A transaction (like selling sex) requires two parties. If you make one side illegal, the act itself is illegal. The only distinguishing factor is who gets punished. Sex work can’t exist without people buying it, so sex work is illegal. Sweden has chosen not to prosecute people who sell sex.
Lifting the minimum wage directly impacts the available income of the lowest income classes, who in turn spend most of their income on consumption, increasing domestic demand and thus also helping the economy.
Only around 3.7% of German workers earn minimum wage. Increasing their wages a little won’t move the needle on the economy. I generally support a healthy minimum wage, but Germany’s economic issues are systemic, and require much broader solutions. Making the cost of doing business even higher right now in Germany - which is what raising the minimum wage does - is antithetical to fostering weak economic growth. Industrial production in particular continues to decline, which is a big problem for Germany. Merkel’s strategy of going all-in on Russian natural gas turned out to be catastrophic. The cost of energy is just too high now for a raft of different sectors. I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before in economic analysis, but these are some of the primary issues and tactical solutions Germany should tackle.
Cheaper energy. This is strangling industries which employ millions and have been the backbone of the economy for decades. Germany needs to build nuclear capacity ASAP, or begin importing massive amounts of Russian natural gas, or begin burning a lot more coal. For environmental, economic, and ethical reasons, I support nuclear. Renewables are about 4x more expensive than nuclear after imputing costs like storage and grid architecture [1].
Germany needs to embrace efficiency at a cultural level. In 2023, 51 % of all point-of-sale transactions were made using banknotes and coins. I cite this not because I think cash is a perfect analogue for efficiency, but to underscore the distrust so many Germans have in technology. Most government departments still use fax machines. Germany’s internet infrastructure is just terrible. There is an astounding lack of digitisation across both the public and private sectors. This aversion to efficiency becomes an increasingly heavy anchor around the neck of the nation as the rest of the world embraces new technologies to build and serve more products and services, faster.
Germany needs a new strategic focus in the economy. Even with cheap energy, industrial production can and will be done cheaper in developing nations. Their car industry is clearly unable to pivot to EVs, and it’s going to completely miss automated driving. Using VW software is like going back to a Nokia flip phone. They need to figure out how to invest in and excel at services and software. This is almost impossible to mandate at a governmental level in a democratic nation. This one will be the toughest to turn around and for this reason, my long term prognosis for Germany is poor relative to many other European nations.
Restructuring Germany’s immigration system to block low and no skilled immigrants, and greatly simplify immigration for high skilled immigrants. Research by the ifo Institute concludes that the 2015 immigration wave has widened the implicit long-term debt burden, i.e., including future pensions, by almost 10 percent of GDP. According to this, every admitted refugee costs the budget around 225 thousand euros over the course of her or his entire life. [2] This problem is getting worse every year. Germany’s immigration system is very difficult to navigate, and can be quite hostile for legal, qualified migrants.
Compounding all of the above is a declining fertility rate. Few countries have solved this issue, meaning [highly skilled and qualified[ immigration is more important than ever. I don’t think we can rely on improving native fertility rates.
When an economy is performing as poorly as Germany, economic stimulus is required. This means lower taxes and increased government spending. QE is not possible for those using the Euro so it might mean accepting higher levels of debt. This is a distinctly un-German proposition. The current government has secured the right to increase national debt but only in the context of Russian aggression. Debt by itself is bad, but if used prudently to stimulate the economy in the right direction, can be useful. I sadly do not trust the German government to invest it wisely. It’s much more likely to go towards manufacturing mortar rounds, and to pay for ever increasing social services.
Which makes it illegal. If you prosecute either the customer or supplier of a good or service, you have made it illegal.
While I agree, people don’t often think of countries like Sweden as very backwards.
No, rape is always bad, whether or not the media reports it.
I’ll allow it. I like what they’re doing over there. No DRM. Download everything. Game preservation. I wish they had done a better job with Galaxy but it looks like Microsoft is about to do their own store aggregator now so maybe that’s moot.
Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect reliability. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.
Dane here. While I love trains, they are a) more expensive than flying in almost every long distance scenario, and b) take much longer. We are trialling sleeping trains but reception is mixed and capacity limited. People don’t like to waste an extra 2-4 days of their vacation on travel. Especially if they’re paying more for that privilege. I should note that this isn’t an issue of imbalanced subsidies. The EU subsidises air travel (in many ways) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a “subsidy.” Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.
The thing is, if even we can’t make it cheaper and faster despite our relatively high population densities and high rail subsidies, I fear the case is much harder still in the U.S. My personal position is that trains are excellent commuter alternatives, and should be liberally built and subsidised in all dense cities. For longer travel, there is no substitute for airoplanes.
Most crime is a direct result of poverty.
This is not correct. There is a correlation but no evidence of directionality. It could be that crime causes poverty, or that third correlates cause both. Sweden saw a massive rise in crime following the large migration of Middle Eastern refugees following the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis, and they decided to study it. Translation below:
https://bra.se/rapporter/arkiv/2023-03-01-socioekonomisk-bakgrund-och-brott
Most people who come from a socio-economically less favorable background do not commit more crime than people who come from a more favorable background, and it also happens that people from a more favorable background do commit crime. This means that even if there is a connection between socio-economic background and involvement in crime, that connection is weak. It is not possible to appreciably predict who will commit crimes based on knowledge of people’s socio-economic background.
