UnfortunateShort

I have used Google, DDG, Bing and Ecosia (which is basically Bing) at this point and ingl, none of them really stands out for its results. If anything, I think DDG and Bing beat Google.

Google might be the first company to create a monopoly out money and apathy. The apathy of users who don’t care about their search engine enough to even change the default.

Firefox enhanced tracking protection is pretty based here if you ask me

Heh, we the best. Now excuse me while I use my amazing brainpower to watch questionable anime and get more depressed 🫥

I don’t even get why they care. Can’t you just inform users once, then drop support and still collect their data?

Great, now we need to convince Linus that anti-cheat is definitely worth being implemented in Linux or what?

Might be a fun project tho… Actually, might become the anti-cheat to rule them all. Who likes cheaters anyway? 🤔

I love how in security, we have gone from “use strong passwords” to “don’t make your own passwords”, because people will just refuse to learn.

I mean, I get it, I like small bezels too, but it’s pretty low on the list…

Lucky you, for me they basically ruined group chats completely. I get notifications for the wrong topic. Reply to a notification, you might end up posting in a couple ones. The client will sometimes jump to the very beginning of the chat history. Sometimes I don’t get notifications for a topic, sometimes old messages appear as new ones.

It has become next to unusable for me.

Plus the bugginess of the new features. Create a group with topics? You’ll have a great time…

And a lot of quality of life improvements are still missing. Use more than one client? You don’t expect proper sync, do you? True E2EE (secret chats)? Well, no more than one client to begin with. Plus you lose a lot of features. Auto-delte messages? Well, you can, but others can just turn it off. Plus you can’t enable or disable it for all chats at once.

What really weirds me out tho is how aggressively they try to make you sync your contacts…

I don’t feel persecuted, I just want to point out how stupid it is to portrait even the slightest economic hiccup as a major failure, especially after facing two crises in short succession (with the climate crisis not even counted).

In fact, what you pointed out is among the reasons for that: All things considered, Germany is doing pretty OK. And I think economic growth is a much easier to solve problem than becoming a more sustainable economy/society (i.e. having social stability, fixing the education system, becoming less polluting and more independent from the global superpowers).

“Germany is hugely successful and has been for years, but now it’s success is slightly shrinking.”

Now please blame socialism and I got that sweet capitalist circle jerk bingo

This is the best idea he’s had so far. I bet that place will actually be tolerable once everyone has left.

Afaik they use your phones contacts. If you want to delete one, you need to delete the number from your phone.

You have fair points, but I disagree with some conclusions. Demographic change for example hits everyone at some point. Concluding that it will lead to a competitive disadvantage specifically for Germany doesn’t seem plausible to me, at least not in the long run. In the near future it might be, the question is how well we’ll adapt. Japan for example is struggling with demographics as well and they still do OK, albeit not amazing.

Moreover capital doesn’t necessarily decline becaue of a demography shift. State funding and buying power in Germany might, but the state is trying to reduce its debt, which opens up opportunities for future investments. Fewer people also mean that (hopefully) fewer investments into certain things are necessary. And as you mentioned, businesses are exporting and expanding into other countries. This means they extract capital there which could be directed towards Germany. You “just” need to capture it by making investments atteactive. I think the R&D area is a possible lifeline here. That said, private capital is a completely different story to begin with anyway. It can be used for investments that drive dividends toward Germany. There is no need for that capital to decline at all. It could of course, but I don’t think demographic change will be at fault if it does. Capital tends to attract more capital.

Finally I highly question the need for military power in order to conduct global trade. The US aren’t an economic superpower because their ships are escorted by destroyers, because pirates are afraid of retaliation or because, in contrast to other countries, they aren’t robbed of their goods. It might have opened some doors and it makes it hard to blockade them, but that’s assuming people want to blockade you to begin with. And Germany doesn’t stand alone. With a strong EU and growing military spending, I’m actually hoping for more independence in every regard, including military, in the future. The cold war is over and the Soviet Union is no more. It’s time to take care of ourselves in Europe and make our own decisions.

And I claim he is dead wrong. It’s hard to overstate just how much money is in and goes through Germany. Despite its size (in land and people), it’s one of the largest economic and scientific powers in the world. The crises left but scratches so far.

Power was already expensive before, Germany and the EU are maybe less, but not unstable and there are tons of research and patents originating in Germany.

With a few course corrections, some of which have taken place, some more being underway and some maybe still necessary, I don’t see why Germany or its economy should collapse any time soon. At least that’s what Münchau seems to imply might happen.

Please feel free to tell me that I’m an idiot, if a couple years from now he turns out to be right. I really doubt it tho. There are even experts who actually claim we’re in relatively good shape rn and I strongly agree with them. There is quite a bit of room to improve in some areas, but hey, just witnessed two major crises and all

Trusting the CCP with your texts is a fantastic idea with no chance of backfiring.

No chance of firing back at the hit-squad that’ll be after you, if you send Winnie the Pooh memes that is.

Because you don’t seem to understand that you are wrong on plain facts and also rudely overgeneralizing. To make it so clear even people like you can understand: If you presented me the facts 10 years ago and asked whether we should use nuclear, I would probably have said yes.

Sure, the country that might straight up ban Chinese hardware in networks because of security concerns and that wants to reduce its dependency on China is going to let China build their power grid. Not that I like this fascist dictatorship better or less than any other, but if anything like this where to happen we would 100% turn to US companies. And this would only solves one of the many issues - supply. I mean, if you really want to anything is possible, but then you might as well go straight for renewables like other countries successfully did.

This “people like me” here hasn’t voted for not putting perfectly fine power plants to good use and especially not for using coal instead.

I’m also not aware of people claiming it’s too late because of practical reasons “for decades”. On the one hand I don’t think the narrative was centered around practicality, but ideology. The opponents of nuclear didn’t want to take the risks and didn’t want the responsibility of nuclear waste. There was also a lot of fearmongering which had nothing to do with practicality either. On the other hand the fate of nuclear in Germany was only sealed when Fukushima happened, that’s not even one decade ago iirc. There was a chance of returning to nuclear, at least with emerging technologies, up until that point. But when it happened, the last opposition to ending nuclear capitulated (and probably filled their pockets with money from the coal lobby).

This whole debate about nuclear in Germany was brought up again by populists. The damage is done and it will not be undone. It will take years to even reactivate the usable power plants we have right now and there is zero interest by companies to build new ones. You’d have to state-fund it pretty much 100%, which no one will support. And even if you did, renewables are still cheaper. The people who have maintained these plants are retired or have new jobs by now. There will be mass protest basically for sure if you change course now. It won’t happen and doesn’t make sense.

Huh, interesting how you resort to low key insult me right away - I guess they didn’t teach you any manners.

At any rate, “look at the past X years trend” is not a useful metric when the current trend is different. In fact, a bunch of laws was just passed to accelerate the further installation of wind turbines. And moreover, what this graphic shows how the capacities have tripled in 14 years. So instead of meming let me make my point clear: I think OP is missing somthing.