The EU is not even a legitimate government in that it’s quite literally a con job (just shows up, moves in and declares “I’m your government now” and the people are like “yes, daddy!”. It’s weird, Europeans, it’s weird), but now you want to just have this fake government that is literally controlled by an unelected commission, unilaterally impose operating systems on all formerly sovereign nations too?
People like you amaze me, it’s the cattle advocating for the slaughter house because it has fancy neon lights and lasers.
Could you please stop posting personal attacks and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Comments like these, and you've unfortunately posted many others like them, are not ok here:
What exactly is a flamebait and what was a personal attack?
It seems more like you are rationalizing your personal dislike into justification to use control over others speech in this forum for which you are clearly not qualified. And that is true regardless of what you do or I say.
You were given the power to abuse, I merely have the ability to speak and I will not refrain from speaking, even in jocular and challenging ways, regardless of what you are wont to do.
Do you know what “patronizing” means? You should look it up. It’s really a rather pathetic and vile quality no one should have. Yet here we are.
"People like you amaze me, it’s the cattle" was obviously a personal attack.
I don't do exact definitions, but flamebait basically means tossing inflammatory language into inflammatory threads in order to vent aggression and indignation. That's the opposite of the curious conversation we want on this site, and your account has unfortunately been doing a lot of it.
e.g. "Sorry to piss in your corrupt government/military contract punch bowl" (personal insult), "I see the Germans are very upset and cannot believe that the marketing and propaganda people may be bullshitters" (nationalistic insult), "You mindless drones really love that peasant slop" (personal insult) - it just goes on and on. If you keep doing this, we will end up banning you, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
These are not borderline calls - you've been obviously violating the site guidelines quite frequently.
You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation. By the way, the commission is subject to a vote of confidence by the parliament, which is directly elected. I'm pretty sure you don't get to directly vote for your cabinet members either, wherever you are.
> You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation.
It might be worth examining the word “countries” there.
Both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU Constitution by referendum in 2005. It was then regurgitated as the Lisbon Treaty (with only superficial changes) in 2007, which was ratified with no public vote.
The Irish people initially rejected both the EU-empowering treaties of Nice and Lisbon, and a followup vote was considered necessary. You get two bites of the democratic cherry if you have enough power.
A majority of the British people voted to leave in 2016, and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.
You might be spotting here a difference in desires and power between the governors and the governed.
That's one interpretation of the irish refs. I think the more obvious one is that the first result was very close and needed to be clarified. That also fits with the second one being emphatic.
You're allowed to think that Lisbon warranted referenda in the member states, but it's a minority opinion.
On Brexit, you should question your sources:
> in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.
This is a disingenuous use of the passive voice. Lots of _Remain voters_ did everything possible - i.e. tweets and marches. The government didn't take a blind bit of notice.
The government triggered Article 50 and then called a snap election - a damming order of events. They rammed it through.
> A majority of the British people voted to leave
Not by a mile, lol. The turnout was 37% and the result was 52% leave. Less than 20% of the electorate voted Leave.
Weakest mandate since the hung parliament of 1912, which only lasted a few months.
The electoral reform ref of 2010 got a 60% turnout. For the status quo. On a fringe issue. 37% is pathetic.
> That's one interpretation of the irish refs. I think the more obvious one is that the first result was very close and needed to be clarified.
Ah yes… and if the result was close but happened to be the one the Establishment wanted, do you think they would have called for a confirmatory vote just to be sure? Of course not.
> That also fits with the second one being emphatic.
The Playbook says spend more on comms, emphasise Project Fear, and call for another vote. Repeat until you get what you want.
> You're allowed to think that Lisbon warranted referenda in the member states
How very gracious of you…
> The government didn't take a blind bit of notice.
I think you’ll find that Parliamentary votes were required for the action to take place, and there were three years of deadlock during which the majority of MPs supported remain (an inverse of the popular vote) and certain MPs like Benn and Grieve led to legislation that made it very difficult to negotiate in the UK interests (no deal off the table, so a weak bargaining position).
