gusgalarnyk @ gusgalarnyk @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

167

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think you're misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don't kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It's not the lack of competition that kills small towns it's the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There's less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.

Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it's easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you're missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we'd have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There's enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn't held by everyone, it's held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don't care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can't afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.

And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don't care how much people like living in big cities they can't live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I'm not because I don't have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can't afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can't afford to rent a house today then what's the point? If my job doesn't pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what's the point? Cities don't create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it's because that's where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they'd feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won't matter where people like living, they'll have to move to where the money is.

I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it's going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there's never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn't exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.

"Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn't consume more than the 90th percentile."

But that's the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they'll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we're already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It'll only get worse.

As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).

I don't think I am being over dramatic, I'd love to know what specifically you think isn't grounded or reasonable.

Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I'm talking about a slope here - a velocity. "Increasingly..." means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we'll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there's 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.

More restaurants in cities because there's more money in cities because there's more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It's all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.

Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can't build that infrastructure because... of a lot of reasons, but I'd argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it's only getting worse.

It's why populism is so popular right now. It's why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It's why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it's why if they're not careful they'll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.

Wealth inequality is everything.

The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.

Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that's where the business is, because they're the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn't have the money or infrastructure to go where they'd like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.

The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.

Ya, I personally didn't swap between two different ones during that time and I remember the first time u went back to a single board qwerty keyboard I struggled for less than an hour and then the muscle memory kicked in. I think my wires get crossed when I jumped between the two while learning and I decided to just stick with the one until I had "recovered" and that really helped.

Good luck!

I switched to a new key layout and was slowed down for like a month, and almost every day I could literally feel myself speeding back up. It was such a cool experience, and one that I imagine has beneficial like neural effects, that sometimes I think about switching it up just for fun.

I'd suggest just sticking with it. I now use English, German, and my custom Workman layout at home without any issue switching between them. Practice makes perfect and cause a bunch of work and fun things encourage typing a lot, practice comes easy and getting back to your normal speed happens quickly.

Picking a new layout like Workman or Dvorak where you can feel the benefits, plus a split keyboard's ergonomic benefits, and I think anyone would struggle to go back (assuming they do it for a month and give it a fair shake).

To add, I've gotten dozens of hours out of:

• the lab*
• beat saber*

20 hours out of:

• elite dangerous

10 hours out of:

• Alyx**
• squadrons
• keep talking and nobody explodes
• Pavlov
• space pirate trainer*

5 hours out of:

• budget cuts
• super hot VR~*
• Arizona sunshine
• hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades

Less than 2 hours:

• job simulator
• I expect you to die
• quivr
• bone works
• Vegas infinite
• VR chat*
• duck season
• gorn
• 9732 blade runner*

• Truly a unique VR experience that I loved and consider making my Index purchase worth it. ** What I'd consider to be on par with other AAA game experiences that are story focused and cross the bar for me on being considered "art" (most videogames are "art" but I mean to say this game crosses into Celeste, God of War, BioShock, Papers Please territory).

I probably have less than 150 hours in VR but I was moving for most of the years I owned my vive or index and in small rooms for their use, and I sold my index a little more than 2 years ago because I moved from the US to Germany and assumed valve was releasing their next set anyday.

I'll be buying the first headset that seems next gen, most are getting close but always missing something I consider rather important like HFR or decent pixel density or outside tracking (although I've heard maybe inside out is getting better).

I think another factor to consider when looking at my 150 hour estimate is some amount of that is with other people. My dad, my less engineering savvy friends, at house parties. Those hours are worth more than X hours on my normal PC. It was an amazing experience to put my friends in their first VR headset and see them light up. I'd pay what I paid twice over to be able to give that experience to more people.

Which I think highlights that hours in VR needs to always have a multiplier applied to it because you can't get that experience elsewhere. I imagine a good racing setup or horas setup would have the same intrinsic value compared to normal gaming. Now that I think about it, same thing applies to handheld gaming too. These different unique modes or experiences are worth more than their hours tell.

🫡

I swapped to Arch Linux in the last month and it's been great. Gaming has been fun. The Nvidia drivers are still kinda confusing, and honestly I wouldn't put my mom on Arch Linux as of right now, but it's good enough.

I'm writing a document so my SW engineering friends can swap over as well within a day and be up and running, and it's just neat to see Linux gradually growing in my circles.

If you're on Linux, don't forget to donate to your favorite SW creators even if they're less flashy than say Larian studios or what have you lol.

I don't know if controlling immigration is the problem or solution, right? It's a scapegoat.

I think the problem is perception. What should happen is when any media org talks about violent immigrants or violent crime they should be forced to display a graph of violent crime for the past 5 decades or something. Germany is in one of the top 3 or 5 safest years it has had in the last like 50 years.

I've had German citizens warn me about the ghettos of Mannheim. These are stores without bars over their windows, plenty of people walking around at most hours of night, music and walk-in restaurants. This is no ghetto like in America. But natives see it as scary because humans are creatures of relativity.

If anything Germany needs to provide a simple, clear path forward to permanent residence (at least) and ideally full citizenship. This tells people who are open to joining Germany that they have a path to starting a life here. Germany also need to provide a security net for those people if they run into problems on their journey to permanent residence (at least) so they know that this massive risk of moving abroad has a minimum amount of safety (cause a work force that feels trapped at their job is not a well compensated work force and everyone wants good paying jobs for themselves and their neighbors). I think Germany does a great job at both of these things already, the scary part is AFD wanting to differentiate between blood-line citizens and naturalized citizens. The scary part is CDU conservatives wanting to reduce the social safety net. The CDU winning hurts the influx of highly skilled or specialized immigrants because now they know the move just got more risky if conservatives get their way.

