The late medieval Burgundians will have been the first to call it the low countries (les pays-bas). They acquired these territories (various duchies and counties in Belgium + Netherlands + bits around it) over time, not as one piece of land. All those different territories had different laws and traditions, different crown laws (HRE or kingdom of France), different local charters, … It wasn’t one country, so plural makes sense.

Most of those do make sense from a 19th century or older viewpoint, so I suspect that it’s not just a coincidence that those words were linked to those countries. If it was only one or a few with an ulterior meaning, then I could believe it to be a coincidence, but it’s most of them. I more believe that there were chinese word artists at work who looked for words with both a fitting meaning and the right sound.

When it comes to nature, the USA is a really beautiful country. France gave the world the Code Napoléon, which is one of the most influential evolutions in law systems. Britain’s success in it’s colonies and in the industrial revolution was very often based on the endeavours of individuals, ie heroes. Northern Germans are sticklers for following rules, politeness etc (which was back then viewed very positively by others, but has since become a bit tainted because an attitude of the law is the law will often lead to inhumanity). Mexico: not a clue. Korea: I just have vague guesses. Japan, when seen from northern China, is where the sun rises.

It looks normal to me for a 1980s tv, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one. I remember it being almost unwatchable during the day with the curtains open. I suspect that the bleed comes from the digital camera capturing the crt scan lines as they are refreshing, which would be too fast for a human to see.

Edit: like the other commenter said, it’s going to be the Moire effect. https://nyanpasu64.gitlab.io/blog/crt-photography/

I think that you didn’t read the article before chosing to back Cruz.

Except that bloat is not what the republicans are targeting. From the article:
“However, it isn’t the infotainment bloatware, wireless key-fobs, power seats, or over-the-air subscription services they’re blasting, but safety systems that the NHTSA says have saved 860,000 lives since 1968.”

As if USA republicans would ever consider taking away your mandatory infotainment system with opt-out ads, that’s now what their donors are paying them for.

Civil + military capital punishment was only officially abolished in 1996 in Belgium, so about 133 years between the decision to stop doing it , and actually putting that into law. And a few months after the law was officially changed, the serial murderer + pedophile Dutroux was arrested, after which there was a lot of public support for the death penalty again. A bit of fortunate timing in unfortunate times.

Wrong Lemmy headline, the graphic is about “death penalty for non military crimes”, which implies that there were death penalty executions after those years on the map.

As an example, in Belgium the last execution was in 1950, by firing squad. The Belgian state had extended the state of war to be able to put war criminals & collaborators in front of military tribunals. That last 1918 execution by guillotine was also ordered by a military tribunal, it was a Belgian soldier who had murdered one of his two fiancées plus her unborn child: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Ferfaille Had he not been a soldier, he would most likely not have been executed. The last execution in Belgium that was ordered by a civil court happened in 1863.

No coaches in Mar-a-lago? Is Vance not welcome there?

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

It’s not going away any time soon. There’s currently 2 to 3 times as many humans as what would be long term sustainable with the way that we live. That means that it’s going to be a problem for at least many decades, but more likely a few centuries. It’s definitely not yesteryears problem. And sustainability should always remain a concern, in everything that we do. Many countries (not the USA obviously) are already taking steps to be more sustainable, but it’s baby steps compared to what is needed.

To sustain the current amount of humans, we are using unsustainable methods. That makes us unsustainable as well.

Some estimates from Wikipedia: “Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on.[9][10][11] Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population often suggest substantially lower figures, between 2 and 4 billion.[12][13][14] Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion.[15] Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

That’s good for office work, the constant ringing gets annoying and when sitting behind the desk, you’re going to see the display light up anyhow. But yes, those settings shouldn’t be used for a house phone, I wouldn’t be surprised if that telecom company uses the same standard install for small businesses and households.

I’m on Android and android has something called app pinning, but that still allows full functionality of the open app and is thus open to abuse. I looked up the guided access system and it’s a lot better than the android method, but it seems much more convoluted to set up. I just want a simple option: you can look at what is currently playing, but touching does nothing.

I want this, but not just for toddlers, just for handing over my phone to anyone really. Put on some media (photo, slideshow, video), lock your phone inputs, hand it over to someone else to look at, without having to worry that they will invade your privacy as a prank.

A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/

Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.

Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don’t know if Paypal ever improved.

Gunboat diplomacy in the 21st century. Since Xi Jinping came to power, it’s been an endless stream of criminal behaviour by the Chinese state. I miss the time of Hu Jintao.

When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.

Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯

There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.

Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.