That is a classic. Personally, for the Netherlands, I was thinking some Doe Maar.

Or possibly Little Green Bag, but I’m guessing that doesn’t fit the “relatively unknown outside the Netherlands” criterion, nor is it in Dutch.

There’s definitely the bureau kredietregistratie in the Netherlands.

As far as I know you can’t “freeze” it like you describe, though you can request information on what is stored about you and who accessed it. It also costs money to run a check, and credit history doesn’t go back more than five years, doesn’t include your mortgage unless you missed paying that for longer than three months, and doesn’t include debts less than €250.

Edit: also just checked, but the information is only shared with parties that share credit history with the BKR. I think that means that it’s basically frozen by default, i.e. only parties that are actually about to do business with you can access it, but I’m not entirely sure. They’ll at least have to do some kind of business, i.e. not be a generic data broker.

That’s some fine future Dutch soil you got there.

Their main point is that they want to enable true pan-European parties 😅

Yeah, which seems a bit of a hassle, given that there’s only two possible opinions one could have on any given matter. Don’t know why they bother with more than two parties, really.

The Netherlands has Stemwijzer and Kieskompas. Of course, we already voted on Wednesday.

In the Netherlands, the parties PvdA and GroenLinks have started working together very closely, participating in elections with combined lists. They did the same for the EP elections, but had the challenge that PvdA was part of S&D, whereas GroenLinks was part of the Greens.

They went for the same solution: half the list (the PvdA part) will join S&D, and half (the GroenLinks part) will join the Greens. They will align their votes, though.

The way I interpret that, is that it’ll be easier to influence the Greens (since it’s a smaller group and thus GroenLinks is a larger part of it), but if the S&D position can be swayed, it’ll have more effect. And in general, both parties presumably aren’t that far from their group’s stances anyway.

Polls predicted both to be at around 8 seats. Exit polls have PVV at 7, Labour-Greens at 8, with a margin of error of 1. So pretty much what was expected.

Whether one or the other is larger is mostly irrelevant, as that only pertains to the Dutch share of seats in the European Parliament - there are way more seats to be assigned, and there will not be an absolute majority for anyone anyway.

Unfortunately I have the same symptoms you do… On GNOME.

It doesn’t always happen, but every now and then the system will get into a state that suspend doesn’t work.

It means that on systems with apps installed written with libadwaita, will also have libadwaita installed, rather than just GTK. But those apps will look like GNOME apps, which might look out of place on e.g. a Windows or Xfce desktop.

Haha I appreciate the candor!

Seems like a bit of an overreaction. From what I can see, it’s mostly that Ubuntu don’t seem confident enough to ship this without more rigorous testing (i.e. they think it might introduce other/more severe bugs), so they want resume doing that testing before shipping it. Doesn’t really seem harmful to anyone that didn’t explicitly choose to use Ubuntu.

I think usually something like that is intended to as a counterweight, to prevent power from centralising.

However, to prevent the scales from tipping too badly, a sufficient majority in parliament can override the veto, and I believe the party that’s pushing this (Georgian Dream) has enough seats to be able to do this.

(Caveat: I’m not Georgian, so this is just based on somewhat above average interest in politics and in the country, following my local news.)

There’s a lot in there that’ll be hard to achieve (my analysis in Dutch), a bunch of things that were mostly expected and aren’t great, and of course a couple of good things too.

Especially considering that the party leaders won’t be part of the government, I wonder how long it’s going to last. It’ll be hard for them to meet the party leaders’ demands, and there are also bound to be things that aren’t specified in the deal that’ll cause friction.

Absolutely, which is why as democracy-loving citizens (which honestly everyone should be), people should strongly protest anything that damages it - in a democratic way, as long as that’s possible. And I don’t think Slovakia has regressed so badly yet that there are no democratic avenues of resistance anymore.

Even if he did not have support of a big part of the population, the point of democracy is to be able to get rid of them without violence.

Be careful reaching for the explanation that best matches your preconceived notions though. There are plenty of normal enemies too, and unfortunately, just one of them needs to be crazy enough to do this.

But Fico is from that party, no? Attacking journalists and what not isn’t good, but neither is shooting a politician. Especially if you’re supposedly on the side that wants to protect democracy.

Same. I don’t see why people need to argue about it or make a conscious decision about it anyway.

(My distro determined it was ready to use a while ago, so I’ve been switched over for a long time now. Indeed it’s working fine, and I think I hardly even notice the difference.)

I don’t get the irony? EU doesn’t want European companies to fall over if they’re able to produce solar panels at a similar price point and quality as their Chinese competitors, so it blocks foreign subsidies that might have that effect. Seems perfectly consistent to me?