I moved to Germany from the US and make a point of calling myself an immigrant to tackle this very thing. Honestly I haven’t heard expat used by anyone besides contractors looking to go back home after the duration, but that’s anectodal.

Because from what I can tell Matrix isn’t a good Discord replacement. I’ll spin up a server just to trial it, but every person I’ve talked to who isn’t already on Matrix and every thing I’ve seen or read says it’s not a discord replacement, it’s just a chat app.

Stoat and Fluxer can be self-hosted which is my main desire. Something fully under my control, with my data security, that won’t rely on another service to keep it running (although naturally I rely on the code base being maintained, hence donating as if it was a paid product).

Alright, stoat or revolt or anyone else, you’ve got 6 months. I’ll move my group over in 6 months and donate to the best solution. Thanks everyone for pushing back against discord, to the indie devs who are working on alternatives, and to the self-hosting community for making it possible for me to even plan to move off of discord.

I’m considered middle class despite being something like in the top 10% of earners in the US and I don’t own any property. I don’t know if I could afford to own property with their current prices. I’m not certain property taxes hit the middle class as much as they might have back when my parents were in their prime. Of course it still hits a percentage of the middle class, but I’m suggesting that percentage is shrinking and smaller than the revenue it would generate from the rich.

What the fuck are you talking about? That’s not how any of that works. Are you young or something because there’s no way you’re going around pretending having a billion dollars is the same thing as owning a billion dollar company and then defending that fictional billionaire because you’re fuckin bored?

I think what you’re trying to say, and not making a lick of sense, is that in this hypothetical scenario this person owns a publicly traded company and owns 100% of the shares worth 1 billion dollars. If that is what you’re saying, that person doesn’t have a billion dollars, they have the ability to sell shares and theoretically, and only theoretically, make a billon dollars. That’s not what were talking about. We’re talking about if a person HAD A BILLION DOLLARS.

Not if they had a billion dollars but it was lost at sea, not if they had a billion dollars but it’s all in gold buried on an island, not if they have a billion bitEthereumDogecoins and technically they’re worth a billion dollars as long as they never sell them. We’re not talking about any hypothetical scenario you want to come up with right now. We’re talking about a random schmuck who has a billion dollars. Now do you believe that person should give all their money away except for, let’s be generous, and say the last 10 million dollars? Enough money to never work again, for their partner to never work again, for their kids to never have to worry. Do you believe that? If not, and all you’re doing is making up hypothetical scenarios as to why the poor billionaires have their hands tied when trying to not be billionaires, then you’re just defending them. You’re going online, and defending the people robbing you of a better life.

Now if you’d like to talk about your hypothetical scenario, we can do that. That’s fine, but that’s a different thing. So let’s say my interpretation of what you said is true. That person could keep on owning that company and, as long as their take home is reasonable, and they’re not able to leverage those assets for loans to make themselves live a rich asshole lifestyle. That’s fine. But the moment they do sell those assets or do leverage them for self-gain, then they need to be getting rid of that money as fast as possible. Taxation, donation, gifting. Right now loans are capable of being taken out again owned assets and essentially escaping a large chunk of taxation and distribution, that should be prevented.

But if that is the minimum, I’d say the correct thing for your hypothetical person to do would be to additionally pay their employees partially in stocks. That way even if the billion dollar’s in stocks is being leveraged, it’s being leveraged ideally equally amongst all creaters of that profit.

Every person should own a portion of the company they work for, that’s just common sense. A portion of the land their business is on, if not the whole thing. Their entire house (but maybe not the land). Their car or a portion of any private mass transit (although of course public is better). Their tools, their food, their art, their hobbies on and on and on.

There is no hypothetical situation where someone is justly living as if they had 20 million dollars or more. They cannot be good people and have that much wealth. Especially at the billion dollar figure.

Buddy I can’t afford a home. That to me is a human necessity. Owning things, especially basic things like your clothes and your shelter and your tools to make a living, is necessary. I make a good amount of money and I still can’t afford all of the basics.

