Spyke

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French parliamentary election: Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) projected to win first round, beating the leftist NPF alliance and Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble

Gee, the title sure is sensationalist. Nothing has been 'won' yet. The actual percentage here don't matter, the system works using two rounds in each circonscription (subdiv of France which can elect 1 MP). What really matters now is who will call to vote for who. The NFP (Left Alliance) leaders said no vote for Far Right, and Macron (in spite of how much he shat on the left) called for a 'grand coalition against the RN' (RN being Far Right here).

And I'll repeat it as many times as it takes 34% IS FAR FROM 50% (The RN is unlikely to find allies, as all the traitors of the trad right wing party have already gone to them)

Edit: forgot to mention that not all votes have been counted yet, the big cities finishing up later, which will likely drive the NFP's score up and RN's down.

europe

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Trump Signs Order Imposing 10 Percent Baseline Reciprocal Tariffs, 20 Percent On Imports From EU.

20 percent on goods from the European Union, 25 percent on South Korean imports.

Bit higher than expected, but not wholly unexpected either.

34 percent on Chinese goods, 32 percent on Taiwanese imports

Oof. That will tank the tech manufacturing industry. GPU card price will shoot through the roof.

46 percent on Japanese products

Holy shit! What did Japan do to deserve freaking 50% tarrifs? I knew there was some bad blood in the 80s and 90s but is it still the case now?

I hope Nintendo stocked those Switch 2s everywhere ahead of time or it's gonna be rough.

world

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France's Macron dissolves parliament, calls new elections

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Well, it's a risky move. Especially since just tonight, Far Right won by a landslide in the EU Parliement elections, so it's likely the results will play against him.

Many of us (in the french subs) think it might be an attempt on his part to get far right into power through the parliment to show electors that all they spout is bull, and make them to suffer hard losses in the 2027 presidential elections.

Edit: some news drop and he apparently believes he can make big wins in this one. We'll see if this bet will pay off, but personally, I sincerly doubt it will ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

europe

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European Credit Card and digital euro is coming, end 2025

Last I heard about this, they did not fully commit on a singular technical solution yet. The closest I know being NGI Taler (FLOSS, created by a Swiss company, and plans a lauch in Euro this year), but it doesn't support offline payments yet, unlike what the digital euro's brochures say.

Hopefully this will be resolved, but I hear this is a very polarized subject since it would remove a lot of powers from the banks (by concentrating it around the ECB), and they are lobying heavily against it, and the right wing is listening.

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Performance Review [Mr. Lovenstein]

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Yeah, but the new guy's gonna be cheaper than the one with experience!

I mean, think about the next quarter benefits! Stop searching for stuff like 'reliability' or 'long term'. That doesn't mean anything to the shareholders who'll jump ship the next month.

(It's definitely an hyperbole, but it does raise a good point over hyper short-termism leading to mass layoffs for 'profitability'. The sick days are just the excuse needed to part the employes that will support their hyper toxic management structures from the ones who aren't 'team players')

world

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French parliamentary election: Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) projected to win first round, beating the leftist NPF alliance and Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble

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34% is already lower than what they polled (and it will go down more as cities' vote get counted). Though, you are right, the normalization of Far Right IS scary af. But it's not a recent thing in France, it started nearly two decades ago, but surged to an extreme during the past few years esp with:

  • Bolloré (our own personal Murdock) bought more and more media, fired the journalists, and put propagandist in their place.

  • Macron started taking Far Right's talking points (immigration), language ('national preference', which is a concept that makes no sense) and methods (just two days ago, his party made, published and propagated on social media a fake 'NUPES' (name of the last Left Alliance) website to calculate one's future pension based on their 'program'. As it turns out, the calculations were not based off their program at all and was nearly always defavorable to the person)

  • Macron, when asked about the surge of Far Right, had only one response: bUt WhAt aBoUt tHe LeFt? (And goes on and on to try and sell a 'both sides' to try and make himself more popular. Spoilers: it didn't work) It's also why it's refreshingly suprirsing to not hear him bash 'theLleft' tonight, and instead call on everyone to vote against Far Right.

games

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Forget the ‘big 3’ — it’s just big Steam

Nintendo’s unbeatable advantage will always be its first-party games, but the Switch 2 — a device rumored to be a fairly light improvement over its predecessor — doesn’t quite feel like it’ll be as culturally dominant as the Switch was in 2017.

That remains to be seen. Back in 2016-2017, every gaming media was skeptical that the Switch would be anywhere near as much of a success like the DS or the GameBoy had been, or if it was going to be another failure like the Wii U.

