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.
It's worth it. I'm almost two years in Germany. Wouldn't move back for a million dollars (although at 3 I could be bought). Work on the local language, volunteer or other community involvement activities, treat it like the new home it is. We're fortunate to be able to move to a new country, try to be a part of improving it and earning your spot there. I'm even more fortunate to be white, male, straight etc - assuming you're at least some of those things, do your best to counter the anti-immigration fear mongering that comes out of the political right. It effects you now, but more importantly it's ramping up and it'll effect people less fortunate far worse.
Hope you love it and welcome to Europe.
Ya, that's rough. That feels like a very immature take. The two parties are not the same, voting does matter, and I'd even argue that there are people so awful that assassination does make sense but I'm happy Trump survived because I think the Republican party would have been stronger without him.
I left the US, I'm between a millennial and gen z, and I left explicitly because I was worried about the future of the US and because moving abroad is akin to time traveling 20 years into the future. I have healthcare now, I live in a walkable city with great public transit, the crime rates are lower (although most places in the US aren't super violent, the probability of getting murdered goes way down when you leave), I have 6 weeks vacation, essentially unlimited sick time, and I'm not allowed to work overtime.
Both parties are not the same but if Democrats won in a landslide in every single election both state and federal in every chamber and every seat, how many years would it take to achieve all of those same things. I have no doubt these policies would happen with the right people in office, with radical change to the party they could even happen quickly and I believe it's what half the people want. But the two other outcomes are 50/50 with the parties and little gets done in a timely manner and worse the corrupt judges continue to error the system, or the Republicans win one big election just one more time and project 2025 starts getting a percent complete tracker and we slide back into the dark ages.
So I left. I believe if things go bad in the US historians will look at Trump's first victory as a period of brain drain from the country. But that's my two cents to go with this article.
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.
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.
If housing is an investment ("a nest egg") then the people and policies that support it as an investment will stand directly opposed to people and policies that want housing to be affordable and a right.
Housing cannot be an investment vehicle akin to stocks in a society that meaningfully values housing for everyone as an objective to strive for.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
He's saying what you're attributing to "a specific lack of willpower" now has scientific backing that disagrees. Your take is old school and misinformed if the current science is correct. I personally haven't done research on the subject or read many studies but Adam Ragusea, a YouTube food science journalist covers this concept in one of his vids and several podcasts surrounding food science and (in my case) the drugs coming down the pipeline to regulate body weight touch on the research as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another good day in the EU!
I never finished it because the alien would teleport too much. I need to install the larger leash mod and give it another go. It's also sooo long for such a tense game. I loved everything about it and I'm upset I haven't finished it lol.
I am paying taxes and am able to vote, but because I make less than the required amount my taxes are essentially zero to the US because we have joint tax agreements between the two countries.
I don't know if I'll renounce after earning German citizenship or not but the exit tax is something I have to consider.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Like I said, it's got pros and cons. Hotels are good too.
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.