What a way to celebrate the solstice.
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Maybe we should have named this thread “2025: Let’s try BETTER!”
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Trying again was already quite optimistic, but “better” seems outright unfeasable with how things usually turn out this century.
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Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.
Interpretation
USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
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interesting…
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BTW, I’d still prefer “2025: Let’s try better”!
Watched this today. Beau-ti-ful!
Check it out … if you don’t live in Germany, you’ll probably need to use a VPN (with German IP number to watch it:
A documentary mostly in German but partially in English, same with the songs:
In the Hamburg “Heaven Can Wait” choir, many of whose members are over 90 years old, they all rock the same hits on stage that their grandchildren are currently listening to.
(above quote from elsewhere, not from the page I linked to below)
The cinema hit “Heaven Can Wait - We live now” by Sven Halfar, who won the audience award at the Filmfest Hamburg and at the Filmkunstfest Leipzig, offers a unique look at the Hamburg senior choir “Heaven Can Wait”, whose members are all over 70 years old and rediscover their joy of life through singing. The film shows how the members of the choir express their joy and passion for music in a mixture of German pop, rock and hip-hop songs.
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Yeah, it doesn’t play, but it reminded me this, so it is all good. 
After all, in a couple of years even more members of the band will qualify for the choir “whose members are all over 70 years old” 
(the drummer on the song above retired recently at 73. What a run he had!).
It is a more positive title generally, but it is not even close to being more accurate than the current one, unfortunately.
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GOODNESS, the bigotry everywhere, corporate USA seem to have broomsticks up their asses. Yeah, cheating’s not nice, certainly, but it’s none of anyone’s business than the “perpetrators” and their spouses, is it?
Except that they are from the same company, and one of them is the CEO. It can raise suspicions of favoritism.
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Also, depending on the company and the business they are in (speaking hypothetically, not about this case), there could be financial implications due to questions about the CEO’s judgment, and espionage implications due to the possibility of blackmail.
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In addition to that, not that business people are known for their ethics (business is business after all), but there is a bare minimum of fidelity that one must uphold. An “honor amongst thieves” if you will. If people are willing to cheat on their own family, they wouldn’t probably flinch about cheating on their company, right?
Not that the ethics of the fidelity is mostly the issue for a lot of them, but getting caught is. 
“So, you know how to steal, but do you know how to hide it?” goes the public wisdom phrase here, implying they getting caught is the biggest “crime” here and not the infidelity or stealing itself.
Ethics of one group can seem quite odd to another…
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However, maybe a twisted lesson from this story is that if they had simply shown no shame in that moment, they may have gotten away completely fine.
No one would have realized that they shouldn’t have been together, there would be no interesting video to go viral, and the general public would not have learned their names or what they had done.
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It is unfortunate that people seem to be punished less if they don’t take responsibility. Maybe we’re all screwed 
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From the article:
I had thought that the toxic sludge of shamelessness — that love child of Donald Trump and the internet
Not to be obtuse, but I just want to point out that the “bring shame back” concept/meme is actually a veeeeeeery “traditional” (to put it mildly) idea of the parts of the society and internet that would love to see things return in an era closer to 1925 than 2025.
Whoever wrote that opinion article might realise to its peril that jumping on random band-wagons just to make a couple of potshots, is not exactly the most wise of choices.
The statement is not even true either. I am old enough to remember pre-internet times and politicians didn’t seem to have any shame back then either, regardless of social, national or linguistic differences and barriers.
Blaming things on “the internet” is as lame as the “your kids are going to turn into a satanist” shaming tactics in the 1980ies when D&D was out… you know, the kind of “shame” the article thinks we might be “missing out” on?
Quite so.
I wonder if that might not lead to some future creative copy-cats hoping to become viral… I had never heard of that company in my life before. It would have been very funny if on top of infidelity there might be future cases where we might see the added issue of “stock market manipulation” (that company is private, so this is not an issue here, but people are wondering what would happen if it was publically traded)
Mh… I interpreted it meaning that those who REALLY have reasons to be ashamed¹ should be ashamed, and that that guy in that video at least took responsibility and quit … while those others unashamedly carry on.
¹ i.e. certain people in power who did and do many things that relatively decent people would be ashamed of if it became public and that really decent people wouldn’t do at all.
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Yeah, but shame is a social structure. Thus it is defined in a different way across time and cultures. Who gets to decide what is shameful or not is actually one of the most constant and consistent power-struggles in most societies, historically, since shame is one of the tools used by powers-that-be at each age (be those social, political, religious, etc).
This is why the “bring shame back” is a very “traditional” motto. They know exactly how it was used in the past and they’d be very happy to have it back into their toolkit.
If I am not wrong he didn’t do that first thing next morning, but he took quite a bit of time to do it, so it is a bit slow to be on the “I took responsibility” spectrum and more into the “I couldn’t hold on to my position after what I did” spectrum.
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I know someone who is lying everyday with no shame, changing the reality, numbers and facts. That same people at the same time is destroying all the means we have implemented to avoid it.
Those caught people cheating is like nothing compared to this
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