I didn’t mean to say they have insightful thoughts, but instead that they’re smart in the way they position themselves publicly and politically. André Ventura in Portugal is a good example. He has a doctorate in Law, is clearly a smart individual despite often playing a part of almost “anti-intellectualism”. He could easily fit in the description of your typical academic intellectual while somehow managing to gather the support of those who hate academic intellectuals.

He grew politically within the main center right party - a fact which he uses to claim that he’s not actually far right - and eventually jumped out of it and created his own party, arguing that his old party was part of the “establishment” - which he claims to be against. In truth, he left his old party because he had reached his political ceiling - his more extreme views meant he wasn’t realistically ever going to attain the kind of influence he wanted within a center right party.

Now, he offers no insightful thoughts of course. He often contradicts himself, changes positions wildly depending on the crowd or on the weather, offers no viable solutions to any of the problems he points out. But he’s very good at jumping on any mistake made by the bigger parties and capitalizing on those. He often points out the mistakes that everyone can recognize, exaggerates smaller issues to paint the parties in power as incompetent and then follows up with the dumbest solutions you can think of. But that’s the thing - since he isn’t in power, his solutions don’t actually have to resist the test of being implemented, they just have to exist. He can act like he has the solution to everything.

Publicly, he often toes the line of what’s “acceptable” speech, so he can both appeal to his more extreme supporters but simultaneously paint the idea that he’s actually a reasonable guy who’s unfairly vilified by the media and “the left”. In truth, like Trump, he grew up in part precisely because of how much the media insisted on attacking him - while giving him exactly the attention he wanted. As a somewhat funny stat, the lowest rating his party has had amongst the public in the last few years was during the pandemic, when the media was so focused on talking about Covid that his party practically disappeared from the public eye for a few months. In the last election they’ve got a really good result, so now they’ve officially become a permanent problem. They now have to be treated like a “normal” party, whether people like it or not.

I’d argue Meloni is a good example in terms of political intelligence as well. She has been able to successfully paint herself as a sort of reasonable and pragmatic far right leader, unlike any of the previous Italian far right leaders, which is a big part of her success. She claims to be pro-EU and is openly anti-Russia - contrary to her predecessors - which might seem like minor positions but have actually been very important for her to paint herself as a sort of far right leader that’s not that far right that she can’t work together with other European leaders. This is also important for many Italians since many see the EU favorably and a far right leader which is at least able to cooperate with the EU ensures that Italy can keep getting EU financing and can keep its influence within the Union. In practice, she represents the same ideas previous far right Italian leaders represented, but she tossed out many of their crazier positions in order to appear moderate by comparison.

Weirdest political take I’ve ever had, but European far right leaders aren’t “dollar store Trumps”. Unfortunately, they’re often fairly smart individuals, with great academic records and very well regarded in their areas of expertise. Very unlike Trump. Which makes them all the more dangerous, because they don’t make the same mistakes that Trump somehow gets away with on the regular: no real life actions that go against their purported ideals (cheating or banging pornstars, for example), no blatant involvement in corruption or financial crimes either. Even in the way they speak, they’re often vague enough in their (authoritarian) statements that they can still claim to hold democratic ideals and get away with it.

I don’t think the UK is a great example of European politics, simply because UK politics is more akin to US politics than to any other European country’s politics. Despite the UK technically being a multi party system, in practice it often acts like a two party system.

Outside of the UK, there’s many European countries - let’s say, as an example, Portugal, Spain and France - which have historically been governed by moderate parties, either on the center right or the center left (left and far left respectively on the American political compass), which have fundamentally failed to solve the respective country’s problems.

Portugal, for example, has been ruled by its Socialist Party for most of its democratic existence. Despite that, it’s currently dealing with chaos in its healthcare system. There’s a general lack of doctors, hours long emergency wait times, years long surgery waiting lines, all because of a fundamental failure in creating a good way of financing the healthcare system. Governments in Portugal, both socialist and center right ones, have until recently mostly agreed on the idea that healthcare should be free. But Portugal has never been very successful economically - which means supporting a free healthcare service has always been way more expensive than the country could financially handle. For a long time the problem of financing the healthcare system was simply postponed. But now it’s reached a point where many of its hospitals are in debt, it’s been unable to give any raises to any of its staff for years, these staff have been leaving in droves for the private sector, it’s been incapable of financing many medical acts, in many hospitals even basic maintenance has been indefinitely postponed, etc.

