It usually only takes one serious incident to start a full riot on scooters. Last month there was a tragic event where one woman was killed by someone with a scooter who didn’t see her crossing. Total outrage! Ban these things immediately. There’s even a draft law in the parliament to forbid anyone riding a scooter unless they got a license of some sorts. Meanwhile, there was another accident where a guy was speeding and hit a woman on a pedestrian crossing. People were like “yeah, but maybe if she hadn’t run on that crossing, and if she made eye contact with the driver, maybe it would’ve saved her life…”

The only alternative that the Bucharest authorities at that time had, was to either ship it or risk letting it fall into German/Austro-Hungarian hands. It’s more like having to choose between storing your physical money to your friend’s house or keeping it with the high risk of having it stolen for good by someone you’re not even friends with.

Edit: and that wasn’t really a “friend” either. It was a country that tried to take advantage of our fight for independence against the Ottomans in order to annex us themselves. And it was a “friend” which previously annexed parts of former Principality of Moldova which was inhabited by Romanians. As the saying goes: with friends like these, one needs no other enemy.

Luckily, they learnt their lesson, so BNR hid what was left of the treasury in a monastery during WW2.

Keeping the answer relevant to Europe, I must say Europe is not one single country, so every country out there has its own media sources with varying levels of trustworthiness. Here are a bunch of them from Romania that come to my mind:

• Recorder
• HotNews
• Libertatea
• PressOne
• Snoop
• RFE/RL (yes, I know they are funded by the American government, but the Romanian desk has kept editorial freedom)
• RFI
• Digi24 (they’ve been quite liberal-leaning for some time already though, but worth checking the latest news on them)
• Euronews (yes, I know who owns them, but the same applies to the Romanian desk of it as with RFE/RL)
• TVR and TVR Info (the public national broadcaster - you can clearly rely on it for the news as well)

> antivaxxers
> making Europe healthy - and make it healthy again

wtf am I reading?!?

Fucking hell no…

Hah, this couldn’t be more obvious. Thanks for the link.

“Czechia — against the green madness.”
[…]
When Babis appears on the campaign trail, he generally speaks out against “the system” and “corrupt politicians,” saying that the political establishment is incapable, bureaucratic and inefficient, that it disregards the people, divides up posts among its own, lies, cheats and wastes money.

Ahhh, sounds so familiar. All the former corrupt politicians are now parading with their traditional values thing and are riding the far-right wave that’s currently sweeping the West lead by the Heritage Foundation, MAGA and the likes. Of course it’s the progressives™ that led the country into chaos with their NGOs introducing their green policies and the LGBTQ agenda. They are the system that needs to be fought against!!! Not THE VERY SAME POLITICIANS LEADING THE COUNTRY FOR 35 FUCKING YEARS LIKE A CASTE, having links with both the former Communist Parties (sometimes even being former members of them), Russia and/or China and THE VERY ORGANIZATIONS AND PEOPLE THEY ARE NOW DEMONIZING AND FIGHTING AGAINST.

Like, we also had a similar Babis in Romania - and his name is Victor Ponta. Who was a PM from the Social Democrat Party and quit after large scale protests when a fire broke out in a night club who didn’t get the autorizations legally. And who said that “I will be against the Roșia Montană gold extraction project as a deputy in the parliament, but as a PM I have to respect the national interest” (of bringing full profit to a private company extracting the gold and leaving a centuries-old settlement in a deep cyanide pit?). And who plagiarized his PHD thesis. And who now is wearing a MAGA hat in public and spinning around the Trump rhetoric (even running for president again last summer as an independent and getting 1 mil.+ votes).

Yeah, these are the brave anti-system fighters of Eastern Europe, heroically resisting the Brussels&Globalist assault.

Solaris is still more cool

Once again, #RussiaIsATerroristState and it shows. I wonder whether European intelligence agencies could also stage some of these terrorist acts back home. Let them struggle and see how is it to have various depots randomly catch fire, etc.

@Lumidaub this, plus corruption, plus Russia

@localhorst

@Servais haven’t really watched it since 2 years ago. Not really into this geopolitical song contest anymore. I prefer finding stuff on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp or wherever I have an account.

Long overdue. He should have gone after the handling of last year’s elections

@mesamunefire The latest find, highly underrated, is @flwwhtrbt (also posting under @PerfectDark on !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz) posts about the latest gaming stuff on Linux and in general. Highly informative imo and not overwhelming with posts.

Then I get my memes from @nonfedimemes and @memes.pixelfed. I also liked @DarthPutinKGB, but it now it appears to have stopped posting.

There’s also my page called @cheamaminerii where I post infrequent updates about the health condition of Romania’s 1st president, Ion Iliescu, charged for crimes against humanity (currently mostly posting about the fact that he’s alive - which is what trăiește means).

There’s also @FoxNews which posts the latest news about foxes. Highly recommended if you want to stay up to date in this regard.

For serious news, some of the journalists I recommend following are @timkmak @kevinrothrock @w7voa @anneapplebaum plus other big publications, which have enabled federation via their Flipboard account, like @BBCNews or which they have an actual Mastodon presence like @theintercept @arstechnica or @Bellingcat

Other creators that I like are @silentbeauties (posting about vintage movies and actors), @Astro_benny (Italian NASA astronaut, posting about all things space) or @notjustbikes (yes, the real one).

Last but not least, there are some bots that reply to you with some various stuff if you tag them:

• @scream
• @bees
• @sandwich

Well, you can easily tell if an envelope has been tampered with. For email, on the other hand, it’s more difficult for the average folk. And again, Gmail is also sharing information with the government (okay, it’s mostly the US government, but still).

Imo, we need more providers like Proton, Tuta, Mailbox dot org etc. and probably more education into how one could protect their data and so on.

Having the government provide email as a public communication service sounds good in theory. However, this could also pose a privacy risk if your government turns rogue and authoritarian. If it is possible to also have this communication E2E encrypted in a way that is as frictionless as possible (no, PGP is not really that frictionless unless it’s built in), it would be great. However, we all know what is the general take of governments regarding E2E encryption, so I think I’ll pass this one.

@cm0002 I mean, it just plays on Trump&co.'s bigger strategy of shitting on Europe all over, so siding with the US might be a losing game for Europe in the long run. I think that, for the short term, Europe should have an ambiguous position, as it gradually rips its links from the US, but still supporting Ukraine in parallel to get back to its 1992 established borders one way or another. After all, recognizing Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea brings a huge blow to the post-WWII system and if these principles will no longer be enforced in any way by anybody, then this would encourage other countries to solve their disputes through force as well if they side with a permanent member of a security council.

After this point, there’s only one small step left until WW3

Fingers crossed for Flygsystem 2020

Here in Romania, much of what was left of our steel production was going to the US. This will hit us very hard.

Because surely someone asked about this /s

Didn’t they need some money for the arms industry? How will pumping the money into restricting this help out?

Would moving to the UK be an option? I remember they were a frequently used option by governments.