I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.

I’m not saying this would be a bad thing, just that this isn’t “more than most people could imagine” kind of wealth. Maybe more than most people will experience in their lifetimes… but imagine?

Ask any 10-year-old what they’d do with $1M and somewhere between their personal butler, building a rocket ship and bringing dinosaurs back you will find the limits of human imagination quickly outpace the confines of $1M.

^ The person I responded to said “maybe more than most people will experience in their lifetime.” And then referenced $1M. I was simply anchoring to their value colloquially like you would in casual conversation.

I’m not trying to come off as defensive, I apologize. I responded to a comment that felt like it laser focused on one sentence within the article, only to be responded to by you with again what felt like a laser focused comment about one sentence. You weren’t like “by the way, the median lifetime earnings of an American is badadadada. [Insert your thoughts on my comment], but I just wanted to correct your quoted value.” Which would have made your comment’s point more clear to me, you just dropped a random correction that wasn’t super relevant to the point I was trying to make or even the point of this thread.

I praised you for correcting that value in the thing you responded to.

… although to your credit at least this is something worth correcting. It’s good to recalibrate statistics, “US people make more than a million dollars over their lifetime”.

Again, I apologize for coming off as defensive that was not my intention. I appreciate the calibration of casual figures, that’s good for everyone (and something I particularly appreciate).

Would you like me to change the number in my reply to 2M? Again, this feels like semantics - although to your credit at least this is something worth correcting. It’s good to recalibrate statistics, “US people make more than a million dollars over their lifetime”.

But it doesn’t change the fact that this article brings up a useful thought experiment, the top reply in this chain added nothing of value to that conversation which I think can be destructive, and I was attempting to point that out in the hopes of improving comment culture on Lemmy.

I’m in Europe. I would like to buy a folding smartphone as I want more screen space. They’re still too expensive and have too short of lifespans as far as I can tell.

When they’re… Oh idk… $1300 and last 5+ years I’ll pick one up.

If I could speak directly to the phone makers I’d also say I don’t want a front facing camera if there is a nicer camera on the back and a screen of almost any size. A front facing camera just feels antiquated for that design.

Sure, I guess you’re arguing semantics in which case have at it. Yes, people can imagine a lot more than what 1M would buy. Yes, most people won’t realistically earn 1M in their lifetime. Sure, the article had at least a single line that should be reworded.

I’d argue if all houses were redistributed to their rightful owners the price of all housing would go down - but that’s outside of this thought experiment I guess.

Remember though that that’s ~500k per person. So every kid, every SO, every parent. I think on average it would equate to more than just getting to own your home, even if we ignored the likely change in wealth valuations that would follow.

If you take all the wealth in an area and split it evenly among that populace there is no “upwards” - everyone is equal in terms of wealth. Money funnels “upward” because of wealth disparity, if someone owns more wealth than the average person than on average some of the average person’s money goes to that wealthier person in the form of rent or interest on debt or profits from the factory or what have you.

If all wealth was distributed this way it would look like everyone owning their own home and a portion of their place of work and their car, etc etc. I’m not saying money wouldn’t pool again over time, or that a new upwards wouldn’t be established, but I don’t think you phrased it fairly. The way you said it felt to me like an assumed hierarchy of better people and worse people - when in reality it’s just wealthy people and not wealthy people.

It’s worth it. I’m almost two years in Germany. Wouldn’t move back for a million dollars (although at 3 I could be bought). Work on the local language, volunteer or other community involvement activities, treat it like the new home it is. We’re fortunate to be able to move to a new country, try to be a part of improving it and earning your spot there. I’m even more fortunate to be white, male, straight etc - assuming you’re at least some of those things, do your best to counter the anti-immigration fear mongering that comes out of the political right. It effects you now, but more importantly it’s ramping up and it’ll effect people less fortunate far worse.

Hope you love it and welcome to Europe.

Kagi seems to surface great independent content and I’ve been loving it.

Is there a guide or any educational material on this? I’m about to swap to Linux (some fedora distro focused on gaming) and I’m interested in potentially one day swapping to arch after I’ve gotten my toes wet. Doing a bit of extra work and planning ahead to make that easier sounds nice.

Well I wouldn’t describe myself as a capitalist per se. I don’t believe there’s infinite resources but I do believe there are better, more efficient ways of distributing them - especially with housing. We definitely live in 3d space, I don’t really know what this comment is referring to or it’s use.

Probably a bit of both, insane and delusional, but I also think imagining a better solution requires a smidge of both.

Again, your loan comment doesn’t make much sense to me because you failed to contributing a meaningful comment - you could elaborate but I suspect you don’t believe government financing is a thing? Or that interest rates can be zero? I’m not really sure, but I can elaborate my original concept - because I’m not an Internet troll and I genuinely want people to imagine and work towards a better future.

Houses are expensive products, we can agree on that, even if they weren’t investment vehicles it takes a team of people months to construct a good house and a lot longer for an apartment or larger complex. Since everyone should be able to own their home, pretending for second we went so far as to abolish the concept of renting, we would need people to be able to afford housing immediately upon becoming an adult and choosing to live somewhere else. Normally we think of this as rent, we pay someone else’s mortgage with our money because we didn’t have the capital to purchase it directly in the past. I. My proposed future, there’d be no landlords to pay mortgages for, so we’d take out our own mortgage to pay for our housing.

Now I think this is where people imagine today’s mortgages and systems being imposed on an 18 year old and think that’s foolish. That’s why i clarify housing as a product instead of an investment vehicle is cheaper, and housing as a right or a goal of society means mortgages aren’t for profit. So someone buys a home that costs less than todays home using a loan who’s interest is less than todays interest - likely the first from the previous owner, construction company, or the government and the second from some level of government.

