Even the NOS didn't really spend a lot of attention on it. I only really saw one or two articles on the topic.That's nothing compared to, for example, the row with China over Nexperia that has been brewing over the past two months.
Germany and Austria have already said they would not participate if Israel was excluded from participation. So it stands to reason that they are not going to boycott the Eurovision now that Israel is allowed to participate. Belgium was on the fence about participating, but they have since come out that they will be participating regardless of Israeli participation.
The only countries that have thusfar said they are not participating are Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands.
The issue I have with that though is that "sausage" and "burger" are extremely generic terms.I don't think it makes sense to protect them in the same way that we protect "brie" or something like that.
There isn't even one type of burger or sausage, as they can be made from any kind of meat (beef, chicken, pork, etc). We then differentiate by calling them a "chicken sauage" or a "pork sausage". Why would "vegetarian/plant-based sausage" be any different?
Clear labelling and vegetarian sausage not being allowed to be called "sausage" are two different things though.
The EU could easily introduce labelling requirements that indicate whether a product contains meat or not, and even what kind of meat if we wanted that. We could standardize that just like we standardized the Nutriscore label.
Edit: In fact, I'd love to be able to see at a glance whether a meat replacer is soy or mushroom based.
I may be misremembering how the COVID response went, but I remember the EU not doing a whole lot in the early days of the pandemic. It was mostly national governments locking down and taking precautions within their own borders.
Don't get me wrong, I like the EU. But it is times like these when I wished it was a little faster to respond to existential threats.
Lasagna is not necessarily made with meat. Lasagna is a type of layered pasta dish with ingredients between the layers of pasta.A vegetarian lasagna is equally a lasagna as one with minced beef in it.
While I agree that deceptive marketing is an issue, the real issue here is the fact that it was not labelled clearly enough that it was a product without meat. The fact that the vegetarian option can be legally be labelled lasagna isn't really the problem.
Similarly, in my opinion, sausage and burger are just a description of the shape the product comes in and what it can be used for.A sausage or a burger is agnostic to what kind of ingredients go in it. There are beef sausages, pork sausages, chicken sausages,.. and vegetarian sausages. A vegetarian sausage is still a sausage, because it comes in the shape of a sausage and you use it in the same way as you would a sausage. As long as it's labelled clearly as vegetarian so that there is no confusion I do not see the issue with it being labelled a sausage.
Worth noting that I do think this is a different issue from using the names of specific cuts of meat, which is what the discussion was about a few years ago. A steak refers to a specific cut from a cow, so a vegetarian steak is not a steak in my opinion, and should not be called a steak on the packaging.
It would appear that the reason why they are currently discussing a ban on using the term sausage and burger for vegetarian products, is not because calling a veggie sausage a sausage is something people have a serious problem with, but rather because the meat lobby wants to kill the meat replacer industry.
While this is all quite concerning, it's worth noting that no policy has passed yet and they are still in the negotiation phase.
EU Transport Ministers have stripped back the European Commission’s proposals to modernise periodic technical inspections (PTI) for vehicles and, at the same time, paved the way for the unchecked proliferation of longer and heavier vehicles (LHVs) across the continent.
However the final shape of the proposals is subject to negotiations with the European Parliament and Commission.
The issue with slow and rational is the slow part. Usually that is no issue, but sometimes you have to act fast in order to not be caught with your pants down.
Our dependence on the US and the Russian threat are such a situation where we have to be able to act fast and decisively.
This place is not quite as active as Reddit, simply by virtue of the userbase being a lot smaller. But I've quite enjoyed the past three years I've been on this platform.
My first recommendation would be to subscribe to some communities (equivalent to subreddits) you are interested in.The main communities are mostly covered, but if they are particularly niche they might either be rather quiet or simply don't exist yet. At that point the only real way is to get them going is to contribute yourself.
Also, small piece of potentially unsolicited advice:
If a community is hosted on a domain that ends in .ml, they are likely a "Marxist-Leninist" (authoritarian communist, aka "tankie") community. The same holds for individual users.
The moderation in tankie communities (e.g. lemmy.ml) is generally not very great, in my experience.They tend to not be particularly accepting of any criticism of their beliefs, so these places tend to turn into an echo chamber.
Personally I blocked lemmy.ml, and the overall Lemmy experience has been better for it.
Most people aren't cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.
Russia is right at our doorsteps and is increasingly aggressive. So we either rearm in the hope that that threat keeps Russia at bay, or we don't and will hopelessly lose if Russia invades.
I believe the point is not to replace the existing carreer soldiers, but to train up part of the population to increase the size of your reserve forces.
That way, if war were to break out, you have a pool of trained civilians to draw from until you finish training your new recruits.
A million today may not be worth as much as a million 35 years ago, but a million still undeniably makes you wealthy even today. Heck.. even 400k in 2025 would make you decently wealthy. You can live a quite comfortable life with that kind of money
I'm not exactly a fan of pretending that millionaires are somehow struggling, and if they don't "feel wealthy" they should take a good hard look at the lives of people in the middle class or lower.
Edit: This all feels very similar to that claim I've been seeing going around recently that somehow an income of 100k per year would be a poverty wage, even though it's twice the mean income of US housholds.
If you can't make ends meet with 100k per month in income or one million in the bank, you might just need to spend a little less lavishly. Your life will still be comfortable, I promise.
Expect more to follow. America is clearly showing that they cannot be trusted as an ally, so countries are going to make the calculation whether it might just be better to align with China instead
Even the NOS didn't really spend a lot of attention on it. I only really saw one or two articles on the topic.That's nothing compared to, for example, the row with China over Nexperia that has been brewing over the past two months.