Always 50/50 because two party system, FPTP and electoral college.

Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.

At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.

Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.

Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.

So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.

Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.

I would also add that isn’t empty talk like “Well he said it once, non biggie”. That statement by POTUS itself drove the national policy other countries. When POTUS says “other nations you are with us or are our enemies”, that matters.

That is a signal the reverberates around with “do we dare to anger USA on this one”. The Afghan war partisipants list is long and contains some not so obvious participants often doing rather small token participations. Which I think is exactly “Well we have to show we are with USA”.

For example here in Finland in the after action report of Finnish participation in Afghanistan tells the reason wasn’t building peace, it wasn’t even combat experience. It was “coalition and alliance building” aka showing USA “we are with them”.

In the after action study one of the interviewed decision makers literally directly quoted:

Yhdysvallat sanoi 9/11 jälkeen: olette joko meidän kanssa tai meitä vastaan.”

United States said after 9/11: You are either with us or against us.

Right above explaining how it was 20 year long very unpopular operation caused losses and achieved nothing in Afghanistan, but hey the Finnish NATO application will go through with flying colors.

The whole time the media blitz was about “Helping and building peace in Afghanistan”. When in reality we went in because USA publicly extorted pretty all of west to show colors.

This isn’t only in Finland in other European after action reports have shown similar “We went in, because Bush publicly demanded show of loyalty”.

Since he was an idiot and gave a no reservations or conditions bid for the company. At way overpriced at that. The existing biard and owners must have been fainting from shock and glee.

No one sane ever gives no reservations and conditions bid. That is insanely stupid thing to do.

Twitter didn’t make Elon buy Twitter. Elon did that to himself. Under normal bid, absolutely he could back out by arguing one of the conditions his lawyers would have put in.

Either his lawyers were highly incompetent, he didn’t use them or he ignored their advice that it would be highly unusual and monumentally stupid to issue such bid while waiving ones right to have terms and conditions included. Well negotiate in terms and conditions. Since obviously otherside might refuse to accept the buying contract, if they don’t like the terms and conditions.

In this case all the judge did was looked at the bid contract and went “Mister Musk, you signed bid to buy with no terms and conditions. So you have to honor the bid.”

It will at minimum be a fight. It won’t just sail through. Also whole governments being against means one of them might challenge the law in to European Court of Justice. Since as nation-states also often have, EU itself has charter of rights part in the fundamental EU treaties. It also has normal limit and share of powers. EU Council and Parliament aren’t all powerfull. ECJ can rule a directive or regulation to be against the core treaties like Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Said charter does include in it right to privacy (which explicitly mentions right to privacy in ones communications) and protection of personal data. Obviously none of these are absolute, but it means such wide tampering as making encryption illegal might very well be deemed to wide a breach of right to private communications.

Oh and those who might worry they wouldn’t dare at ECJ… ECJ has twice struck down the data protection agreement negotiated by EU with USA over “USA privacy laws are simply incompatible, no good enough assurances can be given by USA as long as USA has as powerful spying power laws as it has”. Each time against great consternation and frankly humiliating black eye to the Commission at the time.

ECJ doesn’t mess around and doesn’t really care their ruling being mighty politically inconvenient and/or expensive to EU or it’s memberstates. They are also known for their stance that privacy is a corner stone civil right (as stated in the charter and human rights conventions also, their legal basis) and take it very seriously as key part of democracy and protection of democracy. Without free and private communications and expression there can be no free political discussion, without free political discussion there can be no democracy.

As I remember at the moment partly Von Der Leyen, the current Commission president. She is a German Christian democrat and apparently bit with capital C. Meaning she has bit of a moral panic streak on her of the “won’t you think of the children” variety. As I understand this current proposal is very much driven by her.

However her driving it doesn’t mean it sail through to pass as legislation. Some whole memberstate governments are against the encryption busting idea.

