Wait, you didn't need a passport before, did you? Since it was still EU travel, you could get in with just a national ID, or am I wrong?

Romania has previously jumped into a war, only to change sides later. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up taking the bait before the upcoming presidential elections. From what I've heard, the far right candidate that's left in the race is betting that he will get the votes of everyone that voted for Calin Georgescu. His platform? Being a boot licker for Trump.

Troubling times for the Balkans.

It was just announced that the EU is pausing sustainability requirements on smaller business (< 500 employees) for 2 years. This stems from fears related to the trade war, as they want to keep smaller businesses competitive. Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure that this won't be great for the environment.

For notes, I have moved to Joplin with the option to synchronize my data using a WebDAV server. It works really well, and it has both a mobile and desktop app. If you're interested in developing your project, maybe you can have a look at the options this provides. For example, I really like the ability to separate notes between groups, assign tags, create drawings, and the possibility to use Markdown.

Good luck with your projects! To mirror @enemenemu's suggestion, I would also look into collaborating with the people trying to push the EU Docs alternative. Not sure if that will work, but it's worth a shot if you're interested :D

Thanks for the SherpaTTS suggestion. I really like the GLaDOS voice <3

I am not sure which phone you use, but are you able to set FUTO Voice as the default "Voice input" in the Android settings? I played around with a few apps, which show up. However, FUTO is not an option here :(

Thanks for the suggestion! I gave this a try, but it seems that it won't register any voice 🤔 However, it seems like it shows up in my settings, so it's a good sign. I'll try to get it to work :D

Thanks! I was actually looking at this, but I gave up because I couldn't really figure out how to get a multilingual model running through Obtainium. I'll try again :D

Mine's just one I got from a random kid name generator.

A bit off-topic: not sure why, but I keep seeing posts here on Lemmy lately about Romanian women pulling the short end of the stick in terms of gender equality. I hope I'm not offending in any way with this question, but is Romania sticking to the traditional gender roles?

Accurate user name

Ok, but there are laws involved here. In Romania, you can't be president if you are under 35 years old, or, among others, if you have a criminal record. The people that were stopped from running for president weren't barred because they went against the mainstream parties, but because they openly promoted personalities that were doing the equivalent of the Holocaust in Romania. This is punishable by law by up to 3 years in jail, and they're being actively investigated.

The lady in this post was previously denied her run in the summer of last year, and she kept quiet about it until now because they probably told her they won't pursue it further if she steps back. She took the deal, probably because she realises that she'd rather keep grifting on Facebook than spend 3 years in jail.

How can you have democracy if you let people vote for a person that says he will remove all political parties? There must be checks and balances that stop you at some point. Also, Romanian law prohibits candidates with ties to fascist or extremist ideologies from participating in elections. That's in the law, introduced by people that were democratically elected.

But lets be honest, it’s the not being hostile to Russia that did it. Can’t have that in a US colony where they plan to have the biggest base for their imperialist wars.

Sure, the US that is now serving up its allies on a silver platter to Putin? His friend Trump is going to revert sanctions any day now for that sweet oil. For power in the Middle East, maybe, but the EU is hopefully going to wake up soon and kick all American bases ASAP.

And who helped the openly fascists ukranian to power in 2014?

Firstly, the Euromaidan protests didn't get hundreds of thousands of people attending just because they got brainwashed by the EU/US. Allegedly, Russia attempted to do the same thing in Romania with Georgescu, and only a few hundred people showed up to protest the decision to take him off the ballot. People in Ukraine felt betrayed when Yanukovych wanted to reject EU and get closer with Russia, a country that has had 146% voter turnout during one of its recent elections. Arguably, maybe the EU is not the best, but its system is way more decentralized than Russia's, allowing better representation of its population and reducing the chance of corruption. At least we don't hear people that are criticizing the government "randomly" falling out of windows here...

Secondly, Poroshenko was openly fascist? Or whom exactly do you mean? If I'm not mistaken, Poroshenko assigned a Jewish person as his prime minister. Or you might be hinting at the Azov Brigade being integrated by him into the national army? What would you do when Russia starts invading your country, though? Either way, you might be right that it is in the benefit of the EU (and perhaps US) to have closer ties with Ukraine, but it goes both ways. Ukraine did not like what happened in Georgia, and wanted more security and pro-democracy allies. That does not mean that the EU made Ukraine into a Nazi puppet state to fight Russia.

Not sure if this helps much, but maybe you can reach a social security center in your county?

https://anes.gov.ro/asistenta-pentru-victime/centre-de-asistenta/

Also, maybe you can also get someone to help more here (sorry if not super helpful, I briefly read the translated versions of the websites):

https://www.eliberare.com/centrul-de-informare-si-asistenta/

https://armatasalvarii.ro/blog/2020/09/30/ce-sunt-centrele-de-asistenta-si-protectie-victimelor-traficului-de-persoane-si-ce-servicii-ofera/

Seeing that you have access to the internet, and no one checks what you post, maybe you can send a few emails when you have time off?

No, democracy is when you are intolerant with the intolerant. Maybe read up on what she says/does before commenting.

Fooyin is also a solid choice.

Oh, I don't know how I forgot about this. I have already signed it last year haha. Thanks for reminding me!

Well, what I'm thinking about is not too far from education. I am suggesting that we have independent fact-checkers, or at least tools that show all the angles of a certain issue (e.g., something like Ground News, but not owned by a for-profit organisation), paid by tax money. This should be incorporated in something like an API that Fediverse instances could tap into. Again, not governments deciding who is right or who is wrong, but citizen-backed initiatives that work for the people. There should be open source plugins that could be used by fedi instances to relay the fact-checking or other relevant information.

I am categorizing this as governmental regulation because the tax money is allocated by the government specifically for content "moderation". However, this doesn't mean that content should be removed from social media just because it talks about a topic (unless it is illegal), but people should at least have additional information available for free that they could research further. And no, I don't think the community notes employed by Meta and Twitter are enough, as we've seen how that went for the Americans in the last election.

Mate, I am not advocating here for the EU to break E2EE, nor support linking of your social media profile to a citizen number that can be used against you. Similarly, I do not wish for the EU to start generating its own propaganda machine to replace the US one.

I am merely stating that we should invest more in EU open source, promote more fact checking and open algorithms (or even banning them) for social media. What is happening with Twitter, Facebook and TikTok is not ok. We do not need social media to profile us and push content that a state or rich person deems necessary for their benefit. Aren't you on Lemmy specifically because of that?

Thank you for the information. I'll keep that in mind for the future! To be honest, I intended to find a petition on this topic and share that to incentivize some mobilization, but I could not find anything. This was the most recent article I could find on the topic, given my limited time to research. If you have a suggestion on an article, I would love to change it to that!

It's a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

Here is a quote from the actual "Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership" PDF:

Needed reforms

[...]

Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

[...]

They are engineering most of these situations that we've seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: "This is going to be great television" - the guy is not even hiding it.

On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won't abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of "theatrics" is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

It's truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.

Precisely. The only enemy that the US conservative party sees is China. Everyone else is a business partner that they must strong arm into favourable deals for the US.