You pretending that I’m saying every person must give every dollar away is stupid, disingenuous, and wrong. I’m not saying no one should have savings, I’m specifically saying if you have enough money to never work again in your life and still afford all the basic necessities and plenty of luxuries - which for most western countries is 5 million or so - you should be giving every other cent away. I’m not even saying donate it to charity. I’m saying buy your friend’s houses, buy the city a new library, send a bunch of kids to college and set them up for success, pay your fuckin taxes. And do that so fast that you’re not holding onto an extra dollar longer than you need to be because excessive money turns you evil.

What is broken inside of you that you’re defending billionaires? Why are you defending the very people who harm you daily? That steal from you and your kids? The hundred millionaires that are actively choosing to kill the planet or defend pedophiles or allow starvation and homelessness to happen?

No, I do not believe everyone making less than 200k a year should have no savings and single handedly attempt to fix all the problems the ultra rich are causing. That’s a stupid suggestion. I do believe everyone should chip in to their community, build infrastructure both physically and socially to better society, but God damnit that’d be a lot easier if half the wealth of the world held captive by evil assholes was more equitably distributed.

I’m not going to address your first paragraph, it’s dumb.

But I will address your second paragraph. If a person commits many bad deeds they become a bad person. To become a billionaire you must commit many, many bad deeds. Therefore being a billionaire means you are a bad person.

Even if you believed you could become a billionaire by committing nothing but good deeds, being a billionaire requires you to have a billion dollars. Having a billion dollars over any period of time means you’re committing the bad deed of inaction. Not helping those in need, not giving away your excess money, not changing the world for the better. It’s watching a grandma getting assaulted and doing nothing about it - a despicable act - multiplied by billions of people and then made distant by every dollar you keep. If you had a billion dollars that means you know your friends, and your family, and the homeless of your city, and every person you know who needs expensive healthcare or university or a home is going without those things because you and you alone choose not to give it to them. Not to even speak about the people in places our ancestors abused or the planet that’s dying or any other serious issue that could be meaningfully dented by anyone of these billionaire assholes.

No, I disagree with your position. There are bad people, because those people commit overwhelmingly bad deeds. Being a billionaire means you must be a bad person. Hell, owning more than let’s say 20 million makes you a bad person and I think the state should tax every dollar over 5m.

Ya, I think the information around arch’s difficulty is still rubber banding slowly. It hasn’t caught up with the times tbh. I run into some issues infrequently but like so did I on Windows. It’s also almost always proportional to how much I mess with the system. My mom could run Arch today if she wanted to.

I swapped over early last year, so I’m getting close to passing your one year qualifier, but I’d say it’s been fantastic.

My main concern was stability and gaming. I’m on pure Arch and it’s been completely stable. I haven’t done any deep configuration except for trying to make my yubikey my sudo password and I did not do that well so I had to roll that change back. So in my opinion, nearly anyone can set up Arch if they have a good guide, treat it like a normal computer, and keep it working for at least a year without almost any issue.

Gaming has also been nearly perfect. There’s been a handful of games I couldn’t play for one reason or another. Battlefield had anti-cheat issues, but tbh I would only have gotten it to play with a friend and I’m happy to not give that company money. Robocop was the most recent game that was struggling despite being platinum. I’ll try again later and I assume it’ll be better. I think the only other one I can remember is the Marathon Beta, which is a bummer but again I’m okay if they decide to never turn on the Linux support (because I think their anti-cheat is Linux compatible they just haven’t done the work yet) because I don’t think Bungie deserves my money.

So ya, id recommend Linux for nearly anyone.

I just want to remind everyone that even the best solutions can do better for the planet and for the workers in that production process.

That does not mean gas or oil or coal or hydrogen is good or better. In fact nearly everything that can be applied to green energy supply chains can be applied to fossil fuels with a multiplier.

I always think it’s better in an online discussion, when a subject doesn’t have overwhelming public support like climate change and green energy, to critique it with a clarifying contextual message like the one above. Just to quell any rational counter arguments or creating irrelevant conversation chains.

Hydrogen was never great, it’s always been an oil lobby play because the majority of hydrogen - as I understand it - is a byproduct of the oil process. It makes very little sense to lose efficiency creating a highly flammable substance, lose efficiency transporting and storing that substance, lose efficiency supplying that substance to the end consumer, and then finally lose efficiency extracting the remaining energy from the substance.

