom to just write "Verkäufer/in".
Now, since all societies start to be more aware that a hard cut between male and female might not be existing (go figure), a debate has sprung up if our language needs a new tool to deal with this. The most widely used attempt to expand our grammar to include all people regardless of their gender has been to replace the dash used by a wildcard. Common are "Verkäufer*in" or "Verkäufer_in".
Conservatives have jumped on the issue of course.Think of it as the German equivalent to pronouns.
Now, of course there are people who do not reject the idea, but the execution, but those tend to get shoved into the transphobia camp and ignored.
Conservatives, especially the less radical ones (parties CDU and CSU), fear a further emergence of the more radical ones (AFD) who have of course drummed up their voters on this topic to obfuscate that they aren't really up to anything that would benefit the little man, yet still need the little man to vote for them.
Now, CDU and CSU have started to really lean into their the radocal's talking points and started pathetic laws to prevent government officials in some states to use wildcard characters instead of the "good old" dash. Other states have mandated the opposite and demand wildcard characters in all government writing.
The federal government is not very present in this debate at the moment. Some really clumsy attempts at gender-inclusive grammar have been made to the embarrassment of everyone (our traffic code uses rather weird grammar to omit gendered words entirely which is cringe worthy AF).
That's the rundown so everyone is in the loop and can interpret what's happening.
If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
The father in me also wants to know.... Kind of. I only want to know if there is someone that might actually do something. If they don't do anything to my kid, I don't think it's any of my business what this person has done or hasn't done. That's for the courts and police to deal with. Since "only tell me when you're up to no good" is not possible, I actually prefer to not know.
A system whereby authorities check somehow of they have contact to possible victims and only warn those would be ideal, but how would you implement something like that in reality?
I disagree even with post-conviction. I think that being "the sex offender" forever will drive people in corners they would otherwise have steered clear of. Most sex crimes are domestic violence cases and are not about evil men succumbing to their overbearing and perverse sex drive. They are about control and power. So forcing a sex offender who has committed such an act and then payed for his crime into the role of the pervert psychopath forever is actually not helping anybody.
Same goes for pedophiles. Should they be hardcore barred from every goddamn child on earth? Abso-fucking-lutely. But I don't think that exposure is the right tool here. They can be barred from working with children, they can be checked on by police, there is so much one can do to prevent people like them from doing horrible stuff to children. Pushing them onto a corner for what is ultimately a condition they didn't choose (they did choose to act.on it of course) will just make them the monster they are perceived as, even if they would have managed to get themselves under control had they not been made a pariah for their entire life.
But I get that this is pretty much a cultural thing. I for my part think that it is right that we do not expose people on maps here in Germany.
I always love how baffled podcasters and such are when they report about crimes in other countries where criminals have to be protected from the public (like Germany) and they cannot find mugshots or even a last name.
But you have got to understand: The USA (A country he is neither a citizen of nor lives in) has declared that some things would make them cranky if someone published them, so naturally their sensitivities have to count for something, right? I mean… they are really, really cranky about this, so they should be able to enact some of their laws onto completely foreign people that haven't broken any laws in the place they lived. But… have I mentioned how very cranky the USA is?
Emoji in headline, your joy is invalid.
Besides that: enjoy your invalid joy bro