I don't know about other downvoters, but i downvoted you because you said kids should be beaten into submission at school. Corporal punishment is the refuge of bad parents and it's not a teacher's job to harm your children that way. There is not a single justifiable reason that you need to be physically violent with a child to educate them. In fact, that only makes it worse. You either raise a fearful child or a hateful one. Either way, in my book, it's child abuse and you were calling for it.

And boy would i cause all sorts of sky falling down trouble on the poor soul that decided to physically assault my child, undoing my job of teaching that violence is only a tool of self defense. I suffered significant corporal punishment growing up and i can guarantee it improved my life in no way.

I would say for this to happen, the biggest challenges facing Europe would be to massively develop its services and post soviet democratic countries would have to be on board with their exports losing competitiveness in the global market. Poland, for instance, is industrializing further but interesting to note that 90% of their goods market is the EU and only 10% goes of out EU. So in a way, post soviet democracies can still be goods exporters inside EU's internal market. Letting go of industry is not something i believe post soviet democracies would ever accept.

Western, central and southern europe already survive on luxury and unique regional products to support their industry despite their high cost of living, so competitiveness is not a big issue there.

As for services, specially tech, European customers are used to having easy access to highly unregulated digital tech from the US, with union busting, privacy invasion and low taxation, that gives them an unfair edge against tech developed in Europe. Europe has begun to subsidize all European tech (you can even see some games and software with EU stickers for receiving subsidies), but i think Europe needs to tax US digital services and goods, otherwise there is no competing with massive billionaire fortunes that are president friends. There's no competing when your competitor's workers don't have maternity leave, work 60-70 hours a week and have 10 days holidays a year and thank goodness nothing like that will ever fly around European unions. Trust me, Elon and Walmart tried. Without taxation motivation, there will never be a European alternative to US tech, but they don't want to tax tech without an alternative. Catch 22.

And this is the EU. Anything that takes the US 10 years, takes the EU 20. This is good in a way, because everyone is heard and there is no crazy orange lunatic coming to change fundamental laws overnight, but to react against something like this will take a while. In the EU we're used to wait, we understand why we wait. But international markets might not be so patient. Also by the time the EU starts changing meaningfully, it is very possible Trump is not president anymore, making the change pointless, so i see the EU doing their usual "looking busy and waiting" routine.

It might happen, just not soon.

As a European, the Euro can't replace the dollar. It's not about how stable it is, it's about how many Euros there are. Whichever country will be the world reserve currency will have to produce so much currency to be used all around the world that their non digital exports will never be competitive. The Euro just isn't produced in large enough quantities to be used as a world reserve currency, its production and distribution is tightly controlled for use in European and European partner markets. At least not right now. A long time ago some OPEC countries wanted to try out the idea of using Euros, but just couldn't get enough liquidity to trade all the oil in Euros.

Donald Trump wants the US to both be a goods exporting powerhouse and the world reserve currency. He thinks it's possible, that these diametrically opposed goals have a middle sweetspot where one can be just enough of a world reserve currency not to worry about debt anymore, but also a country that others depend on for manufacturing. That's what all the tariff dancing is all about. I think he's nuts, but hey, every economic theory needs to be tested. Just wish we were testing more sophisticated economic theories.

Anyway, as of this moment Europe is not geared for it. Not industrially, not financially and to be honest, i don't think Europe is even into it. But it's not impossible. It would just require a lot of changes.

100% agree on this. Usually i like geneva_convenience's posts and comments, but if we're going to start editorializing news articles, instead of just posting the original title and clarifying with information about the PA, the posts lose value massively for me. Where does the buck stop if everyone who republishes links "corrects" news titles as they feel ?

I don't even disagree with the point of the OP, but this sort of sensationalizing articles just feels like a distant cousin of click bait. It's what British newspapers do and why i absolutely loathe most of them. Is the new title wrong ? Possibly not, but that's not the original piece of information. It's like the reader is too stupid to be served the original information and thank goodness there's someone to serve you the "correct" title.

I'm against Israel hasbara and disinformation but i find this isn't the proper way to address it.

