gusgalarnyk

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.

I think the solution is attack the systems themselves and when that isn't sufficient there are only a few people at the top with power.

I am leaving or unsubscribing from as many monopoly powers as possible: Google, Amazon, meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc etc. Be vocal about it, take friends and family with you if you can. I'm choosing open source when possible over more polished closed source, like jellyfin and Linux (transitioning this weekend 🤞), and donate. These actions take a small fraction of their income from them and if enough people do it I believe it will cause them issues.

I'm trying to not just leave these things but build communities for when we leave. For me this looks like trying to get a blog off the ground for friends and family, developing friend circles that have these discussions frequently, and then contributing/volunteering within my direct neighborhood or community (working on this one as I'm new in Germany and that comes with it's own time taxes).

Also, if you can afford to, buy local. Buy from someone you know. Buy from people with good supply lines. Be vocal about how this is critical and necessary. The more money that goes to our neighbors instead of the 1% somewhere else in the world, the better. That's all the shift of power, and it starts with not shopping at whole foods or Walmart and buying bespoke or sometimes worse products for sometimes more money so that those good people can work on their process and products.

But these are small steps, and personally I don't have any idea of the connective tissues between a person or group of people and the political systems most of us exist in. I guess in the past political parties were more grassroots driven, like get in a room with your neighbors and develop policies and debate. I've never lived in that reality. Getting back to that is probably incredibly important. I guess new age political parties and old school unions are the best path forward there.

But the inevitable path, if all else fails, is violence. That is the reality. That becomes a lot less personally risky the larger a community you have before starting it, but as we've seen one Super Mario brother is sufficient to make changes.

Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.

I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.

I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I'd like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.

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

The world is trending towards atheism bud. This Islamic fear mongering is horseshit. "Many people" who don't like the "conservative values" that come from Islam are likely the same people who don't like the conservative values that stem from Christianity or Catholicism and yet that's far more prevalent in the US or Germany - in same cases literally baked in to their government - than the number of Islamic migrants could ever reach. It's just smoke screen for blatant racism and xenophobia. Those two religions are more similar than they are different and yet one is tied to brown people and immigrants (looking for a better future). I bet if we looked at immigration statistics for the US the number of Islamic immigrants would represent a minority percentage of the total immigrant population. And that's not even considering the fact that some people label themselves as the religious group they grew up with but aren't practicing and possibly have even fallen out of faith.

I'm a Christian immigrant in Germany but I'm probably more likely agnostic at this point. Now tell me what my values are? Tell me what cultural pressure I'm putting on Germany? The reality is religion, except for heavy practitioners, is not necessarily indicative of their beliefs.

Immigrants bring skilled labor that societies need to survive. Its Not just Germany being poorer, it's Germany not having working infrastructure, hospitals and clinics having larger wait times, it's less organic and ethically produced products in your neighborhoods, it's worse education and more expensive housing. Populations are declining and the best way to ensure every job is still filled, for the betterment of society, is immigration. Culture is a horseshit political word for people who didn't grow up in my small town, which is most people.

Europeans and racist Americans talk about culture as if we're in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, like people across an imaginary border don't use money and don't like music and don't like good food. It's stupid.

The power the ultra wealthy have to cross historic boundaries and bend the world to their will is unprecedented in history. We have to safeguard democracy against these people. Billionaires need to be taxed into the worker class for the safety of democracy. And doing so would mean massive societal improvement relatively overnight.

When I moves to Germany I saw the exact same propaganda lines used in the US against African Americans and Median Americans leveraged against Turkish immigrants. The same percentage bullshit, the same lazy / taking our job lines.

Cultural dilution is not an objective metric, it's a tool to rule up the uneducated and the racist. It's all culture warfare to hide the constant class warfare.

The problem is not the immigrant population in every country on earth, totaling hundreds of millions of people, it's the billionaire/millionaire class in every country totalling tens of thousands of people. The fuckin growing wealth disparity isn't happening because of skilled labor or asylum seekers, it's because of the rich.

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.

Are you reading what I'm writing? How could you have and still argue that Mississippi has a better culture? I made multiple points that irrefutably prove, at least by my definition, that Mississippi is not the better place to live. In fact, by my definition which again is not an objective truth but just my place of discussion, Mississippi wouldn't qualify as one of the top 30 or 40 best places to live in the United States even, let alone the world. Because the average person in Mississippi is statistically doing worse than the average person New York or Washington or pick literally any of the top like 30 states, I'm positive across most statistics those other states are better.