Also I would add, not like this is unanimously supported in EU among memberstates. So this isn’t a done deal, this is a legislative proposal. Ofcourse everyone should activate and campaign on this, but its not like this is “Privacy activists vs all of EU and all the member state governments” situation. Some official government positions on this one are “this should not pass like it is, breaking the encryption is bad idea”.

Wouldn’t be first time EU commission proposal falls. Plus as you said ECJ would most likely rule it as being against the Charter of Rights of European Union as too wide breach of right to privacy.

Like the one recent CEO saying the quiet part aloud by saying government should promote higher unemployment, since in the high employment environment employees aren’t desperate and have more demands costing him money. That employees arent feeling enough pain and despair in economy.

Well PESCO did get created. Denmark dropped their opt out from CSDP. Stuff like this moves slowly, specially upon there not being single hegemonic leader saying “We do this” and everyone else answering “Yes boss”. EU is herding catch and it makes everything move slowly.

However I would note… France has rule about no crosses or cross wearing in schools. So it isn’t like Islam is being singled out. Well this specific rule is about them, but France has very wide rule of “no religious clothing, items or symbols” in school and they don’t much pick sides. Jewish kids… No kippas, Protestants and Catholics, no crosses, Muslims, no head scrafs, no face veils, no religious robes. Sikhs, no turbans.

So it isn’t xenophobic, since the local majority religion is also under rules of “no religious symbols wearing”.

What one can say is, that it is highly anti-religious. However that isn’t same thing as xenophobic or say specifically antisemitic or islamophobic. Islamophobic would be “Muslim girls aren’t allowed to wear scarfs, but it’s okay for catholic girls to wear crosses”.

French government “doesn’t like” the local traditional majority religion either.

One absolutely can argue about “is it too much restriction of religious liberty in general”, however one can’t argue “well but this is about jews or muslims”. It isn’t. This specific rule about abayas is mostly a technocratic decision based on wider political decision of “we have principle of no religious displays in school”. It was decided “oh yeah, we missed this one religious clothing wearing/display. Add it to the long list of specified banned religious displays of all kinds”.

I’m sure, if member of the church of the flying spaghetti monster tried to walk to French school with colander on their head, the courts would rule "no colander hats either, that is religious display also. You can go join the Jewish and Sikhs on the club house of “France banned our religious hat” club.

Depends how deep the lines are. They have breached the first line at some points. However as per ukrainians, after the first line is the second line and so on. Russia knows how to make deep defences and anywhere, where they lose one line, they will adjust and start added more lines to the rear to compensate for the lost line. First line lost, second line is now first line, third line is second and so on and add the new Nth line, since the old Nth is now Nth-1 line.

It will be a slow slug and battering ram fest, unless Russian army morale breaks/ supplies exhaust and they run.

You know a stale mate is a possible state of war. One side doesn’t always have to be winning and the other losing.

SO if Russia starts lobbing around chemical and biological weapons, then Ukraine should do that too? Like not gonna work like that, for example biological weapons are one of those were you can’t just go “tit-for-tat”. Since every biological weapon used is new risk of launching a pandemic on the world and so on.

To certain level, yes if other side breakes the rules, we get to break them also. However there is a line. Line which you never cross. Under no circumstances should Ukraine be allowed to target medical facilities, even on Russia having done it multitude of times. Indiscriminate intentional bombardment of still habited cities with no allowing of civilians to evacuate should always be off the table. You just don’t do that. All it leads is to needless human suffering.

It’s one thing to aim for military or strategic target and miss and hit civilians. That is recognized as reality of war. Terror bombardment? Never to be allowed. Not to mention it doesn’t work. Every example in history has shown all it does is make the receiving end angry, instead of demoralizing them. It sets a “So it’s to the last breath then? That is the name of the game, fine that is the name of the game” and they fight to bitter end.

Well that is a good way for a diplomat to lose their job. Publicly criticizing the head diplomat of the country. Whether or not the criticism is valid is beside the point. One doesn’t go around publicly criticizing the head of state. Now absolutely behind closed doors tell him You should be little more careful, that last public statement might not have been in the best possible tone.

