What the fuck are you talking about? That’s not how any of that works. Are you young or something because there’s no way you’re going around pretending having a billion dollars is the same thing as owning a billion dollar company and then defending that fictional billionaire because you’re fuckin bored?

I think what you’re trying to say, and not making a lick of sense, is that in this hypothetical scenario this person owns a publicly traded company and owns 100% of the shares worth 1 billion dollars. If that is what you’re saying, that person doesn’t have a billion dollars, they have the ability to sell shares and theoretically, and only theoretically, make a billon dollars. That’s not what were talking about. We’re talking about if a person HAD A BILLION DOLLARS.

Not if they had a billion dollars but it was lost at sea, not if they had a billion dollars but it’s all in gold buried on an island, not if they have a billion bitEthereumDogecoins and technically they’re worth a billion dollars as long as they never sell them. We’re not talking about any hypothetical scenario you want to come up with right now. We’re talking about a random schmuck who has a billion dollars. Now do you believe that person should give all their money away except for, let’s be generous, and say the last 10 million dollars? Enough money to never work again, for their partner to never work again, for their kids to never have to worry. Do you believe that? If not, and all you’re doing is making up hypothetical scenarios as to why the poor billionaires have their hands tied when trying to not be billionaires, then you’re just defending them. You’re going online, and defending the people robbing you of a better life.

Now if you’d like to talk about your hypothetical scenario, we can do that. That’s fine, but that’s a different thing. So let’s say my interpretation of what you said is true. That person could keep on owning that company and, as long as their take home is reasonable, and they’re not able to leverage those assets for loans to make themselves live a rich asshole lifestyle. That’s fine. But the moment they do sell those assets or do leverage them for self-gain, then they need to be getting rid of that money as fast as possible. Taxation, donation, gifting. Right now loans are capable of being taken out again owned assets and essentially escaping a large chunk of taxation and distribution, that should be prevented.

But if that is the minimum, I’d say the correct thing for your hypothetical person to do would be to additionally pay their employees partially in stocks. That way even if the billion dollar’s in stocks is being leveraged, it’s being leveraged ideally equally amongst all creaters of that profit.

Every person should own a portion of the company they work for, that’s just common sense. A portion of the land their business is on, if not the whole thing. Their entire house (but maybe not the land). Their car or a portion of any private mass transit (although of course public is better). Their tools, their food, their art, their hobbies on and on and on.

There is no hypothetical situation where someone is justly living as if they had 20 million dollars or more. They cannot be good people and have that much wealth. Especially at the billion dollar figure.

Buddy I can’t afford a home. That to me is a human necessity. Owning things, especially basic things like your clothes and your shelter and your tools to make a living, is necessary. I make a good amount of money and I still can’t afford all of the basics.

You pretending that I’m saying every person must give every dollar away is stupid, disingenuous, and wrong. I’m not saying no one should have savings, I’m specifically saying if you have enough money to never work again in your life and still afford all the basic necessities and plenty of luxuries - which for most western countries is 5 million or so - you should be giving every other cent away. I’m not even saying donate it to charity. I’m saying buy your friend’s houses, buy the city a new library, send a bunch of kids to college and set them up for success, pay your fuckin taxes. And do that so fast that you’re not holding onto an extra dollar longer than you need to be because excessive money turns you evil.

What is broken inside of you that you’re defending billionaires? Why are you defending the very people who harm you daily? That steal from you and your kids? The hundred millionaires that are actively choosing to kill the planet or defend pedophiles or allow starvation and homelessness to happen?

No, I do not believe everyone making less than 200k a year should have no savings and single handedly attempt to fix all the problems the ultra rich are causing. That’s a stupid suggestion. I do believe everyone should chip in to their community, build infrastructure both physically and socially to better society, but God damnit that’d be a lot easier if half the wealth of the world held captive by evil assholes was more equitably distributed.

I’m not going to address your first paragraph, it’s dumb.

But I will address your second paragraph. If a person commits many bad deeds they become a bad person. To become a billionaire you must commit many, many bad deeds. Therefore being a billionaire means you are a bad person.

