29 karma · joined June 1, 2019
While she didn't compose the song, she was the one to originally release it. Tina Turner's version came one year later with a sax and an iconic video, but otherwise Bonnie's version is pretty similar and not much worse imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_(song)#Bonnie_Tyler_v...
> Do Romanians give a fuck?
A Ukrainian USV (water surface drone) just exploded the other day in Romania's main industrial port (Europe's 4th largest for a sense of scale), apparently thinking it's somewhere else due to GPS EW interference. Yes they're affected, yes they care
Supporting point 1, remember that he declared zero campaign expenses and never explained how he ran his campaign
Regarding the second point, the urgency under which his campaign took off and the proximity to the elections allowed him to elude mass-media scrutiny. A lot of shady details were unveiled since he became popular, which arguably would've made him unpalatable for a lot of his voters
ISW has a fairly good synopsis of the findings from the Romanian secret services here: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin...
If you want a comparison to the US political situation, this is not your "Twitter did something shady which bumped Trump's result by 2 percentage points"
A better translation is: Chase Oliver wins the White House! (If you wonder who that guy is, Google him - that's what Romanians had to do with CG after the election night; he was on the ballot and you didn't even know it). All while declaring zero expenses. NSA and CIA suspect foreign interference. His only campaign was on TikTok. Looked eerily similar to Ukraine, Georgia (the country) and Moldova's Russian influence campaigns. He eluded TikTok's swarming detection algorithms. He was unknown until late October - the campaign started in earnest 2 weeks before Halloween. Oh, and he actually looks like RFK jr., talks like RFK jr., just didn't have the same notoriety going into the election
Sorry, you'll have to deal with translating yourself, but current browsers make it easy
For context, Romania's fascist movement, prominent in the late 30s, was called "legionaries"
Polling did see it coming. But the growth was so unprecedented, the pollsters questioned their sanity (read: methodology, or at least sampling bias)
The campaign propelling him happened during the two weeks preceding the election. Enough to create a wave of enthusiasm, just short enough to fly below the radar (of him properly getting scrutinised)
Romania's NSA report suggests the campaign was a copycat of campaigns in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Romania either had an X factor that made this one succeed, or the state actor managed to nail the way it calibrated the campaign this time
What you're missing is that in this particular case the outside interference seems to have been the only support he had
He's claimed zero expenses and his whole stated strategy was "my rise is God's will"
Romania's NSA surmises in this case "God" may have been Putin
So, to answer your question, your spending needs to do some 100% of the heavy lifting in their campaign to match this precedent. In other words, you'd have to be the only guy propelling them. Which nullifies the hypothesis of a candidate you'd want overthrown
He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth
Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together
No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support
Iirc all candidates were supposed to mark their promotional material as electoral material. CG was the only one who didn't. This was considered illegal in Romania and TikTok was supposed to not promote the material. Yet they did
The second thing I vaguely remember is that the secret service report surmised that TikTok has swarming detection algorithms, that CG's posts were clearly swarmed, yet TikTok allowed the material as if it hasn't been swarmed, despite its own policies
New Zealand is an honourable 2nd place and Auckland clocks at 7th with ~11 (median household annual income for median house). The other cities worse off are around 11 as well, with Vancouver at 12 and Sydney at 13. Hong Kong is the usual autist at 18 in its own league
To answer another comment here, Melbourne and Toronto are comparable, London is 20% better off, Austin and Dublin are half that bad, can't even compare
It is a bad system though. It restrains the society from benefitting from said work unless they meet certain terms (usually, payments). It's often times unrealistic to pay for all you'd like to consume. Especially that access to their work is usually badly quantised
(For example, I may want to search Sarah Silverman's book for a keyword, once. That'll cost me the same amount as someone reading the book from start to end. [please take this as an illustrative example and don't jump literally on ways to solve this exact problem])
I don't have a better solution yet, but I think we should definitely open up this discussion: can you come up with a system which compensates those who add value to society without restraining access to their products?
I'll go even further to say this is the fundamental issue in our society, way beyond copyright. That is, to find a way to compensate people for the value they add while eliminating the incentive to artificially limit access to resources needed by others
I'll be more concrete with another example. Take a limited resource: housing. In a society where you don't need to gain more because you're already justly compensated maximally for what you're worth, you don't need to own more than the house you live in. In other words, I'm advocating for a society where ownership is limited to what can be possibly consumed. Importantly, limited to no longer mean a way to extract value from artificially creating scarcity for others
I think this website has the best candidates capable of devising such a system. But we need to start by having conversations about the requirements for a better society
It will further need approval from society at large even if it's well defined, so the road is long. But we need to start somewhere, and that's requirements
Sorry I derailed a bit, but I think all this ties closely to the debate: 'is copyright a good system?' rephrased as 'if we want to achieve a goal, is limiting knowledge the best way to go?'. Which can be extrapolated to 'is artificially limiting access the best way to ensure those who produce value are equitably compensated for it?'
Just a reminder that now exist, in no particular order: - Juno Computers - Tuxedo Computers - System76 - Slimbook - Starlabs - Pine - Framework - Manjaro Computers
Admittedly, the same chassis are reused across a couple of these examples, but there's choice