fritigern

I hate it when people can't have a reasonable discussion and resort to calling others as "bots". Not everyone who disagrees with you is Russian or a bot.

> Replacing Russia with the U.S. gives the U.S. too much power over the EU. It can be used as a bargaining chip in unrelated negotiations like privacy rights etc.

I agree with this.

In my experience scientists and engineers are practical people who are interested in solving problems and improving things. We need such people in positions of power and authority. In contrast people from non-STEM fields, and in particular lawyers, are more interested in activity than results.

We could not trade with anybody if we stopped trading for ethical reasons. By the same logic we should also stop trading with USA because of the Iraq War (and many others).

The Ukraine War looks like WW1: everybody went into it with false expectations and nobody knows how to end it.

It is a mistake for us to replace Russian gas with American gas.

It is relevant. Your point: "US is less scary/harmful than China, because it's a democracy". My response: "The fact that US is a democracy doesn't change anything if you are not a citizen of that democracy. Also being a democracy didn't prevent US from committing mass-murder in the Middle East".

The law is indeed technical. But you know what's even more technical? The topic they are trying to legislate. I would rather have lawyers as staffers and the actual lawmakers come from a diverse group of backgrounds. As it stands now, most lawmakers are coming from a very small set of backgrounds and there are not enough scientists or engineers among them.

Those transparent democratic institutions didn't stop 20+ years of war in the Middle East.

Not really. It's just that tons of Facebook/Instagram domains show up in the PiHole admin page.

I agree, the regime in China is nothing good. But we live in an imperfect world and they clearly are the "lesser of the many evils" our there. Just one concrete example: China didn't wage wars for 20+ years in the Middle East, resulting in millions of desperate refugees showing up on our doorstep.

I don't use any Facebook services, but when a friend visits my place I see background network activiy in my PiHole from all Facebook-owned apps.

What does TikTok do that Instagram doesn't? TikTok is a privacy nightmare, but not more so than any other social network.

Here in Germany Google Maps is terrible. OSM coverage is much better.

I remember John Stewart destroying Cramer during the 2008 crisis. I'm suprised he's still around.

I don't agree. You want lawyers to write the laws, but not in deciding what laws to legislate.

You are right of course. But I think the different backgrounds of the governing elites is just as important.

It has been growing fast since the beginning of this year. I moved most of my "aimlessly scrolling through stuff" from Reddit to lemmy.ml .

Chinese leaders are usually from STEM fields: engineers, scientists... As a result Chinese administration runs pretty smoothly.

American leaders are usually lawyers, pol sci majors and similar folk. No wonder things are not running smoothly.

I use uBlock Origin with Firefox. Is Privacy Badger worth adding on top of it?

I agree, search in OSMAnd is really bad. Organic Maps is a significant improvement in local search, but it doesn't have all the features that OSMAnd has. I use OSMAnd for mapping and Organic Maps for navigation and a Google Maps equivalent (in Germany Google Maps is trash and Organic Maps is much better).

I recommend OSMAnd: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.osmand.plus/

Or Organic Maps: https://organicmaps.app/

Take a look at https://lemmy.ml/ . It's a federated reddit alternative that has a very usenet-like feeling. You can also go for one of the other instances (there are some good ones like feddit.de and also some really crazy ones).