Even if you believed you could become a billionaire by committing nothing but good deeds, being a billionaire requires you to have a billion dollars. Having a billion dollars over any period of time means you’re committing the bad deed of inaction. Not helping those in need, not giving away your excess money, not changing the world for the better. It’s watching a grandma getting assaulted and doing nothing about it - a despicable act - multiplied by billions of people and then made distant by every dollar you keep. If you had a billion dollars that means you know your friends, and your family, and the homeless of your city, and every person you know who needs expensive healthcare or university or a home is going without those things because you and you alone choose not to give it to them. Not to even speak about the people in places our ancestors abused or the planet that’s dying or any other serious issue that could be meaningfully dented by anyone of these billionaire assholes.

No, I disagree with your position. There are bad people, because those people commit overwhelmingly bad deeds. Being a billionaire means you must be a bad person. Hell, owning more than let’s say 20 million makes you a bad person and I think the state should tax every dollar over 5m.

Ya, I think the information around arch’s difficulty is still rubber banding slowly. It hasn’t caught up with the times tbh. I run into some issues infrequently but like so did I on Windows. It’s also almost always proportional to how much I mess with the system. My mom could run Arch today if she wanted to.

And yet he’s in power. A system that promotes people who want nothing more than to enrich themselves and devastate their country and neighbors is not a functional system.

I only say this with the fear of Germany turning into the US over the next couple of decades. I would like this place to be my final home.

The goal of a functioning society is improving things for it’s people. That means people working less, owning more, and generally having better lives.

Germany, and the world, needs to stop voting for people telling you that they want to make your life worse.

At some point violence against the Nazi party was ethically and morally correct. Everyone should decide when they’ve crossed that point, but everyone should have that point defined and ideally written down lest we passively sleepwalk into concentration camps (something that we can’t really confirm isn’t happening already with these non-judicial emprisonments). Every day someone dies in custody.

No one should be surprised that the Liar Merz lied. He’s been lying since I’ve known about him (only a couple years) and I’m told he’s got a history of lying. Conservative governments want to hollow out their countries for personal gain, no one should be surprised.

Stop cooperating with the parties that only want to worsen your standard of living. I don’t care if they say they care about the economy, I don’t care that they plead to supposed reason or security. They’re liars and conmen. They will destroy Germany if we let them.

Cars and car infrastructure cost far more than trains and public transit, we can’t allow conservatives to rob us of a wealthy nation that can afford to serve it’s people.

I swapped over early last year, so I’m getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I’d say it’s been fantastic.

My main concern was stability and gaming. I’m on pure Arch and it’s been completely stable. I haven’t done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.

Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There’s been a handful of games I couldn’t play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I’m happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I’ll try again later and I assume it’ll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I’m okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven’t done the work yet) because I don’t think Bungie deserves my money.

So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.

I use Google maps and Maps which is based on Freemaps if I’m not mistaken. Google’s directions are just miles faster and better than Maps provides but I want to start writing reviews in both and contributing.

1.5 months. It’s a worse flagship and it’s roughly priced accordingly. No major limitations or pains, although because of the privacy stuff knocking out google programs by default I’ve had to troubleshoot an app or two to get the onboard settings right.

I’d recommend it to just about anyone except for maybe a grandma. Phones are largely set it and forget it though in my experience so even then it’s a bit of getting every app loaded and set up and then never worrying about it again.

For instance lieferando I haven’t gotten working but nearly every other app was pretty simple.

That’s what I went with. It satisfies all three for me better than any other option on the market.

Mine do, and every single bank app I’ve ever used works there as well. Admittedly that’s three, but like 2 big and 1 small makes these claims feel antiquated.

I just swapped from proton to mailbox.org and I considered tuta heavily.

I chose mailbox over tuta because:

• tuta didn’t allow third party clients like thunderbird. Given I jumped to proton from Gmail and now mailbox from proton, I wanted to decouple as many systems as possible if I had to jump again.
• mailbox, if I’m remembering correctly, had better encryption properties except for their calendar. Tuta has an encrypted calendar, and now I’m looking into a self-hosted calendar system.

I think I would still recommend tuta to like my mother or something because it’s very clean and easy to set up and good enough. I’d recommend mailbox.org as a slightly harder alternative if you care about your calendar being encrypted.

