The AfD candidates were in their late-50s to late 70s, some apparently with serious preexisting conditions, all ruled natural deaths (and one suicide). I have no idea how to substantially proof the absence of a conspiracy but I see no evidence to the contrary. I would, however, be extremly interested in seeing the math from the people claiming this to be "statistically extremely unlikely". It lacked rigor in the past.
The thing with unlikely events is, that they tend to happen if your sample size is large enough. :D
Nitpick: Second most popular (looking at the federal elections from this year). And I think they have no realistic chance to govern any time soon, as no one from the other parties (the other 75% of the vote!) wants to form a government with them. There is this joke, about the left splitting their vote share over too many small splinter parties: The biggest enemy of a rightist (?) is the leftist - the biggest enemy of the leftist is another leftist who holds 98% of the same beliefs!
I am confident, that I could call our current chancellor every insult under the sun and not be prosecuted for it. (I am aware of the incident with Andy Grote, which has since been ruled unlawful and unreasonable. I would assess this more as a case of improper use of influence / corruption than systemic prosecution).
Conversly, were I to call for his murder, I think prosecution would very much be reasonable. Escalation to violence has, in my opionion, no place in the political process. You are welcome to disagree.
I (honestly!) hope your institutions are up to the task of defending that first amendment. I increasingly get the feeling, that a constitution is of little use, if no one in power is willing to stand up for it.
I have had this experience, but not with healthcare insurers (in Germany). I cannot remember the last time I had to contact them - the last two times they contacted me, was to explain to me, that they have expanded their preventive care offerings and they recommend I go and get them.
Blanket rejections are an extremly efficient measure from the perspective of an entity when the consumer has nowhere else to go and you don't care about ethics. Just tell them no and many people will just give up. If they appeal, you can invest the work to fob them off properly or just pay and not deal with the hassle. I can barely tell the difference with the many public healthcare insurers in germany - if my insurer were to try this nonsense, I would be gone the next month.
Universities, some agencies and especially the god-damned GEZ on the other hand...
What frustrates me more, is that it often turns into a class indicator: Do you know how to word your letters or to handle yourself in a way that indicates, that it will be more annoying to not-deal-with-you than to deal-with-you? And if you don't: Do you have a access (network/money) to someone who does?
Oh, man. One could rant for hours about this. You are absolutely right. But in the end it's not really a class indicator because info about this particular and similar schemes could theoretically be packed into a weekend long workshop. In any small company or big factory, and definitely in schools as early as grade 10.
But it's a matter of character and you have to be damn lucky if you get a teacher who cares that much. Even neighbors will more often than not, NOT enlighten "the less fortunate" about stuff like this. It's pathetic.
But that's why this cascade works so well to keep almost all of the "more fortunate" under perfect societal control by which I don't mean some mythological conspiracy but "Steuerungsmechanismen" (some dude who got out of some cult beautifully explained this but I forgot both his name and the title of the book), keeping almost all of them in line, mostly silent, and alienated from the inter-generational usefulness of critical thinking.
And there is no irony in all this. Too many peoples mindsets never left the modern dark ages. One can only raise a brow and chuckle at all this.
It's a class indicator for sure, but, in my opinion, not class in the sense of hierarchies but of intellectual style, niveau. These tactics are low, like punching drugs.
All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments" and more "deferred payments".
I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?
I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.
Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(
#1. Would I have used the computer at the same time/place/duration? Then yes it is free. It literally cost me nothing.
#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?
Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?
Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
There are costs other than monetary associated with doing things. Just because you are not giving someone cash directly does not mean it is "free".
Those semantics aside:
- Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.
- Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don't have an Android phone handy but I'm pretty sure there's up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can't name any right now.
- Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.
- Workspace is a directly paid-for product.
Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it's slightly odd to suggest they are not.
You're describing the difference between highly diffuse costs (taxes -> sidewalks) and transactional costs (price of a hamburger -> hamburger).
I would like private businesses to offer transactional costs. I do not want businesses leveraging diffuse costs; I'd prefer that only my governments use diffuse costs and that private businesses have limited ability to use diffuse costs. At least with government I get a vote.
The 6th largest Software-Provider in the World (SAP) is probably the most notable global german software firm. Deutsche Telekom, maybe.
As far as I am aware, there are some bigger gaming companies as well.
But this is, of course, a singular counterexample.
Germany has a large "Mittelstand", so medium sized companies and much stronger antitrust/cartell-laws. One could argue, that the lack of extremly large tech-companies is, for better or worse, by design.
Wirecard was a disaster for a multitude of reasons: The company itself [lost|stole|defrauded] a billion euros, their auditors (Ernst&Young, now "EY") failed to notice a billion euros of irregularities and lost their auditing license over the debacle. The german banking authorities failed in some capacity I cannot remember right now.
The BaFin regulatory failure was pretty spectacular too, despite the lid that the German establishment tried to put on it. Not so much has leaked out so far, mainly because prosecutors have declined to take much action against the regulator or its employees and officers, however what is known is pretty damning.
First, they ignored early - like TEN YEARS - and relatively continuous warnings about fraud at Wirecard.
Then they legally targeted journalists who pointed out misconduct at Wirecard (!!!)
