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andrew0

@ andrew0 @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
7
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74
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Romania bans second far-right hopeful from presidential election rerun

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  • How can you have democracy if you let people vote for a person that says he will remove all political parties? There must be checks and balances that stop you at some point. Also, Romanian law prohibits candidates with ties to fascist or extremist ideologies from participating in elections. That's in the law, introduced by people that were democratically elected.

    But lets be honest, it’s the not being hostile to Russia that did it. Can’t have that in a US colony where they plan to have the biggest base for their imperialist wars.

    Sure, the US that is now serving up its allies on a silver platter to Putin? His friend Trump is going to revert sanctions any day now for that sweet oil. For power in the Middle East, maybe, but the EU is hopefully going to wake up soon and kick all American bases ASAP.

    And who helped the openly fascists ukranian to power in 2014?

    Firstly, the Euromaidan protests didn't get hundreds of thousands of people attending just because they got brainwashed by the EU/US. Allegedly, Russia attempted to do the same thing in Romania with Georgescu, and only a few hundred people showed up to protest the decision to take him off the ballot. People in Ukraine felt betrayed when Yanukovych wanted to reject EU and get closer with Russia, a country that has had 146% voter turnout during one of its recent elections. Arguably, maybe the EU is not the best, but its system is way more decentralized than Russia's, allowing better representation of its population and reducing the chance of corruption. At least we don't hear people that are criticizing the government "randomly" falling out of windows here...

    Secondly, Poroshenko was openly fascist? Or whom exactly do you mean? If I'm not mistaken, Poroshenko assigned a Jewish person as his prime minister. Or you might be hinting at the Azov Brigade being integrated by him into the national army? What would you do when Russia starts invading your country, though? Either way, you might be right that it is in the benefit of the EU (and perhaps US) to have closer ties with Ukraine, but it goes both ways. Ukraine did not like what happened in Georgia, and wanted more security and pro-democracy allies. That does not mean that the EU made Ukraine into a Nazi puppet state to fight Russia.

  • Romania bans second far-right hopeful from presidential election rerun

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  • No, democracy is when you are intolerant with the intolerant. Maybe read up on what she says/does before commenting.

  • Been enjoying Rhythmbox, what are your thoughts?

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  • Fooyin is also a solid choice.

  • EU Digital Sovereignty - Time to provide alternatives to US/Chinese big tech

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  • Oh, I don't know how I forgot about this. I have already signed it last year haha. Thanks for reminding me!

  • EU Digital Sovereignty - Time to provide alternatives to US/Chinese big tech

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  • Well, what I'm thinking about is not too far from education. I am suggesting that we have independent fact-checkers, or at least tools that show all the angles of a certain issue (e.g., something like Ground News, but not owned by a for-profit organisation), paid by tax money. This should be incorporated in something like an API that Fediverse instances could tap into. Again, not governments deciding who is right or who is wrong, but citizen-backed initiatives that work for the people. There should be open source plugins that could be used by fedi instances to relay the fact-checking or other relevant information.

    I am categorizing this as governmental regulation because the tax money is allocated by the government specifically for content "moderation". However, this doesn't mean that content should be removed from social media just because it talks about a topic (unless it is illegal), but people should at least have additional information available for free that they could research further. And no, I don't think the community notes employed by Meta and Twitter are enough, as we've seen how that went for the Americans in the last election.

  • EU Digital Sovereignty - Time to provide alternatives to US/Chinese big tech

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  • Mate, I am not advocating here for the EU to break E2EE, nor support linking of your social media profile to a citizen number that can be used against you. Similarly, I do not wish for the EU to start generating its own propaganda machine to replace the US one.

    I am merely stating that we should invest more in EU open source, promote more fact checking and open algorithms (or even banning them) for social media. What is happening with Twitter, Facebook and TikTok is not ok. We do not need social media to profile us and push content that a state or rich person deems necessary for their benefit. Aren't you on Lemmy specifically because of that?

  • EU Digital Sovereignty - Time to provide alternatives to US/Chinese big tech

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  • Thank you for the information. I'll keep that in mind for the future! To be honest, I intended to find a petition on this topic and share that to incentivize some mobilization, but I could not find anything. This was the most recent article I could find on the topic, given my limited time to research. If you have a suggestion on an article, I would love to change it to that!

  • Taiwan says 'impossible' for US to abandon Indo-Pacific

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  • It's a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

    Here is a quote from the actual "Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership" PDF:

    Needed reforms

    [...]

    Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

    1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
    2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
    3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
    4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
    5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

    [...]

    They are engineering most of these situations that we've seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: "This is going to be great television" - the guy is not even hiding it.

    On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won't abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of "theatrics" is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

    It's truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.