Why buy a game on PS5 when you can get it on Steam and have access to it on any number of devices?

That has been one of the arguments for PC gaming in a long time, but it never quite reached the console players' mindset. Not to mention that, despite its dominance in game distribution, Valve and the Steam brand are nowhere near as recognizable as any of the other 'big 3'. The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it's nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays. I can't see it take less than a decade for that mindset to start changing change and competitors and regulation to get interested, and even that's an optimistic estimate.

Still, it's good to hear the platform exlusivity walls are finally breaking down.

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Linux Foundation bands together Chromium browser makers in a “neutral space”

Stephen Shankland's report from 2020 notes a number of people suggesting that Chromium as a whole could be moved out of Google entirely and into an independent foundation, such as the Linux Foundation. That's not what is happening now, but it's another step toward larger organization outside of the web's dominant browser and advertising provider (though Google is still one of the supporters).

One can only hope this is the first step toward a larger trend. LF stewardship of the Chromium project wouldn't be perfect, but it's still much better than the current situation of it being controlled by one company, be it Google or whoever they'll forced to sell Chrome to.

games

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Civilization 7 being compared to Humankind is "probably the best compliment I ever got", says Amplitude boss

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It's reviewed poorly because it just came out and is missing a lot of features (read DLCs) and bug fixes the previous civs already have. That and there is no British civ yet (unless they've added them recently-ish).

Didn't play much of Humankind, but from what I've heard, it was a great concept, but it lacked a lot of polish and got a little overhyped when it came out as the 'Civilization killer'.

europe

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A European Citizens Initiative wants to introduce a Wealth Tax (and they need your help)

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On the contrary, I feel as though a tax like that can only be done at EU level rather than a national level if it wants to have any efficiancy. The ultra-rich are not bound by the same rules of territoriality as the rest of us, and would have no problem moving to another country in the EU if a local tax displeases them.

In fact, this has been a key argument put forward by right-wing politicians against high-wealth tax on a national level for quite some time, that they would flee the country the first chance they get. But by registering it at the EU level, the million/billionaires won't have anywhere to run if they still want to enjoy the benefits of being in the EU :)

europe

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EU rebukes France, Italy and others over excessive debt

Oh boy.

This timing is terrible for us in France. After seven years of Macron who made austerity measure after austerity measure and somehow made our budgetal deficit worse, I can guarentee you that everyone (the population) is sick of it and whoever gets elected in our current legislative will NOT go down the path of 'reduce public expenses to reduce debt' as it would be political suicide right now.

world

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Le Pen’s far right set for big win in first round of French election

(Here we go again)

First things first, shame on you Politico for showing outdated projection results. The actual outcome has been published now (after big cities' votes, including Paris, have been counted) and Far Right lost 5% (they're now polling at 29.2%), barely ahead of the Left Alliance (28%). That's both lower than the polls (which were giving her a whoping 37%), and their result in the last presidential elections.

Edit: source: https://www.resultats-elections.interieur.gouv.fr/legislatives2024/ensemble_geographique/index.html

Secondly, seat projections, right now are highly unstable due to our two turns system. RN (Far Right) might have some allies from the trad right wing parry who was utterly destroyed, but both the NFP (Left Alliance) and Macron's Renaissance* have said their candidates need to desist when they're third and Far Right is first to try to cumulate their votes.

*Macron's PM Gabriel Attal has, for the moment, said there might be exceptions to that rule for the candidates of the radical left party France Unbowed which they consider to be be 'too extreme' for their taste so we'll see.

(Also, slight reminder that Politico is a property of Alex Kreuger, the German equivalent of Rupert Mudrock. Don't expect full neutrality.)

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*Permanently Deleted*

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It's not about 'Google' vs 'the other search engines'. It's about transparency. You've probably read some news about how AI crawlers have been destroying infrastrucure and half the time does NOT declare themselves as crawlers in their UA.

Can confirm that nealy 90% (read hundreds of thousands) of daily visits to several of my websites are made by crawlers from datacenters and I HATE not knowing whose who. Because when I don't know, I block and report. Website owners already have enough between AI, Page Rankings, and Research Agencies who all exploit free infra for their own business.

Do I make exceptions for Search Engine crawlers? Yeah, I do. I've seen Google, Bing, and Mojeek, but weirdly enough, never Brave. Now I know why. And frankly, if they can't be bothered to be transparent about their crawlings, then I won't be bothered to make exceptions for them. They're freeloading just as much as the rest. If they act like shady chinese crawlers, then they have no right to go pikachu face when they're treated like one.