Meh in Holland we are in NATO and they send Tu-53 bear bombers into our airspace every few months. They are escorted by fighters until they leave. I think they do the same with neighbouring countries like Denmark. It hardly even makes the news anymore, it’s so common.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
Lol 😆 No i’m not a robot 🤖
Well in this case it’s not really about the fact that they’re Belgian. Because unlike China there is a big separation between state and corporation here. It’s more the fact that it’s only two private concerns which is hardly competition.
Also, due them being based abroad the local legislation has less grip on them. The exact country they’re from is indeed less important as long as it can be considered friendly.
Media ownership by foreign countries is indeed a worry.
Even in Holland we have this problem: 90% of the media companies (newspapers, magazines, websites) are owned by only two Belgian mediaconcerns. This is not a smart thing to do. But we never hear about that here.
Not that there’s an explicit problem at the moment but such a huge imbalance is not smart IMO.
But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties.
So, like what’s happening in Ukraine right now?
I mean they use drones for some deep strikes causing minor damage but most of the actual advancement is made using artillery and boots on the ground.
Which on its own will help to mitigate the problem. This is why it’s not an extinction event.
It’s just that it’s not really a very good “solution” because of all the misery it causes.
Yes but the outcome is just as bad.
But politics is us. This is what democracy is all about.
The problem is the population at large still doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
The problem about doomism is that it promotes inaction in the less educated “because things are fucked anyway”.
To be honest I think the doomers are right, not because there isn’t still time to fix most of it (there probably is) but because the political will to actually do it isn’t there. Which is an uphill battle because the more we delay the more drastic measures are needed which require even more political will to actually do. Those two things are getting ever more out of sync. The political will has been slowly increasing but not as fast as as the urgency and need for measures.
But the sentiment that results from doomism makes this political will even worse.
The UK’s MOD did similar, albeit on a smaller scale, for training troops for deployment in Northern Ireland, and Germany/Europe.
Those are and were not their enemies and they were not specific targets. What is so eyebrow-raising here is that it is so specific.
The fact that the Taiwanese don’t agree is neither here nor there.
Uhmm yeah that really does make the difference between an invasion and an amicable unification. I would say what China things is neither here nor there because they don’t own it so they have nothing to say about it.
The plane’s shadow wouldn’t be that big. Because the sun is so far away the plane’s shadow would be the same size as the actual plane (at most a bit stretched when the sun is low). Whereas this is purported to be a life-size mockup.
The plane overlay is probably just added for dramatic effect. The kilometers-long flags are obviously not really there either. And after all, which foreign nation overflies China with military planes? It must have been a sat, not a plane.
Training yes I’m sure. Training of a specific target? I don’t think so. It only makes sense if you’re really planning to attack that target, which is what makes this shocking. Does America have a mockup Kremlin?
Oops yes. Sorry.
The political capital and dollar bills used are the same though.
This is not news at all. In fact it was sent every single time until something broke in Apple’s validation servers and nobody could launch any app a few years ago. That brought this whole phenomenon to light and Apple changed it to reporting once per week. Edit: Ah I see this is also an old article. That makes sense now.
However they should just send a blacklist to each system obviously. That’s a much more privacy-conscious method. Their stated goal is to be able to block malware, but there can’t be that many.
Withholding votes no, but IMO the American voting system (at least at a national level) seems pretty broken to me. FPTP, the weird bias to rural areas etc.
Really it should be changed so that it doesn’t always result in this eternal standoff between the two major parties.
Ireland, Australia and New Zealand dumped FPTP and were better for it. It’s just that the US has this kind of romantic idealism about the original founders, as if they were always right and their ideas still hold as much merit in this day and age of voter influencing through digital means, so I don’t really see it happening there. But it should, in my opinion.
Right now it seems like every major election is choosing between bad and worse there and voting for an outsider is just a lost vote.
In that sense I can understand the reluctance of voters to actually show up. Especially in states that aren’t swing states.
This is nothing like a Dutch pancake, which are much more like the French crêpe.
Ik snap het ook niet.
I don’t understand either :P
I think the biggest problem with the US system is the FPTP thing, the winner takes all.
This always leads to two parties that become pure enemies because of the zero-sum game that ensues. A loss for one is a win for the other, there is no incentive to collaborate.
Our coalition system is not perfect because it often causes very uncomfortable coalitions of parties not well suited. But at least it doesn’t feel like a stalemate.
I doubt they’ll let that happen. Every regime needs a scapegoat minority to oppress and blame for all their own failings 😢
They’ll just resurrect the iron curtain.
Hopefully it will remain the “Trump era” and not the “first Trump era”. This is my main worry right now.