That’s my point, higher taxes does not mean less growth - you have a flawed understanding of taxes and economic growth. The government could take your tax money and convert the overwhelming majority of it towards meaningful services that a private company would have no incentive to be efficient about. That’s what free market capitalism does, it finds services and then chokes out competition until the system is inefficient at using resources.

You can look at healthcare as a great example. The US spends more money on healthcare than most other countries and yet achieves worse results than the overwhelming majority of other countries. This is explicitly because healthcare is privatized in the US and prioritizes economic growth over providing a service. Other governments prioritize providing good healthcare and when government run provide better service and a cheaper price point. So if you live in the US you have worse living conditions because your government doesn’t tax you more.

This same concept applies to transportation, Internet service (and often other utilities), elder care, housing, food. The government’s “structural nature” doesn’t mean much, every company is structured and just as inefficient. The difference is companies have an express intent to make more money, not provide better products or services unless that guarantees more money. What we see in an unregulated economy, which would require taxes to prevent, is companies find it easier to monopolize their market than provide better products/services. Governments on the other hand have the express intent to govern by the will of the people with power. In a good system this is the vast majority of constituents and not just the top 1% of wealth owners.

Your experiences with working for government or company or small town are not invalid but you have to understand that your experience is miniscule compared to the number of experiences out there. This is called anecdotal evidence. You can have all the anecdotal evidence and experience you’d like, but it’s meaningless when compared with the whole world’s experience which can only be measured using real world data - scientific conclusions or at least ones relying on some methodology. Because most governments implore 10s of thousands of people over hundreds of departments and locations, you simply couldn’t experience a meaningful amount. So you have to build your opinions not based on your limited experiences but based on data.

Cable monster I think you’re debating in good faith and for that I thank you. But you’ve got a lot of deprogramming to do - your opinions seem very implanted instead of individually formed. I

once believed less taxes and less government spending was an inherently good thing because I was told those things. With a bit of independent research, growing up and leaving the house that watched daily conservative programming, I learned that trickle down economics don’t make any sense and that reducing taxes and government spending isn’t simply good or bad - it’s dependent on what services we feel we no longer need provided by the government.

So your statement of less taxes being better on every level is false from my understanding of the world. And just like you, I’ll provide no sources, because I’m matching your effort here. The reason you’re getting down votes and the reason I can confidently say you’re simply wrong in some of these elements, is because these ideas are easily disproven with a bit of thinking, a bit of research in the real world, and it can upset people when someone holds such wrong opinions attempts to share them on the Internet without first supporting their statements.

Idk if this helps but I’ll continue to respond as long as you continue to come off as not a bot or someone looking to simply stir the pot.

Well he and congress at the time permanently cut taxes for the rich and raised them for the middle class and poor so does that speed up or slow down the economy and does it fuel or resist inflation?

Cause it’s pretty fuckin clear to me that taxing the rich less and the poor more isn’t a good strategy for a healthy society.

Some of the “claims without a citation” are things that were done under the first Trump administration.

• taxes did go up for most Americans under the last tax bill. It’s safe to say that if Republicans need to raise taxes it’ll be through the lower and middle class.

• kids go hungry or into debt for school lunches today because of how little some families make. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a feature for the Republican party and not a bug.

• books are being banned in the US at an alarming rate, look at Florida as a prime example. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a party priority.

• trump suggested multiple times as president that people should just be shot, killed, or executed for things as benign as protesting outside the Whitehouse. He didn’t do it, but it’s a pretty short distance between “the president wants to kill you” and “the president is having you killed”.

• the president did send in national guard and other militarily equipped groups to beat and pepper spray journalists and protestors while president.

• trump appointmented judges clearly lack the experience, qualifications, and apolitical-ness expected of a normal judge. You can see that in the supreme Court and you can see that at the federal judge level.

Insurance exists for a reason, loans exist for a reason, and the difficulty in selling a home is artificial because it’s treated like an investment that appreciates instead of a commodity that depreciates like it actually is.

Landlords buy bad appliances all the time, they are incentivized to, the cheaper the better because they don’t have to live with the consequences except for repairing it when it breaks.

In exchange for not owning anything in the place you live and having a fundamentally worse experience for it you get to pay someone else their mortgage AND their repair fund. You don’t take that into account. Renters pay for everything, we just pay it every month instead of in lump sum hits like an appliance dying.

Landlords do not provide a service, at best they provide living mobility which could be improved drastically if housing wasn’t treated like a private investment but instead a public service - so what little service they do provide is artificial.

Hydrogen is a stop-gap resource that is being pushed by oil companies to continue both producing destructive energy sources and slowing our transition by wasting money on less efficient projects.

“As at the end of 2021, almost 47% of the global hydrogen production is from natural gas, 27% from coal, 22% from oil (as a by-product) and only around 4% comes from electrolysis.”

• source

Everytime someone hears or talks about or supports hydrogen we should cautiously assume oil companies are funding the project and it’s worse than other already established solutions.

Will there be a place for hydrogen? Yes, probably in several niche or minority cases. But it won’t be good for 90% of cars, trains, energy storage, etc because in each of those situations we have a clear path to full electrification or cheaper less harmful solutions that don’t require an oil/gas byproduct.

I just took a train from Mannheim DE to Lille FR. It required one swap and cost me about €250. I felt like that price was too high for that distance and speed (5.5 hours roughly) but that’s comparable to a plane ticket in the US from one major city to the next so it’s a better way of traveling in this instance because trains are more enjoyable than planes for me.

