Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.

Lifting the minimum wage directly impacts the available income of the lowest income classes, who in turn spend most of their income on consumption, increasing domestic demand and thus also helping the economy.

Only around 3.7% of German workers earn minimum wage. Increasing their wages a little won’t move the needle on the economy. I generally support a healthy minimum wage, but Germany’s economic issues are systemic, and require much broader solutions. Making the cost of doing business even higher right now in Germany - which is what raising the minimum wage does - is antithetical to fostering weak economic growth. Industrial production in particular continues to decline, which is a big problem for Germany. Merkel’s strategy of going all-in on Russian natural gas turned out to be catastrophic. The cost of energy is just too high now for a raft of different sectors. I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before in economic analysis, but these are some of the primary issues and tactical solutions Germany should tackle.

1. Cheaper energy. This is strangling industries which employ millions and have been the backbone of the economy for decades. Germany needs to build nuclear capacity ASAP, or begin importing massive amounts of Russian natural gas, or begin burning a lot more coal. For environmental, economic, and ethical reasons, I support nuclear. Renewables are about 4x more expensive than nuclear after imputing costs like storage and grid architecture [1].

2. Germany needs to embrace efficiency at a cultural level. In 2023, 51 % of all point-of-sale transactions were made using banknotes and coins. I cite this not because I think cash is a perfect analogue for efficiency, but to underscore the distrust so many Germans have in technology. Most government departments still use fax machines. Germany’s internet infrastructure is just terrible. There is an astounding lack of digitisation across both the public and private sectors. This aversion to efficiency becomes an increasingly heavy anchor around the neck of the nation as the rest of the world embraces new technologies to build and serve more products and services, faster.

3. Germany needs a new strategic focus in the economy. Even with cheap energy, industrial production can and will be done cheaper in developing nations. Their car industry is clearly unable to pivot to EVs, and it’s going to completely miss automated driving. Using VW software is like going back to a Nokia flip phone. They need to figure out how to invest in and excel at services and software. This is almost impossible to mandate at a governmental level in a democratic nation. This one will be the toughest to turn around and for this reason, my long term prognosis for Germany is poor relative to many other European nations.

4. Restructuring Germany’s immigration system to block low and no skilled immigrants, and greatly simplify immigration for high skilled immigrants. Research by the ifo Institute concludes that the 2015 immigration wave has widened the implicit long-term debt burden, i.e., including future pensions, by almost 10 percent of GDP. According to this, every admitted refugee costs the budget around 225 thousand euros over the course of her or his entire life. [2] This problem is getting worse every year. Germany’s immigration system is very difficult to navigate, and can be quite hostile for legal, qualified migrants.

5. Compounding all of the above is a declining fertility rate. Few countries have solved this issue, meaning [highly skilled and qualified[ immigration is more important than ever. I don’t think we can rely on improving native fertility rates.

When an economy is performing as poorly as Germany, economic stimulus is required. This means lower taxes and increased government spending. QE is not possible for those using the Euro so it might mean accepting higher levels of debt. This is a distinctly un-German proposition. The current government has secured the right to increase national debt but only in the context of Russian aggression. Debt by itself is bad, but if used prudently to stimulate the economy in the right direction, can be useful. I sadly do not trust the German government to invest it wisely. It’s much more likely to go towards manufacturing mortar rounds, and to pay for ever increasing social services.

No, rape is always bad, whether or not the media reports it.

Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect reliability. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.

Most crime is a direct result of poverty.

This is not correct. There is a correlation but no evidence of directionality. It could be that crime causes poverty, or that third correlates cause both. Sweden saw a massive rise in crime following the large migration of Middle Eastern refugees following the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis, and they decided to study it. Translation below:

https://bra.se/rapporter/arkiv/2023-03-01-socioekonomisk-bakgrund-och-brott

Most people who come from a socio-economically less favorable background do not commit more crime than people who come from a more favorable background, and it also happens that people from a more favorable background do commit crime. This means that even if there is a connection between socio-economic background and involvement in crime, that connection is weak. It is not possible to appreciably predict who will commit crimes based on knowledge of people’s socio-economic background.

Other risk factors have a stronger relationship with criminal behavior:

When compared with factors that research has identified as risk factors for crime, such as parenting competence, the presence of conflicts in the family, school problems or association with criminal peers, the research shows that these have a stronger connection with criminal behavior than socio-economic background factors. The same applies to risk factors linked to the individual himself, for example permissive attitudes or impulsivity.

