RunawayFixer
@RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
- Comment on Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE 2 weeks ago:
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[b] is an initiative of the second Trump administration tasked with cutting federal spending which it characterizes as “waste, fraud, and abuse”.[8] It emerged from discussions between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and was established by executive order on January 20, 2025. DOGE’s actions have included accessing government data systems; organizing mass layoffs of federal workers; and cutting climate change initiatives, scientific research, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.
- Comment on America is fucked 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, smartphones are a menace as well in traffic, especially when combined with someone as oblivious as in your example :). The government(s) in my country has had several police + information campaigns against smartphone use since a few years. There’s now also a fine of 175 euro + loss of driver’s license for 15 days for using the smartphone while driving in traffic. And waiting in traffic, still counts as driving. If used for navigation, then the destination has to be put in before starting to drive & the smartphone has to be in a holder or connected to the infotainment system.
This heavier punishment is pretty recent and the chance of being caught seems low, so there’s still often people using smartphones inappropriately. Last one I saw this week was an oblivious teenager on a bicycle. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s been a noticable change in a few years.
- Comment on America is fucked 2 weeks ago:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGd3QWgTLs&pp=0gcJCdgAo7Vq…
For contrast: a video of a more congested street in Paris 17 years ago. The situations aren’t completely comparable: bigger emergency vehicle, smaller other vehicles, smaller street with less options to get out of the way, … One other major difference and the reason I’m posting this, is that 30 seconds into the video, you can see that most drivers have moved to the sides of the road AHEAD of the firetruck and that they are holding still while waiting on the firetruck to pass them. The street + path are less than ideal and there isn’t really enough room, so the truck is still not going very fast, but it’s at least able to keep moving. By moving to the sides, the drivers also blocked in that smaller firetruck that was coming from the side street, so that’s going to cause some confusement after the big one has passed.
The reason that that NYC ambulance is completely stuck I’m traffic, isn’t because of space, because there is plenty compared to that Parisian street, but it’s the drivers who are not creating a path. It’s not an infrastructure problem, it’s something that can be taught + encouraged if there is a political will to make a change.
- Comment on America is fucked 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, absolutely. Americans making excuses as to why solutions that work in other countries, would not work in the USA, are a scourge on your society. Your lives could be so much better if you lot stopped falling for that American exceptionalism propaganda and stopped inventing reasons to not do anything about known problems. And now that you’ve turned into a banana republic, I’m done being polite about it.
- Comment on America is fucked 2 weeks ago:
As if the usa is the only country in the world with congested rush hour traffic. I’ve been in streets that were way more tightly packed + chaotic than this and people would still clear a path for vehicles with sirens. The emergency vehicle would only be able to go 20 to 30 kmh without a motorcycle escort, but that’s still significantly faster than what we’re seeing here.
What we’re seeing in this video, is that (some) vehicles that are directly in front of the ambulance move out of the way, but vehicles that are a tiny bit further ahead, don’t even try. If a vehicle that is directly in front of the ambulance can move out of the way, then a vehicle that is 30 places ahead, is also able to move out of the way, but they don’t even try … What should happen is that as soon as drivers hear a siren, they should start looking for where it’s coming from and then clear a path, and drivers should also especially not be driving into the path that others are clearing. Instead it seems like these drivers wait till the siren is right behind them and only then some start to move out of the way.
Looking for excuses in American exceptionalism reads like a case of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”. This particular problem is something that can be easily improved upon by a public awareness campaign and some light fines for those that keep obstructing after the campaign has been running for some time. But what’s obviously even easier than that, is finding an excuse to continue doing nothing about the problem.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 4 weeks ago:
Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 4 weeks ago:
If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You’re wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.
Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you’ll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.
Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this “Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.” was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here’s statistics: statista.com/…/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.
Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.
Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 1 month ago:
And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
- Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off 2 months ago:
Officially it’s allowed after April 17th, but there’s already an extensive list of approved devices.
www.test-aankoop.be/…/plug-and-play-zonnepaneel
There’s probably a french version of that article as well, but test- achats/aankoop hasn’t made it easy to switch languages :)
- Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off 2 months ago:
These plugin systems shut down automatically when there’s a power outage. To make sure that they really do shut down when needed, in Belgium only plugin systems that have been approved by the network management organisation may be used. The other countries that allow these probably have similar precautions.
