Or, you know, just don’t do this? Why would you want this, it’s literally a power grab. As someone from a country (Netherlands) where our prime minister was in charge for about 12 years, you don’t want this. The government did not achieve much during this time except the classic tax cuts to businesses and wealthy people and the average welfare of our society has tanked. I (partly) blame them for all the crazy violence that’s been going on here now as well, they stripped so much from the education and arts budgets that young people often resort to more criminal behavior now and then they try to solve this with petty laws which make no sense. They’re even talking about people needing a permit to have a dog, ridiculous micromanagement.

Besdies that, our country has only moved right since. If you introduce this and Trump was eventually gone then people might vote even more right (JD?). We went from a right wing liberal to a far right extremist who hates Muslims and any other sorts of immigrants. He became the biggest party and he still managed to finesse it somehow that’s he’s technically not part of the government so any blame for failing does not fall on him, which is ridiculous…

Do you really think it’s likely this will happen? I think hell just start throwing a tantrum and maybe symbolically apply some tariffs.

And they’ll even say sorry for it because they consider it “impolite” and “not done” to talk back to the sitting government or some shit.

Lol that’s pretty funny. Of course that’s something Elon would get mad about, an online dick measuring contest…

That looks really good! Hope you had an appetite because it does look like a lot of food.

At my first company I was part of a team of about 20 people. In this team there were multiple instances of office romance drama. We had a manager with a wife and kids that cheated on them with a marketing colleague during a company skiing holiday, we had a team member that had a (not so) secret relationship with a manager and we had a colleague that was in a relationship with a colleague from another department and then started cheating on him with a direct colleague.

The first one I don’t know too much about because it happened before I came to that team but the second and third ones I was in the middle of. The colleague-manager relationship was especially weird because to me and my direct colleagues it was obvious what was going on, they weren’t hiding it that well. But when people asked them about it, they would always deny it which was kinda weird. Anyway, after one of them left the company they supposedly fell in love afterwards and are now (to my knowledge) still together.

The cheating colleague was a whole different story. She had a relationship with a guy from another department who was pretty good looking but he was an ass. They were even living together. She then proceeded to fall in love with a direct colleague from our team and ended up meeting up with this colleague in the company bathrooms during lunch breaks… This went on for a bit (and was somewhat common knowledge in our team) before she broke up with her partner and started living with the new one. Pretty weird. Also, there were multiple occasions where I saw her straight up kissing another guy in our team on the lips for his birthday which was a bit strange as well.

Last story: at my latest company I got hired to be a business analyst. When I walked in, there was no way I was going to be able to carry out this role. They asked me to use data to support and advise but there was literally no data available. So I stepped in together with another colleague to work on this for the next year or so, with great success. We had a whole data platform with interconnected data and a visualization tool by the end.

However, close to the time we finished our work a new colleague joined our team. When he presented himself, his tasks fully overlapped with my original role. I went to my de-facto manager (my actual manager was only HR-responsible and was not very available at the time) and asked him if this person was my replacement, I got told that he wasn’t. The new guy then proceeded to start getting in my way every step of the way. I went to him and asked him if he was there to take over some of my work, he said no. Long story short, by the time it came to the time of the decision of extending my contract to a contract without an end date, they gave me a bunch of negative feedback (which I later found out mostly came from the newly introduced colleage) and only offered me a temporary extension.

This got me so frustrated and annoyed that I ended up quitting over it. They were very surprised by that but I did not hold back with my feedback during my exit interviews. Luckily I’m now at a different company that seems a much better fit for me where I can actually carry out work that I like. But yeah, overall a pretty eventful 8 years so far…

It’s very nice. Until it blocks your navigation screen in the car, then it sucks :(

It sounds compelling but like the article states at the end, I’m not sure if it’s going to change much. The DNC are way too timid to even consider challenging on something like this and the 2020 shenanigans have soured a lot of people on the “election fraud” claims.

If you put your tinfoil hat on you could even say that this was part of their tactic: make false claims to annoy everyone only to then commit fraud yourself later. It would he an almost perfect plan.

And then treats them like trash. He constantly misgenders one of them and is actively supporting a government that is making them have to flee the country. What a wonderful dad…

Understandable, it’s all a matter of perspective. There’s no ideal way of democracy and any way has it’s pros and cons. I’d say that overall my gripe is a somewhat minor one but it does lead to big issues sometimes, especially during election times because the biggest party gets first dibs on creating the government. More fragmentation on your side of the political spectrum (left vs. right) can therefore lead to splintering of the votes and losing out on being the biggest.

This is more or less what happened last time. The leftist parties tried to prevent it by joining forces shortly before the election but the amount of leftist parties we have still meant that votes were somewhat splintered; that is (among other factors) how we ended up with another right-wing government after people clearly seemed to be done with over 10 years of right-wing Rutte politics.

I’d love to be able to vote for some fringe leftist party knowing I’ll not waste my vote

But in a way it will. Many of these fringe parties never have a chance to make it into the government and will forever be in the opposition, meaning their impact isn’t very big. The PVV started off like this as well and their leader, Geert Wilders, has only ever wanted to be the person shouting at stuff from the opposition side of the fence. Even now, when he has the biggest party, they had to come up with some wicked solution where he’s not the PM and not in the government itself. Instead, it’s a neutral PM with some ministers and everyone else is in the opposition and constantly criticising their own “government”. It’s ridiculous and so far they haven’t gotten much done.

In my opinion, a cutoff of 5% is a bit high but I also think that parties should have more than 1 seat to even make it into the chamber, otherwise it’ll turn into a mess real quick.

Just make sure not to take it too far if you do proportional voting. We have a system in the Netherlands that works like that but the result is that we now also have about 30 parties running for government, most of them being fairly pointless. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than the US shenanigans but you can also go too far.

The difference is that Europe should be more capable of resisting America. We’ll see if that actually happens but given how things have gone before when the EU went after American companies I don’t think they’ll budge easily.

I think some people never learn, especially the people that have their heads so far up their own asses that they only hear the FOX propaganda shouting.

It’d be funny if he called him “Winnie the pooh” when he meets him to explain himself :)

Seems logical imo. With the bigger companies working towards profits more and more over being the “family” companies they once were the workers need more power to push back. This maybe wasn’t needed as much 50 years back but nowadays the Amazons and Teslas of our world try to squeeze their workers for everything they can.