Oh no, you!
Kind of, yeah. We vote for parties, and the parties (yes, plural) with the most votes build a coalition that have enough of the votes between them to form a government. And the head honchos like prime minister and similar, are usually the party leaders. If they were to die or quit or whatever, the government agrees on a replacement.
“You’re the pope?? I didn’t vote for you…”
Honestly I don’t care (well, beyond making this pope post), as I am not catholic. I am technically a protestant by heritage, but the truth is that I find even the term “agnostic” to be too religiously loaded to the point where I usually refer to myself as areligious instead.
As for the pope. Well, he’s… there… well, not right now. But he will be soon-ish. I’ll just accept whoevers named announced while venting smoke from the cardinal thunderdome as being the new pope. And then he’ll be there again.
Beyond that, he doesn’t affect my life in any way. Nor do I affect his life in any way. Unless he accepts my challenge to an offroad and uphill car race. Yes, he’s gonna have to drive the popemobile himself for this. I’ll be driving my new AWD Lolvo. I’m sure it’ll be fun for anyone involved, no matter who wins.
But having said all of that: I think Robbie Coltrane would do well as a pope.
Norway here. Election campaigns are usually around a month, and they’re almost fully focused on parties and not the representatives themselves.
“Hey, I see in my file that you have a truck drivers license. You wanna job as a truck driver?”
Yeah, sure, I accepted because I really needed a job there and then.
Well, turned out the job was maybe 10% driving, and the rest was spent manhandling large copymachines (Xerox, Konica Minolta, and all of the other brands) up several flights of stairs.
And then I placed it there for the “technician”* to set it up. After that it was usually an old machine that needed to go the opposite way.
I quit after one month upon realizing that there were plenty other jobs available to me that didn’t break my back, and for better pay.
*: I put “technician” in double quotes because what they did was essentially set up printers. I’ve since worked (and still work) in various flavors of IT, and we all joke that nobody understands printers… but yo be frank, if that is all you do, it’s not rocket surgery.
After leaving I worked at a tyre servicing workshop. Car come in, change tyres, car go out. Pretty lowbrow, but it was easy, chill, and my coworkers were fun. I started my actual career shortly after that in IT/offshore geophysics, but I still look back at the tyre job as something I genuinely enjoyed.
Technically this post is “seriousposting”, as per the reports, but it gets to stay because of the flawed assumption that Hegseth is part of a competent government capable of credible military strategy.
Succession.
Yes. China’s great firewall mostly handles content filtering and deals with low hanging fruit. Getting around it is fairly simple, and the censorship is mostly focused on stuff that would otherwise be easily accessible by the broader population.
VPN is your obvious choice here. CCP blocks most public VPN providers, so you’d have to roll your own.
You can set up a VPN concentrator somewhere in the world, and you would be able to reach it. As far as I’ve noticed, they don’t block VPN as a whole, and default port should work fine - the reason for this is probably that VPN has many commercial uses that they don’t want to harm.
Source: I run a (work-related) VPN accessible from inside china.
No need for a lawyer. I preemptively saw (see?) that the goon walked into a door.
Destiny Potato