Fair enough. But maybe there were also people that were brought in by Google, that actually stayed after Google left again? Well, I guess it’s hard to say 🤷‍♂️

Every time someone brings up xmpp and how Google extinguished it, I wonder if xmpp afterwards was somehow worse of than they would have been if Google never had embraced it. I don’t know, but my gut feeling would be that Google mostly just extinguished whatever they brought in in the first place and in that case EEE would be harmless. Am I wrong? If so, please explain.

lol, this guy…

Buy the dip 😊

I hope our leaders get their shit together and (1) ramp up their support for Ukraine a lot and (2) work on making the EU more independent from the US (and others).

Germany doesn’t have a FPTP system, and therefore is not a two-party system like the US. No party can form a government on their own and needs a coalition with at least one or two other parties.

Besides that the Bundesverfassungsgericht (the supreme court equivalent) is not corrupted like in the US and we just had a change to our constitution that is supposed to make it more resilient against being watered down (based on the authoritarian playbook we were able to observe in other countries in the past years, mainly Poland).

I could go on about differences between Germany and the US, but the bottom line is: We might have a problem in Germany, but it is an order of magnitude smaller than in the US, so saying stuff like “Look at Germany where the Nazis are about to be back in power”, is just not something I can let stand.

To be fair the Nazis are projected to get around 20% of votes in the election (which will happen next Sunday). And as I see it, it still is unlikely (not impossible though) they would be part of a government. Yeah this is bad, but a long shot from an active fascist coup like in the US.

But it’s on the other side of Ukraine and even if he would take over completely there, I’m pretty sure Ukraine would go into guerilla mode not exactly helping an invasion of Moldova. But it’s russia after all, so better not reply on logic alone🙈

Seems such a weird edge case to me. If I pay for a search engine you can rely on me using it as my primary search engine. And I search the Internet daily, and certainly monthly. So this change wouldn’t help me at all

Can’t believe they asked to start EU accession talks after Russia invaded Ukraine and now this. 😔

I mean, yes it is. But how is that “technology”? 🤔

Nowadays I half suspect any tech CEO to have some questionable mindset (to say the least). So it seems more important to me, what the company actually does. I hope everyone complaining about Proton now also does not use Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, Apple products, and the list goes on. Their CEOs are definitely a lot worse.

Never thought about it like this. Damn this approach does not make sense at all😵

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s left-wing president, has also made headlines for her tongue-in-cheek response to Trump, particularly his proposal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” She countered by proposing that the continent of North America change its name to “América Mexicana,” citing a colonial-era Spanish map as evidence.

Do it! It would not harm anyone, but Trump would throw a tantrum and that would be funny as fuck 😄

Now imagine naming a social media platform after a letter of the alphabet 🙃

I agree. Not thought about it a lot, but there should be some way to use your ID for stuff like that without telling every service out there your full personal details.

I also want to see some siege towers rolling in and some catapults for good measure😊

There will plenty of options for him to get his puppets in power in Europe too. But until then we really should tell him “stfu” as often as possible and as loudly as possible. And then we hope he has a fallout with Trump rather sooner than later, so he has to focus more on staying president in the US and has less time trying to meddle in our affairs here…

The Chancellor (now Scholz and before that Merkel) are the heads of government and are, in practice, more influential. Technically the president (“Bundespräsident”), which is the head of state, stands above the Chancellor and so does the president of parliament (“Bundestagspräsident”). But this is mostly a ceremonial hierarchy and while the president has to “check” laws and sign them to take effect, this is basically always happening. In general the president is mostly a ceremonial position.

You hear a lot more about the chancellor, because as head of government, they are the only ones actually involved in creating/changing laws (of the positions mentioned).

Edit: If my research is correct, it only happened 8 times since 1949 that a president did not sign a law that was accepted by parliament and the last time was 2006. So it really is a pretty rare occurrence.