- Comment on Fucking hell 2 months ago:
Parliamentary democracy with a monarch as non-executive head of state. So being monarch is a mostly ceremonial role, with the seldom used power to temporarily veto or morally object against bad ideas. Juan Carlos saved the Spanish democracy in 1982 for example.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 months ago:
Trustpilot doesn’t have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. Allowing review bombing can also harm their credibility. It’s a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don’t.
Trustpilot’s method and/or communication could probably be better, but what Google is doing is the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss, Google is just silently removing all recent negative reviews. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors that they’re temporarily not accepting reviews and that it’s because of recent news.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 months ago:
Aggregate scores on all sites have become untrustworthy, they’re just poor first indicators now, but reading user reviews is still very much worth it imo. It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago. Once ai llm catch up with writing credible texts, then that method will be toast as well and then we’ll be really screwed when choosing a product.
And I kinda understand why they’re blocking new reviews. Trustpilot doesn’t have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. It’s a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don’t.
Trustpilot’s method could be better (Fe: they could allow reviewbombs to happen and show 2 scores, with and without), but what Google is doing is probably the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors to go check the news.
I actually can’t believe that I’ve been defending Trustpilot, they’ve always had a repuation of selectively removing reviews, but well, Google is now worse than them.
- Comment on LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey 3 months ago:
Honey in the chrome webstore: 4.7 stars. With no clear way to see written reviews, just the aggregated stars are visible.
Honey in the firefox add-ons store: 3.2 stars.
Honey in Trustpilot: 2.7 stars. Closed for new reviews since 4 days, but old reviews and history are still accessible.
Google manages to do worse than trustpilot. Google is once again confirming what a useless company they’ve become.
- Comment on Potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1b may have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere 3 months ago:
Against a dark background
- Comment on Potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1b may have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere 3 months ago:
I read a science fiction book from Iain M Banks over the holidays that was set in a rogue star system that was millions of light years away from the nearest galaxy. No matter how advanced that society could get, they would never be able to travel to the nearest star. They were doomed to isolation in their 1 star system basically. Compared to that, a mere 40 light-years at least gives the hope that it might one day be possible to travel there within a few life times (or less) of traveling.
- Comment on I think we might be leaving the "boring" part of this dystopia 3 months ago:
One of the benefits of living and working in a liberal society is that stuff like this can get publicly published, discussed and rejected if deemed bad. Under totalitarian regimes that public forum is absent, which is why some of the worst ideas/atrocities of the Soviet Union only came to light years after they had happened (instead of being rejected before they could happen). When it comes to human rights, liberalism > communism, and it’s not even close.
- Comment on Belgium's sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law 4 months ago:
We’re the most southern European country in the north of Europe ;)
- Comment on Belgium's sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law 4 months ago:
Yeah, like the other guy said that’s basically the same experience as most Belgians get with the youth vacation days.
The way that the Belgian state treats it’s income and expenditures is very unfair. People who can’t figure out things (and as you noticed it’s very hard), pay the most taxes of anyone in Europe, while people who earn enough can hire a specialist that tells them how to profit from deductibles, subsidies and fake self employment etc. The tax services routinely issue fines that were deemed illegal multiple times by judges in the past and it’s up to their victims to protest against this. And if there is a new scandal of some kind and it turns out that some fines or tax were illegal, it does not automatically get refunded, but instead the victims have to see the news, get documentation together and then ask for their money back.
But the thing is, if we were not in the eu, then it would probably be worse. I think our scummy politicians is one of the reasons that Belgians are so pro eu. The example I like most is clean rivers and streams, because without the eu those would still be dead, smelly and full of shit.
- Comment on Belgium's sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law 4 months ago:
Young people get “youth vacation days”, but they have to apply for it themselves or they lose the money. It’s a decades old system and imo it’s a disgrace that it’s not automatic, but when I graduated we all knew about it atleast. New workers who arrive from outside Belgium only have a solution since 2 or 3 years ago: “supplementary vacation days”. Before that they had no solution for them and it was up to the employer to invent something (or not), which is why many went without. That change and other recent changes is basically the eu forcing Belgium to be a little less exploitative.
I’m not in HR so I may be off on some points, but this is what I remember from when it was news.
- Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD 5 months ago:
They’re gloating about it, absolute monsters.
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 5 months ago:
French people do eat apple beignets, which are basically fried apples.
If you’ve never had one before, apple beignets are easy to make and delicious, plenty of recipes around.