Aren’t donkeys notoriously rebellious?

I mean, if you’re doing a full weekend of activities with friends those beers could be spaced out far enough that you’re never more than slightly buzzed (small cans, <5%ABV). But yeah, if it’s a regular thing, it’s not a great look.

There’s no accounting for taste, famously

The UK is just ahead of the curve

Yeah, it really poisoned the well for any human interaction on the internet and any form of creativity. I wonder if having everyone question what is real is a side effect or the very point.

And now, even if you write something people think is funny, good, poignant, whatever, they’re thinking if there’s anything uniquely human about it that makes it so an AI couldn’t have generated it. Human expression is basically dead already

if you dedicate society to inventing a technology that makes people superfluous, it makes zero sense to keep them alive. It’s not a viable political project

The proliferation of unathorized opinions is threatening democracy! Doubleplus ungood.

Every country is moving towards this and there is no fucking stopping it, it seems.

That’s what the Cybertrucks were for all along

Yeah, for sure. A lack of talented people is definitely not the limiting factor here. The Nissan Leaf DIY community is doing awesome things, for instance.

I’m not from the US, but I’m pretty sure that’s just for shooting up schools and raiding non-existent pedo dungeons underneath pizza parlors.

Not really going to happen, I think, battery warranties make up really big parts of EVs market value. You don’t want to do anything that could risk that.

Before, he’d have to explain that “well, formally, I’m not a doctor”.

The act of reading highly factual, if biased and not independent, still cultivates thinking for one self. Listening to these influencers doesn’t, to the same degree.

Moot, these are just sub-variants of the Swedish language.

You are right that there are no perfect democracies, but the EU really isn’t even close. Rather the EU should foremost be considered a technocracy with some formal democratic underwriting.

In most cases, that’s totally fine and not a problem in terms of democracy. Most policies, especially in the matters the EU was originally formed to make decisions on, there isn’t a huge interest for citizens to get involved – national interests (governments) and organized interest/lobby groups usually offer enough avenues for input on things like technical agricultural export standards. However, as the Union expands into things like organizing mass surveillance under flimsy pretexts, and whatnot, private citizens aren’t adequately represented – a stronger popular mandate is required for the decisionmaking to truly be considered democratic.

Formally, I, as a citizen of an EU member state, can influence the decisions of the EU in two ways: By voting for my country’s parliament every fourth year and by voting in the general elections for European Parliament every fifth. So let’s examine how far that goes.

Where I live, the main opposition party and the largest government party generally agree on most controversial issues pertaining to privacy or individual rights, e.g. Chat Control. Together these parties control a majority of the seats of parliament. Those parties gain the bulk of their support on domestic issues, such as tax policy, crime prevention, etcetera. Thus, question like Chat Control are essentially dead on arrival in terms of parliamentary politics. Now, my country is also not a perfect democracy, but comparatively it would (justly) rank quite high and parties can be responsive to popular opinion and outcries. So let’s say a citizen group managed to put Chat Control on the agenda, to the point where parties feel vulnerable on the issue. What then? Then that amounts to one vote out of 27 in the European Council, which is only meaningful when that is enough for a veto.

But the ubiquitous vetoes are what truly undermines the EU’s standing as a democracy, in my opinion. Notably, vetoes are pretty much the best you can get from your EP vote as well, in terms of the parliament’s decision making powers. In reality, the only thing citizens of the EU can rally behind is stopping proposals by, chiefly, the supreme technocratic body, the Commission. There is no cross-border party mechanism with pan-European campaigning on the council level. Voters do not influence majorities. And on the EP level the party mechanism, built on “political groups”, is opaque and not truly cross-border. Cohesive citizen involvement is foreign to the EU decision making process.

That is not to say that the EU is a nefarious body, or that the democratic deficiencies are intended to alienate EU citizens from the decision process. It’s just that it is glaring, especially in the context of Chat Control, that public opinion isn’t in the driver’s seat.