I just want to remind everyone that even the best solutions can do better for the planet and for the workers in that production process.

That does not mean gas or oil or coal or hydrogen is good or better. In fact nearly everything that can be applied to green energy supply chains can be applied to fossil fuels with a multiplier.

I always think it’s better in an online discussion, when a subject doesn’t have overwhelming public support like climate change and green energy, to critique it with a clarifying contextual message like the one above. Just to quell any rational counter arguments or creating irrelevant conversation chains.

Hydrogen was never great, it’s always been an oil lobby play because the majority of hydrogen - as I understand it - is a byproduct of the oil process. It makes very little sense to lose efficiency creating a highly flammable substance, lose efficiency transporting and storing that substance, lose efficiency supplying that substance to the end consumer, and then finally lose efficiency extracting the remaining energy from the substance.

Hydrogen may make sense in some circumstances but it should not, and I’d even go so far as to say it will not, replace gasoline. Electricity is by far the best supplier of power long term.

Elon liking something should be a red flag into a subject because he has shown himself to be both uneducated and against humanities best interests. It’s not that Elon likes a thing therefore it’s bad. It’s that Elon likes bad things because Elon is bad, and therefore when you look into it it has a pattern of being bad.

This is the number one thing I would bring up tk the question “do we need more users”. We need more users if we want more niche communities, and I want more niche communities without having to post.

So you’re correct in saying the crime rate went up in 2023, but saying it’s a 15 year high is misleading, including comparing it to 1993 because there’s a difference in population.

Looking at macrotrends.net the crime rate per 100k in 1993 was 1.67. The data here only goes up to 2021 but it’s 0.83. Even going back a few years to the highest peak, 2016 that’s still 1.17. So based on this data Germany was 1.5-2x more dangerous in 1993 than it was in 2021. There’s just more people living here than there ever has been. Like even if you take the 214k number and look back for the last time it was that high, it was 2007. The population hasn’t grown that much but the demographics surely have changed, and it’s now as bad as it was in 2007.

Now I didn’t live in Germany in 2007, but I’d bet I’d struggle to find someone who honestly believed 2003-2010 (when the # of reports was above 200k) was a dangerous period in Germany. Like it’s all just the news cycle mate, they get to slap a big 8% on the year over year change and they get to run that for a couple of weeks throughout the year. In reality, it’s not the migrants or the cannibis laws I saw one article suggest, it’s the fact that wealth inequality has continued to worsen not just in Germany but globally and that will cost us (and everyone) something fierce.

We’re seeing it in the US, we saw it in Germany last century, and we are marching onward to more inequality with the CDU and Merz leading the way.

The people in place X should compare themselves to people in place X, first and foremost. Germany has almost never been safer than it is today, with all of the immigrants, with all of the fear, with all of the psyops, it’s an incredibly safe place to live by global standards and by German standards.

That’s my point. The data shows it, living in Germany shows it, and I think this is true for most places on earth.

I just explained how it worked for me - which means it works for some percentage of the population. I don’t what media you’re looking at but the overwhelming majority is fear exasperating, it’s telling everyone all the time to be afraid - not that we’re in the most peaceful era of existence.

I don’t know what you mean by the data is misleading, you’d have to provide a specific example, because nearly every crime statistic shows Germany as incredibly peaceful and nearly ever crime statistic cannot be “slightly misleading”. For instance the number of homicides in Germany in 2023 is 0.9 per 100,000. Compare that to the US which is 5.8 per 100,000, a literal 6x value, and anyone can see that Germany is 6 times safer than the US in this one category. As someone from the US that’s powerful, because I lived fine in the US and now I’m even more safe. That statistic isn’t slightly misleading imo. You could argue some number of homicides are going unreported or that the population numbers are way off - but you’d have to show that as a cause for only one side of the equation, something I don’t believe you can.

I don’t fundamentally understand your second paragraph, what do you mean “the main number is number of suspects”? The number I provided is not suspects, it’s actually homicides, for example.

So I think you’re wrong about:

• data not being effective at helping people fight their biases
• that the media is conveying a peaceful or accurate message consistently
• that the crime statistics, all of them, are “slightly misleading”