He did not view Israel as a foreign government

Totally reasonable I guess. Israel owns America, and America owns us. Wild to think that’s okay though even if it is technically reasonable.

Bicycle licensing systems are horrible. They discourage riding and push people to unhealthy and dangerous forms of transport like cars and they give kids bad interactions with police (or in America, gets them sent to El Salvador).

That said, e-bike licensing for under-18’s makes a lot of sense. If it applied to all bikes, or to all ages then I’d take issue with it. But under-18’s on e-bikes should probably be licensed.

I do take issue with it being a digital-only license. Kids should not have smartphones in the first place, and just imagine losing access to your driver’s license because you forgot to charge your phone (or your mobile data plan lapsed).

If this war were about the hostages, said hostages would’ve been freed ages ago.

Maybe to start with America can stop doing “economic coercion against democracies” itself.

A carbon tax is political suicide now, thanks Bandt.

Maybe don’t run laps around Australia in warships then.

I’d say, rather than conscription, have mandatory military training. It would convince more people to consider a career in defense and expand our ability to rapidly increase our standing army in a real war scenario. Assuming the volunteer army model is indeed untenable.

We collectively need far fewer people to have driver’s licenses in this country. Being part of the minority that can’t drive is harder when that minority is smaller and so less resourced. Although in some ways, with fewer people who can’t drive competition for jobs (especially entry-level) that don’t need a driver’s license may be lighter.

When we publicly criticize China for their human rights record, their tendency is to double-down. They consider it “domestic interference” and so will break further human rights laws just to prove they take orders from nobody.

Even Trump’s allies don’t know what’s going on … does he even have allies? I think it’s just El Salvador, Israel, Hungary, and Vietnam. Israel is the only one who they seem to tell anything.

Just take the Japanese approach, require proof that your garage is big enough before selling you the car.

Last I checked they were ghoulishly waiting at the prison in the hopes of watching her be sent in.

The media is garbage. We did not need this many updates on the case, and they did not need to rub it in so much (I think she obviously did it, but on the off chance she didn’t they’re basically bullying her at this point).

Apparently America is running out, after giving so many arms to Israel.

Found it: “Partly owned by Axel Springer SE”

Just use Qwant. They won’t even LET you log in.

EDIT: I think Qwant may have some ties to the far-right. So maybe not Qwant. But I’m not gonna bother checking.

This seems like a really stupid solution and I have no idea what the government’s thinking.

Can’t be bothered.

You can’t prove it, but you can evidence it. And in some cases you can prove it (we’ve proven vaccines don’t cause Autism, for example).

Although this whole “produce studies” approach is such BS. The “do your own research” slogan is what got us anti-vaxxers (plus, and I can’t stress this enough, I really can’t be bothered). Expert consensus is how we should approach it. The experts know how to read the studies.

Produce studies saying to say it’s not harmful, or be quiet. Social media is too new, and all the psychologists that know the implications are working for the social media companies to make it more addictive. We don’t know whether social media is harmful, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of the three issues I raised. I should not I haven’t actually looked for any evidence because who can be bothered using Google for a Lemmy (Reddit) argument.

In my experience, the type of engagement that social media encourages is not healthy in any way, and this is not on the level of books or movies (some video games fall into the same category though).

Or let’s just go with privacy laws. Any information on engagement with their platforms should be depersonalized before use in content recommendation and ads. Users should need to manually select the criteria of content they want to see, rather than TikTok deciding they’re autistic or something and doing that automatically. In practice though this’d probably just means there’d only be the trending page, but as long as it’s useless (and we’d need to rely on human recommendations) then all’s fine.

I read that as less of a “belief” and more of an “assumption”. Most people don’t think about paraplegic sex at any point on their life, so her assumption went unquestioned until she was prompted to by sex work.