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.

It’s amazing what insulation and proper sound proofing can do. Never lived in thicker walls than here in Germany. Other than the blasted church bells, it’d be hard to convince me I was living next to people if the windows were opaque.

Kagi seems to surface great independent content and I’ve been loving it.

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.

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.

Yes, of course. I wish you and everyone stuck there luck.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the “claims without a citation” are things that were done under the first Trump administration.

• taxes did go up for most Americans under the last tax bill. It’s safe to say that if Republicans need to raise taxes it’ll be through the lower and middle class.

• kids go hungry or into debt for school lunches today because of how little some families make. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a feature for the Republican party and not a bug.

• books are being banned in the US at an alarming rate, look at Florida as a prime example. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a party priority.

• trump suggested multiple times as president that people should just be shot, killed, or executed for things as benign as protesting outside the Whitehouse. He didn’t do it, but it’s a pretty short distance between “the president wants to kill you” and “the president is having you killed”.

• the president did send in national guard and other militarily equipped groups to beat and pepper spray journalists and protestors while president.

• trump appointmented judges clearly lack the experience, qualifications, and apolitical-ness expected of a normal judge. You can see that in the supreme Court and you can see that at the federal judge level.

Ya, remember some number of them are bots or underpaid people who’s job is to spread frustration and essentially commit information warfare.

Since I moved to Lemmy I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking the bad actors after it was clear they are incurable and unsaveable. The ones who seem to live for pro-russian messaging or refuse to have a dialogue like these TLDR people.

US labels also contain weight. And again, unless you are baking all the water out and curious about that nutritional value, you’re picking up a package that has nearly identical labeling and testing standards and are therefore comparable and using that to make nutritional choices. In this case almonds are more calorically dense than tofu and have less protein per calorie. Water included or not.

What? Surely that’s not how nutrition labels are made. If I look at the label for almonds and I look at the label for tofu and they both list 100g of X has Y protein in it - surely they’re comparable. So what is your point? Are you suggesting I need to dehydrate tofu to determine it’s real nutrition? I don’t know if that’s practical or meaningful in anyway. I guess you’re suggesting that if we cook out the water certain foods like tofu get even more macro nutritionally dense?

I think people are upset with the foods included for comparison when they should be upset with metric being used to compare them. Protein per 100g tells me protein to weight but what I really care about is protein to total calorie count per 100g. That tells me if the food is efficient in delivering me protein and even that should be coupled with calorie per gram or volume per gram or something to show how much of the food can I eat.

The graphic makes almonds look amazing, for instance, but you get a handful of almond for 100g and also a fourth of your daily caloric intake at 550 kcal. Which means they’re not exactly an efficient protein source. Where as tofu is rather efficient at only 80 kcal per 100g.

It’s just a weird concept in general despite being wholly believable. I don’t blame you nor think you’re wrong or right. Just a hilarious and sad picture, a societies main hall for political dialogue being an endless feed of algorithmically addicting content. Idk, just a boring dystopia kinda thing.

Oof, if Instagram’s comment section is where we’re having political discussions these days that’s disheartening. There’s clearly a need for a town square application for these sorta things.

This is such a shame. I just moved to Germany and I haven’t had much time to engage in politics but it seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the solutions we need is still present here (possibly with the help of destabilizing countries like Russia or China who seem to have strong misinformation campaigns running online).

Guess I need to accelerate getting involved with my local politics as soon as possible. What social platforms do Germans use to communicate about politics? I used to post on Facebook for Americans, and obviously reddit was a good place to have small conversations, but is there any place I can directly address conservative talking points in a public forum. The fact that young people are voting far right tells me we’re losing the digital battle more than anything.