MyBrainHurts

People have answered pretty well but I'd also come at it from a different angle, the EU also probably wants ways to deepen connections without full blown membership. (Consider the headaches that Orban caused for years.) In an era that looks increasingly like it will be defined by great power rivalry, having the EU create a more nimble sort of partnership than full blown membership could be very attractive to many middle countries (especially in East Asia as countries reassess their security guarantees from America against China's increasingly bellicose behaviour.)

I don't but there's definitely a vegan specific community in the fediverse, they might have more ideas?

Amazing, I didn't know about this either! Thanks!

As you note elsewhere, these are often highly upvoted and honestly, the fediverse is so small that without those posts, I worry about how much content there would be. (We can cry that people need to post more original content until our lungs give out but...)

So, I'd say this is probably a fine tuning issue. We probably want people to choose if they want to filter out as much content from reddit as possible, bot content only, mass reddit posters etc.

Oh for sure, the AI bubble is terrifying as I think I noted very early on in the thread. But, even excluding the last half dozen years (so as to ignore American's absurd covid recovery and AI hype) American stock returns have significantly outperformed European ones.

Oh absolutely, I'm not saying that this won't help, I'm just saying that there is a very real trade-off and it would be unwise to pretend there isn't one.

Ehhhh, a little bit this is also a drastic oversimplification of how the stock market works.

American companies tend to have higher profit returns and growth potential. There aren't many Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia's etc in Europe. There are also huge hurdles to growth (navigating almost 30 different sets of regulations plus EU regulations, or however many languages) that American companies do not face.

The total value of the US stockmaket is 70+ trillion. 400 billion is something but not even a significant percentage.

Tricky one. I love the sovereignty but I also wonder how much that will cut into someone's pension etc as American stocks have wildly outperformed most other stockmarkets. Admittedly, I'm also worried about a serious crash but...

Like I said, tricky one.

Okay, that sweet subscription money.

what is Hasan’s political project for

To make a name for himself so some portion of the internet tunes into his streams and thus give him that sweet advertising money.

What even is the point of him being a part of the campaign?

Free publicity.

This paragraph and ones like it are exactly why I love the series. I don't think the moment to moment writing is particularly funny etc but sometimes you sit back and take stock of the absurd situations and cannot help but laugh.