A new twist on a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

If you ask Americans about socialist policies without mentioning parties or ideology, then they overwhelmingly support them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Almost every Dutch person does speak English, but if you get outside of the cities it’s often not very good Dutch.

I spent a few years feeling like shit because of my terrible Dutch, until my sister came to visit. My partner had a birthday party during the visit, so lots of the people I had known for years but only spoke Dutch with had to switch to English to chat with my sister. Imagine my surprise to discover that my ridiculous Dutch was better than their English!

This is pretty much how The Handmaiden’s Tale book goes. “Terrorists” nuke DC and some Christian fundamentalists take over.

There is an interesting question as to what happens if he dies before being sworn in. It’s not clear what succession looks like then, I think…

Yeah in Holland the average work week is less than 30 hours.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-work-week-by-country

Voting by mail is inferior to having a voting booth. The women secretly voting for Kamela have a much lower chance of being able to vote as they want by mail-in ballots. Indeed anyone in an unequal power relationship has the same problem.

There’s a reason we have voting booths, and it’s still important.

So you think that Kamala is destined to be President?

Decided how?

The “cannot serve two masters” argument was used as a reason not to elect the first Catholic US President, JFK. I find it to be pretty uncompelling.

The important thing is that the US not recognize any titles.

Both Reagan and Bush Sr. got knighted.

https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/queen/the-us-presidents-knighted-by-the-queen-and-king-george-vi-125671/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If your goal is to act as a deterrent then harsher sentences do not work, at least according to research.

At this point, we think it is fair to say that we know of no reputable criminologist who has looked carefully at the overall body of research literature on “deterrence through sentencing” who believes that crime rates will be reduced, through deterrence, by raising the severity of sentences handed down in criminal courts.

https://www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/research-publications/faculty-publications/issues-related-harsh-sentences-and-mandatory-minimum

There is no limit. At some point The Onion will make an ironic story about it that gets reposted every time a woman getting killed by anti-abortion policies makes the news.

This video is exactly why I am in favor of voting booths over mail-in ballots.

If you are unable to vote in person, then voting should be easy to do early. But we should try hard to get people into the voting booth.

Don’t you mean 5/7?

I don’t see much negatively. But I use lemmynsfw.

Warning: Taken from decades-old memories of things that I wasn’t involved in or paying much attention to! Anyway…

In Virginia a man sued the state like 30 years ago because they wanted to charge him to change his name, when a woman could change her name free when she got married. The state could either have charged women or made it free for all. They chose the later.

In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.

Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn’t believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the “farmer’s movement” party and opposes environmental regulations.

😢

I work at a company big into AI. We build our own models. Our senior management drank the Kool-Aid. We don’t have search on our Intranet any more, just LLM chatbots.

Our TLS certificate expired last week on our main web page. I tried to find the contact details for the team responsible and the thing just hallucinated e-mail addresses.

Needless to say, I’m less excited than you.

Sorry what’s the g-word?