I don’t know if I’m going for hoity toity, I apologize if I did. I will say I am going for, or experiencing and processing loudly, an angry place of “everything could be better if we got loud and violent” so there is a little intentionality to me being like “I got the same job at the same company in a different county and everything miraculously got better, imagine if you also formed a union and demanded things” or a basic and passive rebuttal to the "if you pay kitchen staff and waiters what they’re worth food prices would sky rocket and there’d be general anarchy and blah blah blah.

You’re right to say I wasn’t assuming it’d be better for everyone. I’m aware there is some problematic racism and sexism and classism here. That being said, statistically most people would be better off here even if dealing with those -ism’s. Not like the US doesn’t have its fair share of systemic and personal representations of those -ism’s. There’s plenty of Indian, Turkish, Asian, etc people here so it’s not exactly unlivable as you sorta suggest. Most people, regardless of color, religion, or sexuality do fine here and are safe. Always room for improvement and in this case (as in most countries everywhere right now) massive room. But that’s not here or there, I’m not recommending everyone move to Germany. I’m recommending everyone in the US read what I’m saying and realize that things could be drastically better and that it could happen overnight if the people fought for it. The fighting itself would take time of course, and this is an ideal thought experiment, but the point stands there is no reason the US doesn’t have an average of 30 paid holidays per worker, or free healthcare, or public transit, or or or… We have the technology and the money and will, we just need the power.

So much!

The things that I immediately felt:

• I sold my car, I walk or travel by train/bus everywhere. It’s less dangerous, it’s more calm, I can write or read or game while going anywhere, and it costs me a flat €50 a month which is far less than gas+insurance+loan+maintenance of a car.
• related but I moved from a suburban environment in the US to a city environment in Germany. There are multiple grocery stores, restaurants, parks, and hobby spaces within 4 blocks and there’s not a single patch of harmful grass anywhere lol. Hated living in identical boxes with Monolithic grass borders and absolutely nothing nearby - felt like a constant reminder of our societal failings. Now I pick up groceries by backpack and recognize people in the city.
• as a renter I had to buy my own kitchen, sounds like a negative, is a negative in some ways, but now I have a well designed kitchen with an induction stovetop and a steam+convection oven. No more poorly designed kitchens maintained by landlords that don’t care with cheap appliances. No more forced gas stoves or electric coils. I cook nearly every day and the change in stove was a meaningful upgrade in my life, even coming from a kinda nice gas stove (cause gas is just that much worse than induction).
• I kept almost the identical job, my pay stayed the same and my purchasing power went up and my costs went down, I was automatically included in a union so my job security has never been higher, and I got 6 weeks of vacation automatically instead of the 3. I doubled my vacation! That is such an unbelievably life changing difference that I’ll do everything in my power to never go down from that value - and honestly make more major life decisions based around getting that number up. I feel like I work meaningfully less and have more time for hobbies and big vacations and if I could give one thing to every American for a year I’d pick this and I’m positive there would be a revolution within a week of it being reversed.
• I lived in KC. By car you could get to St. Louis or Des Moines, Topeka, Wichita, or Omaha within 4 hours of driving. If you’ve been to any of those cities, I’d argue (and I’m sorry about this) but only St. Louis really crossed the boundary of “worth it” as far as “places worth visiting multiple times”. Now I’m 3 hours away from Paris by train. Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, cologne are all within 5 hours. Zürich, Hamburg, Amsterdam, I think are right on the cusp of that timeline. All by train, less than €100 tickets for all of them which again isn’t far off the gas I’d have paid for getting to St. Louis and back. To get to Paris for cheaper and quicker while being able to do things instead of driving the whole time… I mean that is just unbelievable. So weekend trips or day trips have vastly improved.
• booked multiple dentist appointments for cleaning and wisdom teeth removal. It has always been fast, free, and high quality. Nothing super remarkable because I had “good” “insurance” in the US but here it felt less like a capitalist racket and more like a neighbor who happens to be a dentist taking care of the city.
• Germany does this weird thing where Sunday everything is closed. It’s low-key annoying because that’s one of the two days you have off so like you want to shop and get groceries and what have you. BUT the benefit is nearly everyone has Sunday off so gatherings on Sunday have been Ultra-effektive. I have had multiple DND groups meeting regularly on Sunday, it’s made scheduling so easy.
• I’ve felt the news be slightly better with a functioning government. When I moved here, for the first two years A) things were passing their equivalent of Congress and B) those things were good news like easier path towards citizenship and weed decriminalization and investing in public transit. Now that was the traffic light coalition, which got back stabbed by the traitorous FDP Party (who are kinda likes tea party or free market Republicans, think deregulate everything and help the rich under the guise of being good people and trickle down economics). Unfortunately because of the SPD’s (their centralist Democrats) unwillingness to run on wealth inequality and general slow nature, we’re back to a CDU based government (their Republicans pre-trump) with the threat of the AfD looming large (their Republicans Post-Trump but also in some ways more extreme and in others less extreme (this comment may not age well with the US’s current trajectory)). So the news has once again turned sour and I once again feel like I’m in a country of people losing the information and class war and we’re hovering over the slow self destruct button. BUT FOR A MOMENT IN TIME, the first time maybe in my life, I experienced a working government doing generally good things for its constituents and it was inspiring.

