• 6 Posts
  • 192 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2023

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  • Deflation is bad. Then people stop spending, postpone all purchases, economy grinds to a halt, people lose jobs and companies go bankrupt.

    Hyperinflation is bad. Then people spend money like toilet paper: money becomes worthless. No one has anything left to invest or to save for pension or a big plan or dream.

    The general goal of aiming for about 2% inflation is basically just there to try to prevent those two worst case scenarios from happening. It’s the least bad of all evils: money sort of keeps it’s value, evolution of product prices are rather predictable, people know what they will be able to buy with their wages. Inflation is not inherently tied to capitalism only. Socialist/communist economic experiments experience very similar phenomena.


  • The most powerful table in the UN is ruled by 5 nuclear superpowers, 3 of them are out: Russia, China, USA. A fourth (UK) has nukes which are not fully independent from the USA and basically lost their empire they had when they were given this prime seat, they are less powerful than they seem. That leaves France as sole UN defender. Weirdly you could even see China still being a somewhat stabilising factor. UN goal is indeed not to prevent all conflict, but it definitely was to contain conflict. 2/5 and maybe 3/5 want more conflict in the world, it is very clear, they want to prey on smaller, non nuclear armed countries.

    Then you could also look at it in raw power: amount of nukes, ships, soldiers, missiles et cetera. In that case it’s waaaay more than 3/5th that are out, because USA military is so fucking massive and the guy at the top of that who should be in jail or dead just announced he wants to increase the size of that massive, non UN-compliant military machine by another 50%… Unless USA get their shit together ASAP, UN is useless for protecting all the smaller member states. The goal of mediating any conflict in UN is simply unachievable without USA, because they hold the (raw, military) power. It has become quite likely the UN will indeed die because the major security council members are ruled assholes. Who’s making deals about environment or climate when their neighbours/“allies” are threatening annexation and no big power reacts (worse, they’re the one anbexing)? Right: no one.


  • The UN is functionally dead. It doesn’t succeed in preventing conflict anymore, nor in saving people and the planet. And with it many other international organisations that held shit together in a somewhat predictable way since WW2.

    History shows: next comes conflict. Large scale, very large scale. In fact possibly a scale we’ve never seen before.

    If anything is left after that (nuclear age): the winner(s) make a new set of organisations that bring different actors together and new rules for the game.

    The craziest part is that it’s the dominating USA itself pulling the plug on its own world dominating organisations…










  • “trick some of them accidentally” is definitely underestimating average users. In my experience 95% + of all users click consent once, all is stored forever and they’ll never see the banner again, for sure not on the same device. They don’t do adblocking, no automatic cookie deleting, in fact no browser extensions at all. The average fediverse user is a weird mix of a 1990’s internet poweruser with a today tech kid trying to make it into the future technologies on their own terms and by faaaar not an average user visiting average website on average devices with average browsers and configurations. In short: most people don’t experience this ‘problem’ like us, because they consent by default to anything you throw at them and are then in the gated tracking paradise where there’s barely any cookienagging, visiting the same handful of websites all the time anyway.




  • Not German but moved to Germany. The word is still a normal word, it can be used, only in certain contexts not.

    To me it is very very weird.

    Especially in a comboword there is 0,0 issue: Reiseführer, Bergführer, etc. The no go zone seems very subtle to me, it’s more about pronunciation and context, not the word itself. Especially the word “Führerschein” is super weird to me when used in regular conversations. I automatically hear translated “license to be the Führer”, but it just means driver’s license and nothing else and no one finds it weird.





  • So your reply to this article was very out of place. Things are not white or black, but your opinion was not at all about the article the OP posted and has little place here. Living on Jersey without your own garage is perfectly possible, the only issue they have is man-made (too much car infrastructure, too little alternatives) and obligating people to build expensive garages only makes it worse. Building decent cycle infrastructure and providing better public transportation are very viable options on Jersey. Your living place and your grievances about your living place don’t influence that.


  • The linked article is about Jersey.

    104.000 inhabitants on a rock in the ocean the size of 10km x 10 km, population density 859/km2.

    That population density is not very different from many lower density neighbourhoods in big cities. On top, distances on this rock are never of that kind that a car would be absolutely necessary. They are, geographically and demographically, in an excellent position to organise very good public transportation with little more than a few well served, comfortable buslines. Vast majority of the population is clearly concentrated on one side of the island: the south, where population density is clearly higher (St Helier, 3,380/km2, really not different from average city density neighbourhoods in big cities.)

    I don’t know where you live, but I don’t think “rural” and “long distances” are the right arguments for rooting in favor of more space for cars (and thus… more cars) on Jersey. The longest drive I could draw on a map is from “La Rocque” to “Grosnez castle”. And that’s really stretching it, with a staggering 22km in 30 minutes. Makes you wonder why they’ld have cars at all on this island… Maybe for construction, transporting the sick to the hospital etc etc. But your old regular commute from home to market or home to work… It could be a bicycle paradise an island like this… You can cycle the entire longest stretch in less than 1,5 hours, by foot it would be a staggering 5 hours. They are ruining their paradise island by roads and cars everywhere and encouraging it even further (obligating it, even) is just a god damn shame. One could perfectly live there without owning their own car in their own garage.