They found that cultural factors were far more correlated with criminality than socioeconomic status. This is corroborated by the fact that white collar crime remains so prevalent. If poverty caused crime, white collar crime would be almost non-existent, but it is prolific. It turns out that some people are just greedy. Or mean. Or violent. Or selfish. Or don’t care about how their actions might harm others. Sociopaths in particular exhibit all of these antisocial behaviour. They are unable to feel genuine remorse for hurting others, and no amount of money you give to them will ever change that.

FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).

• In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.

• Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth

• In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.

• A example: 192.168.0.50

• Save the setting, done.

#Important thing to be aware of:

What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.

Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.

If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:

192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80

If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:

192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)

192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)

And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.

Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?

It’s like they deliberately chose the most repulsive colour combinations possible. It’s so bad that it can’t have been a mistake. They took colour theory and then methodically did the exact opposite of it. Then they combined this with some of the ugliest character designs imaginable. I think the artists thought “ugly = unique and unique sells!” I can vomit a strawberry daiquiri onto a piece of paper and create a “unique” piece, but that doesn’t make it appealing and customers are certainly not going to buy it.

The most frustrating part of this for me was the overwhelming feedback before launch that they should have scrapped the designs and started again. Either they began focus testing FAR too late, or more likely, they ignored it. Either one was fatal. Then Marvel Rivals came along with attractive character designs (but arguably generic gameplay) and dominated in the market. Proving this had nothing to do with saturation. They just made a bad game and refuse to admit it.

We’ve got a good balance of socialism and capitalism here in Denmark. There are strengths and weaknesses of both. This is why modern societies have some combination of the two. Societies which try to go all in on any one ideology like communism tend to collapse.

Exactly. We used to exile or execute them. Modern society is almost tailor made for a sociopath to thrive. They don’t have the same kind of internal moral compass that others do, so they don’t feel bad when they hurt people. They rely almost exclusively on external deterrents (and incentives). This means harsh sentences and high certainty of detection and conviction. Sadly many people have an ideological aversion to prison, and we’re seeing less and less per capita spending on law enforcement and prisons in the West.

I agree that authoritarian governments have more latitude than democracies. The CCP displaced up to two million people when it built the The Three Gorges Dam. There was no recourse. No ability to object. People who had lived on the land for generations were simply told to leave. Some were lucky to be given meagre government apartments to live in elsewhere, but that was it. It’s much easier to build large infrastructure projects when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like property laws, health and safety, and human rights.

If your argument is that authoritarianism will win over democracy in the long term, it’s an interesting debate. Most of human history was some form of authoritarianism. Some form of might makes right. There have been small democratic experiements in history (see Greece), but modern democracy is a relatively new experiment. I hope it succeeds, because I like it a lot more than the alternatives.

Telling people what not to do is far less effective than giving them positive and aspirational advice. Jordan Peterson literally told boys to clean their room and he became outrageously popular overnight. How sick is our culture when boys are so starved for wholesome masculine guidance that they’ll cling to the first man who gives them healthy paternal advice like “clean your room”? Something people on the left in particular do not understand about this issue is that telling boys to be more like girls doesn’t work. They need to be told it’s normal and healthy to be aggressive and competitive and physical, as long as it’s done in a way which doesn’t hurt people. Masculinity isn’t evil. Anyone who calls it “toxic” should be admonished and derided. We need Aragorn like figures in the real world to show boys what healthy masculinity looks like.

This is an excellent question. I think the major question mark hanging over this projection is the role that automation will play in the future. Both in terms of physical production, and in terms of white collar or office work. One could argue that economies which are best positioned to take advantage of automation might feel the impact of a declining workforce less, but then those same societies run the risk of high unemployment and low domestic economic demand for products and services. The balance is crucial and economies are generally slow to pivot.

I don’t think framing their issues in terms of women’s issues is helpful. “But what about men” is just as unhelpful when dealing with issues for women. Feminism did great things to advance the interests of women, and it required coordination and struggle over many decades against a system which wasn’t receptive to their needs. Now, each year, the U.S. spends close to $8B on women’s initiatives spanning many areas from healthcare to education. If you’re suggesting men need their own movement, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps what we’re seeing is the early formation of that. Messy, uncoordinated, and immature, as are all early movements.

In the mean time, I don’t think “be better” is a resonant message. It was rightly dismissed when people said it to women in the 1960s and it should be dismissed now. These issues are structural and require structural solutions. I think a big part of this is economic. Men are taught from a young age (by men and women) that unless they make a lot of money, they’re worthless. Society is offering fewer and fewer opportunities for men in traditionally blue collar industries to thrive. If we offer few opportunities and call them worthless for not succeeding, this is a recipe for societal instability.

