Easy, get rid of voting districts and first-past-the-post. Each state gets their usual number N of representatives, but every voter can vote for every candidate stading for election in the state, and the N candidates with the most votes get in. This is likely to also end the two-party system over time.

There is no need to subsidise ground source heat pumps in Finland, 15% of single home houses and 9% of homes (which includes apartments) are using that already and the popularity is growing, because there is a clear ROI on switching from oil to heat pumps.

Well we did celebrate the fact that China's CO2 emissions peaked in 2024 and are now decreasing. Yes they are still building coal-fired power plants to replace some old dirtier plants, but they are also building renewables at an world-leading rate.

Private persons have been paying VAT on imports already in the EU since forever, the 150€ de minimis in the EU is specifically for the tariffs, but not for the VAT. That means that all private imports from e.g. China already has to be processed by customs, so it's less of a jump for the EU to remove de minimis, since it would only cover small shipments bought by importing companies, who do not pay VAT. And with the limit being a much lower 150€, the number of parcels overall that would have to be processed additionally is substantially less than in the US.

As a reminder because Trump doesn't seem to know the difference, VAT is paid when you buy any product regardless of whether you imported it or not. Tariffs are paid only for imported products.

Yawn. Get a life.

These are not well defined terms really, but for example the USSR was a state socialist system where the state owned and operated every significant business and controlled the market and prices etc. on behalf of the people. We know how well that went in the end, but the system did run for decades.

In communism, the state neither owns or runs anything. Instead communes (small workers collectives) own and run their local business. The state is only there to manage things that small communes can't, like foreign affairs and trade. Ideally in an advanced communism system, the state can eventually be abolished. This is an obvious utopia.

This is not capitalism, it's post-capitalism where the goal is that private citizens don't (and can't) own anything anymore. Everything is a service.

Extreme communism isn't totalitarian at all. It's stateless, much like anarchism, and is therefore a complete utopia. Where as extreme fascism is a state in perpetual warfare with a totalitarian strongman ruler, like we see in 1984.

You must be thinking about state socialism in the vein of Stalin's USSR.

At some point the browser won't even load the websites anymore, it will just generate an approximation of them using AI..

I guess some tariffs are paid by the exporter after all :)

Interestingly in some cases these are banned by the U.S. Constitution: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/co....

Although I guess if they are manufactured in Taiwan they can bypass that by never having them enter the U.S. in the first place, because if you read the linked page it states this was specifically for preventing taxes on physical goods leaving U.S. ports.

Yes I mistyped, nuclear causes far fewer deaths overall.

Notepad++ does this, it's pretty nice.

Just as a reminder to everyone; nuclear causes around 1-2 orders of magnitude more deaths per produced terawatt-hour of energy than the usual fossil fuel suspects (oil, coal, natural gas), and this does not exclude large-scale nuclear accidents (or in the case of Chernobyl, a downright disaster). I'd live next to a nuclear power plant every time than a coal power plant.

Now if a country has to choose between nuclear and staying on fossile, then the choice should be nuclear every time. Eventually we may have the available technology to phase out both, but at the moment this is not feasible. Renewables are cheap, clean and available in volume, but they are not stable in output levels. Only we can store enough energy in various forms, then we could switch to 100% renewable. We are not there yet and are not likely to get their in the mid-term.

No it's not, if you are paying for the service then it's not copyright infringement. However you are very likely breaching the terms and conditions of the streaming provider, and that might get you banned or similar.

At least in the EU, consumer protection is strong enough that an EV battery only lasting 5 years (or only up to a certain mileage) would be considered a faulty product even if the warranty doesn't cover it.