I think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.

Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.

And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.

I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.

“Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”

But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.

As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).

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.

And they’ll continue to as long as the ultra wealthy use unregulated media to blame culture issues to avoid fair taxation and political unification. If we want terror attacks to stop we must tax the rich out of existence - we must improve the lives of the average person.

I love this and I support the greens. If Merz’s top priority is giving tax cuts to the rich and paying for fundamental needs like infrastructure with debt (which is financed by the wealthy and who reap the interest) then he should be treated like an enemy of the state. If they’re willing to sell out their neighbors for Blackrock’s enrichment and the enrichment of other massive corporations than we should be calling them out on this every time they walk out of their homes.

To call himself a Christian too, while stealing from the poor and the working class, is unbelievably frustrating. Not that organized religion is a good metric to judge someone’s morality by, for that to be one of his defining characteristics is gross.

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.

I completely agree. I just want to see this topic brought up more by German news and journalists (admittedly as someone learning the language and new to the country I’m not exactly plugged in to the entire media landscape yet and won’t be for many more years, but what gets shared to Lemmy I do my best to read or get translated).

The CDU are going to lead Germany to the same problems the Americans have. The SPD needs to move farther left. And the German populace needs to rally around sane policy demands like taxing the rich, investing in public infrastructure (trains far more than cars), and heavily discouraging landlords and corporate land ownership.

How much of the debt would be eliminated if we taxed the rich more? Why is the conversation always around the debt brake instead of increasing the income of the government from the people most likely to corrupt and abuse it (and which have plenty to go around)?

Ya, sorry, my bad. Someone else commented that there are five flavors and I was like “oof they must not have come across as realistic or viable options for me very early on”. But you know how it is, memory is fickle. This was the best summary I could do as a very inexperienced Linux person.

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.

Remember and talk about with your neighbors and colleagues that this is who the afd associate with. This is what they are and what they want. Do not fall as my country currently is.

Bitte lasst die AfD nicht gewinnen. Ich bin ein Einwanderer und mir gefällt es hier.

Thanks! That’s what I wanted to hear. When researching distros they always talk about them being optimized for gaming or what have you and I was worried some of that wasn’t as simple as installing the drivers and fixing steam.

I look forward to converting this weekend or next!

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 would argue “the economy” can be a term to abstract away from the bottom line, the actual desirable outcomes. That’s housing for everyone, that’s good education, that’s thriving salaries. Given that every dollar given to a millionaire is a dollar not given to someone who needs it (assuming correctly that every society has people below the thriving line) then they are bad for the economy by definition.

Every country should implement laws that fundamentally ban and prevent multi-millionnaires from existing. They are bad for democracy and they are bad for society.

Last I heard the value was like 10 million or 20 million. Anything over that should be taxed at 100% or prevented in the first place.

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.