As for my own opinion - I fully agree not to ditch it right now, unless you are super privacy-concerned.

If you are, and if you think Mozilla is a lost cause, then please, as a community, get together and organise a body that is financially and legally able to carry a FLOSS browser with its own web engine. Not saying this to be snarky or as a gotcha, I am just somewhat irritated by some people saying to ditch Firefox to then say the alternative is a Firefox fork with a team way too small to handle what is needed to maintain a browser project going into the future, if they couldn’t build on the upstream code.

Because if you don’t organise such an organisation, including eventually financially giving to that group if you have the resources, Mozilla will remain in the ambivalent position of trying to balance markets and ideals, with less and less of a bargaining chip on the ‘ideals’ side - and the web will continue to be further and further dominated by non-free software trying to make web standards more proprietary.

I mean, national weapons proliferation? That’s really not a concern with modern reactor tech, and they should know that. The article ignores the last 50 years of advancement in reactor design to present their arguments, and that really undermines their credibility.

The problem is: In real life, most nations want weapons potential as an added bonus to their expensive civil nuclear programs. This connects to the “Takes too long to build” and “Expensive” points.

Nuclear waste is also something, that even though ideas exist in spades, no one seems to have been able to solve. So I wonder: What are the real world hurdles, that have prevented all the talk of “we just need breeder reactors” or something similar, that I have been hearing for many years now, to manifest? Is the tech maybe not as easily implemented as thought? Is the cost/reward ratio too bad, so it would again connect to the expensive point?

Thing is: I am not fundamentally against Nuclear as part of a power mix, with climate change being the most pressing reality. But I think it’s often presented as better as it is in the real world by people that are highly intelligent and knowledgeable in the basic physics and theoretical engineering parts - but then usually don’t have answers for why, then, even states that don’t have large anti-nuclear movements don’t use it often, in real world circumstances.

Nothing to lose but your chains, you say 🤔

Wenn das der Führer wüsste!

I’m sorry, when I made this account there were basically no other instances, and now I don’t want to move and lose the early adopter bragging rights

I know that this is the argument, and I agree in principle (no inherent worth), but people tend to forget: Money laundering, buying black market goods online, supporting illegal organisations internationally and speculating on something are technically some kind of worth. That’s why it still never crashed out to 0, imo.

As someone who was interested in Bitcoin at its very beginning (sometimes I wonder what kind of arsehole I would be now if I hadn’t lost my wallet back then long before the stuff was worth anything) - it took quite some time from its inception to cryptobros being a cultural phenomenon everywhere on the net. So the creation itself may be a bit too early.

But I think your point is still very much valid.

That actually sounds very much like my own motivation structure, and I had a very similar story of how school went for me. Add to that phenomena like me being able to actually care for myself and rapidly improving in just everyday tasks while I was in a relationship vs. now, where I can’t bring myself to get motivated to do basic self-care any more.

Speaking for myself, personally, I also don’t like the maximalism. It is (should) also (be) okay to talk about your depression, anxiety and issues, if you aren’t at all suicidal and in no risk of becoming suicidal. Imagining reading something like this as past me, who was more stuck in depression than today, I’d read it as “okay, I know I am not at all suicidal, so I better not talk about my issues so that the ones that are can have all the resources, as I am not worthy of them.”

The truth is: Professionals (including specialised hotlines) and really, really good friends (and ironically, sometimes strangers on the internet) are the only truly mostly reliable places to vent and find support without risking being misunderstood, and/or them not following through at all. And you have to build from there, with their help.

Friendly nitpick, English is also not my first language:

they are not an American CEO only aiming at extract profit from you.

I think it’s “aiming to extract profits from you.” Unless I am completely misremembering the proper grammar myself.

But overall, this is a great write-up! You really are doing amazing work here, thank you for that. I deleted my reddit account a while back, but here’s hoping people will allow this to stay up and engage with your points in good faith.

Good luck, dealing with procrastination is hard, but it definitely is doable!

Oh and was it genki by chance that you tormented because lets just say I’m aware of there being torrents for it

Sadly, I genuinely don’t remember, was around 2010 or so, so quite a while back.

Oh, back then I totally also used… some websites I found on google. And, uhm… I think I remember printing out a torrented professional Japanese handbook, making a fancy folder to put it in and then… never actually using it. :D

As you can see, teenage/young adult me was very realistic and very committed!

All us former or present weebs that once learned Hiragana, Katakana, maybe 5 words and phrases, and basically nothing else, understand. (And the people actually speaking Japanese, too)

Personally, I don’t think even Merz is at the point just yet to outright create a coalition with them. However, that they did push a directive and try to push an actual law through parliament with AfD votes already is a sign of the direction things may end up going. Who knows, in a few months or years, there might just end up something happening like trouble in the most likely coming coalition of CDU/SPD, where the CDU just says they “had no choice” but to introduce a proto-fascist law that they and the AfD support, but the actual ruling coalition did not, resulting in legitimising them more and paving the way for an actual coalition.

I unstuck him - I think the script sometimes gets caught up on one command (e.g. “right” in that case) - and it seems providing the same command again helps the script to get unstuck (just giving another single “right” command).

PS: Not responsible for the script or stream, I just switch into it every now and then when my ADHD brain can’t focus on what it is supposed to do and needs something else for a while before doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Yeah, sorry, but that is like looking at the map in 1930 from these ones and saying “the NSDAP voters come from East Prussia only, don’t complain about the Nazis in Germany!”

I heard that argument often, and it’s true that the same way and same “we essentially keep the old constitution alive completely and change laws in ways that were technically legal” as back then won’t work.

However, fascism - also in the 1930s already - also has strategies like: “Just doing illegal things and overstepping what your posts are allowed to do, knowing you can only be stopped by force, even if judges and your superiors disagree.” That one was a massive part of how Hitler quickly outmanoeuvred von Papen, even though Papen was chancellor and Hitler “just” vice chancellor. The NSDAP-adjacent ministers, police chiefs, judges, etc. simply did not report to Papen, no matter what the law and constitution said.

What I am getting at: One should never think the laws on paper are some kind of shield and holy fact, only the laws as the executive (cops and courts, essentially) protects and enacts are what really matters, and those are corruptible, no matter how good the constitution is. (Another often quoted example: The constitution of North Korea also guarantees a lot of freedoms and rights, but no one would say, that protects the people there.)

It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.

That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.

That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).

Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.

EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.

This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/