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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.

    Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.

    More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.

    Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.

    It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.

    Wealth inequality is everything.


  • The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.

    Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.

    The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.




  • Thanks for this, I think an additional valuable data point is what the net tax income is in a typical year.

    According to Wikipedia the budget for Germany has a net balance of ~97 billion Euros (2023). Which, if that value is correct and the analysis of the Linke plan is accurate, means we could wipe out the yearly deficit and still have €100 billion left over to spend. Which if carried over a decade would match the spending estimated by the debt break reform (over that same period of time) aimed entirely at the war complex and vague infrastructure needs.

    This sounds like it proves that the majority of parties in Germany are not thinking about the future of the common man but of the future of the wealthy class. Perhaps there’s an argument for these plans being unpopular by the German populace, but that’s a matter of education and communication. We need everyone in Germany, east and west, young and old, historically conservative or progressive, to understand that reducing the tax on the wealthy and corporations only hurts everyone - and that the reverse benefits everyone.





  • Nobara is the oft pointed to gaming distro for Linux. There are three major flavors of Linux as far as I can tell (I did some research for a similar switch, which I haven’t completed because I have some stupid digital coins divesting and when that’s done I’m coming over). There is Debian, Fedora, and Arch. The easiest and simplest way for me to understand them is scaling them in terms of stability and latest releases. Debian is supposedly super stable but furthest behind on releases because of all the stability testing. Arch is least stable but on all of the latest releases. Fedora is the middle ground, more stable but slightly behind.

    Nobara is based on Fedora and is recommended for new Linux users who want to game. The steam deck is on an Arch based distro. Linux Mint, another recommended pick for new comers, is based on Debian.

    I am personally porting over to Arch Linux, because I want to have the latest releases and I believe I can sufficiently reduce the instability with a couple of processes. I have it installed on my laptop and it’s been seemingly stable for about a quarter.


  • PoE2 will be Free-To-Play upon 1.0 launch. For now it’s in what they’re calling Early Access (a Beta period) and requires a €30 euro key. I believe they said they did this because it wasn’t the complete game, they were still looking for feedback, and it’s a bit janky in terms of balance.

    So far it’s been worth every penny, many times over, but I also think the promise they deliver on in the first three acts they fail to deliver on in the end game. I’d recommend people wait if they have other games or ARPG’s to play. I’d also recommend anyone who loves ARPG’s, if they have run out of content elsewhere to give it a try without hesitation. It’s a fantastic game and the best arpg on the market in almost every aspect.


  • I’ve stopped preordering most games, partially because of a backlog, partially because games like 2077 ruined my trust in even “good” companies (and no, I do not think 2077 deserves the redemption arc the Internet gives it). I did however pre-order Path of Exile 2 by a week because I had A) played a beta experience which was terribly fun B) followed all of the content creators talk about the beta’s they played and how even when they complained it felt like choices I’d like (more action focused combat) and C) the preorder I got came with keys for friends I wanted to distribute ahead of time. So I knew for sure I was going to play it, like it at least enough to justify the price, and that I wanted to preload it for a launch party.

    Pretty much the biggest and best reason to preorder is for the preload so you can play at launch. But not every game needs to be played at exactly the launch time (in fact we struggled on launch day of poe2 but did eventually get to play) and all pre-orders should be done as close to the launch date as possible so you can get an easy refund if it sucks.





  • Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or… Bazzite I think the other one is.

    I’m about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven’t decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it’s not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn’t do. Worried it’ll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I’ll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.




  • I appreciate these comments saying the tech hasn’t degraded and it’s been standstill, or that it was never great in the first place, all of which is true but I would like to interject my own Model 3 experience. When we first bought the Tesla in 2019 the self driving functionality on the highway felt safe and functional in nominal conditions. When we sold the Tesla 2 years ago (2022) the self driving felt noticably more finicky. It struggled to switch lanes, recognize when lanes started and ended, and had noticably more issues with maintaining proper speed and distance with other cars.

    It probably wasn’t significantly more dangerous, but it felt like it was. What was a feature we used for the first year or two without much complaint turned into something we never used and our driving time when down in that third year not up so it wasn’t exposure time I don’t think.


  • It’s worth it. I’m almost two years in Germany. Wouldn’t move back for a million dollars (although at 3 I could be bought). Work on the local language, volunteer or other community involvement activities, treat it like the new home it is. We’re fortunate to be able to move to a new country, try to be a part of improving it and earning your spot there. I’m even more fortunate to be white, male, straight etc - assuming you’re at least some of those things, do your best to counter the anti-immigration fear mongering that comes out of the political right. It effects you now, but more importantly it’s ramping up and it’ll effect people less fortunate far worse.

    Hope you love it and welcome to Europe.