“Hey! You bike is getting stolen!”

Is it true - yes. Is it helpful - to the owner, yes; to the thief, no. Is it inspiring - no, not really.

Okay, let’s stay silent.

It’s just a joke, don’t kill me.

Yeah. Democracy kinda forces lesser evil, no? Like you can’t find politician that has platform of any value to you, but everyone tells you to vote regardless, so you end up voting for whoever looks like a lesser evil.

Well, USA is quite dominant and their imperial politics have been permeating across the world for quite some time.

Europe should probably focus inwards and try to gain more independence from outside actors. EU can do it, mostly, it just doesn’t want to because milions of voters cannot outvote a lobbying company.

1. Yes
2. No

This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.

Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.

More importantly, college teaches you how to learn.

Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn. There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.

What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.

If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.

I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager. From the very beginning of my university years my goal was to become a specialist and never ever agree to any position that would require skills that I neither posses nor are passionate about. At which I largely succeeded. My chances of advancement are zero by choice and I hope I will manage to keep them this way.

What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case. I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.

Thank you for your story though - it was an interesting food for thought.

I have several mixed opinions on this.

University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).

Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.

A sentence I neither expected to see nor wanted to.

Like unholy shit, what the hell is going on with those people?

I would be more interested in EU-wide firewall that blocks all advertisements from outside. Just a little quality of life.

Being able to browse the web without being exposed to disturbing material without consent

Advertisements on the internet are very disturbing…

Except bots will be “verified 30-something human persons” quicker than the most tech-literate human manages to go through verification.

Adding to what Pommes_fur_dein_Balg said.

Political movement originally pushed for responsibility of social media platforms over content they show, when such content is moderated by them. For example if you subscribe to crackpot theorists rambling about secret vampire society controlling the world that’s on you, but if social media shows you this content without subscription or annotation that this is misinformation as “recommended”, that is on them and they should be penalized by the law.

But of course money wins over people and lobbyists managed to re-scope the idea into “systemic age checks”, pushing responsibility from companies onto consumers and topic from misinformation to protection of minors.

In the end one can either assume it’s a honest advertising agenda to show people more targeted ads (showing twice the amount of toys to kids) or you may form suspicions about why rich and powerful want to know who online is a minor after their precious island got busted.

I’ll be frank with you. As long as my customers are captive on either Apple or Google platforms I can’t do shit.

I second that. I was initially skeptical about switching to Linux Mint, but every game in my Steam library works perfectly the same as on Windows.

Problem is - if you look at how “World Powers” behave, do you really wanna live in such countries?

Which Europeans would just love to invade neighbors like Russia and USA?

Which Europeans would love to deregulate their countries in order to enrich elites like USA?

Or perhaps which Europeans would love to live under state surveillance while their country buys out foreign infrastructure like China?