I saw a lot of suggestions for that but at the moment i just don’t have the real estate to have a server running. I’m assuming you’d need one for that ?

I’m guessing i might end up looking for an instance like that, a low user, low manned instance that flies under the radar and no one really cares enough about it to block it.

There’s too much instance tribalism around here, which isn’t great. I totally get defederating from stuff that’s harmful, but sometimes it’s down to political stances. People hate China, Russia and communism so they hate ML. Engaging in other communities as an ML user you will invariable just see people say “oh here comes the tankie” even though you said nothing tankie-ish.

I’m not as extreme left as a lot of users in ML but i like to listen and i find common ground with people here in many issues. I feel that disagreeing politically is just not a good enough reason to block or defederate. At this point we’ll end up with echo chambers that lack any semblance of political plurality of opinions. Ignoring people who lean differently doesn’t make them disappear at the voting tables, it just hides one’s head under the sand.

Such a pain you can’t block an entite instance (at least not that I’ve found on Sync) and have to block the individual communities one by one. I blocked the ones with over 500 subscribers and i suppose the others will get blocked as they show up in my Everything feed.

There’s no way i want to be a part of German genocide whitewashing.

I don’t know about other downvoters, but i downvoted you because you said kids should be beaten into submission at school. Corporal punishment is the refuge of bad parents and it’s not a teacher’s job to harm your children that way. There is not a single justifiable reason that you need to be physically violent with a child to educate them. In fact, that only makes it worse. You either raise a fearful child or a hateful one. Either way, in my book, it’s child abuse and you were calling for it.

And boy would i cause all sorts of sky falling down trouble on the poor soul that decided to physically assault my child, undoing my job of teaching that violence is only a tool of self defense. I suffered significant corporal punishment growing up and i can guarantee it improved my life in no way.

I would say for this to happen, the biggest challenges facing Europe would be to massively develop its services and post soviet democratic countries would have to be on board with their exports losing competitiveness in the global market. Poland, for instance, is industrializing further but interesting to note that 90% of their goods market is the EU and only 10% goes of out EU. So in a way, post soviet democracies can still be goods exporters inside EU’s internal market. Letting go of industry is not something i believe post soviet democracies would ever accept.

Western, central and southern europe already survive on luxury and unique regional products to support their industry despite their high cost of living, so competitiveness is not a big issue there.

As for services, specially tech, European customers are used to having easy access to highly unregulated digital tech from the US, with union busting, privacy invasion and low taxation, that gives them an unfair edge against tech developed in Europe. Europe has begun to subsidize all European tech (you can even see some games and software with EU stickers for receiving subsidies), but i think Europe needs to tax US digital services and goods, otherwise there is no competing with massive billionaire fortunes that are president friends. There’s no competing when your competitor’s workers don’t have maternity leave, work 60-70 hours a week and have 10 days holidays a year and thank goodness nothing like that will ever fly around European unions. Trust me, Elon and Walmart tried. Without taxation motivation, there will never be a European alternative to US tech, but they don’t want to tax tech without an alternative. Catch 22.

And this is the EU. Anything that takes the US 10 years, takes the EU 20. This is good in a way, because everyone is heard and there is no crazy orange lunatic coming to change fundamental laws overnight, but to react against something like this will take a while. In the EU we’re used to wait, we understand why we wait. But international markets might not be so patient. Also by the time the EU starts changing meaningfully, it is very possible Trump is not president anymore, making the change pointless, so i see the EU doing their usual “looking busy and waiting” routine.

It might happen, just not soon.

As a European, the Euro can’t replace the dollar. It’s not about how stable it is, it’s about how many Euros there are. Whichever country will be the world reserve currency will have to produce so much currency to be used all around the world that their non digital exports will never be competitive. The Euro just isn’t produced in large enough quantities to be used as a world reserve currency, its production and distribution is tightly controlled for use in European and European partner markets. At least not right now. A long time ago some OPEC countries wanted to try out the idea of using Euros, but just couldn’t get enough liquidity to trade all the oil in Euros.

Donald Trump wants the US to both be a goods exporting powerhouse and the world reserve currency. He thinks it’s possible, that these diametrically opposed goals have a middle sweetspot where one can be just enough of a world reserve currency not to worry about debt anymore, but also a country that others depend on for manufacturing. That’s what all the tariff dancing is all about. I think he’s nuts, but hey, every economic theory needs to be tested. Just wish we were testing more sophisticated economic theories.