That being said I agree with other commenters that we need to continue to invest in our international rail systems and continue to improve speeds, reliability, and cost.

I’d like to take trains all over the EU in the future (rather new to DE). If someone could get me a single train from Frankfurt to Madrid in under 8 hours for €250 I’d be in love. Make planes obsolete for distances a high speed rail can achieve in under 8 hours. Get me into Italy and Portugal and Sweden and Turkiye and Ukraine (after they’ve defended their home successfully against the imperialists) via train. I want to see the world by train.

Ya, remember some number of them are bots or underpaid people who’s job is to spread frustration and essentially commit information warfare.

Since I moved to Lemmy I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking the bad actors after it was clear they are incurable and unsaveable. The ones who seem to live for pro-russian messaging or refuse to have a dialogue like these TLDR people.

The AFD and their supporters are a disgrace to any decent society. I hope we can educate our neighbors and improve our living conditions so that these awful groups disappear for good.

US labels also contain weight. And again, unless you are baking all the water out and curious about that nutritional value, you’re picking up a package that has nearly identical labeling and testing standards and are therefore comparable and using that to make nutritional choices. In this case almonds are more calorically dense than tofu and have less protein per calorie. Water included or not.

What? Surely that’s not how nutrition labels are made. If I look at the label for almonds and I look at the label for tofu and they both list 100g of X has Y protein in it - surely they’re comparable. So what is your point? Are you suggesting I need to dehydrate tofu to determine it’s real nutrition? I don’t know if that’s practical or meaningful in anyway. I guess you’re suggesting that if we cook out the water certain foods like tofu get even more macro nutritionally dense?

I think people are upset with the foods included for comparison when they should be upset with metric being used to compare them. Protein per 100g tells me protein to weight but what I really care about is protein to total calorie count per 100g. That tells me if the food is efficient in delivering me protein and even that should be coupled with calorie per gram or volume per gram or something to show how much of the food can I eat.

The graphic makes almonds look amazing, for instance, but you get a handful of almond for 100g and also a fourth of your daily caloric intake at 550 kcal. Which means they’re not exactly an efficient protein source. Where as tofu is rather efficient at only 80 kcal per 100g.

It’s just a weird concept in general despite being wholly believable. I don’t blame you nor think you’re wrong or right. Just a hilarious and sad picture, a societies main hall for political dialogue being an endless feed of algorithmically addicting content. Idk, just a boring dystopia kinda thing.

Oof, if Instagram’s comment section is where we’re having political discussions these days that’s disheartening. There’s clearly a need for a town square application for these sorta things.

This is such a shame. I just moved to Germany and I haven’t had much time to engage in politics but it seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the solutions we need is still present here (possibly with the help of destabilizing countries like Russia or China who seem to have strong misinformation campaigns running online).

Guess I need to accelerate getting involved with my local politics as soon as possible. What social platforms do Germans use to communicate about politics? I used to post on Facebook for Americans, and obviously reddit was a good place to have small conversations, but is there any place I can directly address conservative talking points in a public forum. The fact that young people are voting far right tells me we’re losing the digital battle more than anything.

The results have been depressing. I want to make Germany my home. But if enough people support conservatives and far right parties we will continue to see immigrants like myself be less and less welcome - and I would like to avoid a recession if at all possible.

I’m swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of 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.

The whole of Spain. I grew up with a lot of people who loved Europe but had never been to it or really anywhere else. Spain for some reason got a lot of love and attention in my social circles but I didn’t engage with it meaningfully so I didn’t understand it. I started my international travels in “the east” and had a wonderful time. By the time I visited Spain I expected a normal travel experience but definitely not the elevated grandeur my highschool years would have had me believe. I had average expectations.

Then I got there and every meal was bomb. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona - I couldn’t go wrong I loved the local food. Worse, I loved at least Madrid and Barcelona’s ability to recreate other cuisines too. Some of the best sushi I’ve ever had was in Madrid and I make a point of getting quality sushi where ever I go (including practically gorging myself into a food coma in Japan).

Then I went to an art museum and it moved me, found some artisanal stores, got fresh orange juice at multiple grocers, saw a movie in a decent theater, you know the normal like “show me what it’s like to live uniquely here” stuff. Ya, Madrid stole my heart for what it was and Spain as a whole surprised me.

Ya, I live right next to where this happened. It’s an immigrant heavy area. These guys planned, and a similar group the following day, to protest right next to the people they hate and want evicted from the country.

I agree, no one should be stabbed for their beliefs and free speech (to a degree) is important. But if someone came to my neighborhood and spent the whole day shouting out of a loud speaker that I didn’t belong, my family didn’t belong, my neighbors and friends didn’t belong, despite some of them living here for multiple generations - I’d be upset, I’d feel threatened.

Now couple that with doing it in a poorer district against a specifically marginalized group who has been historically treated poorly for decades with talking points that are clearly racist and easily disproven - idk. No one should get stabbed but even if I believed those awful things I wouldn’t do what they did unless I was looking for trouble.

Idk, my roommate and I have been talking about it all weekend. Yes we believe you should be allowed to punch Nazi’s, no we don’t think we should be allowed to stab anyone, yes 20% of the German population roughly hold dehumanizing beliefs that are dangerous and we should be educating them, no the government isn’t doing enough to better everyone’s situation and therefore racism and fascism are growing at an alarming rate.