While I still fundamentally agree with you that people are fools to trust the far right, I do understand why there’s such a big distrust in traditional moderate parties, given how much they’ve recently fucked up in dealing with many of the core issues in our countries - regardless of whether they’re on the left or on the moderate right.

I have a personal pet peeve with that. The expression “As a European” is almost always followed by something that’s entirely false or only concerns the commenter’s specific country or region. For some reason, people assume that things that are often specific to their country are “European”.

Just today I saw someone saying “us Europeans have to take a first aid course before getting a driver’s license”. WTF? I wish that was true. It’s certainly not true for my country. I’m not even sure that’s true for more than half of European countries. From a quick google search it seems that’s only a thing in maybe Germany, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland? There’s some twenty other European countries where that might not be a thing at all.

Like I said, even internet Europeans have the weird habit of assuming things specific to their country are some shared European value, when it’s almost always not the case.

This part

It beggars belief that the same people clowning on the US and UK would then turn around and say to themselves “yes, but it will be different for us, it will work for us, our situation really is different, you don’t understand”.

and this one

Before you click reply, just consider that you guys deserve to get fucking dunked on, because you guys spent decades laughing at other countries for doing this shit just to say “hmmm… but what if sticking the fork in the electrical socket works out for me?”

both imply the people laughing at other countries are the same group willing to “stick the fork in the electrical socket”. They aren’t.

This comment shows a large misunderstanding of european culture, policits, everything really. And I mean this with no offense, but there’s no nice way to say it.

The people who were - and still are - clowning on Americans for their politics are a different group than the people currently voting far right. You’re not dunking on the people you think you are. It’s tragically funny in a way because internet active and mostly left leaning circles still spend a lot of their time dunking on american politics while failing to see the growing trend of far right acceptance in Europe.

Europeans also aren’t a singular entity. The comparison of the US vs Europe is almost always bad IMO, as much as people of the internet love to make it - both americans and europeans alike - because the differences between two neighboring european countries are often larger than those between the two most culturally different US states. The country next over is so radically different to mine in terms of politics, economic choices, language, culture, that the only thing making us both “European” is a similar looking ID card and similar looking road signs. When I cross the border and order a coffee they look at me strange and then serve me what I would expect to get at an american coffee shop.

Europe is facing some of the same problems of the US politically speaking. Summing it up to “getting one big wave of immigration” is naive to say the least. There’s a growing discontent with traditional and more moderate parties, which have fundamentally failed to solve what many people see as big issues in their lives. There’s a housing crisis, an ever increasing wealth gap - which even left leaning socialist european parties, which were in power for decades in countries such as mine, have done next to nothing to prevent. There’s a perceived decrease in security - which is real in some places, while false in others but amplified by social media -, a bunch of high profile corruption cases all throughout Europe - often associated with high ranking members in more moderate parties. In short, there’s an ever increasing number of real issues which traditional parties have fundamentally failed to solve. Some because they’re genuinely complex issues, others because of sheer incompetence.

The media in Europe has spent the last few years treating far right parties the same way the media in the US initially treated Trump - painting them and their followers as crazy people which should be ridiculed and often pushing aside whatever issue they pushed as their political flag. The problem is that far right parties in Europe often pick very real problems as their political flags - such as corruption in the case of my country. They offer no actual solutions to the problems, of course, but the attitude of the media helps them paint the idea that the media and traditional parties are aligned in protecting corrupt individuals and that the only way to tackle the problem is to vote for extreme parties. Whatever the “main” political flag is varies from country to country, but the logic is always the same: Problem exists -> problem is pushed aside by media and traditional parties for whatever reason -> far right party picks up problem as their political flag even though they offer no solutions -> people vote for far right party after years of seeing problem be apparently ignored.

The last part on healthcare makes little sense as well. Public or partly public health services are culturally ingrained in a lot of European countries and many of the far right parties have been very outspoken about defending these services - not because they like their existence I’m sure, but because these healthcare systems are too popular to openly attack. A common attribute in a lot of European far right parties is that though they often claim to despise “the left” and make big claims about socialism having destroyed everything and etc, they’ll quickly incorporate any left leaning measure they perceive as popular - often defending measures which are so far left that you won’t even find them in the political plans of far left parties. Far right parties in Europe will incorporate anything they see as popular in their political plans - which they then use as a promotion point, arguing that they are “above” the left and right divide, instead focusing on whatever is “better for the country”.

