As someone learning German right now, I can agree on complex but I’m not sure precise is very accurate. There seems to be a lot of assumptions based on context to know what one means. Maybe a more educated person could chime in, but I have not felt like the German language has made things more precise in communicating concepts (but full disclosure I’m at the A1 level going into A2).
Swapped to Linux 3 or so months ago, and have loved it. Doing Arch Linux, wanted to see every component go into the OS and just get a slightly better understanding of my computer - even though I think most educated people could use it with little complaint.
Games mostly just work, most software I use is there, I’ve found some fun new programs like an ASCII art and dithering image converter which has just been fun.
Last night I broke my system by trying to use my yubikey as the sudo requirement following some instructions that weren’t explicit about the caution I should have had. Loaded a backup via the Konsole and was back to before my fuck up in 5 minutes - mess up to fix (through freakout). That’s given me a lot of confidence in the stability of the system.
I also got to play the Arc Raiders Alpha test. I’ve written about this story before but it didn’t work the first day but it was clear to me it was a server issue or proton issue. Second day a patch came out and I was able to play it no problem. That gave me a lot of confidence that good games, even good online PVP games, will come to Linux without much issue.
Between those two events I’m pretty confident I’ll be on Linux for the rest of my life and if Arch continues to get support that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future (which it seems like it’s only speeding up and not at all in question of their funding).
That’s sorta my point, it shouldn’t be seen as a start. We can agree that the AfD would be an immediate loss, they would make things immediately worse and the country would very quickly decline for everyone but the elite who would be insulated from their own policies.
I need people in Germany to see the CDU as a slow loss, because they make things worse at a slower time scale, and the country will continue to decline under their guidance for everyone but the elite who will benefit from their policies.
The AfD losing is good. The CDU winning over the AfD winning is better. But both scenarios are still a loss, and they are the signals that the system is organically producing worse results and it’ll continue to increase the magnitude of those poor results until we improve the system.
The CDU should barely be considered a win in Germany. They pave the road that the AfD will walk down. Conservatives make everything worse and fascists thrive in poor conditions.
The future can and should be about getting better! That means more efficient, that means more money for more people for less work, that means less hours spent working.
Merz and conservatives want a worse future for you and your family and your kids. They want to enrich themselves and their friends while asking you to work yourself to death. Don’t vote against your self-interests, don’t vote in the AfD or those that inevitably bring them to power like the CDU.
Vote for progress, vote progressives.
Someone put out a patch for the Arc Raiders tech test and it allowed me to play after only the first launch day. Very grateful to the steam/arc team that did that - was a great game experience.
I was able to get once human to work using protondb’s suggested launch settings before this patch.
You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”
Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that’s fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.
This isn’t your governments legislation branch, I’m not proposing a 100 page documentation. I’m simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can’t imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.
Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn’t expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.
Idk man, it’s not that hard.
Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.
60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.
We need to ban (or tax out of existence) the concept of owning a house you don’t stay in. Landlords should be illegal, what value they provide to society is so marginal and so minimal that it would be an overwhelmingly net positive.
That tackles one of the largest worries against a universal income.
Again, you’re defending him under the notion that the ~3 political parties in this coalition couldn’t produce a single other valid candidate from among them. That’s unbelievable and if true should be punished by the voters. There’s just no way 3 massive political parties contain zero candidates as willing and as qualified as Merz (if not exceedingly more so) and if all of them can’t put the country first instead of their ambitions (which is arguably evident already) then we deserve chaos at the government level. And quite frankly I don’t know how much better we are with CDU in power vs no one in power. For most policies I’d argue the CDU in power means a decline in quality of life for Germans not an improvement.
The AFD grows not because of chaos at the federal level but because of the decline in quality of life for Germans. CDU is not fixing that they’re worsening it. I think there’s a solid basis to challenge the notion that a CDU government ran by Merz is better than any other candidate within those three parties and even a basis for argument on the notion that Merz over no one is better. I think the CDU actively harm this country based on their actions.
So no, I don’t think I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying - that only Merz exists as a viable option. And yes I do believe you’re defending him on the basis that it’s him or the AfD growing and I think that’s incorrect. The AfD will grow regardless because he won’t improve things and arguably faster because as corporate taxes go down and public services lose funding, quality of living goes down and more people become amendable to radical change which by their nature centralist parties don’t propose. I’m not seeing a left party capitalize on this in the same way the right is, probably because the funding for facism/racism is larger than for wealth equality but that’s off topic.
