Tech firms and lawmakers still want more specifics on how this is all supposed to work. But if things go as planned, the success of the program would be a major win for the White House, which has been eager to display American technological and industrial might.
So, if it goes according to plan and is a success, it would be a major political victory for the White House/Biden in terms of their eagerness to "display American technological and industrial might".
It's something they want to do, and which if this goes as planned, they will manage to do it. Hence, in politics, a "win". This is different from passing normative judgment as to whether or not it's a good thing: It's a win in the same sense destroying the Supreme Court was a "win" for the previous White House.
So I'm not exactly an expert, I just have some friends who are Swifties and I enjoy sometimes hearing people out about what they're interested in over a beer. But I'll give a shot at answering based on my limited knowledge.
I don't think Swift makes a point out of reinventing herself every time. I guess she had her country phase until Red in 2012 (We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together), and perfected pop in 2014 with 1989 and Shake it Off, Blank Space and all that. The following two albums I know nothing about, but Wikipedia lists them as electropop. And then she completely changes her sound in 2020 with folklore, suddenly being more folksy and reaching an audience of middle aged male music reviewers who had previously not shown any interest in her music. Somehow the fans of her older albums loved it as well, so her fan-base only expanded.
Evermore is kind of a continuation of folklore. I find it to be a little bit more poppy at times, but it's not a huge change of direction, and kind of builds on the same universe (low-key and lower-key). Midnights however, which is her final album to date, is again something completely different: A full blown concept album, and musically again a complete change of direction. A Swiftie friend of mine said she had to give it a couple of spins before she got into it, but that it's now one of her favourites. As a prog rock fan, that sounds about right to me for a concept album.
Personally I started listening to Midnights for the first time ever while writing this post, and I gotta say the opening tune Lavender Haze has some fun things going on in it. The music is interesting, the songwriting is original, and she's a talented performer with a likeable persona. I'm not very surprised she receives her awards.
I used to dislike Taylor Swift along with all other contemporary pop stars. Maybe even a little bit more, because she had the audacity to call herself Country: Spitting in the face of personal heroes like Kristofferson, Nelson, and Cash.
Then I stopped being an edgy teenager, Swift released Shake it Off, and I had to recognize it was a fun song to dance to. In an ironic kind of way of course, but nevertheless.
And then, in 2015, Ryan Adams released his cover album of Swift's 1989, playing every single song on the album in a folksy way. I dug it. And with it, I had to appreciate that Taylor Swift is one hell of a songwriter: I loved the songs, I just don't love the sound of pop music all that much. That's personal taste, not everything I dislike is bad.
Fast forward to 2020, and Taylor Swift dabbles with music I can actually enjoy listening to with her album folklore. Pretty cool. I actually got my expectations up for her next album, evermore, low-key hoping that it would be musically inspired by the Battle of Evermore. Sadly I was wrong, but again, it's a matter of personal preferences.
What matters more is the fact that she's reinventing herself from album to album - she's successful in one formula, and she just ditches it and moves on to something different. And every time she does it, she seems to be even more successful than the last time. Her growth as an artist is astonishing.
Finally, she's just cool. Fuck the labels - she'll just casually re-records her entire discography in order to take back control of her songs. She's caught up in all kinds of stupid celebrity drama, but it tends to be the rest of the industry falling over like toddlers trying to drag her into shit for PR while she acts like the only adult in the room. She also scores points for casually hanging out with Billy Bragg and encouraging people to vote and shit.
I mean, whoever reads the article would also see that they did a similar piece on Trump, listing both positive and negative achievements of his presidency.
I think it's a cool format. The media cycle tends to blow one single story out of proportions while neglecting anything else that happens, this is (imo) a good way to review some of what's been happening the last four years.
Not "they", but Paul McLeary, the Politico defence reporter. Each point on the list is essentially an opinion piece by one of their journalists.
And it's not necessarily saying it's a good thing: It's a thing you might have missed. You could also question whether "the U.S. is producing more oil than anytime in history" is supposed to be a good thing.
Furthermore, as to McLeary's point: Some - such as anyone in the region except the Chinese - might argue it's important that the influence of China in the South China Sea is balanced out by other powerful players. It's not about going to war with China, it's about the continued independence of Taiwan and other fairly fragile balances in the region. It doesn't take a moron to see that the situation is complex.
Worth mentioning that Vivaldi is basically the spiritual successor of Opera, and it's doing pretty well at that. It's still Chromium based though, so unless you really miss Opera for the functionality you're better off with Firefox.
Still, rather Vivaldi than Opera, Chrome, or Edge.
At least this lady is self aware. She knows her strength isn't her legal skills, and she knows she won't be young forever. So for her taking on a big case and being exposed as incompetent for the whole world might be worth it - it's unlikely she had much of a legal career to destroy anyway.
She has also inflicted more damage on Trump than any of his opponents have. I respect that.
Also his idea of "good" is someone who doesn't contradict him. He wants to run the case his way, and no reasonably intelligent lawyer will ever agree to that as it will make them look like idiots and the case is a sure loss.
This might be assuming there's no such thing as natural law. I guess some might argue there is a natural law, but breaking it doesn't amount to a crime. In either case it's somewhat contested in moral and legal philosophy circles.
Well, it's based on experiences travelling through Germany proper - for example Denmark to France or Italy, including transfers. Often the delay will just be a couple of hours, but then you miss your transfer and you're screwed.
Also if you're on your way to Switzerland the Swiss have no patience for disruptions in their services, so if a train is delayed coming from Germany they're likely to just not accept it into the country at all.
I have also heard from people who were told to spend the night in the train, which DB just parked in the outskirts of the city for the night. That way they could offer passengers a place to sleep in the cheapest possible ways. Pregnant women or families with young children were asked to check in to hotels.
I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.
I guess it's the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you've convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.
Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You're lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.
People tend to have multiple browsers. You might have FireFox installed but still not be aware why you should use it over other browsers on your computer.
Also something to be said about how a thing or two has happened in the last five years. Whatever Mastodon is doing seems to be working for a large number of users.
It's not for everyone, and that's fine. The freedom of choice is why we're in the fediverse in the first place. But the fact is that quite a few people want what Madison is offering. :)
I think there's a risk of lacking a coherent direction if decision-making is outsourced too much to the community. Furthermore, core developers might lose ownership of the project and then lose interest. As long as it's open source, I'm pretty happy to have the core maintainers develop projects according to their own vision, and the community fork it should this vision differ too much from their own. :)
What happened with the domain Lemmy.ml when Mali took back controls over its domains and some sites went offline? Are you confident that the .ml domain will be reliable in the future?
sab @ sab @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 683Joined 2 yr. ago
So, if it goes according to plan and is a success, it would be a major political victory for the White House/Biden in terms of their eagerness to "display American technological and industrial might".
It's something they want to do, and which if this goes as planned, they will manage to do it. Hence, in politics, a "win". This is different from passing normative judgment as to whether or not it's a good thing: It's a win in the same sense destroying the Supreme Court was a "win" for the previous White House.