Those are the things I’ve felt most readily. But there have been numerous statistical improvements that I want to highlight:

• odds of getting violently hurt in anyway plummeted. Of course gun violence went to zero.
• average education went up
• average age when married and having kids went up
• risk of bankruptcy for any reason plummeted
• risk of losing my job went down, but also my salary due to an accident, pregnancy (i can’t but just to be clear protecting women in the workplace is cool lol), major illness.
• cost of healthcare went down, I felt the lack of a monthly charge but taxes went up so it felt more like a wash which is why I’m including it here. The fact that every prescription has been free or less than €20 has been noticeable. Still I haven’t felt the lack of financial shock from a major illness or that whole experience so I’m placing it here.

Moved from the US to Germany in 2023 through my work (and the EU Blue Card). It has been life changing and I want to stay forever, eventually becoming a citizen and renouncing my US citizenship.

AMA

TL,DR: Millionaires over something like 20 million dollars are unhealthy people, either by nature/nurture or by the inevitable corruption that isolating wealth causes. A good society would prevent that from happening, as that’s bad for its citizens and dangerous for its stability. Individuals with nearly no accountability shouldn’t have the power that comes with having 20+ million. Until everyone has 6 million dollars, no one should have 20+.

Full response: I think there’s an amount of money that removes you from the experience of your neighbors, that isolates you from your community, and that gives you more power than should be allowable in a democracy. I think people lose their humanity after a certain dollar amount (and of course they have to - can you imagine having everything you could ever need or want taken care of for the rest of your life and your families life and then NOT giving away the excess to friends and family and your city and charity) and I also think some people who lost their humanity because of systemic issues pursue money and power infinitely. In both cases I think an ideal society, a good society, would prevent that accumulation from ever happening - it would limit the amount of wealth a person or entity can have relative to its peers.

Where is that line? My initial comment said hundred millionaires, but you asked about millionaires so let me perform my thought process for you.

I know billion dollars is too much. You shouldn’t be able to count your wealth in the same units as small countries, that is wrong. If you can afford to rent a city or buy a government election or personally fund a NASA equivalent you have too much money and power.

I believe something like 6 million is fine. If you can make enough money to never have to work again, to provide for your family and pursue your dreams, I think that’s probably healthy for society. In fact I think that’s the goal for human society, to get to the point where everyone has everything they need and want satisfied so they can pursue whatever they’re feeling.

So between 6 million or so and 1 billion I know there’s a point where a person has too much money and every dollar of wealth should be taxed away. So let’s double one and half the other.

12 million is enough to earn 600k a year on 5% interest. 360 on 3%. Both conservative values. I’d say that’s at or approaching too much of a salary every year from doing nothing. Maybe that’s fine but I’ve clearly become uncomfortable with it. At 600k a year I could kickstart any project I have ever wanted to do and just see which one’s hit or miss. That’s on the cusp of okay with me. So maybe my value is somewhere between 10 and 20 million.

500 million is enough to earn 25 million on 5%. That’s definitively too much. If I could, by doing nothing, produce another person each year that I already think should be capped on wealth - I think that’s too much power for an individual with little accountability. That money must be redistributed.

I think if I continued this I’d find that 250, 125, 62.5, 31.25 million are all way too much by my standard. So I want to tax every millionaire above 10-20 million out of existence for their safety and the safety of society and, because like housing or holiday potlucks, no one should get 2 houses/rounds/permanent-livable-wages before everyone gets 1.

But knowing that the education systems in the western world have systemically produced people who believe millionaires are cool and okay, and especially people who haven’t thought about it long enough to form their own opinions on the matter, I tend to default to 100 million in online discourse because it is a number I think everyone can get behind.

Elect me your whatever and I guarantee to make everyone’s lives better proportional to the power I’m given :D - starting with the just and healthy redistribution of wealth.