Colorectal cancer is a disease and i see 3 plates of red meat. Not great for you to eat red meat every single day. It's a pretty well known and demonstrated fact that eating red meat every day increases your risk of colorectal cancer significantly. Have you seen colorectal cancer ? It's a terrible, terrible illness.

Article links to a different article for actual risks. Here they are

Strangulation is linked to many different kinds of injuries regardless of whether there is consent. These can include bruising, sore throat, neck pain, a hoarse voice, a cough, difficulty swallowing, swollen lips, nausea and vomiting.

Other more serious impacts include pregnancy miscarriage, unconsciousness, brain injury and death. Miscarriage and death can occur weeks or months after the initial strangulation.

(...)This includes memory loss and difficulties problem-solving. Brain injury also accumulates so the more strangulations, the worse it becomes.

I mean goddamn, what kind of choking are these people doing that makes their partner vomit and have brain damage ? Who is this for ? I've used choking and been choked and it's certainly not supposed to be even close to this hard. So i guess that's the message. If you're choking your partner until they have memory loss and difficulties problem solving, or pregnant, don't do it.

Thanks! It's interesting to find out how differently things are in military procedure in other parts of the world.

So military question, in America do civilians salute ? I see Trump saluting in a suit. In my country that's a no-no. Only military personnel in uniform and appropriate head apparel may salute, like all the soldiers next to Trump. Or is the president considered a military person since he's commander in chief ?

I mean civilians can salute if they want. There's no penalty. It just doesn't carry any meaning from a civilian and looks kind of goofy and out of place. Military personnel can't salute out of uniform, though. You may get disciplined over that.

Wow you seem to have a personal level axe to grind with the way forums like Lemmy work. I'm gonna let you to it then. Get those kids off this lawn, grampa.

You don't wanna answer, don't answer. You don't wanna read, don't read. You don't wanna watch youtube videos, don't watch them. You don't want replies about a topic, don't express comments about that topic. You don't get to say, oh here's my opinion, here are my arguments, now nobody reply because i don't think it's appropriate to discuss it here. My brother in humanity, you started this whole discussion. Ain't no way I'm going to start a thread in Israel-Palestine or whatever and ping you to reply to these arguments, that's not how any of this works. A blog would perhaps be more appropriate if you desire that sort of engagement.

I respect your wishes to not debate. That doesn't mean other people aren't allowed to express their opinions to your comment in this public forum in regards to your already expressed opinions. Maybe someone else would like to come in other than you who shares your opinion. Maybe i could learn from their criticism of my opinions or yours and hopefully become a wiser person than i am now.

Nobody is asking you to continue debating. You do it if you feel like it bud. It's your right to do as you please, so long as we're all respectful here. All the best.

That's a lot of assumptions there. There are many reasons to believe that Israel has no right to exist that aren't connected to bigotry or racism. You could say a state of a single religion in power in detriment of other religions and peoples is a recipe for disaster, as it invariably disenfranchises part of what a real, non curated (read, oppressed/victim of genocide) population is, since there is no place in the world with open borders in which there is only one religion, unless enforced somehow. You could say other religions are allowed to exist in Israel, but we all know they don't get the same rights as those of the jewish faith or even safety.

The homeland of Jews is the same homeland of Christians or Muslims or Buddhists. A free, democratic, secular land is home of us all. My homeland is home for Jews if they so wish it. To create special bubbles for religions, such as a country for a single religion, is antithetical to democracy, freedom of religion and secularism. It's simply backwards thinking. Those are the values of the culture of a great deal of people and it's only normal they reject the antithesis of those values. Sure, there are many countries with primacy for a single religion, and their system is, imo, not any more right than what Israel is.

Then, you have the way of how that land was appropriated and how it continues to be appropriated. There is no plan in the near or medium future for Israel that does not involve mass murder and repossession. To accept the existence of Israel is to accept their current ethos. There were decades of chances and proposals for a two state solution or a one state secular solution, but they didn't happen and they aren't happening, so for many the question boils down to, are you ok with wholesale genocide of the Palestinians in order for Israel to exist ? Because as of this current moment, one thing explicitly implies the other. Not per se, but taking into account the entire history of the modern state of Israel and the plans of its current administration.