  • Kremlin says US foreign policy now ‘aligns’ with Moscow’s vision

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  • Precisely. The only enemy that the US conservative party sees is China. Everyone else is a business partner that they must strong arm into favourable deals for the US.

  • This is why the USA supports Ukraine, typical USA imperialism

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  • I don't know... I feel like this is all premeditated. Project 2025 basically describes this exact thing: get EU to stop relying on the US. It's all a bit more insidious than just Old Donnie being stupid and vain. I truly wonder whether this is a US conservative's gamble to get stronger allies, or just a much bigger plan to extract more wealth for the rich in the US.

    I, for one, would love to see Europe get rid of American dependence, but I have a feeling that everything will go back to the usual after getting peace in Ukraine. The US has enough buffer between them, China and Russia to not care, and plan for much farther ahead. They will keep lining up the pockets of policy makers to get them to lean towards their interests, and 2-3 generations down the line we nudge even closer to far right capitalism. Especially since Europe now might start shifting it's industry to produce weapons, which will take our focus away from other important areas, like local chip manufacturing.

    I'm curious to hear other opinions though. What is your take on all of this?

  • We can all help Ukraine - UNITED24

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  • Pretty cool! I assume this also works if you're an English speaker? I'll definitely look further into this.

  • We can all help Ukraine - UNITED24

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  • Less than 500 euros per drone, according to Reuters.

  • Călin Georgescu does a nazi salute after leaving the General Prosecutor's office (Romania)

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  • I was about to say that he was waving, but he actually stopped for a second during the salute. This guy is mental lol. If I'm not mistaken, there's no first amendment equivalent in Romania that he can get behind to justify this.

  • Apple Removes iCloud E2EE in UK: What You Need to Know

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  • I also had to upload 2000 photos. The issue was that they had to encrypt each, which took me like 2 days with it running in the background 😅 It could have also been due to my phone being quite old. I don't rely on it that much, other than using it as an off-site back-up for my most important documents.

    I do agree that the best choice is a self-hosted solution with proper security, but sadly not everyone has the time or the skills to manage that. The Proton CEO thing also annoyed me, but the Proton Foundation as a whole has good opinions about privacy (e.g., against chat control proposal in the EU). However, next time a slip like this happens from them, I'll probably have had enough time to move my stuff to a local deployment.

  • Apple Removes iCloud E2EE in UK: What You Need to Know

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  • Proton offers a Drive, and they're based in Switzerland. I don't see them being strong-armed like this by the UK government any time soon.

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    Early 30s CD looking for advice on where to travel. For a holiday

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  • Try Western European countries, if it's not too far? For example, Netherlands has beautiful cities, and LGBTQ+ rights are currently pretty strong. However, there's always the chance you might run into a moron that feels attacked by other people's decisions :(

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • I haven't tried it myself, but you could get a Garmin watch and add your cards there. I believe you don't need the phone connected afterwards to make payments.

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    I am 40 and a nurse. Would it be more beneficial to get a cyber security degree? Instead of bouncing around the countries as a traveling nurse?

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  • I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope you have enough support to deal with it!

    Regarding bioinformatics, it doesn't have to be a human-centered job. You can get into the data science aspect of it, and make good money off of helping research diseases, for example. This could also be a remote job, and you'd probably have an easier time getting into it. For data science, you can get quite far with Python, which is easier to pick up when compared with other languages.

    You can also explore your options further by just asking ChatGPT, and seeing what the potential job requirements would be. It's decent if you want to brainstorm some stuff, but do look up the information yourself on search engines. Write there your experience, what you'd want, and what to expect if you were to jump in that field. Perhaps this could help you decide better.

    I wish you the best of luck!

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    I am 40 and a nurse. Would it be more beneficial to get a cyber security degree? Instead of bouncing around the countries as a traveling nurse?

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  • If you already have medical knowledge, why not look into bioinformatics? Cyber security would be a pretty big jump if you're not into tweaking computers as a hobby. For example, have you ever set up Linux on your own?

    Certifications will give you a starting point, but it will take years for all the information to settle properly in your mind.

  • Self-hosted music streaming (and me giving up on it)

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  • Piracy. I'd buy albums if I had money, though. I'll slowly phase into getting them once I get some more cash.

    I can find most stuff I listen to, and I rarely grow my music library. I mostly listen to 20-30 albums, with some more mainstream music peppered in.

    My music library currently sits at 90 gigabytes (mostly flacs), so quite small compared to others I've seen around here. Still, I have plenty of variation to keep me entertained :D

    If you have Tidal, aren't there some apps to rip the lossless audio from there? You could get most of the stuff that you need, and then cancel the subscription. If you feel bad, maybe order some merch from the band, haha.