Hungary. We order our groceries online and the app lets you tip right as you order. For prepared hot food, we often don’t order through one of the major services… we in fact try to order direct from the restaurant whenever we can so they don’t lose on a commission to a service we really don’t need, and in this case we always tip the delivery person. In restaurants, at a minimum you’re pretty much expected to at least round the bill up the nearest 1k forint for a nice sit-down meal, more is common. Some places have mandatory service charge similar to what some places in the US do. Again, we aren’t talking the expected 15-20% of the US, but tipping is certainly expected for some services here. Cabs, barbers, lots of services.

The bigger point to me is that Europeans, rightly, get upset when American tourists refuse to comply with cultural norms they don’t agree with… it’s just as pig headed when European tourists to the US refuse to do the same in my opinion. It’s being a bad guest.

We all pay for it anyway via the negative impacts. It should be the consumers buying the thing that pay for it. Why should society at large be paying for the negative impacts of a product not everyone is buying? Makes no sense. If your product is causing a big environmental impact, that needs to be paid for by the company making the product and the consumers buying it.

Definitely agree with that. I’d say he’s near the edge of politicians currently in an actual elected position in the US, but that’s about as far as it goes. Even in the US, there have been politicians further left in power historically. Absolutely no pipe dream.

Way too many people in here speaking for “Europe”. I live in Europe as well, and here tipping at a restaurant or a delivery driver is 100% expected. It isn’t usually as much as the US, but tipping exists here as well.

Also, when in Rome… plenty of people here get upset at Americans for not following cultural norms, seems fair to get upset at people visiting America for not doing the same.

I just think it pretty clearly isn’t the only way to fight established power when we saw a person that was hated by most establishment powers at the time of his first election and who spent half the money campaigning ended up beating them. Sure, he was obviously not interested in real change, but the fact is they didn’t want him in and he got in anyway.

I dunno, I switched my 7 year olds laptop over specifically because Windows updates kept breaking things. Everything worked out of the box with Linux and hasn’t broken yet. He doesn’t care either way, he just wants to use his programs, and that’s been easier since switching. I say this as someone who very painfully had to use Linux for a few years about 10 years ago… the experience is just very different today. I don’t think a day to day user will notice any difference beyond better stability.

My experience is that once set up, the easy linux distros are way less likely to randomly stop working and need support. And by set up, I pretty much mean “install the OS and grab Steam”.

I think it’s more like people still hold onto a view of the difficulty that hasn’t been true for years now in the big ones (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc). I agreed with this position 10 years ago, but not anymore. Users that aren’t super technical are likely just browsing, watching video, and playing games. All that works out of the box now with nearly no set up in my experience. My 7 year old has been using it with less problems than he was getting in Windows 11 (seriously).

I had to spend the better part of a day fiddling with the USB stick, but honestly once the actual install was done I was pretty much running out of the box. My 7 year old uses it. Steam is even an easy native install now. There’s just not much to set up anymore if you’re just doing games/video/browsing. I spent another day doing some fancy stuff UI setup for fun, but it was working right away. A far cry from the days of messing with alsa or the tears behind getting wifi set up, let me tell ya! Was really surprised as someone who had been away from Linux distros for nearly 10 years.

I don’t entirely agree.

While I don’t agree with the way Congress is arranged with a clearly establishment-favoring Senate, we shouldn’t take this to mean there’s no such thing as a tyranny of majority as we’ve literally seen it play out historically many times. Look at Jim Crowe laws passed by majority white populations that harshly kept black Americans down for years up into living memory. Or anti-gay laws… tyrannies of majority 100% happen and it’s a big reason why we have specific Constitutional rights that try to prevent it. Groups using democracy as a cudgel to smack down other groups certainly happens though. I would agree that the Senate is more about preserving current power structures than actually trying to prevent that though.

I also just don’t agree at all that Biden wanted Trump to win… I think this is a hammer looking for a nail and seeing one, honestly. We just aren’t going to agree on that point and aren’t going to see each other’s point of view, and we’re not going to be able to prove hidden intentions, so I’m not sure this point is worth harping on. What I would say is that as Democrats and Republicans are both neolibs, Democrats would sooner see a Republican elected over someone they deem to be an actual threat from the left.

Well yes, but that’s my point, this trend has been global since the 80’s with Reagan and Thatcher. Continental Europe held out longer, but even here it pretty much rules the day. A lot of Americans have a very, very misinformed view of what politics here look like thinking it much more to the left, and that just hasn’t been the case for arguably a few decades. There’s a few issues we’re even to the right of Americans on. Sure, there are some holdouts, but not many that have impacted politics much in recent history.

So I’d repeat my follow up question: aren’t there quite a few peoples who could claim ongoing discrimination as a justification for founding an ethnostate? Should the Roma in Europe be given an ethnostate? Why do you only extend this to Israel? The Roma face far more open discrimination in Europe today, measurably. Should Europe hand them land that doesn’t belong to Europe in India because that’s their ancient ancestral homeland?

