I really hate all the replies attempting to poke holes with minimal effort. Thanks for this comment and your robust set of examples.
Housing shouldn't be a vehicle for interest or making a living, I'd take it more extreme than what you have if I'm being honest. You can own the buildings you use 60% of the year for work or for housing but nothing else. We don't sell stocks in bananas, we sell stocks in farms. Housing should be a consumable commodity not a line item in a corp's assets sheet.
I moved to Germany from the US this year. There is subsidized public transit, universal healthcare, minimum vacation time, a heavy union culture, strong renter-favored laws (although capitalist for profit housing is still an ever growing plague).
As others pointed out, the terminology isn't a great tool for debate without an agree upon definition. But yes, I would move to a country that cared about people over profits.
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.
I think that's a stretch for something that has a positive impact and is done by a group outside of Congressional gridlock.
We should celebrate the win and push for stronger protections. We should definitely not given into apathy and give up.
This is a great write up, thanks for sharing!
Having no experience in the service industry I don't have great advice so I'll just say I'm sorry you're going through this and I hope it gets better.
In gigs where politics matters more than output or social skills it can be hard to instigate change.
Is eating off of food a reportable offense to a health agency? That seems illegal or it should be.
Hey, this is an exciting first step in planning your trip. I'm 27 and have traveled a lot on my own and with friends, if you need any advice or have any questions feel free to PM me.
That's the bare necessity. I got to stop now but like I said, I'd love to help past that.
Depending on where you're going transportation can be handled entirely by public transit. Don't get a car.
Ya, I live right next to where this happened. It's an immigrant heavy area. These guys planned, and a similar group the following day, to protest right next to the people they hate and want evicted from the country.
I agree, no one should be stabbed for their beliefs and free speech (to a degree) is important. But if someone came to my neighborhood and spent the whole day shouting out of a loud speaker that I didn't belong, my family didn't belong, my neighbors and friends didn't belong, despite some of them living here for multiple generations - I'd be upset, I'd feel threatened.
Now couple that with doing it in a poorer district against a specifically marginalized group who has been historically treated poorly for decades with talking points that are clearly racist and easily disproven - idk. No one should get stabbed but even if I believed those awful things I wouldn't do what they did unless I was looking for trouble.
Idk, my roommate and I have been talking about it all weekend. Yes we believe you should be allowed to punch Nazi's, no we don't think we should be allowed to stab anyone, yes 20% of the German population roughly hold dehumanizing beliefs that are dangerous and we should be educating them, no the government isn't doing enough to better everyone's situation and therefore racism and fascism are growing at an alarming rate.
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.
It's still a buggy mess for me unfortunately. It can run, but I bugged through the world at the delimane (?) quest and closed it again. I've got a top of the line rig and I was so tired of the game bugging out.
Maybe I'll push through but everyone calling this one of the best turn arounds is giving them too much credit. They promised us so much, delivered a buggy mess, spent years fixing it, released a dlc which fixed even more and added supposedly a great story, but they still fell very short of their original marketing promises and as I said it still requires resetting frequently enough to be frustrating.
Large Corporate mergers are almost always bad. We should be breaking up companies right now, not letting them combine!
You got to remember, most of the wealth is still in very few hands. So telling yourself "the stock market also benefits the people who are retiring" makes it sound like there's a good side to this when really it's only a silver lining to an otherwise meaningless and arguably downright hurtful event.
The economy is as bad as it is, we're seeing fascism rise as much as we are, partially because our major economic systems aren't designed to actually benefit the people they're built on sucking value out of.
So no, I don't care that everyone currently cashing out of the system just got a little bit more money or more time out of the recent layoffs and the recent COVID profitteering and the recent inshitification. I think we have to be careful defending bad systems even minorly, despite that being rational and logical, because it feels like we're coming to a tipping point and minor defenses like that make it seem as if we can extend the shelf life of these systems a few more decades, a few more unnecessary deaths, a few more degrees of warming, etc. Idk, only politics is weird. At least you're participating, so thanks for that.