It’s how loans work but instead of for profit they’re for the betterment of society. We do this all the time for various reasons today. The PPP loans being forgiven is one example, so is 0% student loans, and if the government wanted to charge 1-2% interest for a good reason we have historical precedent to that as well. Idk what about this is so hard to understand for you but hopefully this helps. :p

When a house is an investment that grows in value society attempts to maximize scarcity, fewer houses or higher demand means more growth in their value. But imagine we lived in a society where we had more houses than we need, a surplus, because we valued housing people whenever they needed housing and we knew roughly how many houses we needed to do that.

You could move anywhere and find a house to own at a cost you could afford. Imagine housing wasn’t a massive store of value such that multiple bureaucratic steps were created to nickle and dime the transaction. Buying a home could be easy.

You could find a vacant house or one that has leaving owners, inspection papers were regulated and up to date, you could buy it off of them using your money or a loan from the government, and you could move in just like if you were renting.

You don’t have to save up for money to buy a home in a society where housing people is a priority. Housing would be cheaper, cost of living would be lower, purchasing power would be higher, and we could have methods in place for transitioning ownership without requiring a lump sum of cash cause no one’s expecting a massive windfall immediately. Ya know, loans.

Living on the street would be a fictional concept, encouraging homelessness is a societal choice - we could house everyone on the streets within the year if we wanted to. Does that mean long term hotels wouldn’t exist? No. That’s an actual service being provided.

I’m just saying, if landlords served a purpose we could enable that service as a society but if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle it’s pretty clear the number of landlords would plummet over night and we’d quickly realize relatively few people liked the “service” they were receiving.

Your lifetime of experiences does not consistute a meaningful sample size when compared to everyone else’s. It can leave you feeling or believing something completely different than everyone else, for good reason, but that doesn’t make it true.

Most landlords own property because it is a vehicle for wealth growth. And if someone owns something because it makes them money every year they are likely attempting to or interested in maximizing that return. That means cheap maintenance, little to no improvements, and an increasing price tag like an investment vehicle instead of a decreasing price tag like a consumable good.

If landlords were systemically good, if the overwhelmingly majority of landlords were good, rent would go down every year as the building and utilities get used - only going back up after real meaningful renovations.

My last flat had an awful kitchen design, very aesthetic but a nightmare to actually cook in. Can you imagine living in your own home and hating something you Interface with everyday multiple times and not changing it despite knowing you have the money and skills to do so? I can’t. But because I have a landlord, because people have landlords they are stuck with the decisions of someone who either makes absolutely or relatively bad decisions all the time. My current flat the bathroom is a nightmare to live with because a quarter of the room is a bathtub and yet there’s no place to put your toothbrush or plug in a water pick/hair dryer/razor. I’d happily change the entire bathroom, renovate it to include a decent sized shower, add electrical outlets and kitchen sink that isn’t just a bowl - but again I can’t because that isn’t putting money into my landlords pockets and because they’re not planning on living here ever again (if they ever did) they don’t care how it is to live in. That’s what being a landlord does to someone naturally, it’s understandable but the reality is you care less about a place you’re not living in, you’re spending a lot of money for a place you’re not living in so you want to make that money back so you can improve the place you are actually living in so you’re naturally getting more stingy and cheap at your other properties, and over time the incentives of the system realign your values and behaviors.

No, I don’t think your lifetime of “good landlord stories” is a meaningful data point to change what the overwhelming majority of people experience every day of their lives nor the systemic logic/reality of the situations. Good people can become landlords with good intent but they can’t stay good and be a landlord because being a landlord is inherently an anti-productive thing to be in society - overtime the incentives change people into doing things that hurt others for their own interest.

You’re right, there are good examples out there. The point is they’re statistical anomalies not the rule. Landlords by and large serve very little societal purpose.

I just switched to Kagi because I liked the idea of a paid search engine who’s aim was to remove the internet’s clutter, not use any profile besides the one I create to show me results, and where I could weight certain sites that produce good content.

Reading the blog post the issues allegedly are:

1. Privacy is not guaranteed, like with a 3rd party audit
2. AI usage is growing not shrinking
3. The business seems to be poorly run and could have a short lifespan

Is this correct?

This video was fantastic and I hope they keep this series up. I’m switching to Kagi from ddg because of this vid and I’ll spend time this weekend looking into ente/immich and all the DNS options highlighted here.

Super excited. It’s weird paying for email or search engines given they’ve always been free in my lifetime but the services have been noticeably worse as of late and I miss an Internet constantly bombarding you with things you should believe or buy.

Just chiming in, I’m 28, American, immigrated to Germany. Can’t speak for Lemmy but I migrated from reddit when they shut the APIs down. Just want a shelf stable Aggregate site where I can stay up to date on my favorite hobbies and periodically connect with other humans. A healthy political debate is good every now and then but I’m also in the camp that the answers for our current problems are well researched and pretty fuckin obvious so debates have gotten… Idk stale.

Generally Lemmy feels like reddit but smaller, less polluted, but also less connected with every niche major update.

For these things I don’t think you have to prove anything, just a report to your govs food agency could prompt an inspection - or so I think.

Having no experience in the service industry I don’t have great advice so I’ll just say I’m sorry you’re going through this and I hope it gets better.

In gigs where politics matters more than output or social skills it can be hard to instigate change.

Is eating off of food a reportable offense to a health agency? That seems illegal or it should be.

I’ve been using Nord VPN for years. Maybe someone can educate me on why it’s not good but I’ve had zero issues with it and it allows me to do everything I need to for a great price.