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.

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So apparently, from what i read, USAID, while it did some collateral good, was used for covert CIA foreign interventions meant to carry out incredibly damaging experiments for no reason other than CIA being CIA. A lot of these harmful missions were done under covert names like “sex changes in x country” or “lgbt support in y country”. Allegedly Trump saw this and killed the program, just out of bigotry, either before the CIA explained it to him or despite it.

Now i had doubts about this myself so i checked online from several sources and the consensus seemed that it checks out. Major news outlets wrote pieces on it. Even USAID defenders always say some variation of “even though USAID was involved in CIA operations destabilizing foreign governments, that was not its main purpose”.

So if this is true and as far as my research has lead me, i have no reason to believe it’s a fabrication, thank goodness USAID is dead. I thought the US CIA programs of destabilizing foreign governments for shits and giggles was a thing of the past, but i was unfortunately wrong and i now realize that not even aid should be accepted from the US and I’m glad Trump destroyed that program.

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.

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.

I mean where will Microsoft stop with this ? So force people to create accounts, people create accounts, then remove them and only use local accounts or find some other loophole. Then what ? Lockdown windows usage until you have a Microsoft account with a real phone number, always connected and at least one up to date copy of birth certificate or passport ?

Isn’t the money from selling microsoft products enough ? Or is the AI slop that nobody wants so expensive to develop?

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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In my EU country you also get that co-op without getting together with anyone before the building is built. Some company builds the building and sells out the apartments. After purchase you are legally bound to your Condominium, which you have mandatory fees depending on the amenities, such as elevators, insurance, sometimes swimming pool maintenance. Residents are just expected to organize themselves. The building is considered cooperatively owned by the apartment owners and therefore you are cooperatively responsible for its maintenance and integrity.

You also have meetings to democratically decide on what to spend on, like electric chargers, which kind of insurance to get or hiring a new administration company to manage things. You can skip the meetings if you want, but legally, you must pay the Condominium dues they give you.

It’s not just 3-4 story buildings either. I’ve been part of 11 story condominiums, with 3 apartments a floor. I never thought this would be something fascinating in some parts of the world. It’s quite normal here. What changed recently is now many condominium meetings are online, because it’s easier.

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

Oh shoot the actual Nigerian King coming up to London to sue Shell.

Do you figure they ignored his messages thinking it was just spam the first time his administration contacted them ?

Here’s a copy paste from superuser that will hopefully show you that what you said is incorrect in a way i find expresses my thoughts exactly

Magnetic Field Breakdown

Most sources state that permanent magnets lose their magnetic field strength at a rate of 1% per year. Assuming this is valid, after ~69 years, we can assume that half of the sectors in a hard drive would be corrupted (since they all lost half of their strength by this time). Obviously, this is quite a long time, but this risk is easily mitigated - simply re-write the data to the drive. How frequently you need to do this depends on the following two issues (I also go over this in my conclusion).

https://superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data