Heck, look at the anti-Islamic rhetoric and attacks that have happened post 9/11… doesn’t this, using your reasoning, justify the existence of an Islamic State?

I don’t think you can fight racism with more racism, and ethnostates by definition require some degree of racism. All you do is encourage more racism, and I think quite clearly this pans out as the rise in antisemitic views has directly coincided with the actions of Israel. Or you’ll have to walk me through how they don’t… if ethnicity is an institutional dividing line within a state, you necessarily have to engage in racism to uphold it.

(Also not sure what you’re referencing in the Night of Long Knives… I really hope this isn’t an oblique National Socialists are socialists reference, because that would be pretty ridiculous. Even the Strassers, while you can certainly argue had some socialist ideas informing them, were not really traditional socialists. National Socialism was a distinct movement from socialism, and the latter never really aligned themselves with fascists, they were actively bleeding fighting them).

Then why aren’t you out there doing it?

I do agree that DSA, as a whole, aren’t generally socialists, but I also think it’s a little disingenuous to say they’re they same as the Hilary cadre which is more what you went on the describe. They’re certainly to the left of them. If the entire Democratic party was aligned with DSA vs the more staunch neoliberals in the mainstream, what a wonderful problem we’d be faced with compared to where we are now…

Fair point.

The point is to increase the cost of the plastics to the point that alternatives start to actually be competitive. And really, we’re just making them actually pay for some of the externalities they’re getting a free ride on.

If you use government to increase the cost of a thing to the point alternatives become cheaper, most businesses are going to switch. They aren’t sticking with plastics out of ideology or anything… it’s just cheap. And it shouldn’t be.

Second part first, agree totally. I don’t mean to suggest Trump truly represents some sea change against neoloberalism… but his rhetoric was very much a rejection of a lot of it. He’s absolutely a liar in terms of actually representing change from the status quo… he’s a pure kleptocrat, plain and simple. But the point is that facade is what resonated with people because even those without the knowledge base or words to form why they’re over neoliberalism, are very much over neoliberalism. Regular people, not, not just political nerds.

First part, hard disagree because it informs strategy on how to move past it. If you believe both sides are colluding to keep the masses down and there’s no real electoral path to improvement… well, we’re at the stage of violent revolution and there’s no point faffing about further. Neither of us are out there with rifles yet, so I’d argue neither of us really, truly thinks that’s the case yet. Because that actually does happen in places like Gaza, and for good reason - they literally have no other recourse. We’ve got the table tilted against us, but ultimately we can and do upset the institutional power still. Trump, while he didn’t represent real change, was absolutely totally rejected by institutional power in his initial run and managed to win by establishing a faux-populist cult of personality… that literally could not have worked if electoralism was truly totally dead.

Ehhh, this isn’t half as true as it used to be (lived on both sides of the Atlantic extensively, am currently in central Europe). The majority of Europe is as firmly neoliberal as America is ideologically. We have a more robust welfare state, and some of us have some better labor laws, but the core ideals of neoliberalism rule nearly the entire subcontinent with real, old school socialist parties (that are actually still holding socialist views) don’t really have any more power than they do in the US. They get a bit more just by virtue of parliamentary systems, but their actual size and influence is almost non existent in most countries here.

So would you support the idea of ethno-states in general? Do you think being against ethno-states as a principle means one is against any given ethnicity that is attempting to found one? If you don’t support ethnostates in general, what is the basis for granting exceptions such as to Israel? Having suffered a great injustice earlier in history? Couldn’t, say, Ukrainians claim this because of the Holodomor? Would you find it ethical for them to, say, have separate rights for ethnic Ukrainians vs ethnic Hungarians, Russians, and others that are Ukrainian nationals?

I’m really asking here, because I just can’t see how you can square this circle without just being plain arbitrary. You either are okay with the idea of ethnostates, or you aren’t. And if you’re in favor of them, you almost definitionally need to engage in either genocide (in the wider sense of any form of removal of a people) or apartheid (having separate classes based on ethnic lines). No? How else could you realize this without one of the two?

100% not a psy-op or collusion. They really just both bought deeply into the shift to neoliberalism in the 80’s, and it has so defined politics for the last 4 decades that few politicians have wrapped their heads around the fact that the continual rejection of both parties by the people is really a rejection of that neoloberalism that we’re clearly in the death throes of. Trump succeeded not because every person who voted for him was a racist (I mean, that’s definitely a big cadre among his supporters, but it isn’t what got him in), he succeeded because people are so desperate to end the neoliberal norm that’s crushing everyone that they’ll vote for a guy that literally soft-pedals fascism over another neoliberal.

But I really do think the majority of them are true believers. They’ve been born and raised in that politically environment. It’s all they know and they really can’t imagine anything else, even if it’s really only been a few generations ago that things looked very different.

There needs to just be a blanket, punitive, 100+% tax on any and all single use plastics that are not medical devices. Obviously there’s lots of other bigger environmental issues that need to be tackled but this really seems like a pretty obvious one imo.