I don’t think young men are genetically predisposed to this. They are the product of the society in which they grow up. They’re seeking help because no one else is there to help.

There was a moment around the year 2000 when this might have been the case but China’s demographics and unwillingness to permit meaningful immigration will see a decline of 20-25% of their working age population over the next 30 years due to a plummeting fertility rate. This phenomenon isn’t unique to China, but China is one of the hardest hit for many reasons. A decline of hundreds of millions of workers is going to destroy their economy - especially with such a large elderly population set to retire. There is no chance they fully transition to a services based economy by then. Not even close. They still have hundreds of millions of citizens living subsistence farming lifestyles.

Now compound this with all of the structural issues like command and control policies which destroy whole industries because the dictator in charge has a mood swing, a property bubble from which they will never recover, an economy built on unnecessary public spending, and an educational system which continues to emphasise blind obedience over individualism, and I think it very difficult to believe China becomes the most “powerful” country by 2035.

Warren Farrell has been warning the world for 20 years that neglecting and marginalising young men is going to result in generations of angry men who have checked out of society and will turn to criminality. By every available metric from suicide to educational outcomes, boys and young men are suffering enormously. Drowning people do terrible things. Lashing out at society in the ballot box is going to be the least of our issues soon.

Despite this, I predict society will continue to blame them for their failures, marginalise them, mock them, and pretend that they’re privileged. This is going to get worse until people are ready to have a serious society-wide discussion about how we can help young men succeed in the modern world.

Men had a lot more power and influence than women, and men continue to have a lot more power and influence. That isn’t applying blame. That is indisputable fact. Men as a group are more responsible for gender inequality than women, because men hold more power than women. Again, indisputable fact.

Some men. A minority of men. You’re doing the thing right now. “Men” isn’t a homogenous group, yet you’re clearly placing them into one. Women aren’t a minority group. How would you react if a woman wrote a post here about being raped, and I started discussing matriarchy, and how women, as a group, tend to act. Surely that would be a terrible thing for me to do, yet here you are, doing just that.

You make it clear that this is about attributing blame. You’ve dedicated multiple paragraphs to blaming men as a group. That’s why you won’t give up the gendered language. This isn’t about helping men at all. It’s about blaming them, even though you acknowledge most of them are not responsible. You must see how that foments anger from men, and how you are perpetuating negative stereotypes and animosity by continuing to use such toxic gendered language.

I think it’s fine to claim that the majority of positions of power are held by men. I think it’s wrong to say that “men” are responsible for bad things. If you’re specific about the bad men (or even better, bad people), no problem. If you broadly refer to men when describing toxic behaviour, you’re blaming people who don’t deserve it. Just like one shouldn’t blame “women” or the “matriarchy” for things either. Surely you agree with that?

What I’m reading from your writing is that both men and women in power have and continue to contribute to gender norms, which confine and hurt both men and women. If so, why use gendered language at all? There is much research and theory in sociology and specifically feminist studies about the impact of gendered language. I’m sure you broadly agree that “man up” is hurtful gendered language because it implies men should conform to a specific set of subjective behaviour. Why can you not see that a gendered male term for a toxic and harmful system is if not explicitly harmful, certainly implicitly so? Why not use a gender neutral germ like “structural gender roles” or something else which doesn’t imply blame? Surely this is not the first time a man has told you he feels offended by your use of this word. Why do you not listen and accept the hurt you cause by your continued use of it instead of just using something less offensive?

Unless, of course, you do intend to imply blame. That men are more to blame. That more men hold power, therefore we should use a gendered word to ensure we are clear who is more to blame.

Pointing out that the history of patriarchy enforced toxic masculinity is not accusing men themselves of enforcing it on an individual level, or dismissing rhe role that women played in enforcing these gender divisions.

Well it is, and you’ve laid out the case. If the system in which we currently live is designed for and by men, then a) they have less of a right to complain about their treatment, b) they have some hand in its creation, and c) have a burden to undo it. In fact, most men have no hand in its creation, have every right to complain, and have no burden to undo it. Raising patriarchy in a discussion about issues men face makes no sense unless you are d) allocating blame in some way, e) suggesting that men have a responsibility to fix their own issues, and/or f) ascribing a certain set of toxic behaviour specifically to men. None of those are helpful. None of those are supportive.

The issue is treating men like a homogenous group instead of specifically addressing those in power, who are both men and women.