The 37% that experienced no change will not feel the pain for several years as these policies take time to hollow out the country.

The CDU have implemented policies and taken actions that will result in a lower quality of life for the people of Germany. We must tax billionaires out of existence and protect our countries people and assets. 100 millionaires should not exist, and people like Merz should not be insulated from the pain and suffering they are all too willing to inflict on others.

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

That’s how I felt/feel, but couldn’t/can’t refute a native speaker because I just don’t know enough. Thanks for the comments!

This is definitely something that has left me confused. My past comments have been replied to with the explanation that written German is so precise but verbal German, because of the lack of precise tenses, often leaves me having to make assumptions. I chalk it up to my elementary understanding of German, but you explaining the difference a bit helped me pin point what I mean.

I don’t know if I’d say I’m complaining, and I’m definitely not rating the languages against each other. But to be clear German also has variable pronunciation and loan-in words that are pronounced differently. They also have dialects and I have struggled to get consensus on several language related topics with small groups of native speakers before - so like… It is for sure random in many ways, including pronunciation.

Again, no issue with the language any more or less than others. I personally all wish we could like scientifically conlang our way into a less obtuse communication medium. But I’m also a DM so like of course I would like someone to make a conlang for humanity :D

Much appreciated. I’ll do my best! I want to be here for life, so I need to learn.

As someone learning German right now, I guess it’s hard to argue with relative terms but I find the German language to be built with a ton of traps and abnormalities for seemingly no explicable reason.

For instance we conjugate every verb but we maintain the subject, unlike in Spanish where we would conjugate and drop the subject. I don’t see any reason why we would do that except to make the language less efficient and more obtuse.

That being said, it hasn’t been too hard and I agree with the general sentiment that learning any language is a good hobby to have so I don’t want to discourage anyone.

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.

Elon should not be welcome in the EU. He should be seen as antithetical to what the EU should be striving for and it’s common values.

Anyone who says this should be removed from politics because they’re clearly willing to make a deal with the devil if it means a quick influx of cash.

Guy works for Black Rock and then makes his main policies:

• decrease taxes for business and the rich
• cutting public services to fund those tax cuts
• increasing national debt to fund military contracts and tax cuts for the rich

And then he talks about how people need to work more, as if he’s ever had a real job in his life or as if that’s some good marker for a person. A good man wants to improve society for everyone, and working more efficiently (aka less hours, not more) is improvement.

Merz is a classic conservative, he wants to make everything worse for everyone but the rich and wealthy and pretend it’s because he’s business savvy. He’ll sell this vision as necessary or for the economy or against the wave of invading foreigners, and all the while life will get worse for working Germans. For good people.

Don’t get fooled, Merz and the CDU are bad for Germany in the same way Trump and Republicans are bad for the US (or insert your local conservative party of choice).

Just attempting to understand what you wrote here, are you saying that German writing requires a massive number of references to past statements to be understood and that somehow makes it more precise?

As someone learning German right now, I can agree on complex but I’m not sure precise is very accurate. There seems to be a lot of assumptions based on context to know what one means. Maybe a more educated person could chime in, but I have not felt like the German language has made things more precise in communicating concepts (but full disclosure I’m at the A1 level going into A2).

Swapped to Linux 3 or so months ago, and have loved it. Doing Arch Linux, wanted to see every component go into the OS and just get a slightly better understanding of my computer - even though I think most educated people could use it with little complaint.

Games mostly just work, most software I use is there, I’ve found some fun new programs like an ASCII art and dithering image converter which has just been fun.

Last night I broke my system by trying to use my yubikey as the sudo requirement following some instructions that weren’t explicit about the caution I should have had. Loaded a backup via the Konsole and was back to before my fuck up in 5 minutes - mess up to fix (through freakout). That’s given me a lot of confidence in the stability of the system.

I also got to play the Arc Raiders Alpha test. I’ve written about this story before but it didn’t work the first day but it was clear to me it was a server issue or proton issue. Second day a patch came out and I was able to play it no problem. That gave me a lot of confidence that good games, even good online PVP games, will come to Linux without much issue.

Between those two events I’m pretty confident I’ll be on Linux for the rest of my life and if Arch continues to get support that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future (which it seems like it’s only speeding up and not at all in question of their funding).

The future can and should be about getting better! That means more efficient, that means more money for more people for less work, that means less hours spent working.

Merz and conservatives want a worse future for you and your family and your kids. They want to enrich themselves and their friends while asking you to work yourself to death. Don’t vote against your self-interests, don’t vote in the AfD or those that inevitably bring them to power like the CDU.

Vote for progress, vote progressives.

Again, you’re defending him under the notion that the ~3 political parties in this coalition couldn’t produce a single other valid candidate from among them. That’s unbelievable and if true should be punished by the voters. There’s just no way 3 massive political parties contain zero candidates as willing and as qualified as Merz (if not exceedingly more so) and if all of them can’t put the country first instead of their ambitions (which is arguably evident already) then we deserve chaos at the government level. And quite frankly I don’t know how much better we are with CDU in power vs no one in power. For most policies I’d argue the CDU in power means a decline in quality of life for Germans not an improvement.

The AFD grows not because of chaos at the federal level but because of the decline in quality of life for Germans. CDU is not fixing that they’re worsening it. I think there’s a solid basis to challenge the notion that a CDU government ran by Merz is better than any other candidate within those three parties and even a basis for argument on the notion that Merz over no one is better. I think the CDU actively harm this country based on their actions.

So no, I don’t think I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying - that only Merz exists as a viable option. And yes I do believe you’re defending him on the basis that it’s him or the AfD growing and I think that’s incorrect. The AfD will grow regardless because he won’t improve things and arguably faster because as corporate taxes go down and public services lose funding, quality of living goes down and more people become amendable to radical change which by their nature centralist parties don’t propose. I’m not seeing a left party capitalize on this in the same way the right is, probably because the funding for facism/racism is larger than for wealth equality but that’s off topic.

Well your original comment translates to defending Merz. To answer your follow up question, I don’t know the names of individual politicians in the CDU as I’m still new to German politics and learning as fast as I can. But I have no doubt the CDU has a handful of less ambitious people who could strive to produce some form of centralist policies. Will any of them be good in an absolute sense? No, if Merkel was the best they could do then no. But could someone be relatively better than Merz, who from what I can see would sell his mother down the river for more power and money, yes - most likely.

I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.

Yes, really. My alternative would have been any progressive party and failing that any centralist party, and failing that the CDU with any centralist leader, but all of those failed and now we have Merz. He will damage the working class, exasperate the issues that promote the AFD, and he will normalize them. He is, and the CDU are, Republicans 20 years ago in the US. He will lead to Germany’s Trump and the decline of the standard of living for the common man.

Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.

I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.

Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!

I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.