It’s for domestic consumption. Iran is the Big Bad in Israel, due to its support of Hamas, so the Israeli PM is chasing after brownie points from the electorate by hitting Iran over and over again.

Fico faces an EU probe after journalists and opposition politicians found dozens of mansions built or purchased by Fico and his cohort through misappropriated EU funds. He’s desperately trying to change the subject.

How are you dealing with tax returns? I have a coworker who’s a dual citizen, and she tells me that she has to file through an accounting service that costs her an arm and a leg. If she weren’t close to retirement, she’d renounce her US citizenship.

Not OP, but I did the same, when I first realized the US was on a slippery slope towards idiocracy (and, in fairness, I realized it three decades after many intellectuals already warned about it). In my case, I was fortunate to work for a multinational, which agreed to transfer me to a country within the EU, and to take care of the paperwork. Over a decade later, I have citizenship here, my own house, and I feel fully integrated into the local society. And I don’t need to worry about college tuition for my kids. They’ll have a choice of free education anywhere within the EU, and by the time they’re old enough, they may have access to a wide variety of educators who left he US.

I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I’m risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians–which I tend to agree with–that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.

This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren’t ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia “boasts” only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn’t in exile.

All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

• Isaac Asimov, 1980

There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).

I’m personally not sure how it works. But when we were upgrading our bathroom, the tile shop added the VAT to the quoted sale price. I then asked a friend of mine who is VAT-registeted to buy it for us, and he got it from the same warehouse for the non-VAT price.

I agree overall, but VAT is not all that difficult to evade, at least in the service industry. Paying handymen in cash is common in many countries, and that’s a means to evade VAT. Hell, even using them to buy the building or landscaping materials for you (being a registered business they purchase for prices without VAT) saves you on most of the tax. Then there’s service barter. I did it only once, a long time ago, but it can serve as an example: I did family portraits (photography) for my physio, in exchange for a number of physio sessions. If we charged each other, it would have cost each of us, say, 250 Euros, but we’d only see 200 each, and the state would get 100. So, savings of 50 for each of us.

The key phrase is “multi-party democracy”. I guess I should have also added “parliamentary” into that phrase. Political systems with a single winner are far more prone to electoral manipulation than systems where a coalition government is the norm.

I wouldn’t see it too tragic. Those who would support AfD already do, and the rest won’t change the mind because of an article written in a lunatic’s name. If he threw considerable amount of money at AfD, I’d get a bit concerned, but in a functional multi-party democracy, especially one with a nazi past, a nazi party would never be invited into a government unless it won an outright majority.

🐆🍽👨🏻‍🦲

That’s par for the course. Other accusers dropped their cases when their cars or houses got torched. During the trial, his acquaintances filmed and photographed the jurors from the gallery, until the judge threatened a closed doors trial. His close relationship with the Kinahan cartel is public knowledge. Over here in Dublin we knew him as a scumbag all his life, just most people (including me) didn’t even know he existed until he became famous in the MMA

For running, get thin gloves that keep out the wind chill. Your body will heat itself up, including your hands, so all you look for is decent wind protection. I did some trail running in down to -10C, and thin running gloves were sufficient.

If you want bells and whistles, get gloves with reflective elements. In winter, chances are you’ll spend some time running in the dark.

Didn’t the European commission recently declare that Twitter had become too irrelevant to regulate?

I don’t live in the US, so my views are probably biased by our anti-Trump media hype, so even though I agree with most of your points, I’d leave two open for discussion:

If incels think that women hated them before, just wait, his incel base of voters are going to be enemy number one with women from all walks of life.

I was under the impression that Republicans are not looking for love from women, but their total subjugation. Women don’t need to love them (perhaps they can, only in Stockholm syndrome mode), but they have to obey. I don’t think incels will be disappointed.

For the rest of us, just laugh. We’ve been through 4 years of this idiot before.

I said this twice before, and I was always wrong, so take this with a huge boulder of sand. But I don’t think he’ll last four years (unless they do a Weekend at Bernies), so part of the 4 years will be with that weird cross-dresser, and I have absolutely no idea what to expect from him.

I once went to a proctologist who had a “This too shall pass” plaque on his desk. I decided to trust him, there and then.

Just to be pedantic: we’ve had a hell of a time implementing dynamic resizing of svg’s in Firefox. Works fine with Chromium. We spent far too much development time to keep our 4% of users happy, but eventually we did it. Perhaps newer versions of Firefox changed this, but there are customer-facing oddities the bank’s customers may experience.

Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.

I used to use Ubuntu up to 12.04. By the time the support ended, the new versions had the Unity desktop, I didn’t like it, so for a while I switched to Crunchbang (may it rest in peace), and now I’m using Mint Cinnamon. Some of my developers are using Ubuntu with Unity. Everyone is free to pick what suits them; I’m not one to judge them.

On my subscription page, it shows shorts from my subscribed channels. On my main page, it’s girls in bikinis playing on a guitar, violin or drums. I wantch a lot of independent musicians doing instrumental covers, but I don’t recall seeing any of them wearing skimpy clothing.

I guess it’s sort of like facebook, to increase engagement. I stopped visiting there about a year ago, but I didn’t close my account. I now get one friend recommendation daily, and it’s always sexy looking girls I’ve never heard of. These sites register me as male, so they always combine my interests with sexy females, to entice me to spend more time there.