High tariffs and other economic sanctions would essentially be just that, but like another comment said the west isn’t ready for it.

We’ve managed to entangle our economies too deeply with cheap Chinese production, so actually sanctioning them would be painful to say the least and they know it

Are we assuming that everyone is always going to be biking with no other options? I don’t think anyone is even advocating for that.

BUT WHAT IF YOUR LEGS ARE BROKEN? WHAT IF THERE’S A NUCLEAR WAR???

The people who seem to think that biking is an untenable option because you might have to very occasionally use other modes of transport make me wonder if that mindset comes from the fact that people feel that it’s normal to only use one mode of transport pretty much ever, because that’s how many people are with cars.

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The idea that all politicians are corrupt and conniving bastards is mainly a right-wing fiction. They assume everybody acts exactly like they themselves do

Wonder if using first-past-the-post has something to do with that. Seems like a pretty terrible system

Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.

It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.

I figure you’re right, it really doesn’t seem all that likely but it was just a thought that popped into my head.

But yeah, it’s interesting to see what this current “turbulence” will lead to. Requiring consensus only has a chance to work if everyone is acting in good faith, so when a member state is well on its way to becoming essentially a dictatorship with aims that are directly at odds with the EU’s goals, there’s simply no way consensus will work.

It’s interesting that the EU really doesn’t have too many good mechanisms to do anything about bad-faith actors in the first place. Eg. using Hungary’s funding as a lever has been tried, but because of the consensus requirement, Orbán can essentially hold decisions hostage until he gets what he wants.

Too many systems have been built with the implicit assumption that all participating actors are acting in good faith, and a single bad-faith actor can actually cause remarkable amounts of trouble because there’s no mechanisms for stopping them

Oh stop playing the victim, you just don’t like that people disagree with you; asking you to actually give one single example of this wokeness-pushing of epic proportions that you said is the problem isn’t asking you to apologize – it’s asking you to give an example.

I wonder if he’s being treated with kid gloves because he gives an excuse for not aiding Ukraine. “We wanted to, but it’s that damn Orbán”

He’ll be dealt with before he becomes an actual threat

the people earning a lot of money (suggesting responsibility) are wimpy losers who cannot solve this problem.

That’s not the problem, but I really wish it was. The problem is that the people who are actually in charge are psychopaths who don’t give a shit about doing anything to the problem, and are more motivated to actually make things worse

True! For all you non-Nordics, that’s a Finnish Spitz and they’re certified good boyes. My personal favorite is the Finnish Lapphund because they’re so incredibly floofy, and it’s an interesting breed because it was originally bred by the Sámi for herding reindeer:

Wait we do? I didn’t realize we even had one official animal, let alone 4

Edit: the Finnish Wikipedia claims we have 6 official animals, one of them being ladybugs:

XML has a bad rap because people went a bit (ok a lot) overboard with it in the early years, pretty much like what happens with a lot of other technologies, but as far as structured and human-readable data formats with good schema and tooling support go, it’s pretty much unbeatable. Now that JSON is the New Good Tech and XML is the Old Bad Tech, too many developers use JSON where XML would absolutely make more sense, and then we end up with unholy abominations like Portable Text, which is JSON pretending to be XML, and is so incredibly verbose and monumentally stupid that it feels like some sort of joke esolang data format rather than something being used in a production system. But no, here we are, god is dead and JSON is XML.

XML is terrific for building eg. structured markup languages with more complex markup than what something like Markdown can provide, and have the resulting files be comparatively readable, at least in comparison to the JSON-based alternatives – compare HTML to Portable Text, for example. XML has such a bad reputation – partially deservedly – that people just automatically assume it’s not a valid tool for anything modern, even when the modern “NoSQL”, “structured and typed data is for nerds, suck it” JSON solution is a giant pile of shit compared to the XML alternative

What is it with UN*X stuff and ridiculously wanky initialisms

I congratulate you on your attempt, but I honestly don’t know how you lasted this long because holy fuck did it look like you’re trying to argue with a particularly dim houseplant

But only if you get caught! Rule #62, “the riskier the road, the greater the profit”

Ah I thought you pulled that from some Eurostat database and they were using wonky country codes. The AU / AT mixup is a classic one, and since the spelling of Austria and Australia is so close it’s easy to miss that mistake – just like I did

statistia-netcontrib.csv is using some weird country code that isn’t ISO 3166-2, because it’s got what I assume to be Latvia with the code LA which is actually Laos, and that’s reflected on your chart too – I was initially a bit puzzled as to why Laos was listed as being in the EU. At a quick glance it seems to be the only weird one though

The cruelty is the point, as with nearly all conservative policies