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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Any sort of EU federal state I would agree is nigh impossible - as it stands currently there is some lack of overlap on freedom of movement without border checks (the Schengen area) and currency adoption (all members except Denmark are obligated to adopt the Euro at some point in time, but Sweden at least doesn’t seem to have any real intention of doing so) within EU member states.

    On top of that, ‘muh freedumb, they want to take away our right to self-govern’ is used as a very efficient talking point for nationalist parties in all EU member states to shift public opinion against the EU (some possibly due to propaganda, others due to homegrown ideology). Any decision of importance within the EU has to be unanimous, so pretty sure there will be at least one state vetoing any motion to become a federal state.

    Maybe once world peace is achieved, there can be an EU federal state, though even then I’d be skeptical.

    For any brexit reversal, I understand the main issue would be that as a founding member, the UK had some perks (opt out of Schengen and the Euro) that would no longer be on the table for a new arrival. And there’s the matter of breach of trust for already leaving once and causing major headaches.



  • add to that that google turned to crap nowadays and just pushes meaningless bot generated content in the top pages… it’s getting almost impossible to use it to find stuff. not sure about other engines because I only started recently being search-engine-curious, so no idea how they were like before




  • I don’t understand what you consider as bad faith here. You presented and east-west perspective over a single time zone and I presented the northern situation as well (since the phenomenon in question - length of day vs time of day - gets amplified the higher north you go), and not sure where you saw any disagreement.

    I find dismissing it as ‘four hours of daylight would suck either way’ to be in bad faith.

    Now, had I wanted to nitpick your argument, I could have said that Spain should not be counted because they should probably be on the same time zone as the UK and Ireland by their actual geographic location, so the issue there would stem more from the fact that they chose the wrong time zone to begin with. The sun rose in Madrid today at 8.13. In Rome it was at 7.09. Same time zone.

    Notice the subtle difference?


  • Or there was plastic stuck to the machines used to sample and it contaminated the area during sampling. Or there was plastic in the lab during testing. Though potentially those should have been ruled out by testing a blank sample and a control sample of just the ‘empty’ sampling equipment.








  • Also adding to the list of nice things - a picture of the current dictator on all public offices and classrooms. Work and school weeks from Monday to Saturday and a Sunday in which you had to do mandatory free time activities, like go to communist youth clubs, participate in parades for the glory of the state, or plant flowers or do random maintenance work in the park.

    I’ve noticed the arguments tend to center around the notion that ‘that wasn’t true communism’ and that the notions presented by Marx et al. were not properly implemented.

    Fair enough, I can agree with that, but I’d wonder what makes us think that we would do it better next time? How do you actually prevent consolidation of power in the hands of the select few (in any system, for that matter, not just the ideal communism)?

    Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes).


  • Well articulated. I’m not from the US, but I’ve seen housing developments go sideways when they built four 10-story blocks (not in somebody’s back yard, but in an area without proper infrastructure) and after 1000ish people had moved in there were 1 hour long queues just to get out of the complex because there was only one road with one lane per direction. And the only bus stop was not really reliable.

    This was not built in the middle of the city because of land availability (and huge prices even if there was land available - you’re near the metro and tram and a bus stop? pay 50% more. oh, you’re near a park too? pay 50% more on top of that). Should we just tear down old buildings in low density areas in the city to make room for big blocks? Some might be worth tearing down because of age and overall condition, but good luck getting people to move out.