Are you on Firefox? I use an extension called PagezoomWE or something like that. It remembers the zoom level for you.

That seems like good news. Interesting to see US drug policy being more lenient than the UK in many instances.

(Some reasons) Why people vote for right wing populists:

• billionaires are above the law
• be it a pandemic, recession, whatever, billionaires profit from all crises
• there are two strata in society: people who have to work and people who choose whether to work. So long as the latter exists and invests all their time into ensuring that the former will forever be the vast majority of society, people will protest vote
• worse, the billionaires pay millionaires to tell thousandaires what the various classes in society are and who the ‘real’ enemy is and it will always be foreigners or the gays or some BS like that (an enemy that’s always simultaneously infinitely strong and weak)
• there’s billionaires in the first place

(I’m well aware that other things can be reasons, too, like perceived loss of living standards, increased political corruption etc. But honestly, I think it’s all down to rich people fucking things up…see below for some proposed fixes)

Approaches that could fix this (good luck trying that in the arch-neoliberal EU):

• ALL wealth above X amount simply gets taken from you. I know it’s complicated with shares in companies etc. But I’m sure where there’s a will there’s a way. Cap wealth at €100mil or whatever
• inheritance tax becomes 99% above £1million
• remuneration ratios: CEOs cannot earn more / hold more shares than 10x more than the lowest earning employee in the company. This has to include subsidiaries and 3rd parties, otherwise companies will just hire other companies to get around this

The above and the fallout from it, would instantly free up money for public services, free education and healthcare and eradicate homelessnes. You wouldn’t need a UBI, if public services were good enough and well funded.

Technically I’m far more radical in my opinions and think that housing should be declared a human right and all drugs legalised and all those fancy things, but honestly, it feels we have more pressing matters at hand, namely, inequality. Until that gets fixed, we can’t really progress as a society.

My main worry here being that it can’t be done. I simply don’t see how, as a society, we will ever gain the cohesion to implement decisive action against the ruling classes. They have become untouchable and would rather burn the whole thing down than give an inch.

You are right, this fixes slow startup times for Steam, Firefox, Thunderbird and various others.