mudita

Tomek Korbak, one of the employees, who were fired, was the technical liason to METR for the investigation and states: "I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR".

Who made the decision to invite METR is not public knowledge, as far as I know. I imagine that an important decision like this was made on a much higher level in the organization.

While some problems are actually solvable with just pencil and paper, this is not a requirement and the intention of the project is that problems will be solved with a combination of insight and coding.

From the Project Euler website:

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

The game is a bit weird. It often offers very bad deals, without an option not to invest. For example for the Gibraltar strait, the game gives the information that the probablity of success is between 90% and 100% and that it’s been traversed 31 times with a 90 % success rate. Then it offers me the choice between an investment of different sizes, where I cannot win back more than my investment, so I have to risk money for no possible gain (invest 167 ducats in shipment worth 167 ducats).

I wouldn’t say that movies per se are parasocial, but if you behave and feel like you have a relationship with somebody in a movie, then it’s probably parasocial.

To a degree it’s also quite normal to have parasocial reactions to personaes from media, it only becomes problematic once people substitute actual social relationships with extreme parasocial relationships.

It not only doesn’t require interaction, the lack of interaction is what makes is parasocial.

I didn’t know the term sinosphere until now, thanks for making me aware of it.

As far as I know, it is possible to have the entry "ohne festen Wohnsitz"(without a permanent residence) instead of a mailing address in a German passport and he's legally not allowed to use his parents address, if he's not there for at least 183 days a year.

But I don't really understand how this small legal detail would change the whole character of his life experience, in any case. No matter what is written in his passport, he spends the whole year in a train.

I just wanted to say, I stumbled upon your website a few years ago through the Tromp-Taylor rules of Go and found the things you do impressive and inspiring. It’s a nice surprise to see you commenting here.

I’m not talking about the AfD here, but trying to quickly answer the question how banning political parties can seen as justified in principle:

Banning a political party is an important instrument in a wider philosophy known in Germany as “wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy). This philosophy states that democratic states should have legal tools with which they can defend themselves against people, who want to attack the democratic order itself.

Wehrhafte Demokratie is a very well established and accepted concept, here, partially because of a wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Weimarer Republik. It’s also justified by the belief that democracy is not just a dictatorship of the majority, but that even a majority of voters is limited in what they can do and that democracy also includes for example the protection of minorities.

> biased actors who should already be constrained by the rule of law

Banning a political party works by the rules of law.

The legal barriers for banning a political party are quite high in Germany. Basically for a ban it must be proven that the party as a whole, not just single member, have the goal to attack key elements of the democratic order itself and that there is a real danger that they could succeed.

The last condition can also be a legal reason to only ban a party once it actually gets popular: As long as it is unpopular, judges don’t see the condition fulfilled, that the party presents a real danger, so they won’t ban the party. This happened with Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which was ruled to be verfassungsfeindlich (an enemy of the constitution), but not banned because it was so ineffective und unpopular.

That sounds more like the BahnCard 100, which costs 4.339 Euro per year. The Deutschlandticket is only valid for slow, regional trains, not faster long distance trains.