Add to all of this a fundamental failure in left wing and moderate right wing parties to address many of these issues, even while being in power for decades in the came of some European countries, and the constant attempts by these same parties to silence anyone who so much as mentions hot topics like immigration - often by labeling them as racists, fascists, etc and what you get is a growing distrust in these parties.

And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.

What specifically isn’t working? I’ve got Jellyfin running on Docker with transcoding from a Nvidia GPU.

I pretty much followed the documentation here: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/nvidia. I can share my docker-compose for that specific use case if you’d like.

I think those miniPC CPUs do a good job transcoding from what I’ve read, the N95 and N100. I already had older hardware set up when I added Jellyfin so I got a cheap nvidia Quadro P400 for the transcoding. If you’re setting up a new system though, I’d guess a Intel iGPU would be more than enough.

I’ve looked at https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding before for transcoding comparisons.

It says it’s been updated 12 years ago apparently.

I’d never heard of GL TRON but I just installed it out of curiosity and it does seem to run fine. Android 13.

I get what you mean. My pet peeve is more with “real life” people. I don’t spend that much time on Lemmy anymore because, well, in a lot of ways it’s a lot like the worst parts of Reddit. And, in general, I’ve started to notice that “internet opinions” hardly ever represent what I see when I talk to real life people. So I tend to not care much about anything coming out of Lemmy, Reddit, Twitter, etc, as I find it’s often the loud very tiny minority.

But I have the habit of reading opinion pieces on a couple of national newspapers, and I’ve noticed the “you’re an anti-semite if you disagree with me” pattern a lot. Most opinion pieces by usually left leaning political writers have been more level headed than I actually expected them to be - in the sense that there’s a couple of them who usually hold far more extreme positions on pretty much everything else and have been surprisingly “center” on this issue. Whereas on the right, a few people who I would say are usually fairly moderate and level headed have gone hard on the “the left actually hates jews, they don’t care about civilians” trope. And it’s very confusing to me because I have yet to find any actual left leaning person who’s any relevant in my country’s political scene actively sharing that discourse. So it all feels like baseless deflection. It was the kind of behavior I expected out of Reddit - it’s been the case for years I feel that in most bigger subreddits any critique of Israel’s government would immediately make you an honorary anti-semite. Though that seems to have changed a bit after we entered the “Bibi is trying to turn Israel into a dictatorship” arc and he’s not seen as the savior of Israel anymore. But it weirds me out to see these talking points coming out of real life political commentators who I would usually expect to be at least somewhat level headed. In general, with exceptions from the usual crazies and outside places like Twitter, I have yet to find the big leftist pro-Hamas discourse everyone seems to pretend is all around.

It’s why I happily soak up the downvotes all the time from the pro-Hamas crowd on here.

The second part of this sentence is likely why you’re downvoted. The whole “everyone who disagress with me is pro-Hamas / anti-semitic” is tiring, disingenuous, shoves aside any possible good faith discussion, and I’d argue it’s actually destructive as it muddies the definition of these terms. Anti-semite specifically is a term I don’t think people should be throwing around willy nilly, but by this point, 99% of the time I see it used in online discourse it describes someone who doesn’t think mass civilian bombings are OK, and maybe 1% actual anti-semites. It’s basically the right wing version of some “leftists” calling people fascists for having the slightest right of center opinion.

I usually either scroll past any mention of these or downvote and move on because it’s too tiring to devote time to people who, most of the time, are arguing in bad faith.

but they just waited for years

Israel destroys Gaza tower housing AP and Al Jazeera offices - 2021

Israel Bombs Hospital and UN Building - 2019

‘The world stands disgraced’ - Israeli shelling of school kills at least 15 - 2014

You can Google for “Israel bombs”, limit the results to whatever range of years you want, and you’ll find plenty of these. Throughout the years there’s been areas of Gaza that haven’t even had time to rebuild before they’re being bombed again. Searching for “UN condems Israel” is another great one. It’s almost funny how many times a country can be condemned for war crimes by the UN without any actual repercussions against that countries’ government, as long as they’re “allies”. Is this what you call “waiting for years”?