Then they banned short-sellers from shorting Wirecard (!!!!!!) and indeed in internal memos mentioned that short-sellers were Israelis and British citizens in some kind of bigoted justification for the ban. Gross and disgusting, but perhaps par for the course in some levels of the government there.
They tried to cover up malfeasance within their own org, including at least one, but probably more employees undertaking insider trades on Wirecard before its failure.
But don’t be too worried about the poor chauffeur-driven bureaucrats at BaFin!
They’ve since reorganised and added more senior employees to an already bloated and ineffectual regulator who are culturally in bed with the regulated entities.
The gravy train must continue.
(Just reviewing what happened through internet searches has caused steam to come out of my ears again. What the actual fuck was BaFin doing all those years?)
I have a similar story to this: Learnt Delphi (Lazarus) in school, got put on a Delphi project on my first job because I was the only one to "know" the language. The application only had maybe 100k lines of code, but had been started around 1984 (in Pascal, I imagine) and had expanded ever since. I only took over because the previous (only) developer had just retired.
I got hired for my second job, because of my previous experience with Delphi. It was a cool job with amazing colleagues, but I have opted to go for a degree in Computer science and I am not going back to Delphi.
There were many small frustrations with the language.
I have recently worked a lot with GoLang and Python and have come to appreciate the extensive (standard)libraries these language provide. I know how to manage memory or reverse/traverse some iterable by hand - but do I have to? I feel like my time is spent much better by thinking about architecture, maintainability, testing, actually solving problems than wrestling with tasks, that computers can do much better by now.
I agree on this, but I believe the comment was aimed more at the "Tinker-Attitude" that many STEM-People have.
And I believe many other professions have this to an extend: I'd imagine that many journalists and authors enjoy reading in their spare time. Every mechanic I know has a cellar full of half-finished machines he fiddles with in the evening.
I don't have the energy to code on private projects for eight hours after eight hours of coding at work (besides occasionally enjoying not sitting in front of a monitor...).
But every once in a while it bites me to blow 10 hours of tinkering on some strange useless problem, like simulating Logic-Gates with basic arithmetic.
I think it is really, really hard to get the scope of a no-code or low-code platform right. If your scope is too narrow, your users will hit a wall where they cannot implement the feature they want ("I like the default search-feature, but I want my results sorted by length, not by date - sadly there is no option for that...") and if your scope is too big or too customizable, you need to be a programmer to understand/use it and might as well use [Your-favorite-language].
Joel Spolsky's "Leaky abstractions" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...) fit that problem nicely. And I have no solution to offer for that...
My problem with smartphones in that context is that (at least for me) it is very difficult do efficiently interface with them. You have rather limited space to display information ("Code-Blocks", your Program-Flow, Debug-Info, Output) or to input information (only two thumbs/drag-and-drop instead of all my beloved keyboard shortcuts).
So I agree: To make that viable, there has to be a rather big paradigm shift, either in the way we interface with our machines or in the way we write programs.
I wholeheartedly agree. It feels a bit like a debate about speed limits: "I'm really only a couple kph/mph over it. The speed limit here is stupid anyway."
I am however glad this issue came up. The author does not appear to want to screw anyone over legally on this - so why not take it as a lesson learned and go from there?
Some suggestions:
- Try finding a sport you can perform together with others. For me this was climbing/bouldering - if you have a climbing hall near you, I can highly recommend this.
- Try building a social "net" that will catch you on the days you feel down and motivate you to keep on doing your activities. This helps me immensly, especially with exercising or sports.
- Think about getting a dog (or another pet). A dog will always motivate you to go outside and be there for you when you dont feel too good. If you are into pets, that is!
- Patients with "normal" depression are often told to reduce their sleeping hours to 5.5 - 6.5 per day. You should however consult a doctor before integrating this into your schedule. Consulting a doctor on this topic might be a good idea anyway. (In Germany, health insurance covers this - so I do not know if this is applicable to you.)
- Get some warm and weather-proof clothing (Thermo-pants, long underwear, fleece or softshell jacket). This makes going outside (and subsequently going anywhere) much more bearable.
- Think about "light therapy". Getting enough light in the morning can change your motivation for the day greatly.
Regardless of aforemnetioned ideas, I'd recommend on taking this issue to a psychiatrist. They are certainly more qualified to give advice than I am - and can, contrary to popular belief help you in more ways than just getting you medicated.
Nitpick: Second most popular (looking at the federal elections from this year). And I think they have no realistic chance to govern any time soon, as no one from the other parties (the other 75% of the vote!) wants to form a government with them. There is this joke, about the left splitting their vote share over too many small splinter parties: The biggest enemy of a rightist (?) is the leftist - the biggest enemy of the leftist is another leftist who holds 98% of the same beliefs!
I am confident, that I could call our current chancellor every insult under the sun and not be prosecuted for it. (I am aware of the incident with Andy Grote, which has since been ruled unlawful and unreasonable. I would assess this more as a case of improper use of influence / corruption than systemic prosecution). Conversly, were I to call for his murder, I think prosecution would very much be reasonable. Escalation to violence has, in my opionion, no place in the political process. You are welcome to disagree.
I (honestly!) hope your institutions are up to the task of defending that first amendment. I increasingly get the feeling, that a constitution is of little use, if no one in power is willing to stand up for it.