Well your original comment translates to defending Merz. To answer your follow up question, I don’t know the names of individual politicians in the CDU as I’m still new to German politics and learning as fast as I can. But I have no doubt the CDU has a handful of less ambitious people who could strive to produce some form of centralist policies. Will any of them be good in an absolute sense? No, if Merkel was the best they could do then no. But could someone be relatively better than Merz, who from what I can see would sell his mother down the river for more power and money, yes - most likely.
I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.
Yes, really. My alternative would have been any progressive party and failing that any centralist party, and failing that the CDU with any centralist leader, but all of those failed and now we have Merz. He will damage the working class, exasperate the issues that promote the AFD, and he will normalize them. He is, and the CDU are, Republicans 20 years ago in the US. He will lead to Germany’s Trump and the decline of the standard of living for the common man.
Merz is bad for the working class and for Germany. Every day out of power is a good day for the world.
I don’t have a favorite source so any searching will give you various perspectives but here’s one I fully read that seems reasonably objective.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Essentially, they praised the Republican platform. Then they took it back and said we won’t share political comments that aren’t neutral. Then they shared some more pro-republican opinions. And then they again said “whoops our bad back to politically neutral comments.”
I personally think political neutrality is a coward’s position and most often used by the supporters of “The Empire” to hide their uniforms and obscure their salutes. I can understand when your company employs X people, it’s a highly public company, and your product is something as detached from politics as possible like - oh idk - a twitch streamer showing videogame footage or something entirely entertainment based. Even then, I still think neutrality is the garden which allows weeds to thrive.
But this is worse than that, this is pro-republican people who got excited their guy won and got vocally bold, got punished, and are now going into hiding. And their company isn’t an entertainment business, it’s one who’s product is intertwined with privacy and the digital/corporate landscape we live in today. Proton wouldn’t be doing as well as they are if a pro-worker party was in power for the last 50 years. They wouldn’t be as profitable if monopolies had been busted sooner and mergers denied. And this is only the tech related focus they’d like you to consider, which isn’t fair. If the KKK are burning crosses in the front lawns of your neighbors and lynching people, it’s a bit tone deaf to talk about how good their sponsored lunches are and it’s evil to walk around the town square praising them for their lawn care. There are more important things they’re responsible for than the things that benefit you. And that’s even if you believe they’re doing any good on this subject which I have not seen. Trump has approved historically massive mergers, republicans have removed people like Lina Khan who was actually doing good, and introduced people who have publicly said they want less scrutiny on business - while deregulating corporations and defanging the agencies responsible for holding corporations accountable.
I haven’t seen, read, or heard any reasonable defense of any of these points and I think more people should be aware. We all make deals with the Empire at times, I’m not here to shame the workers, but if you’re like me who wanted to move their email from Empire to something Rebel than you might as well know that Proton is not the best alternative you could choose.
I’m currently looking at mailbox.org as an alternative.
Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.
But you are, you’re defending the line “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.” That’s your stance. I’m saying Trump got put in office by not one billionaire but by dozens. He was funded by big corporations and his actions show him supporting them. In his first term he gave a massive tax cut to corporations and the rich and he raised taxes on the working class (disguised as a temporary decrease in taxes while he was in office). You’re literally saying wall street was okay with RvW being repealed, an anti-humanist action done by Republicans, as long as they got tax cuts, an anti-worker action done by Republicans. Republicans did two bad things you can recognize that go against your central argument you’re defending “Republicans are for the working class and Democrats are for Big corporations.”
When the trump administration successfully does something Anti-Trust related and the American people benefit THEN I will say “wow look at that, one good thing they did.” Until then I’m gonna focus on the fact that they’re generally and overwhelmingly NOT doing good things. Including but not limited to pro-corporation anti-humanist anti-worker actions like deregulation, disrupting oversight, allowing massive monopolistic mergers, going against unions (except for police unions it seems) and taxing the working class more while giving slush fund money to their corporate donors. All the while they’re locking up judges and US citizens and immigrants without due process.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a bad progressive and I’ll happily join hands with you in making good policy changes but I will call out what I think to be bullshit that hurts the cause because we need to have a united front against the billionaire class and they win by creating wedges and one liners that are plausible and divisive. Like “Republicans are pro-worker and Democrats are for Big business” which is at best reductive and misleading and at worst fucking obviously stupid, wrong, and dangerous.
Just one of the sources detailing some of the billionaires that funded his return: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/08/14/here-are-trumps-top-billionaire-donors/
Just attempting to understand what you wrote here, are you saying that German writing requires a massive number of references to past statements to be understood and that somehow makes it more precise?