It is not just more people for the same number of houses, but importantly also changed preferences.

If more people want to live in the city, then empty houses in the countryside don’t help.

I’d have to look it up, but I also think the amount of living space used per person has increased. Especially for older people that keep on living in the same house (which they might own), even after the children have left.

I never had an Xbox and probably am not the target audience, but I can definitely see the value proposition.

Seems great for casual gaming with a very low barrier of entry. Who knows how long game pass retains the value it currently offers, but until then there is nothing wrong with enjoying it.

Personally Xbox never was for me because PC is just very different (I e.g. wouldn’t want to play strategy games on a console) and if I were to get an additional console it would likely be a PlayStation since the exclusives usually seem stronger.

Glad to hear that! I think there are plenty of us, it’s just really hard to to have these kind of discussions online and other voices are just louder.

I feel like this reasoning would change character of the right to vote from something inherent, to something that has to be earned. Which i am not really a fan of.

If you are too young to work you shouldn’t have to vote

Makes it sound like a chore, not sure if that was intended. The phrasing however somewhat leads to another completely different discussion, whether or not it would be a good idea to require everyone to vote (even if they just mark their ballot invalid) to combat low voter turnouts.

But as with other arguments, we again don’t tie voting rights to having a job otherwise we would deny them from the elderly or sick aswell. I think in this context the argument is sometimes made that when you have a job you are forced to pay taxes and therefore should be allowed to vote, but there are other taxes like sales tax that everybody pays earlier.

This of course won’t solve all the parties being shit tho.

Now that is the truth.

I agree with you, but a baby can’t read a ballot or pull a lever

I absolutely get the sentiment, but with arguments like these i always end up running into hypocrisy and double standards. There are plenty of illiterate adults and we are rightfully allowing them to vote, so do the blind. Paralyzed people are also voting despite them not being physically able to move a lever. As you said, there should always be help available.

In practice i doubt many babies will articulate a desire to vote and the number of extremely young children will also be limited. So to me if a 6 year old comes up and says “i want to vote” i say let him, he certainly is affected by the consequences of the elections regardless.

let anyone who is able to register go to the polls.

I would note that depending on the implementation this can also be a unneccesary hurdle and be abused as seen in the US.

As an inherent right it really should be as automatic as practial limits allow it to be (some sort of register is ofc needed to prevent voting multiple times).

Here in Germany for example it’s simply tied to your registered primary residence, which means that only people without such have to actively seek out registration wherever they live.

I would be concerned about a certain type of person trying to make as many little voters as they can crank out, but I suppose some people do that anyway and just wait until they turn 18.

And that’s the slippery slope: Who gets to decide that “certain type of person”?

To go with your example of the number of children: I think statistically poor people have more than the rich. Is that what we want to fight? Also who is to say that children vote the same as their parents?

Agreed. And it’s good that we aren’t keeping those away. Always a slippery slope to make rules about who can or can’t vote.

Honestly I might even go as far as stripping down the requirements to the very basics:

• Citizenship (including special cases that e.g. EU citizens can vote in regional elections of other EU countries if they live there)

• the desire to vote

Just let them start voting when they express their desire to do so.

because most will be able to read and understand government

People with dementia and other mental illnesses don’t lose their voting rights, neither is it coupled to IQ. And imo with good reason.

So I am actually not sure why we are applying this hurdle to children to begin with, when we aren’t doing it in other situations.

Ah, one of our classic lullabies, perfect for the evening.

You stopped that quote a few words too early and left out the “as i hoped” part. I guess i simply had unrealistic high hopes that we would collectively move here, but the mods of /r/de opened back up at some point and the majority is still there.

But you are of course right that overall there are quite a few of us here. I guess expanding into a new space that is leaning towards communism is something we have experience with.

Unsuprisingly !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !selfhosted@lemmy.world made the transition quite well.

The german communities didn’t transition quite as well as i hoped, but the like of !deutschland@feddit.de and !dach@feddit.de still see enough engagement to serve their purpose.

So i guess those are my favorites so far. Simply because they already function quite well.

Beyond that i am more of a Star Wars/Lotr guy, but i am warming up more and more towards Star Trek (liked it before aswell, but didn’t dive into it too much). Especially since i enjoy some of the current series (Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks) quite a bit.

Well Munich is a city and not a state, so hard to compare to Texas. However the state of which it is the capital (Bavaria) can in many ways be compared to Texas as it is rather conservative and rural in many parts.

