grepe

the US is not this way because he is the president. he is the president because US is this way...

years ago a colleague of mine used to say: could you, please, unplug your book from my computer? i need to charge my cigarette.

one big city is fine as long as you don't want to have city where you work separate from the suburbs where you live. this is one completely artificially created expectation that only exist in america due to a century of car lobby and propaganda. if your work, doctor, pub, park and shop are all within 5-15min walk from your home and you can get everywhere else by public transport it's ok if the city stretches wide and it is actually quite pleasant to live in (ymmv).

regulation only works if the laws are not written by the companies that are being regulated

that sounds horrible. in the country where i am from even a person who gives you the first aid cannot be possibly prosecuted as long as they give it their best shot at helping you, even if they would end up ultimately harming you (for example they try to stop a bleeding after a car accident and mess up your broken spine when moving you).

this guy probably doesn't know what he's talking about but you can, in fact, travel without money. just not very far, very fast, or to a guaranteed location. i hitchhiked all around europe during my studies on semester breaks when i had lot of time and no money... i slept under bridges in a cheap sleeping bag or under a tarp on an alpine meadows and ate the cheapest grocery store items that didn't need cooking. i typically spent less while traveling than i would have spent if i stayed home (especially if i didn't need to pay rent during the summer).

“But if you don’t wash it, it gets dickcheese!”

did you know that when you don't wash your hands you get lot of dirt stuck behind your fingernails? i got an idea! maybe we should take a pair of pliers and take those off as well. does that sound reasonable? no? that's exactly how this "argument" makes me feel. when you don't wash it then it gets dirty so we'd better cut it off is some really dumb stuff...

customer protection is taken seriously in germany (or any country whrere laws protect customers from companies rather than the other way around for that matter). you can't for example just send an email to your customers saying "we've made some changes to our terms and conditions" without making it possible for the customers to say "ok, I'm out". if there is no such option the customers may rightfully argue that this is simply not the product they purchased and the conpany is breaking their end of the deal.

i got first permabanned by a mod from r/news for commenting "when a terrorist hides in a school full of children it is not ok to blow up the school with the children still in it" under an article about IDF doing just that while hunting for some hamas fighters (no warning, no previous infractions, straight permaban, reason: "you broke the community rules" - no further explanation). it hurt a bit cause i did not participate in any political discussions normally. but shortly after that there was a picture of WW2 nazi flag on someone's front yard in ohio and people started suggesting that someone should bring a veteran to this person to explain them the error of their ways. i didn't resist and responded that this person knows exactly what they are doing and they do it cause there are no consequences to it. i also wrote that somebody should "tar and feather them and chase them around" - after which my account got restricted cause "we are trying to create a community where everyone can feel safe and therefore we cannot tolerate calls for violence against others".

oh, got it! going to found a startup for AI slop cleanup. we could use LLM to automate...

i have a family. living with a small child in an american city without a car is entirely possible. you lose the ability to go out (either to city or to nature) but with a small child you don't have time to do that anyway so you might as well pay more to live closer to your job. alternative is paying the difference in rent for a car loan and loosing the time you don't have while sitting in traffic. big caveat: this works only if you earn enough to be able to afford living close to a city center in the first place. also, it is still way less comfortable than a life in a developed european city.

it's activitypub thing so lemmy as well. you sign up on one server, subscribe to community on different server, mods of the different server will decide they don't like your server for any reason (e.g. explicitly because mods of your server didn't blacklist some other server) and you are out of that community. it sucks. imho something based on the old news system would be better (i.e. community exists independently and servers just subscribe to them or not).