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You can learn more about FUTO at https://futo.org/ This video was recorded on March 15, 2025 at FUTO's Don't Be Evil Conference

A European Citizen's Initiative is a formal process for the European Commission to debate/discuss a proposition by citizens that has managed to collect 1 million signatures from European citizens within a year. I think the tides are turning and it might be good to ride the wave that the orange man on the other side of the world has started.

We could start an initiative to ask the EU governmental bodies to use software that is guaranteed to be European. Probably it would be better to ask them to use opensource only and no proprietary software. A citizen's call for digital sovereignty could be understandable and even get business backing because there are even people on LinkedIn calling for the same.

What do you think?

More than one million Europeans have called on the EU to ban "conversion"' practices targeting LGBTQ people, the results of a petition showed Friday. Story by August Hakansson.

Keep up the momentum and sign for Stop Killing Games. Did you know that you can watch the European commission stream? Put some eyeballs on these initiatives when they're in session. Make the politicians aware that the people are watching!

Just under 3000-4000 people are required per country in Lithuania, Latvia, Malta and Luxembourg. Come on now... that's a small town and in some places even just a village. Are there really that few gamers in those countries?

Thanks to everybody who responded to my last thread asking how the system works. I went in thinking Australia had Winner Takes All (WTA) or First Past The Post (FPTP) for parliamentary elections of the House of Representatives, but found out it does in fact have preferential voting.

As a European living in a democracy with lower houses / parliaments / houses of representatives that have proportional representation (multiple parties in parliament forcing requiring coalitions) allowing only a single tick per list on the ballot, it's a little strange to see the choice in Australia seemingly come down to two political parties. There are multiple groups here fighting for preferential voting and you guys have it yet look like the UK or the US when considering voting outcomes.

Why doesn't preferential voting not lead to plurality in Australia and more choice? Have there been efforts to change the system in such a way that plurality can be achieved?

Thank you for your insights! This is quite interesting to me.

Y'all have first past the post / winner takes all, don't you? There was a vote recently and "labor" won from what I'm reading?

Labor, coalition, independents, etc. what kinds of parties are these? I thought Albanese was a "cunt" yet his party seems to have won again? What's going on?

Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?

AI is everywhere, it's the first technology to do the thinking for us, so what effects does it have on us? In this episode we take a look at how AI have could diminish our mental abilities without us knowing.

Show notes: docs.google.com/document/d/1fifRcyUFtlKNvd8sVH_IU2iE1bpgxhDWqVVFcGmVyYY/edit?usp=drivesdk

Watch or listen to ColdFusion on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1YEwCKoRz8fEDqheXB6UJ1

ColdFusion Music:

youtube.com/channel/UCGkpFfEMF0eMJlh9xXj2lMw
burnwater.bandcamp.com

Found in the article How will European consumers react to US tariffs? where they detail sentiment of Europeans towards US products:

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The article reports on sentiment of European toward US products

Overall, around 44% of respondents expressed a willingness to shift their spending away from US products, irrespective of the tariff rate and primarily due to a preference to switch away

A little ironic that the ECB uses a link to a US tech giant in such an article.

Upside is that the form has a final section "Is there any other feedback you would like to give us?" Maybe we should suggest they use Nextcloud or an opensource solution for their surveys.

There are so many meme templates from USAian media, but there are lots of European movies, series, and art and it's not being used. The closest I found was https://framamemes.org/ but it's just USAian memes redrawn.

It's great that Pierre lost and he probably lost to someone better, but were there better candidates for the common people on the ballot? How are liberals as a whole for Canada? Would another party have been better - greens for example?

I've seen a community about better vote counting system, so it seems Canada is still a first past the post country?

Some of those channels have videos complaining quite loudly about youtube, some are tech channels that do talk about the fediverse sometimes, some aren't even aware of the fediverse but might be interested.

It might be worth drafting a message that explains that it won't cost them anything to just sign up to an instance mirror their videos to peertube as a first step. For more technical channels, they can setup their own peertube instance and mirror there - together or alone.

There might be more incentives, but that's for the community to discuss. What do you think?