That said Munich itself is actually quite progressive and open.

Case in point regarding politics: On a local level the major has almost always been from the SPD (social democrats, the last conservative one was in the early 80s), and in the last federal election the green party actually got the most votes (compared to the overall result for Bavaria where the conservative CSU won with a wide margin)

I was under the impression that this wasnt a big risk with starlink as they are in a lower (around 550km), which means potential debris will decay rather than stay in a stable orbit.

Others have already mentioned some of the many reasons why.

But i would like to add that even if they’d rejoin, they could not do so with the same conditions that they had before. Since they joined the predecessors of the EU so early, they had a number of privileges that a new joining member nowadays would not be granted. So from that side “going back to how things were before” wouldn’t be possible to begin with.

I like the idea, but I fear that I would quickly run out of things to print that I actually need. After then I’d start looking for applications. And the one thing I don’t need in my life are more small (or large) plastic things.

If I remember correctly here in German it was marketed as “Dredd 3D”, which turned me off at the time.

I’ll try to make a case for why you should care about privacy aswell:

First of all there are some aspects where privacy is simply a requirement for things to work. For example there is a lot of talk about banning end-to-end encryption, but things like banking or remote work rely on this. Even if you wouldn’t care about someone else having the opportunity to read your personal messages, if those aren’t encrypted you are opening the gates for malicious actors.

I care about consent and freedom of choice

For me in a lot of aspects you simply can’t have “freedom of choice” or “consent” without the default being privacy.

Take for example medical records: those aren’t just relevant for you, but also anyone you are related to. At somepoint insurance might factor in medical history in their rates. You might not care about your record being public, but if you e.g. carry some genetic predisposition for a disease that will also have consequences for your child or sibling.

If the default for privacy is “opt-in”, then in many cases this will have a negative affect on people who do want it. Want to rent an appartment and the finances of most people are public? Well tough luck. Guess you have to decide, if you give up that privacy or keep searching. Because surely you have something terrible to hide otherwise you wouldn’t want privacy. Not much of a fair choice.

For a lot of things once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t reverse it. Extreme case: a far right party like the AfD comes into power. Suddenly you might get targeted for certain information that is available about you. And you can’t also easily hide it for future things, because that sudden shift might make you suspicious.

I think there are a lot of cases where most people might not care about their privacy. But those that do need it are reliant on the default being privacy and most people having it. Because otherwise it does not work. Then you just have “those that have nothing to hide” and “those that clearly have that particular thing to hide, because otherwise they wouldn’t chose privacy”.

Another aspect is targeted advertisement. Despite whatever you think, even if you know how it works, it’ll have an affect on you. Whether you like it or not. Human beings can’t be perfectly rational and psychology will have an affect.

Besides that a lot of efforts to dismantle privacy will just lead to average people losing it, while e.g. criminals will still use it. Privacy is also highly important for things like journalism or whistleblowers, something you are also profiting from.

I’m saying this because it feels like Germany is 10y behind other countries in digitization solely because regulators think I’m too stupid to give me the agency to opt in to sell my soul to our digital overlords.

This i disagree with, we certainly aren’t SOLELY behind in digitalization because of privacy concerns. Most of the time it’s just incompetence or bad implementations (often time coupled with some corruption and lobbying).

These are just some random thoughts and far from exhaustive (probably also not perfect arguments)

interstellar shout

Seems like they haven’t read the “remembrance of Earth’s past” trilogy, otherwise they might have known better than to shout into the universe

There definitely are growing pains, but in think all things considered it is moving in the right direction. As much as I wish it were different, expecting lemmy to instantly match and replace reddit (that had a ton of time to organically grow) is wishful thinking.

Have you tried signing up on other instances? That determines a lot of the performance you are getting. Personally lemmy.world at the time I signed up was having issues (might be better now), which made me try out lemm.ee . So far it has treated me very well performance wise.

As far as apps are concerned I am on android so I can comment for its, but connect has been my choice this far. Works fairly well, although not perfect. However in all apps I’ve tried the speed of progress has been very encouraging.

Lastly concerning submissions without comments, lemmy simply still doesn’t have a user base to rival reddit. So in some way we have to be the change we want to see, otherwise things will never change.

Personally I have given up on reddit, but I wouldn’t fault you for using it alongside lemmy for a while. I’d just hate to see people like you stop using lemmy completely just because it can’t instantly replace a platform that had such a massive head start.

!selfhosted@lemmy.world could be helpful