This is so absurd to me how can anyone disallow painting and drilling into walls of an apartment, I’m very glad that tenancy laws here basically say that if you rent a place you can do whatever you want with it, as long as reasonably it’s restore-able.
For a lot of the younger folks in the EU if your rental contract tells you you can’t do something it’s probably bullshit. And even if it isn’t at worst you’ll lose your deposit.
I tried to only pick stuff <1M subs excluding game play and news.
Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;
if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.
is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.
That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.
I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –
Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.
Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.
And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.
But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.
The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.
It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.
DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.
I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.
To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.
In this same reality it’s also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I’ll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn’t seem particularly appealing to me.
Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.
Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It’s been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.
The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.
Yes it doesn’t work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I’m obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there’s not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn’t turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the “West” largely created.
Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.
The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn’t gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn’t gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we’ve been doing.
Ah yes because 2M people without any ~15cm diameter metal pipes sugar and fertilizer makes a lot of sense.
Which is a stupid thing to say knowing full well that the IDF doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians, or anything said by them. The IDF and the Israeli police and public regularly take Palestinian land, harrass their people, as well as jail and kill them. How would any Palestinians suffering from that situation even begin to trust the IDF for anything.
2016 Brexit referendum -> Turkish coup-> trump presidential win
It reinforced all my feelings about what was important in this world and simultaneously made very clear we are actually living in an age of sliding back, not of Progress. I was already very interested in politics by that point but with just about the knowledge to grab the weight but no proper explanation this summer half of 2016 felt like falling into chaos and uncertainty 3 times. In retrospect the outer two likely had much more influence on my life thereafter, but the middle one was the more jarring to watch unfold at the time.
The German Grundgesetz if that makes any sense.
I try to find guidance on how to interact with the system, and how to interpret others actions from a very neutral but very comprehensive, guide to practical morality which is the GG for me.
Also I just love Art1 " Die würde des Menschen ist unantastbar"
Obviously it has some flaws, but if you interpret it enough it gives a good baseline for interpersonal stuff. Also it is the base law in Germany so practical value can also exist.
No 100% renewables is viable. You don’t need anything running beside it.
Accounting and banking.
This is very interesting to me and I’ve played with this kinda idea a few weeks ago, the Activity Pub proposal you linked seems very sensible for communicating between actors but doesn’t really offer much of a path to create a platform. In my view creating a platforms is the reason this should exist, because current platforms (Amazon,Ebay,Uber, AirBnB,DoorDash,Lieferheld) are mostly just engaging in rent seeking from buyers/sellers on their platforms. Rentier Capitalism
I don’t believe a protocol can sufficiently challenge the current players without an underpinning organizational structure that ensures fairness and transparency to both sellers and buyers, when it comes to moderation, indexing, and categorization. Especially moderation but also hosting will have costs, and the consequences for bad moderation are likely much larger with commerce than with social media. So I would like a Coop with significant control from both sellers and buyers to provide the public facing platform which then federates with the Stores which can be self hosted by sellers (potentially as an extension to existing eCommerce Software).
Or alternatively two Coops if it’s not reasonable for the sellers to host their own Stores e.g.: Uber and AirBnB, here the sellers should outright own the one providing the Stores, and own the minority in the one providing the Coop. Obviously middle grounds could also exist where e.g.: a Platform for Delivery food federates with seller servers that are hosted on a local level by Coops comprising of restaurants of a region.
I very deeply believe something like this could make our commerce much better and fairer, and while getting it of the ground might be hard, I think because the sellers make money on these Platforms it should give real incentive to develop both the tech and the legal orgs as well as advertise for them, and for the sellers to invest real money into it, or maybe agree to kick 1-2% of a purchase back to the coop.
Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.
Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.
Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.
Yeah I’ve certainly met people in Germany that knew it. Never heard anyone mention it in a US context, so I wanted to show some love.
So the hard but correct way to do this is to found a housing coop and buy up everything that gets to market, as well as build housing in large amounts. when the coop has two digit percentage ownership, rent and property prices should start to go down, especially if you also try for some political work. For example there exist rules in some places that limit short term rentals to 5months/year or one rental/person.
Since no one doesn’t seem to be meant literally, 13 1/2 Leben des Kapitän Blaubär (13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear). It’s a very humourous and arguably pretty absurd fantasy story, one of a handful of books I’ve actually read twice. Unfortunately I can’t really say much about the English translation but if that’s decent it should be very enjoyable to read.
Obviously they already exist and looking at cooperatives like that they mitigate most of the problems of private enterprise at least somewhat. The argument I’m making is that Private companies (especially large ones) are extremely dangerous to any system that tries to be democratic and because of the danger they pose shouldn’t exist at all. I mean look at how much of US government is just captured by private companies and what effect that has (had) on politics in the country and on it’s foreign policy as well.
The lack of education and an informed public is not the cause of the problems, it’s one of the many symptoms. It’s not like Bezos bought WaPo for sport. It’s not like de santis and trump get fossil super Pacs by accident. It’s not like super Pacs exist because voters love companies throwing tons of money into political messaging…
This is what I mean with Private enterprise is dangerous to democracy
These side effects were written into every liberal governments constitution by Bourgeoisie to protect their wealth from before democracy even existed. Sure there always were some concessions made towards people that weren’t wealthy but obviously it was always the wealthy who had the greatest influence.
I don’t care what particularly replaces it but this system must be changed so much to get rid of these perverse incentives that it should probably be called something else too.
Marx obviously is a good way of analyzing these failings of liberalism but he certainly is not the be all end all. Did you know for example that North eastern Syria has a constitution actively building a direct democratic rule in the region Constitution and Principles . The principles are anarchist or libertarian socialist in nature and certainly address the issues you had in terms of state authority and rush toward corruption and monopolization.
Theory and even practice of socialism obviously doesn’t stop at Soviet or CCP “communism”.
The problem is that current companies are authoritarian organizations as seen from the inside, there can still be competing companies and media without this internally authoritarian structure. Imagine every company was 51+% owned by it’s workers, and they elected their senior/management staff. That would for what I understand capitalism as end it, but obviously would be vastly different from the few socialist attempts in history.
Brother US (and maybe the UK) made the propaganda and the systems of the world, they are gonna be very effective for their goals.
Have you forgotten they are a superpower or something? They are the origin of that kind of red scare propaganda, and they always aimed most of it not at the inside but at everyone else.
It’s certainly a saying here in Europe that we do what the US does ten years later (or that we do what they tell us to do) and it’s a saying because it’s core is true.