Virtually nearly every night I see a friend or two, sometimes I’ll go a week or so without doing this. On the weekends, I virtually see 2-5 of my friends probably 2 a month for the bigger group and 6 or so times for the smaller group (so 6 total gatherings, 2 of which a larger group shows up). Every other weekend I meet in person with a group of 4-5 nearly religiously, to play TTRPGs. Probably once a month I hangout on a Friday with friends from work at like a pub or a beer garden or a pizza place. Once a month (sometimes more) I’ll meet with friends on the week days for dinner or a movie.

All things considered I feel pretty fortunate to have very virtual hobbies so I can meet with people about as much as I want nearly whenever I want to. Still working on getting more friends in my time zone that play the same games as me (I’m a recent immigrant to Germany, most of my gamer friends are still in the US, arc raiders is coming up feel free to PM me if you’re in the EU timezones lol). I’m also fortunate to have made a lot of quick friends at local nerd/queer spaces and am an eternal GM when RPGs are in their golden era. It was/is not hard to find a table of people interested if you fish for a bit in my experience. Honestly I’d like to be doing more in person stuff but my flat isnt fully ready for hosting but when that happens I’ll be adding a monthly board game night and a seasonal party to the mix!

Hope this helps, for what it’s worth.

This is great news! No AfD! We don’t need corporate lapdogs willing to sell their neighbors out in power in this country. I know we have the CDU issue still, but AfD would be worse.

Vote progressive, tax wealth, eliminate hundred millionaires.

I think that’s a very common and logical instinct/bias. I’m fairly confident you and everyone else does this as well. If someone told you two compare two drinks and that one was expensive, the expensive one gets a statistical boon. If someone says this book sucks and the author is an asshole, you’re primed to take previously neutral statements and skew them towards a negative understanding.

I always read before voting but ya, we have bias my guy and talking about them is good.

I don’t know if it’s Lemmy not standing different opinions than: A) some opinions don’t add much value to any conversation except to say “I disagree” and that’s both not super helpful and in a small community I’d argue it’s healthy for positive engagement to be more prevalent than negative engagement. B) some comments disagree or tear down a solution without offering up a good alternative - which leaves the people with solutions feeling worse for their solution, the problem unaddressed in a different way, and if someone likes their solution or even knows it’s superior to alternatives it becomes very easy to down vote a subjectively wrong opinion.

In this instance “going to the website” is not a helpful alternative for a tool who’s purpose is to aggregate many desired websites into one location only when they have new content. “Going to the website” would be less efficient both in time and effort. This person saying they don’t get them, while being on Lemmy - a site aggregator - is to me very funny.

My instinct was to down vote because it was already down voted and for the reasons above, but your comment gave me pause so now I won’t down vote but I also won’t upvote because it’s not content I think anyone should waste their time reading.

Should there be a neutral response on site aggregators for this very circumstance? Never thought about that before.

I’m not gonna shill for any company, so no worries there, but our governments aren’t breaking up these monopolies so we have to. If my options are a trillion dollar company and a 10 billion I pick the 10 billion.

I wonder if a company can get to X billion dollars in revenue and not be bad.

Just chiming in as another kobo guy. I like it’s UI better personally but most importantantly it displays books, holds books, battery lasts forever, and is an eink display - like it’s an ereader, I’m not in the percentage of people who can meaningfully discern between the two.

Kobo being theoretically repairable and not supporting a trillion dollar inshittification machine was good enough for me to swap.

We left this month, wife is moving to YouTube premium as a way to ease her out of straming services and I’m building our collection of music every month through self-hosting so when she’s ready there’s a large library for her.

It’s been great buying music from artists and listening to whole albums which is not something I normally do.

Spotify doesn’t support their artists as far as I’m aware, what money they do spend on creators it’s people like Joe Rogan, and they continue to increase the price every month. I’m tired of paying for techno fascist’s next Yacht (or election) and this is just one way we’re slowly pulling away from subscriptions.

Sounding off as another kagi user. It’s great. If the company doesn’t do anything extra stupid or come out pro-techno fascist they’ll have my business for life.

If for no other reason than to decrease my digital footprint, get rid of ads, and pay billionaires less.

I’m self-hosting my own music as of recently. I’m paying for every song. I don’t have as much music as I did on Spotify, but I’m also A) owning the music B) slowly acquiring more and C) actually paying the artists. For me this is a good step in the right direction.

