So does Iran and so did the USSR. Or at least they had elections. The problem is that allowing the people to choose between a carefully curated list of party suits isn't the same as democracy, at best it shifts the focus to different points of the party program.

Funnily enough that whole snippet has the AI smell about it.

It's not just about Em dashes, it's about the tedious overuse of certain rhetorical devices. Like this one.

Spotify always had fixed monthy subscription costs, so paying out a fixed/semifixed sum per stream was never an option.

Probably some hilariously misguided attempt at damping vibrations. Or cosmic radiation or something. It's not full of copper, that's for sure as the weight would do a proper number on the connections (there are matching RCA cables just hanging in the air.

So why did you compare the EU to Canada earlier then? No-one else brought Canada into the thread. If the UK is a small country, then every country in the EU is small and the size comparison to Canada becomes irrelevant.

My stomach doesn't like me eating large amounts of wheat bread, whereas other grains aren't nearly as bad. I'm quite sure this has nothing to do with gluten, but I guess eating gluten free bread would help because it's not wheat. I can imagine that most self-diagnosed cases of "gluten sensitiveness" is really something else, like low level IBS, or lack of fibers or something similar.

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..