He was in the opensuse board of directors at some point I think. I knew him from his Youtube channel that talked about Linux and related topics, it was fairly popular in the Linux community for a while. I mostly watched it for Linux related news and technical opinions. A bit after he left that position, he started occasionally mentioning how now that he wasn’t representing opensuse anymore he could finally “speak freely”. That’s when the channel started taking a weird turn.

At first he started going on weird political tangents while doing the whole “I don’t talk about politics” thing. Some videos started popping up where he would attack some person or organization for what seemed to be mostly political reasons, but under the guise of his reasoning being purely technical.

Eventually, he just started sounding like someone who fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, or some weird far right cult. I stopped watching then, most of his videos by then had little technical interest anymore and they sounded more like someone who was losing their mind. I don’t know if it’s a mental issue or something, but his whole persona shifted dramatically into something… weird. I haven’t kept up in the mean time, though.

I recently played Metro Exodus and I felt like it was a drag at the beginning of the game instead. It was one of the few times in my life in which 1 hour into the game I was so bored I was googling whether the game would eventually get going and become fun. The story “twist” at the beginning felt extremely rushed and out of nowhere and it sort of put me off. But as the game got going I got very into it and I was the one “dragging” it by doing every secondary objective.

I’ve been playing Cities Skylines a lot - got pulled back in with all the talk about the new one - and also Going Under.

Going Under is one of those games I bought a while ago because it seemed fun, played for a bit, got my ass kicked more than what I was used to with roguelites and stopped for a while. I started playing it again recently and think it finally made sense to me. Looking back, I probably wasn’t paying much attention to the game the first time I tried it because I didn’t understand there was an indication for weapon damage on different weapons - which made weapon choice feel random - and I also didn’t understand how the mentor system worked - which is a big part of the strategy of the game. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it now, though.

I tried to play the original System Shock two/three years ago but gave up at a stage that felt very close to the end. I basically had a save at a weird spot, when I was low on ammo and anything else useful, right between two complicated rooms. I reloaded a ton of times and always died trying to go forwards or backwards before giving up.

Anyway, would you recommend System Shock Remaster for someone who likely almost completed the original one, gave up, but still liked it overall? Or is there something shockingly different about the original’s ending I’ll be missing?

On another note, I was checking out some of your sources so I could learn further and I noticed the source for flights per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/air-trips-per-capita) isn’t actually measuring flights per national individual, only flights inside a country, without accounting for who’s flying in them.

The figure was odd to me as I was wondering how portuguese people could be flying this much - you’d think we’re all making top dollar here haha.

It’s only natural that countries that mostly rely on tourism (such as Portugal where tourism is king over every other sector of the economy) have a big number of flights. Switzerland is a great example as well - it also has a high number of flights despite having a knowingly very good transport system. I’d hazard it’s mostly not the swiss contributing to that stat.

Continuing…

And at least for gas taxes there certainly is an alternative without large changes that is especially viable for non city-dwellers: electric cars. While still too expensive, they are much cheaper than even 5 years ago.

The cheapest electric car I know of in Portugal is the Dacia Spring for around 20000€ - 20X the average portuguese salary. A used Zoe goes for around 12000€. As comparison, the Dacia Spring costs 15800€ in France, only 9X the current minimum wage. Electric cars are talked about in Portugal as cars for the rich - though a lot of the “rich” upper crust of portuguese earners (the low top 15%) is only middle or low-middle class by the standards of neighboring countries (an interesting piece by a portuguese economist on that - https://www.publico.pt/2023/08/18/opiniao/opiniao/classe-media-politico-quiser-2060528).

The price of electric cars has ironically been increasing fast in Portugal. I remember the Spring was around 16000€ at launch.

The last point is entirely ridiculous: The Netherlands certainly isn’t known for cheap trains and france is the opposite of a train every 10 minutes (especially outside paris), with often large multi-hour gaps between TGV connections from many cities. Most people in other european countries fly much less than people in Portugal or Spain (…)

I mean… yes? That’s my whole point. As an anecdote, students in Portugal going on an interrail are usually told to fly to somewhere in the center of Europe and start it there, so they can do it cheaper and better, and then fly back. It’s natural that with better rail infrastructure, people don’t use flights as much. I wouldn’t get in a plane or car if I had the option. I didn’t take a drivers’ license while I lived in Porto. When I was forced to move out tough, I got one. Outside of that and Lisbon, it’s car trips mostly as it’s often the only option. I didn’t even know what a TGV was until I rode one in Italy. Check the timetables for an intercity train in Portugal - it manages to be simultaneously slow, with large time gaps and expensive prices when adjusted for salaries.