Hydrogen may make sense in some circumstances but it should not, and I’d even go so far as to say it will not, replace gasoline. Electricity is by far the best supplier of power long term.

Elon liking something should be a red flag into a subject because he has shown himself to be both uneducated and against humanities best interests. It’s not that Elon likes a thing therefore it’s bad. It’s that Elon likes bad things because Elon is bad, and therefore when you look into it it has a pattern of being bad.

This is the number one thing I would bring up tk the question “do we need more users”. We need more users if we want more niche communities, and I want more niche communities without having to post.

If I ever win a lottery over $10M I’ll give away everything above $10M…

This is horrible, tragic news for Germany and it’s people. I hope the citizens of this country vote these people out of office before they allow their country to be destroyed.

If one or more of the guys making the most money at proton is pro-trump and makes donations, isn’t that the same thing as the company doing it? Like if Willy Wonka funded rainforest restoration, buying his chocolate is directly supporting the rainforest regardless of if it’s the factory or the CEO doing it.

In an age where corporations and the rich are literally destroying the world, I think it’s reasonable for people to greatly weigh the political byproduct of their purchases. Proton doesn’t seem to care about privacy or improving the world or being a good company, they seemingly just care about making enough money through catering to the privacy crowd. For me, going non-google isn’t to hurt Google it’s to support smaller owned businesses who also want to support smaller owned businesses and their community.

This comment makes no sense in relation to this topic. This is a picture of a winter market in a German city (theoretically, I’m not verifying it but it looks legit). The size of the country as a whole or even really the population makes no difference when comparing this to the US and it’s cities. As someone who’s lived in multiple cities in both countries and visited far more, the population density is the only distinction and that can be designed for. Kansas city is urban sprawled to hell by design and Berlin isn’t all that different, except Berlin has trains galore.

Actually looking up the data on where I live right now, Mannheim, and where I just came from, Kansas City this point is easily driven home.

KC:

• 825 km2 area
• 508k people
• 623 people/km2 density
• 2.2 mil metro

Mannheim:

• 145 km2 area
• 316k people
• 2186 people/km2 density
• 2.3 metro

America is the home of the car. Germany isn’t even considered to have the best public transit and yet any country with that as a priority thrives in human centric metrics.

It was a nightmare to drive downtown in KC, find parking, visit a handful of shops, and drive home. It took time and money and was generally dangerous.

Going anywhere in the entire metropolitan area of Mannheim takes me max 30 minutes, and that’s by tram. I walk most places and that’s 1-10 mins of walking for all my needs. I can walk a block to my nearest Christmas market, 5 blocks to the next and something like 10 to the next. Nothing even remotely as communal or friendly in my suburban neighborhood in KC.

I swapped a laptop over maybe 5 years back at this point and bricked it within a week. I tried a total of 2 or 3 times and something always went wrong (this was Arch btw). I converted it to Mint maybe a year later and it was stable but I wasn’t convinced it was stable enough for my main computer.

I’m also pretty sure before that majority of games were not easily compatible like they are today.

Even as we speak Steam is not constantly resetting my keyboard as of some recent patch and I’m positive this wouldn’t happen on windows. Like Linux is great, it’s come a long way, and I would say it’s mature enough for most of friends to pop over without issue - but there are still clearly situations where I’m fighting the OS’s minority status or hodgepodge structure.

I love it, but claiming it was better than windows for the past 20 years is a bit of a bubble. You must not game, because 20 years ago it would have been worse - to name the one niche I care to point out right now.

I mean I can imagine, but I think it’s fair to say there’s been significant gaming progress and user friendliness to happen over the the past <5 years. It was unthinkable to switch over a decade ago and now it’s practically no different than windows. To me that means a different bar for what maturity is i guess.

I swapped over to Arch early this year. Very little issues, rather simple compared to the online stigma. Maybe it’s because I have up to date hardware, idk.

Made a guide for friends, one has swapped over and a couple others have voiced interest. It’s only a matter of time with the windows BS and as Linux continues to mature.

I think that’s the surface level, rational reading, but I think the realistic reading is it was simply a kickback to fortune 500 companies that got these politicians elected. Haven’t we already funded at least one factory that ended up being smoke and mirrors?