Article 50 may have been triggered the year after the referendum, but the UK didn’t actually leave until 2020.
> Not by a mile, lol.
LOL indeed. 33.5 million people cast a vote, which was 72% of all people registered to vote. That doesn’t sound “pathetic” to me, unlike your comment in general. It reeks of someone who loses interest in democracy when it doesn’t align with what they want.
It’s extremely common and nothing to worry about. As a brass instrument player, I sometimes come across someone whose instruments always deteriorate at 300% of the rate of others. Laquer peels, silver plating blackens, etc.
I’m fine with holding them all accountable to varying degrees. For example, yes, ultimately the president is responsible, but so is the person who dropped bombs instead of refusing an illegal order; just like the street dealer, gang banger, trafficker, and cartel boss are all guilty of all of their various crimes.
What do you find difficult to understand about that?
My assumption based on many factors is that it is precisely why the carpet surveillance systems like Flock are being rolled out in preparation.
There are people in control who don’t make 1, 5, or 10 year plans; they make 20, 50, 100, and 500 year plans; and they know human nature quite well, which allows them to of not predict, have an anxious understanding for what their plans will cause and what needs to be prepared for in advance.
The flock systems are being installed by cities not the feds. You make it seem like someone has some master plan. Does not make flock any less dangerous but its not as organized as you make it seem.
It doesn’t need coordination to be organized and have the same incentives. Just like the wave of consolidation in media. Dario and Sam don’t need to talk to know what is in both their interest.
The concentration of wealth is at an all time peak. The top 1% own more stocks than the other 99%. Nobody thinks about that hard enough. The callousness by which people’s livelihoods dignity and safety are threatened is tremendous
Listen to the flock CEO talk and then tell me he isn't trying to build a counter-revolutionary dragnet. Just because cities are doing it doesn't mean it's not deliberate, that's just a step in the plan. Not everything the ultra wealthy do is a single step, they're lobbying and schmoozing their way to their goals in every way possible.
I understand the impulse, but there are not only significant differences, i.e., the requirement to add labeling to cigarettes was mostly a judicial or legislative action, but there is also that rather perverse fact that this kind of legislation that people are championing is often funded by profit and greed just like the harm being sued over.
The article even at least mentions that at least one of the suits is private equity funded; which generally will result in the partners and/or investors of the private equity firm and the attorneys suing, which are often all one and the same in what is just a financial and legal shell game, net tens of millions of dollars, while the supposed victims will end up with nothing but pennies on the dollar of harm and injury.
I get the impulse to also “cheer” for the lawsuits, but if you thought Meta, etc. are bad; you really don’t want to look into the vile pestilence that is the law firms that are basically organized crime too by the core definition of crime being an offense and harm upon society.
I don’t really know a solution for this problem because it is so rooted in the core foundation of this rotten system we still call America for some reason, but for the time being I guess, the only moderately effective remedy for harm and injury is to combat it with more harm and injury.
I mean you see piles of the libertarian types here on HN that would tell you that unending civil suits is how the country should work. That is freedom to them.
The other option is consumer protection agencies with teeth to put down actors like Meta quickly, but HN gets all mad about that as they are temporarily depressed billionaires that will hit it big at any moment.
That probably means they receive a lot of small donations. Payment processors often have a fee structure that's 2.9% + <flat fee around $0.30>. So any donation below ~$4.50 would end up having a >=10% processing fee.
There could be currency exchange rates that are factored in at the donation end as well.
I agree that 10% is high, but it's still explainable.
Yeah, and those amounts are much more common when organizations are pushing for users to make their donation a monthly recurring donation resulting in much smaller transactions.
I believe they use stripe and this would also include:
$6.25 * 97% =$6.06 - $.30 =$5.76 That's $.49 in processing fees and .49/6.25=0.0784 So 8% rather than 10%.
I assume donations other than monthly are more like $15 or $25 but maybe there are people who do $5 or $3 or even $1.
Add in chargebacks, etc. and 10% unfortunately seems reasonable.
