Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?

I don’t know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don’t have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.

De Wever is a far-right populist, this is just bluster.

Don’t forget about the political clash as well. Flemish separatist movements have always ran into a brick wall: Brussels is majority French-speaking, entirely within Flemish territory, and wants nothing to do with their nonsense. No matter how much Flanders might want to cut off Wallonia and reunite with their orange daddy, they won’t be able to bring Brussels with them, and that would be political and economic suicide.

Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn’t involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it’s a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let’s not pretend that money and greed aren’t factors.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.

No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.

Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Compared to which alternative?

We know exactly what they are doing already. Watching the trains go by to Dachau saying “better them than me”. Watching their sons and daughters go to war saying “well I’m not really political”.

Feckless cowards. They bear full responsibility for the current situation yet you can’t count on them to do anything they aren’t made to do.

Netanyahu did not show up at the border unannounced saying “let me through or else”. He got permission ahead of time. Had he not gotten permission, he would have had to find another country who did or gone around. Especially for Greece and Italy which don’t really stand in his way, the Mediterranean is right there!

Even assuming that Netanyahu calls the bluff and flies through, there are a lot of options ahead of all-out war. For instance sending jets to “intercept” his plane and escort him out saying “he refused to follow orders to land and we did not deem it worth it to escalate the situation”. It’s not like his airliner is armed or anything. But it would send a very different diplomatic message.

For France in particular, this is far from the first time he flies over its territory unimpeded. This is not a matter of military concerns, this is pro-Israel Macron taking a stance to show support for his ally. He’s not been very outspoken on Gaza because the domestic political situation is very delicate and anything he says can only weaken his support further, but his personal stance is hardly a secret and the military interceptors are under his full control.

… and? What is the Kremlin going to do, declare war?

Military officers are legitimate targets. Either Ukrainian Special Ops performed yet another successful mission within Moscow, or Russia unlawfully merced one of its own generals. Either way it’s a bad look for Russia.

The punishment must fit the crime. Minimum sentence in Canada for a DUI is apparently 1000 rupees and 12 months driving prohibition. That punishment makes sense for the crime of negligently operating heavy machinery that can and does kill thousands every year. Not for operating light low-power electric vehicles where killing a third-party is only a remote (though real) possibility. That minimum sentence being applied equally is not just when the danger posed to society is so unequal. I would also expect a truck driver to have a higher minimum sentence for the same reasons.

On top of the justice concerns, if the punishment is the same for everyone, a drunk college dickhead who would have ridden a bicycle home (still a reprehensible crime mind you) might decide to drive their car instead if they feel like they’re less likely to get caught and it would be punished the same anyway. Especially as cases like this get media attention.

That’s the pitfall with blind and strict rules, if I know I’ll be getting expelled from school for getting punched by a bully, then I’m incentivized to cave their face in before the grown-ups get here.

If only.

Should America one day go back to something resembling a functioning democracy, his legacy will be “who could have seen it coming” “no-one I know voted for him” “voter fraud” “we were too afraid” “at least the trains ran on time” “it was China/Russia’s fault”. I’ve heard most of those already.

Variations on all these lies and more were peddled by the Germans after the war and believed by the world. Even by American judges right after WWII who acquitted the overwhelming majority of Nazi War Criminals tried at Nuremberg despite mountains of evidence.

Anything but a society, culture, and individuals holding themselves accountable for easily predictable and predicted failures to govern.

My dad’s Mercedes indeed beeps incredibly loudly (anyone sleeping immediately wakes up in a panic) if the blind spot sensor goes off… which it does as soon as you put your blinker on.

Guess what that wonderful bit of tech taught my dad to do? That’s right, don’t use the blinker to change lanes if you don’t want your eardrums blown out.

The fundamental problem is that car manufacturers aren’t being held liable for the accidents caused directly or indirectly by these “safety” systems. There is zero oversight and no mandate to investigate false positives of these systems, even when they cause an accident. The end result is that for the manufacturers the point is not to improve safety but to do obnoxious safety theater so regulators look away from rising pedestrian deaths. “Sure our cars are one ton heavier, but they have automatic braking soooo we’re good right?”

Who knows if these gadgets actually do anything or even if they don’t decrease overall safety. The manufacturer gets positive marketing, throws the regulator off their scent, and isn’t held liable for shit when the “safety” system fails or encourages bad habits. Win-win-win. Except the general public loses. But who ever cared about these schmucks?

That’s treading dangerously close to a specific kind of conspiracy theory there.

The EBU has pretty strong financial ties to Israel, not least of which their main sponsor Moroccan Oil. But at the end of the day you can count on the ghouls in charge to always find the coward’s way out and follow the money. It’s the exact same pattern of behavior they had with Russia in 2022, which they initially allowed to compete before backpedalling.

Pretending that this is an issue solely because of some conspiracy is not only baseless, but it also unfairly lets most European broadcasters off the hook for refusing to uphold the set the same hard lines with Israel that they set with Russia. Israel competed because European broadcasters were happy enough to include Israel. Simple as.

Well to be fair if my electoral choices directly and irrefutably contributed to the death of thousands, I’d be going cuckoo-crazy from the cognitive dissonance too.

Eeeeeh. I mean sure, we do have stricter requirements, but not nearly as much as fantasized by Americans. My grandpa still has a license that he got where the whole test was saying “I solemnly swear that I can drive”. Here in Belgium the country is extremely car-dependent so license suspensions are actually vanishingly rare, requiring you to get caught red-handed more than 40 km/h above the speed limit (50 in practice due to radar correction), and even then the suspension is only temporary; I have never heard of anyone who lost theirs permanently. Most people here do consider driving to be a right. Until a few short years ago temporary license suspensions could even be scheduled only on weekends and holidays!

Another angle to see this problem: I see Dutch people driving in Belgium daily. And they’re absolute menaces. But they’re so chill when they drive in Holland! What gives? Well most roads around here have more in common with American roads than Dutch ones… Give a dutchie in a BMW a wide straight line and he will do 75 km/h in a school zone without a second thought before changing lanes without signalling, then barrel through a roundabout while ignoring right-of-way. They aren’t better drivers, they just have such good road infrastructure that forces them to drive one very specific way: slowly and carefully.

It’s multifactorial. Cities like Helsinki and Amsterdam are poster children, but Europe also has plenty of areas (especially suburbs) that are as car-dependent as equivalent US cities.

However traffic deaths remain much lower than in the US thanks to less idiotically-designed streets.

Step 0, by far the biggest impact-to-cost ratio, is narrow the damn streets. Take the biggest road-legal vehicle allowed on that street, mark down the path of travel, and put some plastic bollards a few inches on either side. Watch as everybody instinctively slows down even though the flow of traffic is not even impeded or redirected in any way. This policy - by itself - doesn’t even reduce car dependence! If you do it as part of the regular road repair schedule, it’s literally free.

America’s wide-ass roads constantly astound me with their profound stupidity. There’s literally no tangible gain, and so many downsides to public safety. I understand (though I strongly disagree with) the usual refrains for why the US is car-centric, but making streets too wide is simply inexcusable and unconscionable.

And I want a unicorn for Christmas.

Look, right now I don’t even have a good reason to hope that Israel will be stopped before they finish their genocide. But step 1 is to get a permanent ceasefire in place. Whatever fantasies we might have beyond that is a moot point. But recognizing both parties as sovereign would go some way towards facilitating the terms and enforcement of that ceasefire.