In all airports that I’ve been through (all in Europe), the scanners for people + their carry-on luggage are from the customs agency, so from the government. They won’t check or enforce any airline weight limits there. The airline may still ask to check the weight of carry-on luggage at the gate, but I’ve never seen it as an automated process, only as spot checks.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[b] is an initiative of the second Trump administration tasked with cutting federal spending which it characterizes as “waste, fraud, and abuse”.[8] It emerged from discussions between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and was established by executive order on January 20, 2025. DOGE’s actions have included accessing government data systems; organizing mass layoffs of federal workers; and cutting climate change initiatives, scientific research, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency

Yeah, smartphones are a menace as well in traffic, especially when combined with someone as oblivious as in your example :). The government(s) in my country has had several police + information campaigns against smartphone use since a few years. There’s now also a fine of 175 euro + loss of driver’s license for 15 days for using the smartphone while driving in traffic. And waiting in traffic, still counts as driving. If used for navigation, then the destination has to be put in before starting to drive & the smartphone has to be in a holder or connected to the infotainment system.

This heavier punishment is pretty recent and the chance of being caught seems low, so there’s still often people using smartphones inappropriately. Last one I saw this week was an oblivious teenager on a bicycle. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s been a noticable change in a few years.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGd3QWgTLs&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD

For contrast: a video of a more congested street in Paris 17 years ago. The situations aren’t completely comparable: bigger emergency vehicle, smaller other vehicles, smaller street with less options to get out of the way, … One other major difference and the reason I’m posting this, is that 30 seconds into the video, you can see that most drivers have moved to the sides of the road AHEAD of the firetruck and that they are holding still while waiting on the firetruck to pass them. The street + path are less than ideal and there isn’t really enough room, so the truck is still not going very fast, but it’s at least able to keep moving. By moving to the sides, the drivers also blocked in that smaller firetruck that was coming from the side street, so that’s going to cause some confusement after the big one has passed.

The reason that that NYC ambulance is completely stuck in traffic, isn’t because of space, because there is plenty compared to that Parisian street, but it’s the drivers who are not creating a path. It’s not an infrastructure problem, it’s something that can be taught + encouraged if there is a political will to make a change.

Yeah, absolutely. Americans making excuses as to why solutions that work in other countries, would not work in the USA, are a scourge on your society. Your lives could be so much better if you lot stopped falling for that American exceptionalism propaganda and stopped inventing reasons to not do anything about known problems. And now that you’ve turned into a banana republic, I’m done being polite about it.

As if the usa is the only country in the world with congested rush hour traffic. I’ve been in streets that were way more tightly packed + chaotic than this and people would still clear a path for vehicles with sirens. The emergency vehicle would only be able to go 20 to 30 kmh without a motorcycle escort, but that’s still significantly faster than what we’re seeing here.

What we’re seeing in this video, is that (some) vehicles that are directly in front of the ambulance move out of the way, but vehicles that are a tiny bit further ahead, don’t even try. If a vehicle that is directly in front of the ambulance can move out of the way, then a vehicle that is 30 places ahead, is also able to move out of the way, but they don’t even try … What should happen is that as soon as drivers hear a siren, they should start looking for where it’s coming from and then clear a path, and drivers should also especially not be driving into the path that others are clearing. Instead it seems like these drivers wait till the siren is right behind them and only then some start to move out of the way.

Looking for excuses in American exceptionalism reads like a case of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”. This particular problem is something that can be easily improved upon by a public awareness campaign and some light fines for those that keep obstructing after the campaign has been running for some time. But what’s obviously even easier than that, is finding an excuse to continue doing nothing about the problem.

Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.

If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)

If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.

That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.

Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.

And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Parliamentary democracy with a monarch as non-executive head of state. So being monarch is a mostly ceremonial role, with the seldom used power to temporarily veto or morally object against bad ideas. Juan Carlos saved the Spanish democracy in 1982 for example.

The eu commission warning was officially only aimed at their internal services, it wasn’t a mandate that all organisations within the eu should stop advertising on x. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if it comes to a total ban in the eu, X is already under investigation for disinformation.

What those statistics do not take into account is the different incidence rates of men/women being out alone at night.

Because women feel more afraid going out into the dark alone, they’re less likely to do so, creating less opportunities for them to be robbed/raped/killed.

To make an analogy:
What are my chances to drown in the sea if I never go swimming in the sea? 0% chance.
What if I go swimming once a week, with a risk of drowning of 0.5% each time I do so: then there’s ~23% chance that I’ll drown by the end of the year.
What if go swimming twice a year, but because I’m such an amateur the chance that I drown is 5%: there is ~10% chance that I drown by the end of the year.

Conclusion: even though it is 10x more dangerous for the inexperienced swimmer to go swimming in the sea, in a given year the experienced swimmer is still 2.3 times more likely to drown in the sea than the inexperienced one.

Canceling to downgrade your 365 subscription is the “normal” Microsoft way, so that part is not a new scummy practice that was invented for this scummy occasion. I do hope this forced upsell comes back to bite Microsoft in the ass, most consumers won’t be aware of the downgrade option, but consumer agencies shouldn’t let this slide, it’s setting a very bad precedent.

The ms instructions:

1. Go to Services & subscriptions and if prompted, sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your subscription.
2. Find your current subscription and select Manage > Cancel subscription.
3. The Cancel page will show you the features of your current subscription plan. If you’re switching to another plan with less features, select the plan that works for you.
4. Follow the instructions to complete the switch. Your existing subscription might not change immediately, but it will automatically change to the new plan when the plan renews. You won’t be charged for the new plan until it renews into that plan.
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/switch-between-microsoft-365-subscriptions-3fcc1efc-2722-427f-8efa-db94b9b0a36b

Animal Farm is the allegoric tale about communism in Russia.

1984 is more general about totalitarianism, still based on stuff that went on in Nazi Germany + Soviet union + wartime England, but it wasn’t a full allegory of things that had already happened. It was more like a science-fiction prediction of the bad things that could happen in any nation if democracy and human rights were not protected.

I still would love to hear your explanation of why he is “waving” at the American flag.

So according to you, Elon Musk has his heart in his upper left side longue, close to his left shoulder. Sounds like one special kind of human.

And if that’s just waving, then why according to you did he wave to the American flag? Is that just how south-africans salute the usa flag, by “waving” at it?

And I also call bullshit on the claim of having watched countless videos. If you had, then you had seen a much greater variety of Nazi salutes. Nazis as they got older and/or higher in the Nazi hierarchy, they became sloppier with the Nazi salutes. Sometimes the mind is willing, but the body says no.

What the hell are you on about?

Elon Musk does an unmistakable Nazi salute, you claim he was just “waving”, despite there not even having been a waving motion, just the one swing from left shoulder to full extended right arm, which is a textbook Nazi salute. And now you come with whataboutism about Hamas and I don’t even know what’s the point of it.

What kind of troll are you?

Have you seen the video? He did an unmistakable Nazi salute to the crowd, then turned around and did the same Nazi salute towards the USA flag. This was as Sieg heil as Nazi salutes come.