It's not about having a sales tax applied to some or all goods or about how much that'd be. It's about not listing the final price including the tax right until you're supposed to pay for it. How dumb is that?
There's also threema which is pretty tried and tested and quite popular where I live (and also not connected to weird crypto schemes) but it of course has the same issue.
Ah, the 10 is already out... I checked the 9. So at least it'll be one more year of updates, but it still just is really not much for a device that's 850 €.
That wasn't on my radar, but the same point that kinda keeps me away from the Sony that I'd really like to like otherwise applies to the zenfone as well: really short update cycles. The zenfone even more so, as the Sony is just about to be released while the zenfone is already available for almost a year. I tend to keep my phones longer, so that really is a factor.
It's too damn big. I got a Fairphone 4 and got rid of it because I just couldn't properly use it (and because of the poor camera performance on top of that). Now they're releasing an even bigger phone? I may be the minority here, but that's a deal breaker for me. I'll need a new phone in the next few months, but right now I'm only considering the s23 or the Xperia 5 V, just because everything else is just too fucking huge.
TIS-100. I saw a friend play it and got it shortly afterwards. Essentially, you have a bunch of small compute units with a few available instructions each that can pass data to adjacent ones and have to solve "puzzles", which are essentially assembly programming assignments. Despite the game being rather new, distributed e.g. via steam and gog, all you get is a full screen console line interface to code in. I love it.
Just realised that this isn't just about music. Those were all musicians or bands, but Germany of course has people from all trades.
To universally loved artists I'd count
Janosch, a children's books author. Love his work. Never met anyone who didn't.
Franz Kafka. Like... Depressing stories? Dunno. It's just that, despite his work being quite dark, it's just pretty damn good.
Peter Lustig moderated a kids' TV show, Löwenzahn. He eventually stopped due to his age and his successor does a good job, but he was just... Chef's kiss, you know?
Michael Ende wrote what I guess would be some of the most famous German children's books for older kids. The Neverending Story, for example. All his books are considered modern classics.
There are a lot of famous actresses and actors, but when it comes to being loved for their work without any attached drama, I guess Bjarne Mädel takes the cake. Tatortreiniger is brilliant and I haven't heard anything negative tied to him.
Armin Maiwald und Christoph Biemann spearheaded the German kids show "Die Sendung mit der Maus" and are very much loved for their work.
Santiano is not universally loved. They're too close to Schlager for that. And the issue with Rammstein isn't really alleged nazism (which only came up briefly when they used Leni Riefenstahl's footage) but rather their singer's alleged backstage raping.
So far, I haven't met people who hated Herbert Grönemeyer, Marius-Müller Westernhagen, Jan Delay, Nina Hagen, die Ärzte, die fantastischen Vier or Reinhard Mey. A little more recent music that I have rarely seen associated negatively would be by Kraftklub, Peter Fox or Deichkind. None of this is particularly progressive, but it's decent stuff that is so universally liked that e.g. weddings often rely on them to get people to dance.
So, I got some games from the sale and slowly started playing them a little...
Slay the Spire seems to be quite liked, but it's not really my thing. Beat the game with three of the four characters I have access to and it still hasn't really "clicked". If somebody could explain to me what makes this game so (supposedly) great, maybe I'd be able to appreciate it a little better?
I also got Redout 2, because I really enjoyed the first part and thought the second should be at least as good. So far I like it, seems like a graphics upgrade and some gameplay enhancements from the first part. However, with ai assist disabled, the difficulty curve seems to be brutally steep. Also, even though I have only played like 8 tutorials and 3 campaign tracks so far, I have already had some issues with clipping through the course after jumps, which might turn into a rather annoying trait if it remains an issue. Still, would recommend. It's a beautiful antigravity racer with terrific "car" mechanics.
Apart from that, I got the gog version of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri running (although the videos don't work). It's kind of my comfort game which I keep returning to.
It really shouldn't be. Nuclear plants don't emit co2, that's right and that's nice. However, they have so many disadvantages that I can't wrap my head around how they could be considered a viable alternative to renewables.
They are not economical. Full stop. Building and running them is expensive as fuck, like an order of magnitude over renewables.
They're risky. People usually argue that this point would be fearmongering, but there's a simple solution for that: get insurance. That's impossible though, no company wants to offer an insurance for nuke plants. Gee, I wonder why? This point adds to the economical issues - if the risk was properly calculated and the according price added to every watt, they would be even more expensive. The only solution here is to socialise the losses and risks - if one of them should ever blow up, society just has to eat it. There's no other way to ruin these things.
They need to be cooled. With the climate crisis just getting started, this is hard to calculate, but it's already showing. France, with their 80-something percentage of nuclear power, has constant issues to power the country in summer when the rivers get too warm to efficiently cool the reactors. And god forbid one of those larger rivers ever running dry.
The fuel is hard to get. Most countries need to import the fuel from countries you don't want to depend on, like Russia. It's also limited.
It's a very centralised solution. That means you'll probably have to rely on corporate solutions, with community-run or private projects being essentially ruled out. That means, power will remain in corporate, for-profit hands. This is also the reason why I think a lot of astroturfing is taking place. Of all the carbon-neutral methods to generate electricity, this is the only one that is almost guaranteed to remain in the hands of the largest corporations. I also predict that any reactor that is at least said to be runnable by smaller communities won't deliver on that promise for whatever reasons, probably safety and security.
It's not available. A new plant takes decades to build. Any of the new designs that are at least said to offer a solution to one or two of all those issues are not yet tested and will take even longer to be built in larger quantities. We need, however, to ramp up carbon neutral energy production now, not in ten years.
It's not about having a sales tax applied to some or all goods or about how much that'd be. It's about not listing the final price including the tax right until you're supposed to pay for it. How dumb is that?