Military stuff is out of the picture since they established their trade with CCP and NK for rockets

Not all rockets are made equally. The NK rockets, artillery barrels and artillery shells are much worse than they could manufacture with western components. A degradation in quality leading to less accuracy which lessens the battlefield impact is still a positive step.

It also means that China can take advantage of Russia to get much more than it could usually get for their gear. China is not helping Russia out of the goodness of it’s heart or some ideological reason. They’re taking advantage.

I wonder if sanctions targeting non-consumer products critical to producing them can lead to long pauses

Interesting question. I have no idea. I’m pretty confident all sanctions so far are for gas, oil, and military/dual-use technology.

Maybe. The point of the sanctions isn’t to cause unrest though, as I said, it’s to apply pressure to the state. If it happens to cause some unrest, that’s an unlikely side-benefit.

To piggyback on @Syntha@sh.itjust.works, the point of sanctions is to create an extreme economic cost to a state as a bargaining chip. Stop doing the thing we don’t like and you get your trade back. Unfortunately, states control the national currency (most of the time), which means anyone who uses that currency also gets hit. There is no way around that.

Politically speaking, a majority of Russians have been utterly disenfranchised from politics, repeating the refrain “I’m not political” like it’s a magic spell that will ward off the consequences of their government. Consequently I’m not that sad about them experiencing a bit of economic hardship. Maybe it’ll help them realize that politics isn’t just for politicians.

Commentators I’ve seen blame the lack of defence on incompetent commanders that aren’t reporting losses, lack of construction equipment for preparing fallback lines and lack of communication between units. There are apparently many cases of electronic warfare units jamming Ukrainian drones because they don’t know what the drone unit is doing. In short: doesn’t sound like a problem that can be solved by just adding more bodies.

Disclaimer: fog of war, I’m reporting on what people have said about what people have said, this may not be accurate (but what source is perfectly accurate in the middle of a war?).

I did the same. Anything can be a garden path sentence if your tired enough.

scum-masters

Best typo ever.

Yup, absolutely. We have 2 posts in the two rooms we spend the most time in for exactly this reason.

My younger cat needed a lot of convincing to use only the scratching post. Every time I saw her scratching the couch, I’d pick her up and put her in front of the scratching post. Took a few weeks, but we got there. She hasn’t scratched the couch in ~2 years now.

I see you have a scratching post. Excellent! Number one mistake new cat owners make is not having somewhere for the cat to scratch (it’s a physiological need for them), then they get annoyed when the cat scratches their furniture.

18, like the rest of Europe.

Like most things law-related, it’s more about enforcement than anything else. Things dramatically improved while our anti-corruption force was under the control of Laura Kovesi. She kicked some serious ass. Now things are treading water a bit, but Romania is not quite the kleptocratic corruptofest it was in the 90s. There’s always improvements to be made ofc.

If they get into an accident, or it’s a spot check, or something like that they get breathalized.

Yup, exactly. Strictly 0.0. There are cases where people have lost their licenses after having one of those little chocolates with the rum-flavored fillings. This was a reaction to a huge wave of deaths due to DUIs.

Cheaper? Maybe. Easier? No, not really. Ion Popescu from Bumfuck, Nowhere doesn’t have the DNA breathing down his neck, watching for any signs of living outside his means and any unusual bank account activity.

EDIT: To be clear, I’m not saying corruption doesn’t happen. It does. I’m just saying it’s not automatically much worse than juries.

There’s also the fact that appealing a judgement goes to more judges, always different than ones who have seen the case. Basically:

1st judgement -> 1 judge

1st appeal -> 2 different judges (must be unanimous)

2nd appeal -> 3 different judges (must be unanimous)

This makes corruption less common, as getting 6 different judges to all risk their career for a bribe is unlikely.

I’m not going to claim this system is perfect. There are issues with the fact that there is no mechanism for preventing enforcement of an unjust law. If it’s on the books and it’s an open-shut case, the law will be applied no matter how unjust it is. The inverse is also true though: you can’t have unjust rulings that ignore laws the other direction, for example jury nullification of the murder of a black person (used to happen all the time in the US).

Like most things, it’s a tradeoff. Some things are better, some are worse.

Did my comment need a /s on it?

Probably. Poe’s law becomes firmer every day as vocal crazies become more and more outspoken.

Fun fact about our legal system: we don’t do jury trials. The evidence and arguments are heard by the judge, who decides both guilty/not guilty and the sentence.

Sounds like he’s still stuck in the 90s. The police used to be corrupt as all hell, but things have slowly improved. Most would probably take a kickback for something very minor, like drinking a beer in a park, but there’s too many eyes on them for anything more major.

Just 2 months ago a guy I know came in from Italy, but didn’t realize Romania has a zero tolerance policy on drunk driving. He had a single glass of wine and was driving. Police stopped him, asked if he’d been drinking, he said yes. Once he realized how much shit he was in, he tried to bribe them. They added that to the charges. He’s now banned from driving in Romania (he had to get a pair of friends from Italy to come pick up his car), but they were nice enough to not cancel his driving license completely.

But seriously, are there really women who talk about men in those terms?

Yes. Personally, I see it as the mirror image of the “tradwife” thing where toxic men see their partner as a subservient maid. Seeing men as primarily an income source comes from a similar place imho.

To add on to what @halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world said, you need to change the voting system first before that becomes viable, and then it happens naturally without any manual intervention.

Take the Alaska 2022 election as an example. Before, candidates had to be extreme in order to appeal to their base, as all that mattered was making the other side look “evil”. Once they switched to rank voting, all of a sudden they had to convince voters of their own worth so they’d be put in at least second or third place, if not first directly. It also meant people could safely vote third party or alternative candidates within the major parties without a spoiler effect, as if the candidate is unviable, the vote just gets transferred to the second place pick.

Tl;Dr: The real solution to what you’re trying to do is abandon first past the post and adopt some kind of ranked choice voting.