Flying is one of the few climate related things where the only foreseeable “solution” is a reduction.

I very much agree. We should work to stop most - if not almost all - flights inside Europe, or at least when the destinations are internal or between neighboring countries. But I also think we should remember that countries in the EU are at incredibly different stages in terms of economy and buying power.

The EU’s major plan for combined train infrastructure has been halted by France for around 10 years, because they desperately wanted to prevent english from being chosen as the main language for train conductors - though I’ve just checked and that decision has finally been approved in may, apparently (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12109253/Train-drivers-EU-countries-speak-English-new-rules-Brussels.html).

I applaud France’s new found enthusiasm for saving the planet, I wish they hadn’t spent the last few years boycotting EU decisions to prop up its train infrastructure.

People in poorer countries get to have “leisure” as well. These types of blanket decisions only seem to further the already existing and increasing anti EU sentiment in countries like mine and periphery countries in general.

(…) flying is very obviously a big-city thing. Inhabitants of big cities fly much more because (…)" etc…

… assuming there is an alternative. If there is no viable alternative infrastructure other than the airport, you get a flight.

In general poor people fly very little, which is also the case in Germany (…)

I already addressed this. Quote: “The poorest are already not travelling, sure, but making travelling even more expensive is going to stop a whole lot more people from doing it.”

Making prices higher naturally incentivizes other transports, when those exist. If flight prices increase by much I’ll just… mostly stop going anywhere honestly. Ironically, I’m not “poor” by portuguese standards. I just earn around the average portuguese salary - which is below minimum wage in all neighboring countries. Do only the poorest of the poorest count?

Portugal is itself mostly responsible for its transportation network and (…)

It is, in part, if we ignore European obligations often forcing our hand. It should still not be France mandating minimum prices across all of Europe, which is what the article we’re all talking about mentions.

Trains (and transport infrastructure in general) are actually one of those cases where smaller countries get shafted - not on purpose, but by the sheer size of the country and their economy - mostly because of having less budget to work with. We’re often paying outside companies to build our train infrastructure and the trains themselves, paying their prices adjusted for their salaries and costs - which ends up ridiculous for us. That doesn’t happen with roads, which was why roads were often the focus of large infrastructure spending in Portugal - we could do it with national companies paying national (very low) salaries - so costs were fairly low in comparison to train infrastructure. And those investments mostly happened 20/30 years ago, when trains weren’t really all that popular. Since then we’ve mostly made on investments on anything really.

A great example is the - supposedly - soon to be portuguese TGV. The government has already basically admitted that the construction costs for the whole thing will be large enough that it’ll be impossible for the state to cover it, so it’ll mostly end up being done with public - private partnerships. The arrangement will likely involve private companies assisting the state in paying for the whole thing, in exchange of the state having to pay a fee for around 50 years for every train that crosses certain parts of the line. The state will then pass on that cost to train operators - TL:DR, tickets will probably be very expensive for the first 50 or so years to account for that.

While just looking at the cp website it seems that prices are pretty low compared to germany or france. Similarly for hostels it seems porto and lissabon are cheaper than many less touristy cites like lyon, toulouse, cologne, genoa, … right now.

Prices for trains are only “cheap” if you look exclusively to suburban trains which only cover territory around Porto and Lisbon. Look at intercity or regional trains and the prices suddenly get much higher. And that’s without adjusting for salaries. Only 15% of portuguese make the equivalent of the French minimum wage (post-EDIT - actually even less, I didn’t know the minimum wage in France had increased). If you look at stats for young people alone, only 3% make over that (https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/fact-check/apenas-3-dos-jovens-em-portugal-ganham-mais-de-1600-euros-por-mes). Account for the salary difference (even without counting taxes) and portuguese transport prices become much less friendly.

I just can’t imagine it being cheaper to fly outside of portugal for vacations based on those prices.

It is. I’m not going the extra length to prove it to you considering I’ve spent my life min maxing for prices every vacation I took, but if you want compare going from Porto to Lisbon, staying in Lisbon and returning for a weekend in october, for example, versus Madrid, for example. You can do the same for a lot of smaller european cities. It’s ironic in a way, but I hardly know Lisbon.