Germany, like most countries, does have issues with law enforcement. But, as you noticed, so far our checks and balances hold - at least when it comes to fatal violence.

I don’t think you can extrapolate any trend from the extremely low annual numbers. 2024 was indeed an unusually violent year (even though official stats haven’t been finalized afaik), but looking at 2025s numbers so far, this does not appear to indicate any trend.

No, it really doesn’t. German shoots and kills, on average, fewer than 10 people per year. The total amount of bullets discharged at people hovers around 50 to 60.

In a country of 83 million.

The US population is four times larger and the number of victims of police shootings is literally 100 times higher. An estimated 1173 in 2024 and the US internationally doesn’t even properly track this number.

Heck, even France’s police kill significantly more people than Germany’s “trigger happy nazi cops”.

I think I was just added to JFK Jr.'s Signal group-chat.

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“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people”

~Good Omens, Terry Pratchett

The same is true for almost any open world game with vehicles. Casually driving a car in GTA while obeying the traffic rules has been a thing from the very beginning.

This still feels different somehow, though.

Mullvad no longer supports port forwarding.

And that sample size is pretty small. I wouldn’t count on the US losing a war.

I was going to add stupidity, but they usually go hand in hand.

Kompromat / компромат

and, yes, the Chinese government has used similar methods.

Tesla understood the “computer on wheels” approach to vehicle engineering far before most, if not all, traditional manufacturers. Their EV route planner in combination with their Supercharger network is still mostly unbeaten and was long its biggest selling point. The software is far from perfect, but it’s mostly polished, mature and has been a focus from the beginning.

All your criticism is perfectly valid, though. But most of them aren’t owed to lack of software quality but merely bad management decisions. I’d even argue that the autopilot is doing well with the limited sensors its been given - a restriction its unlikely to overcome with software alone, regardless of Elon’s lies.

I would never buy a Tesla, but most manufacturers struggle more when it comes to delivering software people actually want to use.

Software was probably one of the last areas where Tesla still had a small edge over the competition.

The competition has caught up when it comes to range and Teslas were never really competitive when it comes to quality or price.

Of course. But on the other hand: Who else would?

It’s not like Bob from Des Moines is going to find $100 billion behind the sofa cushions to buy it. There aren’t that many companies with much higher valuations.

The only thing that surprised me about the idiotic numbers was that they weren’t overwritten by even dumber ones in sharpie.

It’s an old British Idiom far preceding Pink Floyd.

Isn’t that the plan, though? Crash the economy, let the billionaires buy what’s left of America in a fire sale.

To be fair, this isn’t quite the worst thing the US has done in those 248 years.

The writing was on the wall for this one, development had effectively ended two years ago and had already slowed down significantly before that.

It’s a bit pricey (and likely only going up in price with the upcoming licensing changes), but by far the best there is.