Anyway, as of this moment Europe is not geared for it. Not industrially, not financially and to be honest, i don’t think Europe is even into it. But it’s not impossible. It would just require a lot of changes.

100% agree on this. Usually i like geneva_convenience’s posts and comments, but if we’re going to start editorializing news articles, instead of just posting the original title and clarifying with information about the PA, the posts lose value massively for me. Where does the buck stop if everyone who republishes links “corrects” news titles as they feel ?

I don’t even disagree with the point of the OP, but this sort of sensationalizing articles just feels like a distant cousin of click bait. It’s what British newspapers do and why i absolutely loathe most of them. Is the new title wrong ? Possibly not, but that’s not the original piece of information. It’s like the reader is too stupid to be served the original information and thank goodness there’s someone to serve you the “correct” title.

I’m against Israel hasbara and disinformation but i find this isn’t the proper way to address it.

My completely anedoctal reasoning is that at this moment Portugal and Spain have more pressing local fish to fry and the whole American issues are taking a backseat on the public discourse. Most people you talk to will be out of the loop over the DOGE, MAGA, nazi salute plot. Moreover the smaller volume of luxury car sales are also contributing to a lagged response. People who were going to buy Teslas made that decision a while back.

Thanks! It’s interesting to find out how differently things are in military procedure in other parts of the world.

So military question, in America do civilians salute ? I see Trump saluting in a suit. In my country that’s a no-no. Only military personnel in uniform and appropriate head apparel may salute, like all the soldiers next to Trump. Or is the president considered a military person since he’s commander in chief ?

I mean civilians can salute if they want. There’s no penalty. It just doesn’t carry any meaning from a civilian and looks kind of goofy and out of place. Military personnel can’t salute out of uniform, though. You may get disciplined over that.

You really don’t understand who you’re talking to here. The average person hasn’t heard about browser extensions. I’m serious. The amount of even engineers that work with me who are incredibly good at one specific thing, like autocad design, but don’t really know or care about general computer things is pretty high, let alone non technical personnel. I’ve had people ask me to explain extensions and how to use ad blocking software. People just want a computer that works and does the thing they want it to without fancy things.

People don’t fear the terminal, they just don’t understand it and they don’t care to memorize things to learn it. If Linux wants to be an end user desktop, you need to do everything by the GUI. What is intuitive, interesting and easy to you is a nightmare for other people. I’m assuming vice versa if the accountant gives you a 10 dimension excel spreadsheet or something. It might just be me projecting my fear of accounting excel spreadsheets.

Ah yes, the appeasement strategy. Works every time, for whoever is on the receiving end of it of course. One would think Europeans would know better, but i guess life teaches you the same lesson until you’re ready to learn.

Maybe AstraZeneca CEO should figure out where the massive windfall covid vaccine profits went and invest them wisely instead of filling the pockets of shareholders. Dude got massive taxpayer investments, spent the last 5 years acquiring smaller healthcare companies, snubbed a uk plant investment because they didn’t get enough money from the taxpayers and bragged about how much money they were making about a year ago from the pipeline investments.

Clearly there isn’t enough space here for AstraZeneca’s shareholder greed and progress it seems, but it sure as hell isn’t the job of the European taxpayers to prop these guys up. Honestly i find it embarassment that a company that has been all about bragging about growth these last 5 years now complains they aren’t competitive enough because they aren’t getting enough free money.

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The problem with the Euro and why it’s so stable is that its supply is tightly controlled. If there is to be any Euro vs USD to be widely used in world markets for trade, more Euros have to be made available worldwide for countries to use. Such an increase of supply will have destabilizing effects in the economy and will be more challenging to keep stable, as now the ECB must consider the trade happening with Euros wordwide and not just eurozone trade in its currency supply control.

Additionally, the EU would face less competitive exports, which is one issue currently faced by the US that Trump is trying to fix because he doesn’t understand economics, but can’t.

Overall the EU would require a much more robust financial asset trading and regulation infrastructure to handle being a world reserve currency.

It’s not just whoever currency is the top dog, a world reserve currency requires a finely adjusted economic policy that the ECB must be prepared for.

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The worst country on planet Earth. The lowest of the low. A nation of evil demons from hell.