As far as protecting their border or slowing the rate of immigrants in total or from certain areas... Idk honestly. I don't know if that's a real problem, I don't think it is, and I don't know how Germany could fix that. I have no doubt very smart people have several great solutions that are human-centric policies that improve the lives of everyone on both side of the fictional line - but I'm positive it's not the policy conservatives will be pursuing. Because again, I don't think it's a real problem.

Real problems are housing for everyone, higher wages for everyone, infrastructural improvement, improving education, better medicine and access to healthcare, etc etc. Germany and most developed countries are wealthy enough to handle their current level of immigration without issue - if the money is spent well instead of funneled into the parasitic 1%'ers pockets. Cultures and integration happen naturally over time, that isn't a fear for me either.

MAGA won because the economic decline outpaces the societal progress for too many decades, and the perceived solution was not based in reality. Germany has far more run way in the economic and societal race, but the influence on perception is both at a high in terms of strength and a low in terms of being attached to reality.

Idk what you're saying is incorrect here. Conservatives are by and large Anti-Labor which means they are anti-80-90% of the population. Merkel began decommissioning nuclear plants and put more money towards oil, now we have an energy "crisis" that could have been entirely avoided. But conservatives are pro-oil when everyone in the world would benefit from being pro-green energy including nuclear power.

Conservatives are by and large pro privatizing public functions. The German train network has the issues it has today partially because it's not publicly owned and operated. Conservatives are anti-infrastructural spending and they tend to be budget conscious only when it benefits the Uber wealthy.

Merz wants to complain about the fiscal budget but then wants to cut taxes for corporations. The CDU wants to fund that, last I checked, by cutting spending on welfare and social security nets. Conservatives want to take money from the sick, poor, and elderly and give it to big businesses and the only argument they have for why that could be a good thing is it could make the "economy better" and some of that money will trickle down.

We are in the mess we are today because of conservative policies. Voting for the CDU is voting for the declination of society based on all the data I've seen. I'd love to see what an SPD government looks like when it's not being sabotaged by the FDP but I worry, like in America, they're still too centralist to be massively effective at reversing decline.

Immigrants aren't the problem. Germany needs more immigrants to stay functional in the coming decades, just like most developed countries.

Then don't do what we did, vote for progressives not Conservatives. Conservatives are a plague on society.

Coming from an American who moved to Germany, Merz will pave the road to Germany's Trump.

This was a nice read, thanks for sharing!

I agree, but the fear is that a government which doesn't improve things at a rate greater than the rate at which things get worse for the bottom half will result in a greater swing towards populism.

Ya, sorry, my bad. Someone else commented that there are five flavors and I was like "oof they must not have come across as realistic or viable options for me very early on". But you know how it is, memory is fickle. This was the best summary I could do as a very inexperienced Linux person.

Nobara is the oft pointed to gaming distro for Linux. There are three major flavors of Linux as far as I can tell (I did some research for a similar switch, which I haven't completed because I have some stupid digital coins divesting and when that's done I'm coming over). There is Debian, Fedora, and Arch. The easiest and simplest way for me to understand them is scaling them in terms of stability and latest releases. Debian is supposedly super stable but furthest behind on releases because of all the stability testing. Arch is least stable but on all of the latest releases. Fedora is the middle ground, more stable but slightly behind.

Nobara is based on Fedora and is recommended for new Linux users who want to game. The steam deck is on an Arch based distro. Linux Mint, another recommended pick for new comers, is based on Debian.

I am personally porting over to Arch Linux, because I want to have the latest releases and I believe I can sufficiently reduce the instability with a couple of processes. I have it installed on my laptop and it's been seemingly stable for about a quarter.

On Reddit everything I posted was for the betterment of a private company owned by tech assholes and was sold and scraped for profit by other tech assholes.

Lemmy gets rid of that incentive to shut up and stay quiet. I still don't post much but that's just a product of how I partake in the Internet. I imagine I'll post more as I age.

The amount of investment you'd need to reduce your need to work takes the average person multiple decades, that's literally what retirement is. And even if you only considered a part time retirement that still takes decades. In fact my current understanding is most people's retirement funds will be insufficient when they go to retire.

No amount of investing will save the majority of people from needing to work for the majority of their life. The other alternatives to selling your labor to capital, like starting your own business, requires up front investment and even then isn't a guarantee. The number of jobs that require minimal investment and can serve as a sole source of income do not exist in sufficient quantities.

So no, investing is not the solution, becoming an entrepreneur is not a solution, at the scale of our society there are few solutions and the primary one is taxing corporations more and taxing billionaires out of existence.

People deserve a right to live. I'm not saying people shouldn't plan for retirement, I'm not saying don't try and start a business. I'm saying to you stop framing it as dependency, that's a fuckin crazy thought process. The overwhelming majority of people go to school and then get a job. Those people deserve to thrive without having a perfect stock portfolio which will materialize in 40 years, without having a second job, without turning their art into a commercial enterprise.

I'm responding to a comment on Lemmy, not the LinkedIn post. That should be obvious but here I am spelling it out just incase.

"Dependency on a single wage is the entire problem people are having" is a crazy statement to read from someone who is trying to give advice on the Internet. The entire problem is not that people have one job, it's that all the profits are going to the fewest people in our society. No one should have to work two jobs to survive, that's an insane status quo you're attempting to defend.

Stop defending the status quo, stop defending corporations, stop trying to normalize surviving this system and start normalizing changing it. We need large societal reform and every additional person who has to work two jobs is another family ready to do so through violent means.