Haha I think they might be talking of how Mastodon doesn’t insert ads or bought posts right next to your own posts, so a professional institution like a parliament no longer risks having erection pills next to a post by a political party leader.

The EU itself also has a Mastodon instance with the funny, overly clear name of social.network.europa.eu

But only the institution of EU, not for EU residents.

I like this idea because it becomes very easy to verify authenticity especially now that verification badges on X is just subscription badges without verification. You simply set up a subdomain of the form social.country.tld and you’ll know [email protected] is an authentic representative for a political party or whatever. No money involved other than running the instance, which will be a tiny cost for something as niche as one offering a voice for the parliament.

There are trade unions in the USA but the cultural difference compared to in a Scandinavian country is very striking, both in terms of American vs Scandinavians unions themselves but also their support. It would surprise many Scandinavians to learn that many Americans don’t even want trade unions because it’s for example commonly seen as how they interfere with career paths, promoting seniority at the cost of new blood or keep the wages low because individual wages can be affected.

I think the culture collision here is that the whole idea behind unions in Scandinavia is to offer a stronger collective voice and bargaining actor to increase wages and other subjects so that the relationship between the work place and the individual is less asymmetrical.

But it’s been a long journey and it still is even if unionizing in USA has seen an uptick in debates lately, because USA has a radical and capitalistic history where there are very loud voices that even asking for basic rights on a job can be seen as “greed” and the company looks for someone being less of a bother and not asking these questions instead.

At least they’re trying to. Fortunately, the Russian psyops seem pretty poor in this war and they haven’t even managed to pull off any false flag operation to the point of causing contoversy among Ukraine’s western allies, and the support remains as strong as one could hope for this long into the war.

I know it’s supposed to make them sound good and might indeed be meant for leaking, but all I can think of is the demands on quality assurance and risks of failures down the road if such precision is paramount for the operation of the vehicle.

Looks like a fun thing to kick off the second half with! Good job.

I assumed the intent is not to actually be Polish or Celtic etc. but give areas influence. I’m still not sure I like it though.

I would rather have seen it done more like Middle-Earth where names can be different depending on language, but the common “English” tongue is normally used. So you have a river called Brandywine and another place Rivendell for locations in regions for two different races. Both just being English-sounding words unless asking their native races.

It kind of takes me out of it when suddenly stepping into Druid country and I start thinking of Scots and single malt whisky. I mean there’s no lore reason behind this at all because this is not even planet Earth. It just… is. :-/

Lap 1 is going to be lit!

I’m personally a huge fan of Red Star OS.

Honestly from experience I’ve learnt that the yes answer also usually applies to the no answer. Since Linux is highly customizable and the choice of e.g. desktop environment matters little (just install whatever you want if you want something else), community size is the most hard-earned property and usually trumps all.