Like it is kinda funny how he got sacked criticizing head of state for what might be interpreted as alliance disunity. While showing national disunity by publicly criticizing his own head of state. Yeah. That gets you fired.

traditional grocery stores won’t put in any effort to provide it

At least where I live here in Finland, traditional retail chains are very much in the shopping delivery business. Exactly including using their vast retail stores network as their base of deliveries. However again their stores are actual stores.

The dark stores would have had choices. For example don’t run a purely dark store. Run it as combined delivery base and retail store. The walk in retail might be minority of the business, but then they could say “no, we also have walk in customers. We aren’t a dark store, the city mayor is free to walk in and come buy a bottle of cola from us.”

Well they didn’t ban the business model. They just ruled that a warehouse can’t be classed as a store. Which is atleast to me fair sounding. Since should customer not be able to walk into that establishment and buy stuff, it isn’t a store. It is delivery warehouse. Hence it shouldn’t be allowed on zonings and placings only meant for stores. You shouldn’t run commercial warehouse out of retail zoning. Since commercial warehousing is not a retail business. Retail implies customers are directly retail consumers, not other business partners.

Normal store could still partner with a delivery company. Issue is the delivery companies don’t want to partner with normal stores, since then the store wants their cut. They want to directly rent a space and turn it into warehouse. Since that costs less per item, than paying to partner with a store. You could still operate the store as supply point. Just can’t be just a delivery point.

It was companies own decision “we don’t think this makes sense, if we can’t pinch the last penny by running our own dark store. instead of say partnering with local retail chain”.

Nah. He is also known for instant turns, when he thinks he has bargained enough or when it happens to suit the image he wants to present.

For example say he decided “Vilnius is the moment I stop bargaining, but only at last minute. Lets see what concessions I can get out of them until then” or so on.

It is exactly on brand for Erdogan to suddenly turn his position and go “what problem, there is no problem. What I said last week there was a problem… no no no, I Erdogan The First have solved problem quickly in only few days. Yes we made a deal, I negotiated amazing deal, deal solves the problem. There is No problem anumore. It’s solved.”

What happened to solve the problem? Nothing, Erdogan just stopped insisting there was a problem in first place and well some flowery language on top to make it look like it was deal to end the problem and not a climb down to end the problem.

Nah. Sweden doesn’t seem to have given any firm commitments about security beyond “We work on it together”, which can mean exactly as little or as much it fancies Sweden after they are in NATO.

To me this is simply “Erdogan has decided he has seen this bargaining to completion and it would look really bad, if this thing wasn’t resolved by Vilnius. Pressure started to mount with This is starting to be embarrassing Recep from rest of NATO” and he simply called it good.

Nothing needs to have been changed on this exact moment, He just decided he has tried long enough and has exhausted the concessions and no point dragging it on. Instead of benefit, it started to be more hindrance in his calculation to keep this going.

He can now tan in the limelight in Vilnius as the leader who saved the situation at last minute. Mind you the problem was of his own creation, but hey those are the best kind of problems. You have exact control and can “solve the problem” at exactly the most suitable last minute moment. Actual problems are harder for “last minute saviour” credibility collection. You might actually fail to solve the problem and thats not good.

Yeah, but the part I don’t get is Ukraine choosing to litter it’s country side and eastern cities with un-exploded submunitions. It will be massive and nasty clean up operation after wards. everyone time cluster munitions have been used anywhere it leads to both friendly fire and civilian casualties from lingering UXO submunitions.

Like I absolutely get why USA is offering, what I don’t get is Ukraine accepting instead of demanding different kind of munitions. Hopefully they stuck them in “last resort reserve, if all else runs out” and then after war they just blow them up in big pile in some artillery range.

Teflon mark is just straight up quitting? Didn’t expect that one to happen.