The funniest part is that in one of his dialogue trees, he reveals that he’s never actually been to the Semenine islands and his whole understanding of Semenese culture is based on stuff he’s read and heard on the radio. He legitimately has no real understanding of the culture he presents as superior, and no place in it.

Sure, but my whole point was that you can’t exactly expect defederation to impact their culture in any meaningful way considering being completely defederated was the status quo.

I highly doubt there’s much more migration than before. Hexbear existed as a standalone site with no federation for years before the reddit apiocalypse caused the mass migration to Lemmy.

Personally, the game I run the most is Shadowrun. Managed to transition my DnD group to Pathfinder 2e and it’s great. Pathfinder is DnD but so much better.

"I’m another day older and deeper in debt.’

https://youtu.be/E5VMZqgVzRo

I knew exactly what song that’d go to, clicked on it anyway, was not disappointed. Love that song.

Works for floors!

Yup, absolutely. We have 2 posts in the two rooms we spend the most time in for exactly this reason.

My younger cat needed a lot of convincing to use only the scratching post. Every time I saw her scratching the couch, I’d pick her up and put her in front of the scratching post. Took a few weeks, but we got there. She hasn’t scratched the couch in ~2 years now.

I see you have a scratching post. Excellent! Number one mistake new cat owners make is not having somewhere for the cat to scratch (it’s a physiological need for them), then they get annoyed when the cat scratches their furniture.

And privately owned firms are extremely hierarchical.

I’d say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.

18, like the rest of Europe.

Like most things law-related, it’s more about enforcement than anything else. Things dramatically improved while our anti-corruption force was under the control of Laura Kovesi. She kicked some serious ass. Now things are treading water a bit, but Romania is not quite the kleptocratic corruptofest it was in the 90s. There’s always improvements to be made ofc.

If they get into an accident, or it’s a spot check, or something like that they get breathalized.

Yup, exactly. Strictly 0.0. There are cases where people have lost their licenses after having one of those little chocolates with the rum-flavored fillings. This was a reaction to a huge wave of deaths due to DUIs.

Cheaper? Maybe. Easier? No, not really. Ion Popescu from Bumfuck, Nowhere doesn’t have the DNA breathing down his neck, watching for any signs of living outside his means and any unusual bank account activity.

EDIT: To be clear, I’m not saying corruption doesn’t happen. It does. I’m just saying it’s not automatically much worse than juries.

There’s also the fact that appealing a judgement goes to more judges, always different than ones who have seen the case. Basically:

1st judgement -> 1 judge

1st appeal -> 2 different judges (must be unanimous)

2nd appeal -> 3 different judges (must be unanimous)

This makes corruption less common, as getting 6 different judges to all risk their career for a bribe is unlikely.

I’m not going to claim this system is perfect. There are issues with the fact that there is no mechanism for preventing enforcement of an unjust law. If it’s on the books and it’s an open-shut case, the law will be applied no matter how unjust it is. The inverse is also true though: you can’t have unjust rulings that ignore laws the other direction, for example jury nullification of the murder of a black person (used to happen all the time in the US).

Like most things, it’s a tradeoff. Some things are better, some are worse.

Did my comment need a /s on it?

Probably. Poe’s law becomes firmer every day as vocal crazies become more and more outspoken.

Fun fact about our legal system: we don’t do jury trials. The evidence and arguments are heard by the judge, who decides both guilty/not guilty and the sentence.

Sounds like he’s still stuck in the 90s. The police used to be corrupt as all hell, but things have slowly improved. Most would probably take a kickback for something very minor, like drinking a beer in a park, but there’s too many eyes on them for anything more major.

Just 2 months ago a guy I know came in from Italy, but didn’t realize Romania has a zero tolerance policy on drunk driving. He had a single glass of wine and was driving. Police stopped him, asked if he’d been drinking, he said yes. Once he realized how much shit he was in, he tried to bribe them. They added that to the charges. He’s now banned from driving in Romania (he had to get a pair of friends from Italy to come pick up his car), but they were nice enough to not cancel his driving license completely.