Seen from Europe (Verhoeven is Dutch), this is completely deranged.

Don't look!

I am more than forty y.o. and I know the story, I've been there. The story isn't that Europe are freeriders, but that the USA kneecapped any attempt at European strength, for example by using their special relationship with the UK to veto every European defense agreement outside of NATO, because they wanted the EU to always be dependent on the USA.

The current push is also a pure extorsion racket, as provent by the violent threats the US is making against the EU for the crime of rebuilding their continental security with European weapons: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/02/pentagon-...

proving once and for all the the US isn't really pushing for "Europe taking taking charge of their own security" and that you are a liar and a gaslighter.

>after 9/11 and the, shall we say, tepid enthusiasm that the rest of NATO (absent maybe Great Britain) had with supporting the US

See? What can I answer except "Fuck you, fucking asshole".

Sorry to have not sent even more of our soldiers to die into a war that... you now think were very bad mistake, perpetual wars that shouldn't have happened... We tried to tell you and got "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" as an answer. And then you still sent soldiers, and now you say they never mattered.

Why are you surprised we don't want to follow your lead at all now? We should help you in the war with Iran that you won, you need our boats but you don't need them - which is it?

And you, has it crossed your mind that Putin and his supporters are lying?

Fact: Michael Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador.

Fact: Flynn lied about the content of his call. Not to journalists, but to FBI agents.

Fact: Trump dismissed Comey to stop the investigations around Flynn. He said it openly, on camera.

Fact: Trump pardoned Flynn.

Fact: Trump is pushing for the prosecution of Comey - a case so weak it has already been rejected before going to trial.

Fact: FBI agents have been demoted and punished for nothing else than working on the Russian dossier. Including respected career agents currently working on e.g. Iranian operations in the USA. Their only crime has been to be assigned to the Russian dossier, something they didn't choose.

You absolutely don't need the Steele dossier to see something's wrong - except to deflect from the obvious.

When he parrots the same ideas down to the exact same words in the exact same order, what doubt is there?

The current US government (and the millions who voted them in power despite their clear fascistic tendencies) made perfectly clear to the rest of the world that the USA is friends with nobody: we are all supposed to be either enemies or vassals.

You can't have Vance come to Europe and insult all of them and expect us to be friends with you.

Which your proposal to abolish the filibuster further proves: it would make governing even more a "winner-takes-all" game. Or ranked choice voting: you can't even stop Republicans from gerrymandering. (And no, gerrymandering is not done by "both sides". California did it as reprisal and put provisions to get back to a fair system when Republicans stop gerrymandering. And gerrymandering is the official strategy of the GOP from bottom to top.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/04/artemis-moon-lau...

You are right that it is an engineering compromise. Higher frequencies mean a greater acceleration of the balance wheel. The inertia of the balance wheel is itself a compromise with the strength of the main spring. You want to have a large oscillation amplitude, but also that the watch can self-start, and not too much pressure on the escapement's contact points.

5 Hz is, surprisingly, a big engineering gap especially with regards to lubrication: only dry lubricants work, and it was figured out (at scale) only in 1969 by Zenith with their "El Primero" movement (which is still in production and is a major milestone in watchmaking for many reasons, on top of having a crazy history).

But when Rolex decided to use El Primero movements in their second version of the Cosmograph Daytona, they reverted it back to 4 Hz to avoid having to retrain all the watchmakers in their vast service network.

https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2026/article/les-usa-detourne...

The US is not a reliable weapon supplier anymore. Contracts don't mean anything anymore.

No, it is strong evidence that I can hear the very noisy xenophobic propaganda and whistle.

Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.

It depends on how frequent and how in-depth you want the exams to be. How much knowledge can you test in an oral exam that would be similar to a two-hour written exam? (Especially when I remember my own experience where I would have to sketch ideas for 3/4th of the time alloted before spending the last 1/4th writing frenetically the answer I found _in extremis_).

If I were a teacher, my experience would be to sample the students. Maybe bias the sample towards students who give wrong answers, but then it could start either a good feedback loop ("I'll study because I don't want to be interrogated again in front of the class") or a bad feedback loop ("I am being picked on, it is getting worse than I can improve, I hate this and I give up")

Next steps are bone conduction microphones, smart glasses, earrings...

And the weeding out of anyone both honest and with social anxiety.

Nothing there makes sense at any level.

But people getting fired and electricity bills skyrocketing (as well as RAM etc.) are there right now.