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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • No one should be surprised that the Liar Merz lied. He’s been lying since I’ve known about him (only a couple years) and I’m told he’s got a history of lying. Conservative governments want to hollow out their countries for personal gain, no one should be surprised.

    Stop cooperating with the parties that only want to worsen your standard of living. I don’t care if they say they care about the economy, I don’t care that they plead to supposed reason or security. They’re liars and conmen. They will destroy Germany if we let them.

    Cars and car infrastructure cost far more than trains and public transit, we can’t allow conservatives to rob us of a wealthy nation that can afford to serve it’s people.


  • I swapped over early last year, so I’m getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I’d say it’s been fantastic.

    My main concern was stability and gaming. I’m on pure Arch and it’s been completely stable. I haven’t done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.

    Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There’s been a handful of games I couldn’t play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I’m happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I’ll try again later and I assume it’ll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I’m okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven’t done the work yet) because I don’t think Bungie deserves my money.

    So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.



  • 1.5 months. It’s a worse flagship and it’s roughly priced accordingly. No major limitations or pains, although because of the privacy stuff knocking out google programs by default I’ve had to troubleshoot an app or two to get the onboard settings right.

    I’d recommend it to just about anyone except for maybe a grandma. Phones are largely set it and forget it though in my experience so even then it’s a bit of getting every app loaded and set up and then never worrying about it again.

    For instance lieferando I haven’t gotten working but nearly every other app was pretty simple.




  • I just swapped from proton to mailbox.org and I considered tuta heavily.

    I chose mailbox over tuta because:

    • tuta didn’t allow third party clients like thunderbird. Given I jumped to proton from Gmail and now mailbox from proton, I wanted to decouple as many systems as possible if I had to jump again.
    • mailbox, if I’m remembering correctly, had better encryption properties except for their calendar. Tuta has an encrypted calendar, and now I’m looking into a self-hosted calendar system.

    I think I would still recommend tuta to like my mother or something because it’s very clean and easy to set up and good enough. I’d recommend mailbox.org as a slightly harder alternative if you care about your calendar being encrypted.



  • Hydrogen was never great, it’s always been an oil lobby play because the majority of hydrogen - as I understand it - is a byproduct of the oil process. It makes very little sense to lose efficiency creating a highly flammable substance, lose efficiency transporting and storing that substance, lose efficiency supplying that substance to the end consumer, and then finally lose efficiency extracting the remaining energy from the substance.

    Hydrogen may make sense in some circumstances but it should not, and I’d even go so far as to say it will not, replace gasoline. Electricity is by far the best supplier of power long term.

    Elon liking something should be a red flag into a subject because he has shown himself to be both uneducated and against humanities best interests. It’s not that Elon likes a thing therefore it’s bad. It’s that Elon likes bad things because Elon is bad, and therefore when you look into it it has a pattern of being bad.



  • So you’re correct in saying the crime rate went up in 2023, but saying it’s a 15 year high is misleading, including comparing it to 1993 because there’s a difference in population.

    Looking at macrotrends.net the crime rate per 100k in 1993 was 1.67. The data here only goes up to 2021 but it’s 0.83. Even going back a few years to the highest peak, 2016 that’s still 1.17. So based on this data Germany was 1.5-2x more dangerous in 1993 than it was in 2021. There’s just more people living here than there ever has been. Like even if you take the 214k number and look back for the last time it was that high, it was 2007. The population hasn’t grown that much but the demographics surely have changed, and it’s now as bad as it was in 2007.

    Now I didn’t live in Germany in 2007, but I’d bet I’d struggle to find someone who honestly believed 2003-2010 (when the # of reports was above 200k) was a dangerous period in Germany. Like it’s all just the news cycle mate, they get to slap a big 8% on the year over year change and they get to run that for a couple of weeks throughout the year. In reality, it’s not the migrants or the cannibis laws I saw one article suggest, it’s the fact that wealth inequality has continued to worsen not just in Germany but globally and that will cost us (and everyone) something fierce.

    We’re seeing it in the US, we saw it in Germany last century, and we are marching onward to more inequality with the CDU and Merz leading the way.



  • I just explained how it worked for me - which means it works for some percentage of the population. I don’t what media you’re looking at but the overwhelming majority is fear exasperating, it’s telling everyone all the time to be afraid - not that we’re in the most peaceful era of existence.

    I don’t know what you mean by the data is misleading, you’d have to provide a specific example, because nearly every crime statistic shows Germany as incredibly peaceful and nearly ever crime statistic cannot be “slightly misleading”. For instance the number of homicides in Germany in 2023 is 0.9 per 100,000. Compare that to the US which is 5.8 per 100,000, a literal 6x value, and anyone can see that Germany is 6 times safer than the US in this one category. As someone from the US that’s powerful, because I lived fine in the US and now I’m even more safe. That statistic isn’t slightly misleading imo. You could argue some number of homicides are going unreported or that the population numbers are way off - but you’d have to show that as a cause for only one side of the equation, something I don’t believe you can.

    I don’t fundamentally understand your second paragraph, what do you mean “the main number is number of suspects”? The number I provided is not suspects, it’s actually homicides, for example.

    So I think you’re wrong about:

    • data not being effective at helping people fight their biases
    • that the media is conveying a peaceful or accurate message consistently
    • that the crime statistics, all of them, are “slightly misleading”




  • I’m not certain I understand the intent of the question but yes, totally!

    I haven’t told this story before but the first week I moved here I had a moment of panic. I moved to Germany with my best friend and roommate. We rented bikes to get around town and we were heading to a grocery store a ways away. We went through an industrial part of town, like warehouses and vans and workshops. Somehow we got split up, I think she took a right when I went straight, and I couldn’t find her.

    I rode the path google maps suggested for a bit longer, couldn’t see her on the horizon, turned around and rode backwards the way we came, couldn’t find her, called her, didn’t answer. And in that moment I had a serious “Taken” panic. I knew Germany was incredibly safe, I’d traveled the world already, but having just moved there and feeling vulnerable, I reimagined the industrial area as scummy. What was a plumbers can was now something to kidnap people in, the graffiti on the walls which I don’t mind turned into a warning signs about this place, I absolutely thought she had been kidnapped and I was going to have to explain to her parents that I lost her somewhere in a medium sized town in Germany.

    So I decided to fall back on planning, if you lost your parents, be predictable, go to where they’d expect you to be. So I rode on the parrelel street over (cause I’d already covered the main street), and biked to our destination. Sure enough, she was waiting at the intersection right before the grocery store, happy as a dog on a walk. She had taken the parrelel rode after her turn all the way and didn’t think about me or getting lost or nothing. Didn’t check her phone, was just totally in the moment (that little shit).

    And the moment I saw her, I realized what had happened emotionally to me. How American movies like “Taken” had primed me for terror, how vulnerable I felt, how not worried she was in any given moment (even if she was far more fearful than I in the big picture concepts), and how despite having traveled extensively I was ready and able to believe the worst if I suffered a personal experience irrespective of the data.

    I’ve lived here for nearly 3 years now. Haven’t had any scares like that since. A couple of city experiences that can make you feel unsafe, but nothing that made me forget and disown the data or my rational self. If I hadn’t looked up the data, if I hadn’t been rational, left leaning, etc I have no doubt that would have been a scarring moment despite it turning out fine. That’s why I recommend everyone look at the data and challenge their fears with real world observations.