I think there is a very big difference between listening to Michael Jackson’s music in 2026 and engaging with the Harry Potter universe in 2026.

Michael Jackson is dead, so any money going to his estate isn’t actively being used anymore for malicious purposes. JK Rowling is very much still alive, and actively using her position and wealth to try and eliminate trans people from public life.

Any money going to Harry Potter is also money going to JK Rowling and therefor supports transphobia

I’ve called my computer a piece of shit before when it’s being too slow about something

Could be worse, they could have misspelled it “Nicholas Angle”

It’s still good to research it and confirm (or disprove) a hypothesis that might seem obvious

You mean to say I can take the anti-stress bench for free? That’s nice :)

DD-MM-YYYY is what is most commonly used in Europe, and in my opinion it is perfectly acceptable and logical to use.

But YYYY-MM-DD does have one major benefit that makes it extremely useful for archival purposes. When you sort it alphabetically, it also sorts correctly by date.

You can even keep going and use YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:SS…

Parliament has expressed the desire for a clearer ban on these glasses a few weeks ago

https://nos.nl/artikel/2632327-tweede-kamer-wil-breder-en-duidelijker-verbod-op-camerabril

Parliament wants wider and clearer ban on camera glasses

We already have privacy legislation, and it is already not allowed to secretly film someone and share the footage. So parliament is mostly talking about making it more explicit that these camera glasses are not allowed.

They are currently awaiting an advisory on “AI wearables” by the European Committee for Data Protection, which will arrive later this autumn.

Then the law should be changed.

With a jury system you can end up in the situation where they will apply the law to the fullest if the jury doesn’t like you, but it gets ignored if they do like you. Examples where this would apply could be racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

A properly functioning justice system should be blind and apply the law equally to everyone, and a jury system makes that less likely. A judge can also have biases, but they are supposedly at the very least a professional and an expert on the law, and are meant to act accordingly.

To me it is the complete opposite. The judge at least knows the law, whereas the jurors have to make a best guess based on their gut feeling.

If the judge makes the wrong call, you can still appeal the decision.

Coincidentally my country does not have jury trials (and nor do I think they are very common outside of the anglosphere?)

I honestly wouldn’t oppose cutting the Russian internet out from the rest of the world

It’s a lot easier to cut off your own country from the internet than it is to cut off another country from the internet.

Packets will route through whatever path is available. So even if you cut the wires in the countries within your influence where you border with Russia, other countries that border Russia that you might still want to connect to may not do the same thing.

So physically disconnecting Russia is basically not happening.

That depends how you phrase the question. AI has a tendency to affirm whatever you ask it, so if the question is leading towards a positive answer AI will probably agree with it.

It can now pretty reasonably be assumed what OP’s first name is, and that can be associated with his username.

Granted, his username might also be a derivative, but on its own there is a certain amount of plausible deniability there.

The more crumbs of identifiable information you leave around, the easier it becomes for malicious parties to gather them together and build a profile on you.

If I want to host videos on PeerTube, I want to do so on my own instance, and the process of setting up your own instance is not as easy as I would like. I’ve tried it a few times, ran into a wall, gave up and went back to YouTube with my tail between my legs.

For the Netherlands:

• Marktplaats.nl
• Ebay.nl for tech you want to import from abroad (useful for slightly better deals)

The local “kringloop” (closest translation would be goodwill) is also always a good place to check out for certain things.

There is innocent people in my country too. That doesn’t mean we are somehow owed the same privileged position that the US has held for decades.

The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.

It made it plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that American software cannot be trusted, and caused a bunch of countries to start preparing their exit strategy for building down their dependence on American software.

And for what?.. So that they could be an annoyance to some people prosecuting the war criminal, and friend of the US government, Benjamin Netanyahu? That sounds like such a small win, if it causes you to lose the leverage completely.

Edit: Not that I mind. It’s a good thing that it’s this plainly obvious that we cannot trust a reliance on anything American.
It makes it cost a whole lot less political capital in order to get governments to move away from these dependencies.

I always took the term “apartheid state” to refer to the way Israel treats Palestinians both in the West Bank, which despite being a separate country is also under military occupation by Israel, and at home within Israeli borders

I’m not too worried about an AI destroying the world, but I am worried about someone in power over-relying on fallible AI and making a mistake of serious consequence as a result.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-military-ai-hallucination-chinese-ship-intercept-b3052760.html

AI won’t plot to start WW3, but it might just get us there with the help of human incompetence.

I did not call euthanasia itself a part of the erosion of the west, I was simply mentioning at a general development.

In that case I must apologize. I misinterpreted what you meant with that erosion. I also shouldn’t have written it as a quote as I initially did, since it was paraphrasing and not a direct quote. I didn’t mean to misrepresent.

That still doesn’t change the rest of my argument, however.

Secondly, I don’t believe the parents should decide.

That’s fair. We differ in opinion on that, and I can see where you are coming from.

My issue with that, however, is that we then end up in a situation again where this child needs to spend ten years in whatever pain and agony they might be going through, just because they legally cannot make the decision by themselves.

Preferably that should not be happening, and giving the parents the ability to decide on their behalf is in my view an acceptable compromise to prevent that suffering from happening. While it is a decision with a lot more weight, we already do give parents a lot of power to make decisions for their child in other situations, so it is not entirely without precedent.

…Another country making mistakes doesn’t absolve the Netherlands if the Netherlands serves as law-inspo

I think this is a ridiculous take. The Netherlands cannot be held responsible for what it didn’t do itself.

You don’t understand. The child, while suffering extremely, is in no way able to consent to their killing. The state sanctions it as ok, as long as a list of criteria are met.

Which at that point becomes a decision that is made by the parents, not the state. The state can’t decide for you that you will be euthanised. That is a decision to be made either by the person in question, or in the case of a two-year-old their parents.

The alternative would be to not allow euthanasia on young children at all, and force this child to live with their disease and experience hopeless and unbearable suffering for ten years, until they are twelve years old. That was the old cut-off point for decisions like this.

The way I see it, is that giving parents to ability make this decision on their child’s behalf, in order to make sure their child doesn’t have to needlessly suffer, can be a good thing if done carefully and thoughtfully. The checks and balances are there to make sure that is gets done carefully and thoughtfully.

I certainly wouldn’t call that an erosion of the west as per your first comment.

This signals to other powers, who view the Netherlands as a role model that state sanctioned involuntary killing in medicine is fine, as long as you have a long list of reasons you can go through.

So because another country might not be deliberate in the way they implement their version of euthanasia, we shouldn’t be implementing our version of euthanasia?

Edit: Removed the quote characters around “erosion of the west”, because it isn’t a direct quote. It’s a paraphrasing, and it’s disingenuous of me to put that in quotes.