Could not agree more. I’m a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don’t support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that’s telling. Just FYI, there’s been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don’t hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I’ll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he’d be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because “We’re all Christian!”. Trust me, you haven’t seen “Christian love” like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

Hi, Eastern European here. We begged to join NATO. We kicked and screamed, wheeled and dealed, anything we could to get that coveted NATO membership.

You know why? Because we’ve been dealing with expansionist Russian imperialism for our entire histories. Different coats of paint in different time periods, but it’s all the same shit. The US is an empire, but at least here it’s preferable to Russia’s imperial ambitions.

This reminds me of a story from “They thought they were free”. A Jew was accused of raping a woman. The judge heard the case and determined he was innocent. However, the gestapo were waiting outside the court to nab the accused as soon as the trial ended.

The judge decided to stick to his verdict instead of ruling guilty to put him in a normal prison instead of a concentration camp. After all, how could he justify ruling an innocent man guilty, even if that was objectively a better result for the man?

In Romania, CFR makes DB look like the most competent shining lights of progress by comparison.

Track that hasn’t been properly maintained since the fall of communism (and we keep lowering max speeds because of it). Rolling stock consisting of hand-me-downs. Constant engine breakdowns.

And the worst part? Due to political shenanigans finding inventive new ways to siphon money out of the company, it’s still managed to find a way to go bankrupt again, meaning another government bailout.

Downvoted for complaining about downvotes. The internet points do nothing. Everyone please downvote me so I can demonstrate how little it matters.

If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:

1. My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)

2. I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.

3. The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).

4. I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there

This is what underfunding education for decades and TikTok does to a country. Romania has the highest number of TikTok users per capita in Europe.

You know you’re old when the gf/wife wants to accompany DnD with a cheese board and a bottle of wine for the guests :))

The key is sharing a hobby. For me, it’s board games and TTRPGs. Much easier to hang if there’s an activity.

To me, “guys” has been a gender-neutral term for a while now. At least that’s how it’s used here in my little bubble in Europe.

/me eating popcorn as a nano user

I missed the mention of Verizon. Good catch!

How do you know this is the US, rather than UK, AU, NZ or a British school in the EU?

EDIT: Looked at the original file linked here in the comments, and it makes reference to “HCPSS”, which according to a Google search means this is in Maryland. Your assumption seems to have been correct!

In Uni I ran Gentoo as my daily driver. It was stupid, but I learned a lot.

Trying and failing to get a working desktop environment, using IRC on the command line to get help from people who knew what they were doing and could advise a dumb kid like me, following their advice and getting a working DE after a reboot was the most hackerman I ever felt. I was convinced I was real hot shit. In actuality, I’d followed the advice to tweak the kernel config to get working drivers :))

There’s also the issue that the US needs to sell bonds at higher and higher yields just to convince them it’s worth the risk.

As far as I understand it (not an economist), that might lead to a debt spiral.

In terms of amazing new games, Terra Invicta is eating all my free time. I’m losing over and over because it’s a sprawling beast of a grand strategy game, but still fascinating to poke around and see how deep the rabbithole goes.

Pigeonometry in my ass?

Most USs in the iron don’t use dryers

Switzerland or Finland?