iglou

No, they can't.

What some parties in the EU want is to force chat services provider to give them access to chat messages, which destroys the entire point of encrypted chats and essentially bans E2E chat encryption

It's not really a concern anymore, now that pretty much all a lambda user's traffic is encrypted. Anyone collecting your wifi traffic only sees garbage.

Websites also can't be so easily spoofed. The spoofer would need to have a certificate issued by an authority trusted by your device for the spoofed domain, which is highly, highly unlikely to happen as long as your software is up to date, which nowadays is done automatically.

So really, the fear of untrusted public wifi is a thing of the past, and a good marketing lie for VPN companies.

I'm not anerican so I'm unsure how pertinent my experience is.

But yes, my representatives often hold public neetings in which anyone is invited, although I don't go there myself.

Oof, that's a tough question to answer in here. There is no really good way to generalise who has what power, and there is probably many ways to split the powers in a meaningful way.

You can read the articles on both positions specifically for France, which I do think in this case is a great example, on wikipedia, although if you want a more precise and complete understanding you'd probably have to read the french article and translate it.

The main advantage of this system is that when the president doesn't have the majority to support him in the parliament, most of the executive power de facto shifts to the prime minister, who is usually nominated (by the president) in accordance with the parliament's majority coalition. When that's not done, the parliament can move to "censor" the government and force the president to nominate a new prime minister, who then nominates the rest of the government.

That system is a good way to make sure the president doesn't do whatever the fuck they want if the parliament disagrees.

1. Then we'll have to agree to disagree on this.
2. I'm not overthinking it. Doing stuff like this is my job. I receive a problem, I ask the questions to get precise requirements. What I am telling you is that depending on who answers these questions, the outcome of the elections can be completely different. In a very oversimplificated way, it's a new, even sneakier way to gerrymander.

It is better than FPTP, but not a great system either. The flaws are similar to FPTP: The final winner may not be the candidate that would be most approved by the pooulation.

The main arvantage of it is that you can go wilder during the first turn, and pick a small party that you truly support, in hope it passes to the second turn. That happens often enough. And if it doesn't, then you vote for the least bad candidate in the second turn/the closest candidate to what you want.

No! France has a head of state (the president) and a head of government (prime minister).

They are both powerful, none of these role is performative.

1. You are conflating complexity and difficulty. But I'll argue it's both more complex and more difficult. It's more complex because rather than choosing your candidate, you have to express your opinions. You have a bunch of choices to make instead of one. That's complexity. But it is also more difficult, because it requires you to have a grasp of all the issues that are brought up. Not everyone is able to give their opinion on how to best fight a job crisis, for instance. And picking what "feels" best makes the choice pointless and dangerous. It also doesn't prevent lies, marketing and false promises at all, as a candidate could still be lying about their intentions just to get more votes.
2. It is very hard to find the closest match. I tell you that as a software engineer. Because what rules do you use to determine the "closest"? Do you consider every opinion as important? Do you minimise the average distance? Do you minimise the amount of extreme differences? Do you prioritise some "more important" issues? Who even decides what is important? There are so many ways to bias and twist a system like this.
3. Then you're probably better off advocating for a direct democracy, which is another topic and can be done in a much easier way than trying to adapt a representative democracy for it!

Except that the lack of a third candidate is partially because of the FPTP system. It's a waste of time, money and energy to try to compete with the Dems and the Reps. In a ranked voting system, or even a two-round system like we have in France, I guarantee you you'd see more candidates, because people then wouldn't just "vote useful".

Congrats, you have written the dumbest take I've read today

The arguably huge downside of this, is that it cuts the direct line from you to a representative. That undermines democracy, because it undermines your capacity to be heard.