I think thinking this way is dismissing an entire swath of legitimate expressions of political opinions that aren't necessarily motivated by hatred of a religion or a race of people. I find it perfectly legitimate to consider Zionism and Israel toxic colonialist ideologies that have not brought and will never bring anything good to the world, but really, it depends on the context of before and after.

I could also consider that any person who thinks Israel has a right to exist is also expressing racism towards Palestinians, since for Israel to exist with their current plans, Palestinians must become stateless or be killed. However, i understand this issue is more complicated than that, since there are a myriad of reasons why someone could be thinking that. For instance, they could be thinking of a possible future where Israeli magically become human and stop indiscriminately murdering civilians, most of which children, then out of the goodness of their hearts spare an economically viable continuous stretch of land where Palestinians can exist in peace and make it illegal for wild settlers to drive them away from it. Like my dear, lovable and gullible EU does. For me personally I'd probably even disregard how much i idealogically disagree with the entire concept of Zionism, if genocide was off the table. I have the heart to try and accept other cultures, flawed as i may find them, but genocide i cannot.

Anyway, long story short, despite being used by antisemites, rejecting Israel or Zionism in itself is not evidence enough for racism or antisemitism and my opinion is that attempts of doing so are merely tools to groom public discourse away from the real problem of the ongoing genocide. Don't take my word for it, hear the thousands of jews worldwide who came out to express just this feeling.

You really don't understand who you're talking to here. The average person hasn't heard about browser extensions. I'm serious. The amount of even engineers that work with me who are incredibly good at one specific thing, like autocad design, but don't really know or care about general computer things is pretty high, let alone non technical personnel. I've had people ask me to explain extensions and how to use ad blocking software. People just want a computer that works and does the thing they want it to without fancy things.

People don't fear the terminal, they just don't understand it and they don't care to memorize things to learn it. If Linux wants to be an end user desktop, you need to do everything by the GUI. What is intuitive, interesting and easy to you is a nightmare for other people. I'm assuming vice versa if the accountant gives you a 10 dimension excel spreadsheet or something. It might just be me projecting my fear of accounting excel spreadsheets.

Ah yes, the appeasement strategy. Works every time, for whoever is on the receiving end of it of course. One would think Europeans would know better, but i guess life teaches you the same lesson until you're ready to learn.

I mean where will Microsoft stop with this ? So force people to create accounts, people create accounts, then remove them and only use local accounts or find some other loophole. Then what ? Lockdown windows usage until you have a Microsoft account with a real phone number, always connected and at least one up to date copy of birth certificate or passport ?

Isn't the money from selling microsoft products enough ? Or is the AI slop that nobody wants so expensive to develop?

Maybe AstraZeneca CEO should figure out where the massive windfall covid vaccine profits went and invest them wisely instead of filling the pockets of shareholders. Dude got massive taxpayer investments, spent the last 5 years acquiring smaller healthcare companies, snubbed a uk plant investment because they didn't get enough money from the taxpayers and bragged about how much money they were making about a year ago from the pipeline investments.

Clearly there isn't enough space here for AstraZeneca's shareholder greed and progress it seems, but it sure as hell isn't the job of the European taxpayers to prop these guys up. Honestly i find it embarassment that a company that has been all about bragging about growth these last 5 years now complains they aren't competitive enough because they aren't getting enough free money.

In my EU country you also get that co-op without getting together with anyone before the building is built. Some company builds the building and sells out the apartments. After purchase you are legally bound to your Condominium, which you have mandatory fees depending on the amenities, such as elevators, insurance, sometimes swimming pool maintenance. Residents are just expected to organize themselves. The building is considered cooperatively owned by the apartment owners and therefore you are cooperatively responsible for its maintenance and integrity.

You also have meetings to democratically decide on what to spend on, like electric chargers, which kind of insurance to get or hiring a new administration company to manage things. You can skip the meetings if you want, but legally, you must pay the Condominium dues they give you.

It's not just 3-4 story buildings either. I've been part of 11 story condominiums, with 3 apartments a floor. I never thought this would be something fascinating in some parts of the world. It's quite normal here. What changed recently is now many condominium meetings are online, because it's easier.