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Senators are elected by a college of locally elected people. Those locally elected people were elected, during various kinds of prior local elections, by direct universal suffrage (one adult citizen = one vote).

The title should probably specify “for a presidential election”. France uses an electoral college for its Sénat, it’s made of regional/departmental elected people.

While Russian companies and individuals are not authorized to sell Starlink, a gray market has emerged, fueled by the high demand from military forces and private buyers.

The Post reviewed four of the many Russian sites offering direct sales for the “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war. Most terminals are sold through Telegram and start their journey in the Moscow area, before being funneled to the front.

One site offers a terminal and connection fees starting at just above $1,000. Customer service is free, and each client receives recommendations “to minimize risks of blocking,” the page notes, with glowing video testimonials from soldiers.

“We have been using Starlink for about a month. No complaints, the speed is good,” one review said, showing a terminal covered in camouflage. “Technical support works great.”

“The internet is flying, the men are happy,” another said. “Gentlemen, I recommend!”

To activate a device, users need a foreign phone number, email address and bank account to pay the monthly subscription fee, prompting suppliers to seek out people willing to lend their identities. Users in “client support” Telegram chats say it is easy to buy and register Starlink kits abroad. Most are obtained in Europe and transported through the United Arab Emirates. One page warns not to activate the terminal in Russia.

One supplier advised that connections for devices bought in the European Union could be blocked after 90 days of usage, suggesting one solution is to register using Ukrainian details.

Hard to shut down

Starlink can both disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers and block areas from receiving a signal, a practice called “geofencing,” the Federal Communications Commission told a U.N. regulator this year.

One person familiar with Starlink said that the company is technically capable of identifying the location of active terminals based on their pings up to satellites, but that it can be challenging to discern the user in the “forward edge of the battle area,” where Ukrainian and Russian troops are operating.

Stacie Pettyjohn, defense program director for the Center for a New American Security, said the U.S. effort to curb Russia’s use “doesn’t seem like it’s been hugely effective,” partly because of the shifting front lines.

“Ukrainian forces are in Russia now. Where exactly are the front lines?” she said. “If there’s a line drawn as to where it works and where it doesn’t, you’re basically fixing the front lines where they are and preventing the Ukrainians from going on the offensive.”

Ukrainian troops, for their part, said they also had concerns over denying access in geographic regions because it may shut their own terminals down. As it is, the troops entering Russia as part of August’s incursion suddenly found their terminals not working because of the geographic restrictions.

Significantly, they soon found workarounds to get the Starlinks online again — probably the same methods Russians have deployed. Interrupting the software update process and tweaking GPS settings can get it working in Russia, said a Ukrainian drone pilot operating there.

There are other viable methods to control illegal terminals, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow and space security expert at the American Enterprise Institute. One possibility, he said, is for Kyiv and Washington to collect terminal IDs and provide them to SpaceX, with direction to deny access to anything else.

See the explanation in the source article https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/12/starlink-russia-ukraine-elon-musk/

It is pretty much what was answered to you, when it’s on the frontline it is very hard to know if it’s Ukrainian or Russian usage, even in Russia now that the Ukrainians did an incursion. Ukrainian themselves are worried to be cutoff by geo fencing.
About the billing account, there is a well organized black market that will use European identities and bank accounts before selling the service to Russians.

assurances from Space Force and Air Force officials that they would increase efforts to monitor the effects that rocket launches have on nearby wildlife.

Right, those are certainly the best people to trust with wildlife protection.

When I say people who need a car, I mean people outside of cities where it is not reasonable to have public transportation. In this case, having a system of automatic electric cars that can be used by different people for their daily commute could reduce the number of cars outside of cities if the service is good enough.
Inside cities, public transportation is the solution.

I also hope this can be a solution for people who need a car to live while reducing the number of individual cars, but I’m afraid Tesla is not really interested in reducing the number of cars.

It’s a battle of political ideologies.

ml is administered by the creators of Lemmy, they are openly socialist/communist/tankie depending on your own ideology, ml was chosen to represent Marxism-Leninism, and so the people it attracted are generally also adhering to this kind of ideologies.
.world was created for Redditors exile, as such, it is mostly center-left to social democrat.

Political extremists tend to extremise everything, typically a tankie will call you a Nazi/fascist if you disagree with them. That’s one of your answer.

Secondly, some ml people are frustrated that Lemmy is not their own little thing anymore for them and their friends, as world is the biggest instance now by far. So they show some kind of instance-xenophobia, not much different from the Great Replacement theory: “we are being culturally replaced through mass migration”.

Not all .ml people are like that of course. In my experience, it is enough to block a few tankies to get back to civilized discussions.

Or the patent with a camera to make sure you’re watching the ad.

Some supermarket brands are made by the same factories as the original ones, the difference is mostly marketing.

By the way, this is similar to Amazon analyzing the most profitable products from their partner merchants and creating their own “basic” version to take the market. But people don’t seem as scandalized when supermarket do it.

I am confused, every statistic of .world seems bigger. What am I missing?

a diluted version of communism,

Is there still something communist in their economy? Are the people working 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week, owning their means of production?

I’m not from .world and also complain about it sometimes. In my opinion, it’s a legitimate reason that makes Lemmy less attractive, as a consequence, you have to set up blockers to keep your sanity which is a hassle for the average user.

Isn’t it lemmy.world?

Her argument is that “Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition”, so basically she says they can do whatever they want with the EU Parliament money if it is the decision of an elected person, which is clearly not the rules for this fund and she knows it.
To make it juicer, they found records of her party members explicitly estimating that they should not do that because it is embezzlement.
For context, this comes from a time when her party wanted Frexit similarly to the Brexit party in the UK, which the same irrational arguments. So misusing EU money was completely aligned with their idea to damage the relation. Turns out, Frexit was very unpopular even within right wing French people, so they pivoted to some kind of small EU now.

I think I heard about it before, but instead of having to remember that, I could just ask an uncensored LLM.

No, but I think it could make the knowledge more easily available which increases the risk that it may happen.

Still a public safety issue.

Trying to do the same thing in EU I guess. It’s funny how the tech giants are mad at it and not releasing their latest energy black hole data pumps in EU. It’s like cocaine gangs threatening us to not sell in our countries if we don’t change the laws. No, thanks.