Other risk factors have a stronger relationship with criminal behavior:
When compared with factors that research has identified as risk factors for crime, such as parenting competence, the presence of conflicts in the family, school problems or association with criminal peers, the research shows that these have a stronger connection with criminal behavior than socio-economic background factors. The same applies to risk factors linked to the individual himself, for example permissive attitudes or impulsivity.
They found that cultural factors were far more correlated with criminality than socioeconomic status. This is corroborated by the fact that white collar crime remains so prevalent. If poverty caused crime, white collar crime would be almost non-existent, but it is prolific. It turns out that some people are just greedy. Or mean. Or violent. Or selfish. Or don’t care about how their actions might harm others. Sociopaths in particular exhibit all of these antisocial behaviour. They are unable to feel genuine remorse for hurting others, and no amount of money you give to them will ever change that.
FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).
In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.
Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth
In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.
A example: 192.168.0.50
Save the setting, done.
#Important thing to be aware of:
What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.
Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.
If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:
192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80
If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:
192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)
192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)
And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.
Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?
It’s like they deliberately chose the most repulsive colour combinations possible. It’s so bad that it can’t have been a mistake. They took colour theory and then methodically did the exact opposite of it. Then they combined this with some of the ugliest character designs imaginable. I think the artists thought “ugly = unique and unique sells!” I can vomit a strawberry daiquiri onto a piece of paper and create a “unique” piece, but that doesn’t make it appealing and customers are certainly not going to buy it.
The most frustrating part of this for me was the overwhelming feedback before launch that they should have scrapped the designs and started again. Either they began focus testing FAR too late, or more likely, they ignored it. Either one was fatal. Then Marvel Rivals came along with attractive character designs (but arguably generic gameplay) and dominated in the market. Proving this had nothing to do with saturation. They just made a bad game and refuse to admit it.
We’ve got a good balance of socialism and capitalism here in Denmark. There are strengths and weaknesses of both. This is why modern societies have some combination of the two. Societies which try to go all in on any one ideology like communism tend to collapse.
Exactly. We used to exile or execute them. Modern society is almost tailor made for a sociopath to thrive. They don’t have the same kind of internal moral compass that others do, so they don’t feel bad when they hurt people. They rely almost exclusively on external deterrents (and incentives). This means harsh sentences and high certainty of detection and conviction. Sadly many people have an ideological aversion to prison, and we’re seeing less and less per capita spending on law enforcement and prisons in the West.
I agree that authoritarian governments have more latitude than democracies. The CCP displaced up to two million people when it built the The Three Gorges Dam. There was no recourse. No ability to object. People who had lived on the land for generations were simply told to leave. Some were lucky to be given meagre government apartments to live in elsewhere, but that was it. It’s much easier to build large infrastructure projects when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like property laws, health and safety, and human rights.
If your argument is that authoritarianism will win over democracy in the long term, it’s an interesting debate. Most of human history was some form of authoritarianism. Some form of might makes right. There have been small democratic experiements in history (see Greece), but modern democracy is a relatively new experiment. I hope it succeeds, because I like it a lot more than the alternatives.
Telling people what not to do is far less effective than giving them positive and aspirational advice. Jordan Peterson literally told boys to clean their room and he became outrageously popular overnight. How sick is our culture when boys are so starved for wholesome masculine guidance that they’ll cling to the first man who gives them healthy paternal advice like “clean your room”? Something people on the left in particular do not understand about this issue is that telling boys to be more like girls doesn’t work. They need to be told it’s normal and healthy to be aggressive and competitive and physical, as long as it’s done in a way which doesn’t hurt people. Masculinity isn’t evil. Anyone who calls it “toxic” should be admonished and derided. We need Aragorn like figures in the real world to show boys what healthy masculinity looks like.
This is an excellent question. I think the major question mark hanging over this projection is the role that automation will play in the future. Both in terms of physical production, and in terms of white collar or office work. One could argue that economies which are best positioned to take advantage of automation might feel the impact of a declining workforce less, but then those same societies run the risk of high unemployment and low domestic economic demand for products and services. The balance is crucial and economies are generally slow to pivot.
I don’t think framing their issues in terms of women’s issues is helpful. “But what about men” is just as unhelpful when dealing with issues for women. Feminism did great things to advance the interests of women, and it required coordination and struggle over many decades against a system which wasn’t receptive to their needs. Now, each year, the U.S. spends close to $8B on women’s initiatives spanning many areas from healthcare to education. If you’re suggesting men need their own movement, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps what we’re seeing is the early formation of that. Messy, uncoordinated, and immature, as are all early movements.
In the mean time, I don’t think “be better” is a resonant message. It was rightly dismissed when people said it to women in the 1960s and it should be dismissed now. These issues are structural and require structural solutions. I think a big part of this is economic. Men are taught from a young age (by men and women) that unless they make a lot of money, they’re worthless. Society is offering fewer and fewer opportunities for men in traditionally blue collar industries to thrive. If we offer few opportunities and call them worthless for not succeeding, this is a recipe for societal instability.
I don’t think young men are genetically predisposed to this. They are the product of the society in which they grow up. They’re seeking help because no one else is there to help.
Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.