I do wish there was a way to pay companies that was less expensive for them but very little friction on my end. Venmo business is 1.9% + $.10 and that's better than I was expecting but still higher than ideal. I've encountered that once. Zelle depends on the business's bank and I've never encountered it as an alternative to credit cards.
Not affiliated with Mozilla or Venmo or Zelle in any way.
That is very high. Not sure who they are using for processing, but I know Stripe will give registered charities a (very small) cut on their fees, I'm not sure about non-profits. But even with market rates, the average fees through Stripe would be well below 10%, IME.
Although it could be higher if a lot of donations are small, and hitting the minimum transaction fees. The average could also be brought up if donations are made through the play or apple app stores, which have much higher takes.
People keep saying this is the US as if anything about this regime is in any way legitimate, let alone abides by the Constitution, regardless of whether you like that or not. The founders of America tried to set up a system that would prevent the very thing that this thing still called America has become. Washington warned about foreign entanglements, now that’s basically all America is. It’s an extremely complicated story, but calling it America is basically “deadnaming” it. No founder of America would in any way agree with anything going on today and would be horrified of what it has become.
The repeated, systemic manner in which the Constitution is and long has been inherently violated in every possible way for many decades now, makes it self-evidently not a legitimate government; which would require having abide by the foundational supreme law that would confer actual legitimacy.
It’s like signing a contract and then not only not abiding by it, but committing all kinds of other offenses/crimes on top of that. The contract is clearly no longer valid.
Not only due to the duration of the violation of the Constitution, but the near impossibility of restoring and reversing all the violations at this point makes this thing we still call America something, but a legitimate USA based on the Constitution it is not, no matter how you look at it.
People may have a hard time accepting that because of various mental conditioning structures, but regardless of whether people are willing to accept that or not… this is simply not the USA. It’s basically identity theft, regardless of who the actual person behind the fake identity is.
Is Mexico still an Aztec empire? No. Would China still be China if Russia conquered China but still called it China? No. The closest analogue from history seems to be when Britain controlled India and still kept its name and used certain aspects of India’s culture for control to facilitate the exploitation.
Just because the hostile takeover by a kind of parasitic civilizational private equity firm through a leveraged buyout called the national debt has kept the branding of “USA”, does not mean it’s not been gutted.
Even the “right” is equally merely holding onto something that does not actually exist anymore, kind of like an old guy in an old steel mill that some private equity firm has taken over to financially plunder, vehemently defends the new management without understanding one bit of what’s going on, because all he has left after 50 years of working there is delusional hope.
I’m not sure what else to call it, but it sure is not the USA anymore than an ant infected with the “ zombie ant fungus”, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is still an ant from the second it is infected with the spore that then spreads and controls the ant in ways that are not yet fully understood.
It is like any abusive or parasitic relationship, you may not realize you’re in for abuse and parasitism, but the abusers and the parasites sure know that about you.
Sorry, but no. It is the USA. But now without the veneer, this rot was there for a long time, it's just that people no longer feel any need to pretend they're respectable. Other places have similar problems, where I live, in NL, there are a lot of things that would not have passed in public in the 80's or the 90's that people routinely engage in now because it has been normalized. The only difference though is that it is public rather than said behind closed doors. No country is immune from this. The only way to fix it is to own it.
The irony is that it only implies we have be in the proto-Idiocracy stage for a while, regardless of whether people who live in bubbles do not understand that “Upgraydd” type characters are not exactly a new or invented thing.
Man, that font used for the individual attribute evaluation percentage badge is horrible.
I’m guessing based on the color coding that what could also be a slanted and italicized 1 is actually slanted and italicized 7, but talk about a horrible font, on top of what looks like about 10 different other fonts used on the site.
I guess that is in keeping with the theme; the Idiocracy status tracking site is also Idiocracy.
so, I'm not the only one who was scrolling it and thinking, "damn, it's so horrible and illegible, it must be on-brand with the topic." I even thought that the Dark Reader extension messed things up yet again.
People like you amaze me, it’s the cattle advocating for the slaughter house because it has fancy neon lights and lasers.
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