There’s another factor that nobody mentioned: the sales tax in EU countries is different for different products. This allows countries to incentive or disincentivize different classes of products by ramping the sales tax up or down. Higher tax on junk food, cigarettes and/or alcohol, low or nonexistent sales tax for basic ingredients and medicine.

Interestingly, France and the Czech republic tax wine and beer respectively like basic food.

Many people (not all) rent because they can’t afford to buy, not because they don’t want to own property.

(remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm)

Isn’t this definitionally true? The norm, by definition, is the market rate.

It’s actually worse than that. Starvation takes a long time to happen (~3 weeks). Lack of access to water causes death and desperation in a much shorter period of time. If water pipelines and/or pumping facilities get screwed up in any way, cities will become mad max much faster and in a much more intense fashion. In a water-starved population, people are mostly composed of water…

The key thing is practice. Like any creative pursuit, your first attempts will be trash. The greatest writers, artists and musicians ever went through this too. If you care about that form of creative expression, just keep at it!

FYI, I’m not Ukrainian. I’m Romanian. We have more skin in the game than Germany or France though. If Ukraine falls, Moldova falls 24 hours later, and allowing our brother country to go back under Russian domination is pretty unthinkable.

Even without that existential issue, allowing democratically minded Europeans trying to walk the same path we walked 25 years ago get invaded by Russia without as much help as we can give them seems horrific to me.

This period of war in Eastern Europe is pretty shit and I would like Western Europe to take it more seriously, thx

Technically yes, but I don’t mean technology as phones/laptops/tablets/etc. Imho, the biggest factor in social isolation is atomization due to bad urban planning. When everything and anything is only accessible by car, you lose any connection with your local neighbourhood and local stores/cafes/etc.

In environments where people walk around the neighbourhood, doing small daily shops, going to local businesses and taking mass transit to work/school/restaurants/bars, then you’re much more likely to interact with people rather than driving around in your social isolation-mobile.

Urban planning can be considered a form of technology, which is why I said technically yes.

EDIT: Oh, another big factor here is the loss of the third place. It still exists in some places (local pubs in British towns, local coffee shop in Portugal, etc), but in places without a socially normal “hangout spot” that is separated from both home and work/school, it’s much harder to meet acquaintances which may in time become friends.

Works for floors!

Do I grab them by the bridge bit that sits on their nose

This is the way.

Blink-blink-blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink.

No, I don’t have something in my eyes, I swear I’m fine looks nervously at boss.

I’d say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.

LLM’s aren’t real AI

I think that’s mostly a semantics issue. When people talk about AI here on Lemmy, they generally mean AGI. LLMs are not AGIs, as far as I understand it.

There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it’s far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.

anti-anything google

I hear that. Went through the technical reasons for the manifest V2 deprecation (if this is only to target ublock origin, why did they implement filter lists into the browser? Why does ublock origin lite work just fine?) and it got more downvotes than upvotes. Haters gonna hate I guess :))

This video does an ok job of it.

While we’re on the topic of EU initiatives, the tax the rich initiative still needs signatures. It aims to set a floor on tax rates for the very wealthy, and have member states use that new money for environment, employment and social policies.

They’ve hit the threshold for France and Germany, but still need more signatures everywhere else.

separately, it would be a travesty to say that the so-called “tribes” […] were “given to us by chance”

What I meant by that is that you don’t decide where you’re born or who your parents are. That is “by chance” from the point of view of the individual.

Humans are a tribal species. Whether we’re talking culture, ethnicity, nationality or any other method of defining who is inside or outside the group, the fact is we have an ingrained tendency to separate “us” from “them”.

Modern psychology says that the process of becoming more and more inclusive and tolerant is the process of expanding your mental map of who your “tribe” is.

This means that to truly accomplish our goal here (you and I seem to 100% agree on that goal), we need to expand people’s mental model of their tribe to encompass all people.

While I do hope that eventually we get to one humanity-sized tribe, until then humans still seem to want smaller tribes. While trying to convince people to see all humans as part of the same tribe, we can simultaneously try and improve the smaller arbitrary tribes we were given by chance.

So, I watched that third link in its entirety. It was pretty interesting. I think the core idea is that NK isn’t some absolutely insane bizarro land, which I actually agreed with beforehand. It did not disprove the fact that NK is an authoritarian dictatorship. The only thing it did prove (which again, I knew about beforehand) is that western media likes to exaggerate the faults to hyperbolic levels. I honestly think that the average north korean would live a better life without the Kim family (or any other family regime) ruling over them. This doesn’t mean that they force people to have specific hairstyles at gunpoint or execute politicians for slouching during speeches (as the video joked about), but they still direct a large portion of the states wealth towards friends and family.

I think you should really honestly consider the fact that two wrongs don’t make a right. NK and the USA do terrible things. Instead of litigating which one is worse, maybe we should focus on how to make better alternatives, like you’ve done with this alternative to Reddit.