Citizens may have non-citizen friends and family who are potential targets.

Honest question: are eggs going to be affected? Corn feed for chickens is mainly domestic, there’s a lot of US factory farms. I’d expect tarrifs to primarily hurt foodstuffs that are heavily mported, like avocadoes, bananas, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, etc.

We already started during this year. No sane leader trusted in a coin flip to guarantee our security. A possible Trump presidency was planned for.

This is more about ramping up domestic arms production to fill the gap that is going to come from US production no longer going to Ukraine.

I think Brexit has also been a significant factor in making UK way more xenophobic.

Personally, I don’t think it’s made the UK more xenophobic. A decent percentage of people supported Brexit due to xenophobia, and the success of the referendum made them more outspoken. Basically, Brexit is a symptom of xenophobia rather than the other way around.

The key thing is practice. Like any creative pursuit, your first attempts will be trash. The greatest writers, artists and musicians ever went through this too. If you care about that form of creative expression, just keep at it!

It’s a confirmed fact they ordered troops in fallback lines to shoot any fleeing Russian troops trying to pull back on some of the fronts.

FYI, I’m not Ukrainian. I’m Romanian. We have more skin in the game than Germany or France though. If Ukraine falls, Moldova falls 24 hours later, and allowing our brother country to go back under Russian domination is pretty unthinkable.

Even without that existential issue, allowing democratically minded Europeans trying to walk the same path we walked 25 years ago get invaded by Russia without as much help as we can give them seems horrific to me.

This period of war in Eastern Europe is pretty shit and I would like Western Europe to take it more seriously, thx

Technically yes, but I don’t mean technology as phones/laptops/tablets/etc. Imho, the biggest factor in social isolation is atomization due to bad urban planning. When everything and anything is only accessible by car, you lose any connection with your local neighbourhood and local stores/cafes/etc.

In environments where people walk around the neighbourhood, doing small daily shops, going to local businesses and taking mass transit to work/school/restaurants/bars, then you’re much more likely to interact with people rather than driving around in your social isolation-mobile.

Urban planning can be considered a form of technology, which is why I said technically yes.

EDIT: Oh, another big factor here is the loss of the third place. It still exists in some places (local pubs in British towns, local coffee shop in Portugal, etc), but in places without a socially normal “hangout spot” that is separated from both home and work/school, it’s much harder to meet acquaintances which may in time become friends.

Except when they did protests targeted at oil infrastructure, that was still apparently wrong and got far less coverage than much safer stunts like these.

scum-masters

Best typo ever.

I’d say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.

18, like the rest of Europe.

Like most things law-related, it’s more about enforcement than anything else. Things dramatically improved while our anti-corruption force was under the control of Laura Kovesi. She kicked some serious ass. Now things are treading water a bit, but Romania is not quite the kleptocratic corruptofest it was in the 90s. There’s always improvements to be made ofc.

If they get into an accident, or it’s a spot check, or something like that they get breathalized.

Yup, exactly. Strictly 0.0. There are cases where people have lost their licenses after having one of those little chocolates with the rum-flavored fillings. This was a reaction to a huge wave of deaths due to DUIs.

Cheaper? Maybe. Easier? No, not really. Ion Popescu from Bumfuck, Nowhere doesn’t have the DNA breathing down his neck, watching for any signs of living outside his means and any unusual bank account activity.

EDIT: To be clear, I’m not saying corruption doesn’t happen. It does. I’m just saying it’s not automatically much worse than juries.

There’s also the fact that appealing a judgement goes to more judges, always different than ones who have seen the case. Basically:

1st judgement -> 1 judge

1st appeal -> 2 different judges (must be unanimous)

2nd appeal -> 3 different judges (must be unanimous)

This makes corruption less common, as getting 6 different judges to all risk their career for a bribe is unlikely.

I’m not going to claim this system is perfect. There are issues with the fact that there is no mechanism for preventing enforcement of an unjust law. If it’s on the books and it’s an open-shut case, the law will be applied no matter how unjust it is. The inverse is also true though: you can’t have unjust rulings that ignore laws the other direction, for example jury nullification of the murder of a black person (used to happen all the time in the US).

Like most things, it’s a tradeoff. Some things are better, some are worse.

Did my comment need a /s on it?

Probably. Poe’s law becomes firmer every day as vocal crazies become more and more outspoken.