And then treats them like trash. He constantly misgenders one of them and is actively supporting a government that is making them have to flee the country. What a wonderful dad…

Understandable, it’s all a matter of perspective. There’s no ideal way of democracy and any way has it’s pros and cons. I’d say that overall my gripe is a somewhat minor one but it does lead to big issues sometimes, especially during election times because the biggest party gets first dibs on creating the government. More fragmentation on your side of the political spectrum (left vs. right) can therefore lead to splintering of the votes and losing out on being the biggest.

This is more or less what happened last time. The leftist parties tried to prevent it by joining forces shortly before the election but the amount of leftist parties we have still meant that votes were somewhat splintered; that is (among other factors) how we ended up with another right-wing government after people clearly seemed to be done with over 10 years of right-wing Rutte politics.

I’d love to be able to vote for some fringe leftist party knowing I’ll not waste my vote

But in a way it will. Many of these fringe parties never have a chance to make it into the government and will forever be in the opposition, meaning their impact isn’t very big. The PVV started off like this as well and their leader, Geert Wilders, has only ever wanted to be the person shouting at stuff from the opposition side of the fence. Even now, when he has the biggest party, they had to come up with some wicked solution where he’s not the PM and not in the government itself. Instead, it’s a neutral PM with some ministers and everyone else is in the opposition and constantly criticising their own “government”. It’s ridiculous and so far they haven’t gotten much done.

In my opinion, a cutoff of 5% is a bit high but I also think that parties should have more than 1 seat to even make it into the chamber, otherwise it’ll turn into a mess real quick.

Just make sure not to take it too far if you do proportional voting. We have a system in the Netherlands that works like that but the result is that we now also have about 30 parties running for government, most of them being fairly pointless. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than the US shenanigans but you can also go too far.

The difference is that Europe should be more capable of resisting America. We’ll see if that actually happens but given how things have gone before when the EU went after American companies I don’t think they’ll budge easily.

Lol. “Be happy we’re killing people damnit!”

I think I saw a movie about that, they ended up shooting down the Eiffel tower or something /s

They also very much had the advantage of knowing their terrain and both Hitler and Napoleon got cocky and kept going during winter time without being prepared for it. Hitler especially was actually making good progress until winter hit so you could almost even say that Russia took a calculated risk (even though I think it’s more of a “got lucky” situation).

My GF asked me to come to it ends with us with her. I didn’t see any trailer or read anything about it so I assumed it was a romcom or something, boy was I wrong…

The plot was quite gripping though and Blake Lively and the cast were really good in it. I’d definitely recommend watching it but keep in mind that it’s a pretty intense movie with lots of dark content in it.

I’m still happy that I went through the effort to delete all my old posts when I left Reddit a while back. I periodically check if they’ve restored them and luckily it hasn’t happened so far. I do miss some of the bigger communities but overall I’m having a good time on Lemmy.

I know right? Executives just never seem to get that you actually need to provide value to have people want to sign up for it. Saying that though, there’s a lot of dumb consumers out there that just pay for it if needed.

There’s already been 2 terrorist attacks in Europe and based on the evacuations of public spaces in France it seems like it’s only the start. I’m not sure if it’s all because of the war (the attack in Brussels seems to be more related to ISIS according to the news) but it sure seems like it’s gotten a lot more frequent since it really kicked off last week.

Except most governments. They also fund humanitarian aid for the Palestinians on the down-low but publically they’re supporting Israel. Just look at the US.

The family plan sadly isn’t an option for me, I don’t have anyone in my family that uses YouTube as much as I do so they wouldn’t be interested in it.

I wouldn’t mind paying a little bit of money every month to get YouTube ad free. However, it costs €12 a month. That’s a lot of money if you only care about getting rid of ads. I personally don’t need the other features (downloading videos, background play and YouTube music). If they added a 5 to 7 euro a month tier through which you could get rid of ads then that would be much more interesting to me. Now I just feel like I should keep looking for ways around their pop up shenanigans.

Nope, it feels like most people are too far gone for that and they’ll never accept it. All thanks to these dumb politicians that took bribes to cover it up for years and years. Thanks for making our futures so much worse…

This is my main problem with hydrogen cars. I think it’s a very cool concept that might eventually overtake pure electric cars but there’s almost no places to get hydrogen yet.

It’d be funny if he called him “Winnie the pooh” when he meets him to explain himself :)

I usually just end up recording them if I really want to watch them so I can fast forward through the commercials when I watch it later.

I suppose, except happy hour gives it a bit more of a positive spin. People like getting discount way more than having to pay more. They could’ve definitely handled this one better.

Also, having people pay more at peak hours is potentially going to shift when people start drinking. Day drinkers will most likely become more common that way.