That's a bit cynical, I'm sure some corrupt politician's secretary's cousin's dog will receive a suspended sentence that is later overturned on appeal, and the prosecutor in the case summarily executed in February 2033.

Arbeit macht frei.

All get off scot-free, maybe one or two resign before 2028 to take jobs somewhere in the fascist grift circuit.

There’s nothing to be gained by flooding land, it will not prevent future floods or reduce the size or strength of them.

This is incorrect. Controlled flooding is used to mitigate the risk and effect of floods. This is especially common in the Netherlands, where designated areas - "uiterwaarden" - are periodically flooded as needed. These areas are typically used as pasture or for recreation under normal conditions.

Hundreds of Congresspeople were involved in a coup attempt in 2020.

None have faced any consequences whatsoever.

This clearly has emboldened the current administration to ramp up efforts to further undermine the already compromised and unfair elections.

Not "the worst," but also not anywhere close to the least worst, which are obviously European social-democracies, and even their efforts for the renewable transition and tackling income inequality are not that impressive. But I suppose capitalist European countries are less suitable of a subject for tankie memes.

There are a lot of things China does badly but not the ones you mentioned.

Okay, but the stat you linked confirms China's per capita emissions are pretty bad, more than double France's for example.

As for income inequality, I was looking at the World Bank data listed here. There might be a discrepancy due to difficulty in obtaining reliable data for China.

China has higher per capita CO2 emissions than Europe, despite a lower per capita economic output. While there has been significant investment in renewable energy recently, there is still a large amount of coal power and China has been slow to phase out fossil fuels.

In terms of income inequality by Gini coefficient, China is estimated to be in the higher 30s, substantially worse than Canada, Australia, Japan and almost every European country. China has a minimum income guarantee (unlike the USA for example), but it is very low by European standards. In terms of the number of US$ billionaires, China ranks second globally behind the US, though in terms of billionaires as share of the population does not rank as high.

Okay, but the profit margins of takeaway food and drinks really aren't that high. Commercial real estate is expensive, the logistics are much less efficient than supermarkets, and it's labour-intensive as well. There is no conspiracy to rip off ordinary folks, especially considering it's pretty easy to enter the food retail market.

In fact, takeaway is actually quite affordable in the US compared to rich European countries. The Big Max Index, for example, is about 40% higher in Norway and Switzerland.

Naloxone helps mitigate the effects of an overdose, it doesn't prevent overdoses (or at least isn't used for that purpose). An overdose is not always lethal.

The research suggests that the observed reduction in overdose deaths was not primarily due to increased use of naloxone.

Judge orders murderer to potentially stop murdering in some cases, murderer faces no charges

If people are too tired and don't have enough time to prepare stuff at home, then that's what they should be outraged about.

I just clock my 35 hours a week with 8+ weeks of paid vacation and have plenty of time left to prepare food at home and make snarky comments to Americans online about how they should book a one-way ticket already.

When did the US education system desegregate? School districts, school boards... these are all vehicles for continued segregation and serve no other purpose.

A logged-out-only experience it is, then.

Merely gambling not enough? Now you can gamble while gambling on whether or not your casino still exists tomorrow and/or can cash out your chips.

There are limits, but they are still too large and preparing an ERC grant application takes weeks of fulltime work.

I think you can ethically, if not bureaucratically, toss all the grant applications in the garbage and just look at the resumes and publication records, and you'd probably get better results in terms of ensuring the best scientists obtain funding.

It’s so obviously a stupid system.

How is that "obvious" when proportional systems are so utterly dominant when it comes to the most prosperous societies?

This rise is attributable, in part, to the ease of writing applications with artificial-intelligence tools.

This is definitely one of the better uses of AI. Billions are wasted every year on utterly pointless grant application writing. I have long been in favour of laws severely restricting the maximum length of scientific grant applications, but now technology has made that unnecessary. In many cases scientists simply chose not to apply for grants they might have a chance of getting because the process is so cumbersome and bureaucratic, now they can just have an LLM write it so they can get back to their actual job.

The problem in Israel is not that it has a proportional system, but that Palestinians in the occupied territories have no voting rights. If they did, a two-state solution would have come out of the Knesset a long time ago.

A lot of oppression can happen when a party has to to make deal with radical nutjobs to form a coalition.

Yes, that can happen, but it's still not as bad as having a single party of radical nutjobs not having to compromise.

Close your spreadsheet and look at how proportional representation works in the real world.

That's a good suggestion, I advise you to follow it. Take any quality-of-life ranking and look at what kind of political system they have.

In the Social Progress Index, we find the first non-proportional democracy, Ireland, on 8th place. But even Ireland has a semi-proportional system with multi-member districts. The first two-party system is in 13th place, Australia, which uses ranked-choice voting.

In the inequality-adjusted HDI, the first non-proportional is again Ireland in 9th place, with Australia, the UK and Canada from 12th place.

You could also have a look at indices for democracy and rule of law. The V-Dem Democracy has Ireland on 5th place and France (which uses a two-round system) on 9th.