Customs union and single market aren’t the same thing. Customs union means no tariffs, and a unified tariff policy on those outside the union. Nothing more, nothing less. There are active discussions about doing this.

Single market is joining the EU, with regulatory alignment and free movement, as you quite rightly say.

Not only did he support the neonazi, the neonazi returned the favour by endorsing him.

Joining the EU right now doesn’t make sense politically. Far more useful and effective to work on getting a customs union in place. Most of the benefits without most of the headaches.

They could simultaneously work on regulation alignment, and then they’re off to the races.

My dad grew up in a communist country, and I know exactly what you mean.

I’m incredibly lucky that we have a kind of mutual intellectual respect, where we fact-check each other a lot and are both willing to change our minds about stuff. Consequently, I’ve managed to explain the differences between totalitarianism, communism, and fascism (had to explain why horseshoe theory isn’t a thing).

He thought I was being hyperbolic about the US’ slow descent into fascism in 2017, as I ran through the fascist identification checklist. As a victim of communism, he naturally tried to make excuses for Trump. That ended the first week of his second term, and we’re having some close calls with a similar candidate here.

No, this is a very old joke that uses the fact the command has “fr” in it to trick people about what the command does. Joking aside, here’s what the command actually does:

rm is the command to delete files and folders

-f is the force modifier. This means it’ll keep going even if it encounters problems and just delete as much as it can

-r is the recursive modifier. That means it’ll go down every folder it sees in the target and delete the contents as well, and delete the contents of folders of folders, etc.

/ is the target. This is the root of the filesystem. If you’re used to Windows, that’s like targeting C:.

Put it all together, and this command basically deletes your whole filesystem. A safeguard was put in place a while back due to people meming about this and causing newbies to delete their whole system. Now it won’t work unless you put in --no-preserve-root, which tells rm that yes, you really mean it, please delete my whole system.

/* as the target works around that safeguard, because technically deleting everything in root is not the same as deleting root itself.

And to avoid annoying error messages about preserving the root of the language, add a * at the end. Final command should look like this:

sudo rm -fr /*