And some stocks have a 2:1 stock to book value ratio wheras others have 50:1. In the first case, even if the company closed down, unless the books were fraudulent you can still recover half your investment as it represents hard physical valuable assets.

Like many people with the reddit exodus.

But i also got quite annoyed with the main German communities shifting more and more to the right and the moderators of the largest german subreddit to tolerate and enable transphobic and racist discussions, e.g. when there was some tabloid “news” on either topic shared.

I dont know how much of it was because the communities were more and more targeted by organized far right propaganda and how much was the moderators of the /r/de subreddit sharing such viewpoints.

Those trends already happened for some years, getting particularly worse with covid.

Unless you are forced to life in that area you are making a choice. And you are not forced to life there. It comes with trade offs. The trade offs are traded in the housing market. People fled the cities in the 80s to move into suburbs. Now people want to life in the city again.

And cost of living of course includes the coffee and toast. You see that in areas that are gentrified, forcing people who dont make the 100k a year to move away. Where before the coffee was 3$ it now is 15$. And someone is paying for that, otherwise the business would not work. So again people are making that choice. And the people with 100k make the choice actually forcing the hand of people who only make 30k and are literally forced out of their neighbourhood.

Of course then there is all the more compulsion to claim, that they had no choice but to gentrify and had no choice but to drive people out of their neighbourhoods. Because if the people with 100k weren’t forced to do so, then they would need to take responsibility for their role in that market. Of course the main responsibility remains with the landlords who are happy to drive rents up and people out. But then again i doubt there to be many six figure engineers who are devout to left parties (in case of the US, the Democrats are not a left party by any outside standard.)

But then why is it an acceptable choice for the commuting grocery store worker, but not for the engineer? There is a quality of living involved here that the engineer chooses to pay for, which the grocery store worker doesn’t have.

Thats what i mean with unrealised luxuries. They claim to live paycheck to paycheck because their understanding of what a “normal” standard of living ist, is very different, from what “normal” people actually have as a standard of living.

This is not to say, that theses conditions are a good society or dont need changing. But who can get such an engineering job definetely chooses to have a quality of life that he pays all his paycheck for. If it wouldn’t be a choice the grocery store workers wouldn’t exist.

So where is that place, where the cost of living fully eat up a 250k salary, or even a 100k salary? And by eating up i mean actually living paycheck to paycheck, not as given in the examples enjoying many small luxuries that add up, but are not realised as such.

I get the concept. But realistically that would mean three things:

In a region where people make 250k a year for them to live paycheck to paycheck the cost of living would need to be somewhere around 4-5x higher than in an area where people would make 50k a year.

That would further mean that in the areas where people make 250k a year noone would exist that could afford anything less than that. So the grocery store cashier and the gas station clerk and the postman would all need to make the same money as google software engineers. That is clearly not the case.

And thirdly that means that either the people who make that much money living paycheck to paycheck are economically illiterate and dont grasp such simple concepts… Or which is far more likely, the quality of life in high cost of living areas is in fact so much better, that it is worth paying the extra.

Either way someone who can make 250k a year is choosing to life paycheck to paycheck by choosing to pay such expenses. They definetely have the means to work somewhere where the difference between cost of living and paycheck allows for saving signficant amounts of money over time. Claiming those people would be victims of the system who were forced to live paycheck to paycheck is simply not true. It is still very much their own choice.

Excuse me what? Someone earning that much money is only living paycheck to paycheck because their lifestyle is that expensive. And then it actually is their own fault for buying the 15$ Latte with a 30$ Avocado toast every morning, driving to work in their leased 100k $ car, while their wive drives her own 100k $ car.

Isnt the federations key idea to avoid collapse if any single instance it failing? This sounds like the system has become too centralized around lemmy.world

I used to work at an utility company that started to build, or rather started to plan to build a new site, for something that mostly exists in developed countries already. The normal projects thus were usually expansions, upgrades and refurbishments.

Getting to build from scratch, and especially at that size is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately though mixing the slower processes of a utility company with political interference in an unstable political environment, company leadership where the CTO role was vacant for multiple years and the rest of management is classical business school people w.o. engineering background and insane ideas about new management practices, bogged the whole thing down pretty harshly.

With the managing practices i’m talking about things like bonus systems that most companies tried in the 90s and got rid of again. This is particularly absurd as the companies goal is to provide the utility at cost coverage, not to maximise profit. But it gets even worse, as the main issue is lacking cooperation cross departments. In an environment where people are already clingy to “this is our department standard, i will follow it precisely because i dont want to take risks”, adding on top conflicting KPIs that impact peoples salary is a recipe for desaster with a 100% guarantee.

Also they got an insane idea about “desk sharing” to cut down on office space rented, since most people are working from home. But they didnt increase the allowance of work from hom days. So you are basically forced to stay at home on specific days and go to the office on other days, so you can meet both quotas, effectively taking all the benefits for the employee away.

I left and i’m not looking back. I would have loved to continue working with the colleagues though and i am still amazed by how they try to make the project happen despite every boulder the company throws into their path.

But would anybody be bothered by it, if there’s no interaction there? Boomers destroyed Facebook for younger audiences, as all of a sudden parents would join in on conversations with your friends in the comments under a photo. You would link an article about a political issue and your reactionary uncle would proceed to call everyone who reads it a damn commy that needs to go to the army to learn some real life.

