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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Correct on a per capita bases Portugal has been growing much much faster then Germany. The simple truth it that Germany is not benefiting from austerity either. What should happen is that the German government massively increases spending. This would turn Germany from a net exporter, to a net importer. That allows the PIIGS to export products to Germany paying down the debt, but it also stimulates the economy. Germany profits from the increased spending as well.

    The simple truth is that German life expectancy is declining since a couple of years(being below Spain, Italy and Portugal btw). Median wealth of Italy, Spain and Portugal is higher then that of Germany, which is only slightly higher then that of Greece. Real wages in Germany have gone up by 3.8% over the last decade(not annually but the entire decade).

    The only ones who really profit from this austerity are the super rich. Other then that it is as bad a policy for Germany as it is for Italy, Portugal, Spain or Greece.




  • If only Germany would not be willing to recognice Palestine, then this might happen, but that is not the case. France and Italy the two next most powerfull countries do not recognice Palestine either.

    Germany is usually fairly happy with the current state of the EU. The things Germany wants to change are usually also supported by Spain and that means blackmail is harder. The only exaption to that is finance. However Spain is not going to let billions go to waste to have Palestine recogniced. That is just more of a symbol, rather then massivly important.

    Also Germany leaving the EU would cause some massive problems in other EU countries as well. They would hardly be cheering for it.




  • Social media in general loves controvery. So they push radical ideas, as they create conversation, clicks and other interactions, which means more time on the site. That then allows for more ad money.

    The truth is most Americans are not that radical, due to just not caring too much about politics. They just want things to keep going as they are.

    The other part of it is none Americans on social media. For Europeans for example Biden looks center right for the most part. Then again Europeans have options further left.



  • There are a few ways of going about it. One is third parties. If you vote for the Green Party for example, you get voting reform, anti genocide policies and a much better enviromental policy. At the same time Biden is still much better then Trump and being realistic about what you can get should also be part of voting strategy. Also it is incredibly important to say, that citizenship does not end at the ballot box. You got to and can do more to influence politics. So I would probably vote Biden in a swing state and Green Party in an state, which is not a swing state. This matters in two ways. Firstly the more people vote third party, the more likely they can get into some actual power, but also the Democrats see that they can gain potential votes, by improving policies.

    Also no lesser evil has to be distinguised from compromise and deals. If you get an actual improvement out of doing something, it can be worth doing even at a price. So if two countries face a powerfull invader, it can be worth making a deal that country A gets 40% of the invaders land and country B also 60%, if country B is already stronger for example. In that case both get something out of it. However without the alliance both would probably fail. In this case the question is, if Biden would actually net improve the US compared to today.


  • There are a lot of procoporate enviromental policies. Building renewables, EVs, public transport and so forth is pumping money into the economy, which cooperations love. Obviously it is not enough and the US has to activly lower consumption to do enough to keep climate change manageable. For that you need activists. However corportists like Biden are activly working on making real things in America, which is a hell of a lot better then the finance presidents before that. To be fair Trump is also a corporatist, but he does nothing for the enviroment.

    Welcome to reality.




  • Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.

    That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.






  • Because Twitter is a very different service to all the bigger ones. The limit on the length of tweets means, that the messages posted have to be to the point, hence they are easy to quote by news of all sorts. That attracts politicans, CEOs and somewhat celbreties to the site, who want to be in the news and it becomes a self enforcing cycle. The eleven larger ones focus either on direct messaging like WhatsApp, Telegram and so forth or have none text media as their dominant form of content like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.