Just chiming in, I'm 28, American, immigrated to Germany. Can't speak for Lemmy but I migrated from reddit when they shut the APIs down. Just want a shelf stable Aggregate site where I can stay up to date on my favorite hobbies and periodically connect with other humans. A healthy political debate is good every now and then but I'm also in the camp that the answers for our current problems are well researched and pretty fuckin obvious so debates have gotten... Idk stale.
Generally Lemmy feels like reddit but smaller, less polluted, but also less connected with every niche major update.
I think part of convenience is name brand recognition. I don't know how you took a heartfelt compliment and made it hostile, but the reality is I grew up knowing what Google was and using it as a verb. Gmail was an obvious and convenient tool to pickup.
I just found out about Protonmail, or at least heard of it for the first time that it broke the barrier of not-caring into carrying. I imagine user numbers reflect that pretty readily.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying Protonmail is worse in anyway, please don't assume I am. It's okay to like a product and admit it's flaws, in this case the only flaw I'm suggesting it has is being less known than Gmail and even then only for me and my small corner of the world.
This was a fantastic read and is getting me to move over to 7zip from .rar at least. Thanks for posting!
I'm swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of it.
Another good day in the EU!
You shouldn't be scared of hotels. If you're getting a reasonable room you'll have an entirely normal experience. If you cheap out, then you are taking a risk in exchange for money.
But if you're going to travel internationally, you should default to not afraid. It is by and large safe out there. Be smart, but not media-sensitized.
Thank you for this recommendation, I'll look into switching. It's a slow process of moving towards less convenient but more private services but your comment has moved the needle for me at least.
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.
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.
The Q.A. page specifies that you can specify what games are shared or shown using the normal means.
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).
The whole of Spain. I grew up with a lot of people who loved Europe but had never been to it or really anywhere else. Spain for some reason got a lot of love and attention in my social circles but I didn't engage with it meaningfully so I didn't understand it. I started my international travels in "the east" and had a wonderful time. By the time I visited Spain I expected a normal travel experience but definitely not the elevated grandeur my highschool years would have had me believe. I had average expectations.
Then I got there and every meal was bomb. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona - I couldn't go wrong I loved the local food. Worse, I loved at least Madrid and Barcelona's ability to recreate other cuisines too. Some of the best sushi I've ever had was in Madrid and I make a point of getting quality sushi where ever I go (including practically gorging myself into a food coma in Japan).
Then I went to an art museum and it moved me, found some artisanal stores, got fresh orange juice at multiple grocers, saw a movie in a decent theater, you know the normal like "show me what it's like to live uniquely here" stuff. Ya, Madrid stole my heart for what it was and Spain as a whole surprised me.
Which is a silly conclusion... What's the point? The better question would be why isn't more housing being built? And I suspect the answer to that question is there is a vested interest in increasing that deficit.
Whenever someone starts to conclude that housing is so expensive purely because there aren't enough homes, they often follow that up with pointing to construction costs. Which to me screams deregulation and wage complaints, two things an improving society should not be encouraging.
This discourages using housing as a financial asset past owning where you live. This alone should reduce the cost of housing significantly. Housing gets cheaper, more people have housing.
Create programs where people or cities can get stable, low cost loans from the government to construct housing ranging from detached single family homes to high density apartment complexes.
If you live somewhere with restrictive zoning laws, revise them for the modern age.
This should allow communities to solve their own housing issues via lowering the financial burden of various solutions.
Continue to offer free shelter for homeless who want it and need a place to get back on their feet, provide amenities that make that transition easier.
Create a research task force to determine any other causes of homelessness and propose solutions. I'd wager: legalizing most drugs, forced mental rehabilitation, and sunset laws for criminal records would get rid of the rest.
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.
Like I said, it's got pros and cons. Hotels are good too.
"Most countries" is a hell of a stretch in my opinion. I've traveled to something close to 20 popular countries and only needed a visa for China when visiting, Singapore when studying, and Germany when moving there.
Here's the official list and I'd wager a guess that more than 75% of native US Tourist Traffic goes to these countries.
