From the proposal I like birds way more - no issue with national associations and "birds cross borders beyond nations".

Erm... by this logic either: "Currie is French" or "Callas is American"

Also: you meant "Skłodowska"? :P

You see the issues here? ;)

They started with "we love open" and when became virtual monopoly they extort the position :/

yes, mastodon.social is big but there is more plurality. There is about 250k users on mastodon.social while whole fediverse is about 10 milion

On the other hand while tere is roughly 35 milion bluesky users there is only ~50k on non-blusky PDSes (https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses) so there's that…

Most of the Europeans know who the President of EC (so basically president in France or PM i other countries) is -- everyone hates beloved UvdL ;)

The same goes for comissioners - they mimic same roles as your government has but level up. Some positions may be more prominent (and names known), some less.

Then if you go level _DOWN_ to local authorities (regional, municipal) then people would most likely be clueless who-is-who-and-do-what.

Basically we live in dumbed-down world where people are aware of basically the only-single-strongest-figure (Presindent, PM) because… idiocracy…

Same could be said for . Quite often people are just generally clueless how things are administered/goverened ;)

Yeah, EU setup is absurdly convoluted but it's simply a result of the consensus that tires to balance difference sources of power (the people and the countries).

Ideally the whole EU population should just vote for MEPs in EU parliment, which the would form the government. But that would completely sidestep member states government which they won't ever agree to. And any even mention of reforminng the EU towards that is immediatelly shoot down because nationalists are screetching about soverignty (which at the same time complain that the EU is undemocratic)

So we have the setup with European Council (heads of governments) setting the agenda, Comission (presiden of which is selected by council and approved by parliment) that makes that into law and then Parliment and EU Council (not European council!) votes for it.

A coupld of infographics how that works:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240524STO...

https://static.cfr.org/sites/default/files/image/2022/03/-la...

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022...

I live in Spain now and over here we have Mercadona as a "low cost market" and they do basically the same thing - limited selection of mostly in-house brands.

At first I was stlightly annoyed by it but over time it turned out that it's kinda preferred way -- indeed I waste less time hunting for The Brand and just The Item I need. And most of the time quality is on pair (or better) while costing less…

Luckily on Android and Linux I can select custom icon sets that can have shapes…

Most distros can handle the annoying quirk of having older+newer version to run `pg_upgrade` but when using docker it's pure PITA to upgrade to newer (major) version :/