I’m honestly surprised that the fat man cust conceded. I was convinced there would be some type of shenanigangs or at least an attempt at crying about foul play or “outside interference” by the evil EU/Ukraine/Soros…

If a large country such as France is serious about such a switch I’d be surprised if they didn’t use some sort of custom distro, perhaps built upon Ubuntu. This would allow for solid compatibility with the “parent”, but also allow for some tweaking to fit the specific needs of the French government and its many agencies. To my knowledge the German state of Schleswig Holstein, which decided to switch to open source as much as possible months ago, still hasn’t decided which distro would be the best fit for their project. Such a major decision really needs good planning and cannot be allowed to go wrong.

It must have been a terrible experience serving on one of these. The death rates were also very high.

This is good news. I’m honestly surprised at how positive the last few pieces of news from Moldova usually are. It’s obviously up to the people of Moldova and the people of Romania, but I would welcome Moldova into the EU via reunification with Romania at some point in the future.

As someone who was born outside of Germany but now lives here (with no immediate plans for going anywhere else) I regularly ask myself this question. Obviously many Germans seek economic opportunity in Switzerland, but the Swiss seem to really have about enough of all these immigrants. Then there might be other destinations that some people also bring up like Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but these fail to even break the top 20 destinations statistically.

In 2024 most emigrations seem to be in the context of people returning to their other European home countries. Out of the statistical top 20 only Spain/Italy (climate, retirement) Switzerland (economic opportunity) and the United States (again, economic opportunity, but recently with more people moving from the United States to Germany than the other way around) sound like plausible targets for German emigration at scale.

In all likelihood this could just be part of the general “mopiness” that seems to be prevalent in German culture.

I believe the specific law is from 1977, but I agree with your point in general, that service shouldn’t discriminate based on gender.

From my knowledge this rule was supposedly active for decades before Germany discontinued conscription and nobody really followed it then. Why there is a need to reactivate a law that will not be followed by the vast majority and that has no enforcement mechanisms associated with it really beats me. It’s probably a mix of incompetence and “we’ve always been doing things like this”.

This is a beautiful map!

The United States are rapidly becoming unreliable even as an arms supplier. Once they start stealing payments from clients without supplying the agreed upon goods, countries will start looking elsewhere, even if that means delays and perhaps different capabilities. I see great times ahead for defense products made in Europe.

All that needs to happen now is for the countries of Europe to unify and St. Lucia loses this incredibly important title!

TIL there is a Eurovision for trees.

That being said, I am an elm enjoyer. I have an elm in my garden (Ulmus × hollandica), which is the most beautiful tree in the entire neighbourhood.

Are any routers made in the United States and theoretically compliant with this rule?

The only country to ever invoke Article 5 was the United States. As things stand there is no scenario whatsoever in which Europeans will once again agree to fight and die in a futile American war in the Middle East. Let the Americans sort out their own mess. Perhaps we should even consider trying to find a solution to resuscitate the world economy together with China, India, Iran and other involved parties in the region.

If everyone was as positively weird as this gentleman the world would likely be a better place.

Isn’t there some type of shitposting community for these posts? I believed this place to be for interesting, informative or pretty maps.

I know. It still feels odd to me as a Dutchman though to know that there’s dozens of gun related crimes going on all the time.

That’s true. I used to travel to Saint Louis quite regularly for work about ten years ago. It always seemed fine, at least on the surface.

Still, even the safest US states would rank among the most dangerous EU countries in terms of gun violence and gun related homicides.

I used to live in Wiesbaden and can confirm that there are many Americans there. They should qualify as suspicious.

Oh, I didn’t see you there…

No, you seem to be (willingly?) misrepresenting what I’m saying. There is no long term plan. There is no strategy. There simply is a situation in which the actions of Europeans in the past have caught up with Europeans in the present and we are now stuck between a rock we failed to move decades ago and a hard place we built ourselves. What our current crop of “leaders” seems to be doing is (once again) hoping this all blows over in a decade, because we’re all out of other good options. While this is a fatalistic point of view, I believe it is warranted. Building some degree of strategic autonomy will take years, maybe decades. Until then we remain dependent on the hegemon and cannot face it head first on any and every issue. Had we collectively done what le Général had told us to do back in the 1960s, we’d be in a better position, but we didn’t, so we aren’t.