Without data, take media reports as sensational by necessity. France's problems may not be as bad as they seem (I would assume they're not) and France's problems don't automatically translate to other countries like Japan.
To wrap this back around to your main post, travelling to Japan shouldn't induce fear at any step. It's a safe country with low crime rates and few health problems for tourists.
It's not about capitalism vs something-other-than-capitalism, it's about all the small systems that make up our way of life. As a simple example, housing shouldn't be a vehicle for profit seeking. It should be illegal or so greatly discouraged that owning an unhealthy amount of properties is non-viable because if house prices must always go up and everyone needs a place to live - the cost of living must always go up. A subsystem of capitalism that needs fixing, not "a new system that isn't capitalism".
And I'm not suggesting people not have 401k's or not invest or not save money, I've got my retirement fund too. But we have to realize that that system isn't doing it's job and it's harmful to society and the more we participate the more incentivized to keep it harmful, to keep it around. So participate like an intelligent person and then leverage your power and position to better the systems for everyone - eventually at an expense to yourself.
I played it on launch with friends. It was an arpg with better combat than most and pretty great graphics. Those are ALL of the positive things I have to say about it. It was so buggy it was hard to play without crashing. We lost progression multiple times. The servers were atrocious, the first 6 hours of playtime were trying to log in and not crashing. We ended up refunding it obviously.
Unfortunately the ARPG genre is super stale right now and we were looking to support any project we could. No rest for the wicked is the best thing to come out in ages and it's still got a ways to go in EA before I give it a proper play through.
When a house is an investment that grows in value society attempts to maximize scarcity, fewer houses or higher demand means more growth in their value. But imagine we lived in a society where we had more houses than we need, a surplus, because we valued housing people whenever they needed housing and we knew roughly how many houses we needed to do that.
You could move anywhere and find a house to own at a cost you could afford. Imagine housing wasn't a massive store of value such that multiple bureaucratic steps were created to nickle and dime the transaction. Buying a home could be easy.
You could find a vacant house or one that has leaving owners, inspection papers were regulated and up to date, you could buy it off of them using your money or a loan from the government, and you could move in just like if you were renting.
You don't have to save up for money to buy a home in a society where housing people is a priority. Housing would be cheaper, cost of living would be lower, purchasing power would be higher, and we could have methods in place for transitioning ownership without requiring a lump sum of cash cause no one's expecting a massive windfall immediately. Ya know, loans.
Living on the street would be a fictional concept, encouraging homelessness is a societal choice - we could house everyone on the streets within the year if we wanted to. Does that mean long term hotels wouldn't exist? No. That's an actual service being provided.
I'm just saying, if landlords served a purpose we could enable that service as a society but if housing wasn't an investment vehicle it's pretty clear the number of landlords would plummet over night and we'd quickly realize relatively few people liked the "service" they were receiving.
Again, don't be. I don't have data off the top of my head, but I'd wager Japan has shockingly few cases of bed bugs in their tourist sector.
For these things I don't think you have to prove anything, just a report to your govs food agency could prompt an inspection - or so I think.
I'm stoked, the ARPG genre feels stale. Hopefully they keep up what seems to be engaging combat. No rest for the wicked is still in early access and D4/LE/POE1 have very unrewarding combat IMHO.
This can't come soon enough.
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.
That's great for you, I'm happy you got a bug free experience. Overall that has not been the case for most, you're the outlier. Maybe now with the dlc I'm the outlier, I can't say. Most reviews I saw only talked about the dlc and not replaying the main game.
But even ignoring performance, the original marketing even up to weeks before the release contained promises that were never delivered. That to me sours anyone comparing this to no man's sky, which has received dozens of major updates compared to Cyberpunk's one.
I'm still hopeful I'll drop back into it and get past any crashes. It's a very beautiful game and I'd like to finish the story lol. Plus everybody went crazy for the dlc story and I'd like to see that. Wish I was you lol
Who the fuck reads the entire steam page? My friend says buy the game, the reviews say it's great with friends, you go and buy the game not scan the steam page for predatory data hoarding policies.