Do you think it’s better to block someone or add a note to them so you can still engage with their content? I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking people and I’m not sold on it being the best approach.

I appreciate these comments saying the tech hasn’t degraded and it’s been standstill, or that it was never great in the first place, all of which is true but I would like to interject my own Model 3 experience. When we first bought the Tesla in 2019 the self driving functionality on the highway felt safe and functional in nominal conditions. When we sold the Tesla 2 years ago (2022) the self driving felt noticably more finicky. It struggled to switch lanes, recognize when lanes started and ended, and had noticably more issues with maintaining proper speed and distance with other cars.

It probably wasn’t significantly more dangerous, but it felt like it was. What was a feature we used for the first year or two without much complaint turned into something we never used and our driving time when down in that third year not up so it wasn’t exposure time I don’t think.

I’ve read it, I read the discussion around it, idk man. One guy’s thoughts on a company and it’s founder isn’t enough to move me off of something without better proof, better alternatives, and worse crimes than maybe having a bad long term vision.

Hopefully every company outgrows it’s founder and becomes a system. We’ll have to see, right now I’m satisfied and that gets me off Google and signals to others I’m willing to pay.

I recommend Kagi, I’ve been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.

Yes it’s paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn’t a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I’m either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I’m paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.

Now it’s up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.

That’s my point, higher taxes does not mean less growth - you have a flawed understanding of taxes and economic growth. The government could take your tax money and convert the overwhelming majority of it towards meaningful services that a private company would have no incentive to be efficient about. That’s what free market capitalism does, it finds services and then chokes out competition until the system is inefficient at using resources.

You can look at healthcare as a great example. The US spends more money on healthcare than most other countries and yet achieves worse results than the overwhelming majority of other countries. This is explicitly because healthcare is privatized in the US and prioritizes economic growth over providing a service. Other governments prioritize providing good healthcare and when government run provide better service and a cheaper price point. So if you live in the US you have worse living conditions because your government doesn’t tax you more.

This same concept applies to transportation, Internet service (and often other utilities), elder care, housing, food. The government’s “structural nature” doesn’t mean much, every company is structured and just as inefficient. The difference is companies have an express intent to make more money, not provide better products or services unless that guarantees more money. What we see in an unregulated economy, which would require taxes to prevent, is companies find it easier to monopolize their market than provide better products/services. Governments on the other hand have the express intent to govern by the will of the people with power. In a good system this is the vast majority of constituents and not just the top 1% of wealth owners.

Your experiences with working for government or company or small town are not invalid but you have to understand that your experience is miniscule compared to the number of experiences out there. This is called anecdotal evidence. You can have all the anecdotal evidence and experience you’d like, but it’s meaningless when compared with the whole world’s experience which can only be measured using real world data - scientific conclusions or at least ones relying on some methodology. Because most governments implore 10s of thousands of people over hundreds of departments and locations, you simply couldn’t experience a meaningful amount. So you have to build your opinions not based on your limited experiences but based on data.

Cable monster I think you’re debating in good faith and for that I thank you. But you’ve got a lot of deprogramming to do - your opinions seem very implanted instead of individually formed. I

once believed less taxes and less government spending was an inherently good thing because I was told those things. With a bit of independent research, growing up and leaving the house that watched daily conservative programming, I learned that trickle down economics don’t make any sense and that reducing taxes and government spending isn’t simply good or bad - it’s dependent on what services we feel we no longer need provided by the government.

So your statement of less taxes being better on every level is false from my understanding of the world. And just like you, I’ll provide no sources, because I’m matching your effort here. The reason you’re getting down votes and the reason I can confidently say you’re simply wrong in some of these elements, is because these ideas are easily disproven with a bit of thinking, a bit of research in the real world, and it can upset people when someone holds such wrong opinions attempts to share them on the Internet without first supporting their statements.

Idk if this helps but I’ll continue to respond as long as you continue to come off as not a bot or someone looking to simply stir the pot.

Well he and congress at the time permanently cut taxes for the rich and raised them for the middle class and poor so does that speed up or slow down the economy and does it fuel or resist inflation?

Cause it’s pretty fuckin clear to me that taxing the rich less and the poor more isn’t a good strategy for a healthy society.

I’m currently deciding between nobara and vanilla arch, coming from windows (but am a software engineer). I like arch because, as I understand it, its lighter and more customisable. I also like that it’s not corporate driven which potentially has conflict of interests (which I’m to understand red hat might). My biggest worry though is how much time I may spend maintaining an arch desktop and the possibility of hitting fail states too frequently. Obviously I can overcome some of that with good a good backup system, but I’d like to spend less nights working on my desktop and more time working on projects my desktop should enable. So I’ve been recommended Nobara as still cutting edge but more stable.

If anyone has some strong recommendations or thoughts I’d appreciate it. I think sticking as close to main is important and if fedora really does introduce issues I can always jump ship to arch or Debian after I’ve gotten my feet wet - but I’d like to not for as long as possible.

Surely if that statistic is true it can’t mean that on average after solar panels are installed people are taking more energy from the grid. I imagine it’s also pretty easy to single out individual groups, like software engineers or something, who on average might use more electricity or reverse that and say people who use more electricity on average are more likely to get solar panels installed.

I only bring this up because sustainable energy initiatives, even individuals installing a handful of panels, should be praised. There’s nothing better we can do right now than clean up our energy generation (and maybe go vegetarian? Lol).

Another good day in the EU!

The Q.A. page specifies that you can specify what games are shared or shown using the normal means.

You no longer have to give up citizenship to be a German citizen, and the US doesn’t require that either. A new law passed this year and comes into effect sometime around April I believe (still new to the exact legislation process in this country).

But yes, I would not encourage anyone to move to the US at this time. They are the largest proponent of late stage capitalism and those policies bring instability to the worker classes which begets authoritarianism. That’s rarely a good thing for anyone.

My friend and I moved to Germany last year. We met some Americans from st. Louis who moved the year before.

It’s anecdotal but not unreasonable to imagine some amount of brain drain is happening because of the instability in the US driven by late stage capitalism.

That feels like a really pedantic difference.

Example:

I kill 100% of a population AND my intent was to do that = genocide

I kill 100% of a population BUT my intent was only to kill a lot of people = not genocide???

If that’s really what you’re saying is the discrepancy then I have to disagree with this recognition being purely political. This seems like a common sense thing. The holodomor happened, it was mass purposeful death. We can argue if it was targeted against a people or a location, but the effect was clearly bound to some group or region and it was effective within those boundaries to the extent that it could be considered a genocide.

Without doing any reading on the matter for this topic as well, that’s what I’d say.

We just need to keep and increase the number of dialogues we’re having with our neighbors on life and our government. Apathy is powerful and hopelessness doubly so but we can build a better future working towards solutions with our neighbors.

Capitalist’s are pushing the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. We have tools that can reverse that disparity and with it remove the intoxicating push to the far right.

Housing as a speculative investment is a plague on society. I hope countries place regulations and heavy taxes against properties you own but do not live in or utilize personally.

The main comments seem to think Milley WAS commenting on Biden’s health after saying he wouldn’t and I disagree.

He said Biden read the prep material, was aware of the current issues, and took national security matters very seriously. You could extrapolate that to mean he’s mentally well but I don’t think that’s a necessary conclusion and it’s definitely not a direct comment on the president’s health.

No one likes how old the president is, but Milley wasn’t going against his own words here in the excerpt that I read.