My Seat Leon car. VW really shat the bed with their latest gen cars.

They’ve just learnt it all from Vegas.

Paris is lovely, as long as you avoid the worst tourist areas. Seeing people queue in the middle of Champs-Élysées, between lanes of traffic, just to get that one pretend shot of the Arc de Triumphe is a special circle of hell.

So knowing that European consider Swiss people cold, imagine how cold they are.

They are stone cold to foreigners - so many English speaking wealthy people live there and they are not welcomed into the local communities. It can take a decade to make local Swiss friends.

Tbf that’s a better explanation than any other I’ve heard.

But what if I don’t have an MEP? (Cries in British)

I mean you did claim Sweden was being occupied. Words do matter, you know. It’s how we understand what you believe.

Agile Coaches.

It’s like having a cadre of political officers in your team.

I’m a 47 year old man.

Whenever I hear Salute by Little Mix, I bop along. How could you not?

Your pace of walking definitely has a huge impact on people’s impression of you.

It’s a workplace monitoring tool dressed up as a workplace wellness tool.

You know that table that shows the risk of employees who might burn out, given their meeting frequency, teams interactions, email rate, work hours etc.? If you flip the sorting order, you can measure who isn’t doing enough (by whatever metrics the employer decides).

100% agreed. For me it’s pretty simple; issue the same test you issue immigrants for citizenship. If people can’t pass that, why the hell are they getting involved in the governing of our country?

And I speak as someone who has passed the U.K. citizenship test to acquire U.K. citizenship. It takes 2 weeks of studying one hour/week AND some general understanding of what’s going on in the country. It’s not hard, it just requires a little effort and involvement. Seems a minimum you can expect before people make decisions that affect us all.

Voting.

Reddit by far was a better experience; more content, better moderation, less negativity.

I’m still here on Lemmy, though, in hope of it getting better (and it definitely scratches the same itch as Reddit without the corporate arrogance).

That said, even though it annoys me, I do find myself getting exposed to a wider array of opinions on Lemmy that I just never saw on Reddit. And while I disagree with a lot of it it’s probably healthier for things to be that way. The tankies, though … so many tankies.

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Not really. They’ve got a version of the euro, called kroners, which allows Danes to believe they have their own currency. They are locked into an exchange rate band (extremely tight) which means the Danish central bank has to follow every decision the ECB takes within minutes). And this makes complete sense, in that it’s a compromise that’s edible by voters (maintaining the illusion that Denmark didn’t adopt the euro) and edible by business (allowing businesses in Denmark to participate fully in the common market).

And that’s one of the reasons Denmark has such small national debt and runs a government surplus - they can’t really invent new money because it would break the bond with the euro. So the Danish budget is sort of a “household budget” in that in contrast to, say, Sweden, they cannot create money (meaningfully) and the books have to balance (which they do; lots of oil, Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and a few other big international plays who still pay a majority of their tax in Denmark obviously helps a lot).

Yes more or less, that is indeed how the central bank creates money most of the time; the government creates a piece of paper that says “IOU 100k and I’ll pay you 5% interest on it for 20 years and then I’ll return your original 100k to you in 20 years” (that’s a bond), which they sell on the open market, at auction (where the variable element is the interest rate someone is willing to accept). When the central bank wishes to increase the money supply they buy government bonds on the open market (ie from other holders, rarely from the government directly) by materialising money out of thin air.

When they wish to shrink the money supply they sell their government bonds and destroys the money that they receive from the sale.

Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?

Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.

No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

Or watch the film Finding the Money: https://youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.

Dunno about affordable but you can usually find some decently priced 1L Dell Optiplex micro systems. I’ve got one running under my desk 24/7. Great Linux support.

After 20 years with my wife, I still have weekly “you haven’t seen X?!?!?!” moments with her. The amount of films she hasn’t seen is staggering.

(conversely, the amount of time I’ve wasted watching films is kinda scary)