No, vacation, healthcare, general safety, labor rights, these are not "soft" benefits. These are tangible facts. You are way more likely to get shot in Mississippi than you are in Germany, your children an order of magnitude more, those are not soft benefits.

Listen, Internet stranger and anyone else reading this, I'm not on team Germany. You should not be on team Mississippi. I am not arguing sports here with you and one of us has to win and one of us has to lose. I'm talking about reality, and we all win if we all realize there are many countries doing better than the US (including and especially Mississippi) in most desirable metrics. I'm not saying Mississippi is a bad place to live and anyone who lives there should feel bad. I'm saying the people of Mississippi could implement 20 days of minimum vacation and be instantly better off without the system collapsing. And they should.

To the larger conversation, I'm saying the US (including and especially Mississippi) is behind in real human metric compared to their European counterparts and people should not believe that they are similar - unless they cannot parse reality and refuse to accept facts. Pretending the US is doing well prevents or discourages real change from happening.

If the point of your comment was to say "you have not lived in every town in every state in the US and thus can't say for certain Germany is better" then you're missing the central thrust of my argument.

I'm speaking to the law of averages, I'm talking about the universal improvements one would experience if they moved to a country like Germany. No place in the states has all of the benefits I've listed and nearly everywhere in Germany does. So for people who care about those things and are wondering if other countries like Germany have it better across the board, the answer is yes. Yes they do have it better (and everyone in the US could too).

I think culture is a buzzword, an excuse for grading a place based on biases and vibes. There is no culture in Mississippi that will provide me more vacation, there is no culture that will pay me more money, there is no Mississippi culture that will improve the states average reading scores or lower their hate crime statistics. Culture is a proxy vibe for other more tangible more desirable statistics. If I want to know how the culture values intelligence and education I look at their educational stats. Or how generous and charitable, I look at how they treat immigrants and the homeless and those who've lost their jobs. It's that whole concept of "a system's purpose is what it does", a places culture is what that culture produces. And in that light the US suffers greatly comparatively.

But if we go strictly off of vibes - a good culture for me would be one of generosity from my neighbors, from the businesses I support. A good culture would be the warmth of introductions and the quick witty humor of new friends. Supporting rapid progress, helping those in need, valuing art and creation, spreading global peace, challenging power structures and the redistribution of wealth from those who have far too much to those who have far too little, etc etc.

Don't you think all of those are easier behaviors to cultivate when the average person isn't overworked, is fairly compensated, is safe in their work and housing, etc? Cause I think so.

So no, there isn't a place in the US today that I would like to live in over Germany. And that's not even discussing a 10 year forecast. What does the US look like in 20 years vs Germany? Do you think Mississippi has universal healthcare in 20 years? How about a mandatory vacation minimum of 4 weeks? How about a well connected rail system? Pick how many decades you think it'll take for the culture in Mississippi to improve to the point where they value these thingsx then pick how many decades it would take to enact them. Then consider moving to Germany and time traveling by X number of decades. Do you get it now?

As someone who moved from the US to Germany almost two years ago I'd like to chime in here for anyone wondering if the two countries are really similar.

They're not, Germany is way better. Maybe not for everyone, definitely not in all aspects, but it's like teleporting to the future by 30 years.

I've lived in Kansas, Iowa, California, Florida, Colorado. I'm now living in Baden-Württemberg. Simply by moving to Germany I now walk or train everywhere (no car), my vacation doubled (6 weeks not including holidays), I have worker protections (it's not as easy to fire me), unemployment would cover something fuckin crazy like 80% of my current salary if I was fired (I'm not worried about this but what a relief to know society wouldn't just grind me up if I got a short streak of bad luck), medicine is easier to get and healthcare is a marginal cost every month (compared to self hundred in the US), I make slightly more money after conversion and my take home is roughly the same (so the whole taxes are so high thing is offset by cost of living and line items being removed like healthcare and car). The grocers are better here but the restaurants were almost universally better in the US, at least compared to where I'm currently living. I have a quick path to citizenship, people speak great English in general (but I'm learning German cause I want this to be a permanent move). And I can make day trips to multiple countries' major cities by train.

It's night and day. Again, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, it's not necessary the best at things everyone may care about, but the average metric rose a meaningful amount simply by crossing a border (lol to simplify the process).

The US is just way behind in the metrics that matter, human-centric, quality of life metrics. I say all of this not to say "wow US bad", to gloat or what have you, but to say "it can get better and it could get better quickly if political power was redistributed to those who cared about quality of life instead of GDP or their stock portfolio.

AMA