It is explicilty mentioned at the beginning of the video, that the country is as green as it gets, since it is the end of the rainy season.

All the area that is filled with the half moon structures would be barren during rainy season too, as you can see with the soil around the half moons. It will look less impressive at the driest time of the year, but the positive effects of retaining biomass and water will remain present.

In a way it is a bit sad though. It gives a more rigid feeling to things. “about quarter past” would usually be something between :10 and :20. There is room for interpretation and time feels more available with less demanded precision.

It is not a new story though. A family member argued about a traffic accident, that the description provided by the other side is physically impossible. The judge replied, that physics would not count for humans.

A lot of people who study law do so, because they are terrible at sciences.

There is a regular governmental press conference, usually monday, wednesday and friday where the speakers of the chancellor and the ministries are invited by an independant journalist organization. The organization is called Bundespressekonferenz.

Since about ten years the journalist Tilo Jung is recording most of the press conferences and uploading them to his youtube channel I highly recommend you to watch the latest video on the massacre in Gaza. The current government called it an “tragic use of shooting weapons”.

I cannot find the specific video right now, because the topic of mass surveillance through automated scanning of messengers, or by allowing back doors has been a topic since at least the past 5 or 6 years. Please note that i was refferring not to this but the previous german government, albeit the current chancellor party SPD was also in the previous government and the chancellor Scholz was the last finance minister under Merkel.

If you believe my statement to be implausible without video evidence, i’d like to invite you to meet our former minister of defence in the current government, Lambrecht, who resigned after referring to the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to have met many nice people in a social media video. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64288267

Before she was defence minister under this goverment, she was minsiter of justice under the previous government. There she demanded that all websites should hand passwords over to the police as demanded. When it was pointed out that there is no use with hashed passwords, she asked to just safe them in plain text then. Alongside where further demands for extensive backdoors, violation of encryption and automatic scanning. It took months of heavy criticism to get her to drop it, despite the main point being that most of what she proposed was in violation of other laws including EU regulation.

https://netzpolitik.org/2020/hacker-interessieren-sich-nicht-fuer-stopp-schilder/
https://www.heise.de/news/Justizministerium-WhatsApp-Gmail-Co-sollen-Passwoerter-herausgeben-muessen-4615602.html

When asked about employing mass surveillance, in particular also spying on Journalists, Doctors and Lawyers, the previous German government replied, that it is fine if we do it. After all we are not like Russia, China or Saudi Arabia, so those people have nothing to fear…

If we could power the earth from Orwell turning in his grave, we would have solved cliamte change long ago.

I disagree. Thge main purpose of Israel to the US is to sow division amongst the Middle Eastern countries and to keep the US allied countries under control. Putting the countries against each other and putting the people against their leaders, but in a way that is still supressable with US support, is the cynical way of keeping the region weak. China made it happen that both Saudi Arabia and Iran have joined the BRICS. If those two were to reconcile with each other, the US strategy would fail. By confronting Saudi Arabia with a clear moral failure, that they are yet unable to speak up about, they make it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to seek alliances outside the US influence. At the same time the people are angry with their leader to he needs the US arms support to be able to supress his people, if shit would hit the fan.

It is only creating a headache for Biden because not only are the Israelis commiting genocide in Gaza, they feel so sure about themselves, that they are also bragging about it. If the Israeli public, in particular the supporters of Netanyahu wouldn’t be so bloodthirsty, that they demand the genocide to be accompanied by genocidal rethoric, the US and Israel could do about the same, while keeping it under the rug.

Sorry but this is just wrong. Israel is very explicit about attacking all Palestinians. They are also explicit about their plans to drive them from their Land even more. The US full well knows and supports the Israeli plan to commit genocide and mass displacement to the Palestinians.

The only purpose of the current actions is to create a veil of deniability, to not be charged as a direct accomplice in the crimes. If the US had a genuine interest to fight Hamas, while helping the Palestinians, they would have sanctioned Israel to hell decades ago, established a new UN mandate and return the stolen land, while providing proper justice and opportunity to the Palestinian people, until either two equal or one united state is founded.

The US has been enabling Israel in its crimes against the Palestinians and through this enabled Hamas, as well as helped the Israeli government to help Hamas, which Netanyahu himself was very outspoken about.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan… The US has bought many allies in the region.

The danger is not an immediate loss of allies. The danger is a long term stable Middle East, that is not ridden by war and insurgency. if the Middle East realized its shared interests it would become a major global power. So the US needs Israel as the thorn right in the heart.

But the IP lobby sucessfully got that idea to the courts. In my country if you are caught torrenting a series episode just for 10 seconds, the courts accept the idea, that you spread like a hundred copies of the IP to people who would have definetely bought it otherwise, so you now owe the IP holder 1000 €.

It is complete horseshit

Also this is data that any reasonable company could get in like half an hour of searching and asking.

There is data on how many meals are sold a day at the mensa, how many students are enrolled, how many students live on campus…

Unless the vending machine is in the last corner of the third floor of an half empty building, all this information can be puzzled together to get a good estimate of how many people are passing the machine on a day to day basis.