Mostly a shrug. Live and let live.

Are they independent from the cancerous management though?

Removed by mod

The thing is that there isn’t. Israel could continue to exist if they didn’t murder all the children in Gaza. In fact, there is probably a derailer on the track with the people, since all this killing makes for great recruiting for Hamas.

Have you seen how much a razor costs nowadays?

I guess you need a cheap, reliable, relatively high performance truck with good off-road capabilities with a large bed to mount weaponry on.

What else would they use?

The iPhone workers designed, workers made, workers marketed, workers transported, workers sold and “landlords” got paid for. It really is a perfect illustration of the issue.

I guess Linux projects tend to come from around the world, instead of US boardrooms and marketing desks.

Linux is Finnish, SUSE is German, so is KDE, Ubuntu is South African, GNOME is Mexican (?).

is that companies can increase profits and productivity

Not even necessarily increasing productivity, just slashing it less than they slash worker pay, so that they have more of the pie for themselves. Like with customer service chatbots that are worse than agents, but are less worse than the amount of money they “save”.

This cracked me up, thanks!

Have your dreams and happiness anything to do with crack, Crackhappy?

My first dream was to leave the region I grew up in, which I did. The second was to leave my native country

I get that, I had that exact order of things I wanted to accomplish myself. It was rough, but I feel I’ve made it happen.

but then I had to come back. So it felt a bit like a setback. That’s still one of my goals.

But you went out, that’s an accomplishment. And if you could do it once, you can do it again. If it is harder for some reason now, you’ve had practice, you’ll do it. I believe in you.

If it’s okay to ask, what changed to your dreams from then?

Yeah, it’s more “intensifying”.

It’s not a new idea at least, other than the self-landing part. I sincerely hope they will have to employ and pay a proper aircrew to be in charge of a gigantic flying vehicle though.

I’d try and buy a Fairphone, the only branding is on the detachable back cover. You can probably get a non-branded replacement off eBay or AliExpress, and just snap the old one off and the new one on.

IIRC the Crusades were launched for similar reasons. Not saying either “holy war” is justified, only that fundies on either side act as fundies do.

There are wannabe authoritarians everywhere, one of the functions of government is to stop them. Which kinda sorta works in the EU if you don’t look too far east.

There aren’t direct elections by the people like in countries, things are a bit more complex

It’s as complex as most elections in countries that have territory based representation. My local elections are actually more complex than the EU elections. Also for that matter, if I move across the EU to a different country, I have immediate voting rights in municipal elections.

Also not everything that the parliaments says is required to be enforced in member states.

Only regulations. The EU has the power to override national legislatures if it so wishes, and it uses that power regularly, like with the GDPR. The point is it isn’t up to the member states to decide what to enforce, the EU decides where it leaves leeway and where it doesn’t. In some aspects, that ties member states together tighter than US states, as the US federal govt can’t regulate some matters even if it wants without amending the constitution IIRC.

The founding treaties of the EU don’t allow for the creation of a European army

You got me there, the EU does not have a standing shared army, but there is nothing prohibiting it either IIRC. There are EU Battlegroups that can be called up in days which are then under joint EU command, and many member states share military resources. Stuff is trending towards a shared army as well, with the recent merging of Dutch and German armies for example. There is a joint defence and security policy as well, and forces under joint EU command have undertaken dozens of missions across the world.

trying to ban encryption so they can have total surveillance over their citizens

On the contrary, they are the first to enshrine it as a basic human right. Chat control got shut down so hard not even the EU legislature can pick it up again easily.