I’m seeing a lot of comments about music discovery being the reason to not stop paying Spotify. Idk if that’s something I’d agree with. First of all, I personally listen to singles and not albums but I’ve been buying albums simply because that’s easiest for a lot of sites (or cause I’m getting them on vinyl). So swapping over has led me to listening to full albums and thus a bit of discovery. That may not apply to everyone though. Several of those albums or artists have had collabs that have turned me on to other artists, again, maybe the music discovery people think this is child’s play but it’s led to a noticable increase in my collection.

Second, can’t you just use Spotify free version to discover music? That’s what I plan to do if I’m feeling like my current collection is getting stale. But between friends, other web services for discovery, various platforms like YouTube that happen to unveil a song here and there, indie concerts that show off new openers to me, or what have you I feel like my discovery is more than sufficient to grow the list of music I need to pick up faster than I’m burning it down or becoming bored with it.

Also, I don’t understand how discovery can represent a majority of a person’s listening habits. Like isn’t the point of collecting favorites songs and making large playlists to listen to those things. I’ve got playlists with like 48 hours of music on them which cause me to not hear a repeat idk, more than once a month if I’m not seeking them out. That’s partially because I have 3 playlists or so I rotate through but like… Is music discovery so critical and so exclusive to Spotify that it’s worth the subscription. More me it’s not.

Not to yuck anyone’s yum or anything. Just trying to add an alternative perspective to these pro-spotify comments.

I liked the technical discussion so thank you. Keep it up, I got into this career because there was always so much to learn.

Ya, I can’t believe how negative people are towards LTT. That channel is the reason I de-googled when I did, dove into home assistant, even checked out Linux (and now use arch full time by the way). I’m not super interested in defending a company let alone a YouTube personality, but like Jesus Christ some most of the people commenting negatively about LTT need to chill the fuck out. They’re not that bad, they clearly pay people well, they’re open and honest about most shit. If your bullshit detector is going off with LTT I think it needs tuning because you’re probably hitting a lot of false negatives IMHO.

I have no doubt being as wealthy as Linus is is changing him, I have no doubt that’s effecting the company, but there’s nothing I’m seeing as a regular watcher that is glaringly bad or evil and I recognize in myself I’m actively starting to default to “fuck off” for millionaires so like ┐⁠(⁠￣⁠ヘ⁠￣⁠)⁠┌. I don’t think the channel is getting grandfathered in on that clause either, they just seem to like people doing their best.

I don’t like Linus’s time-theft stance as of late, the most recent multi monitors vid had a comedic discussion between him and an employee and I recognize his job in that role is to be the straight man and say time charging fraud is theft or whatever but it feels out of touch. That’s a negative thing I can point to I guess. Am I gonna consider Linus or LTTY evil or shit because he’s vocal about theft being theft even though I think corpos can fuck off because they’re getting more productivity then we’re getting paid - no, no I’m not.

Ah, to own a house… Wouldn’t that be neat? And imagine if it wasn’t a piece of shit produced at the lowest cost possible by overworked and underpaid builders. Hell, imagine a custom house for my particular tastes!

What a world we could live in if we just taxed the rich out of existence and owned a portion of our work place.

It seems you’ve been scorned from treating investing as gambling and I’m sorry to hear that but that’s not how this works. Yes, markets can go down and you can lose money but:

1. this is a hypothetical which doesn’t care about real market considerations
2. you can and should average your retirement investing against a conservative figure so in boom years you’re underspending and in bust years you’re still covered

This is all calculatable. The problem is we’re all paying for some jackass’s yacht when we should be paying for community rail and affordable housing.

Buddy, you seem to have a problem around investments because again that’s not how this works. You shouldn’t be investing in individual stocks unless you like gambling or have insider information (which is supposed illegal but the US is really showing that it’s not as of late). You should be invested in broad index funds, like ETFs, which track the entire market (to simplify they own a fraction of every company on the market). The market, over the long run, always goes up so you always win (although again, with the US in very interested in understanding what happens when a country collapsed, from what I read about Germany it was actually surprisingly fine if I’m not mistaken).

You seem to be looking at investing as a way to get rich quickly, a gamble that may pay off. But good investing is slow, consistent growth that guarantees a safe retirement (but also unfortunately does not give us an escape from this capitalist hell hole of permanent work).

100% I would do that but that’s a bit unfair because:

• I make enough money to splurge more than I need to, namely eating out, and I would happily never eat at a restaurant again if it meant I got 40 hours of my week back for the rest of my life.
• I would spend the next 60 years of my life doing all the hobbies I want to do. I have stories I want to write, video games I want to make, furniture I want to craft, themed parties I want to throw, a TTRPG I’m working on, a card game (gods to make a card game before I croak!). Even if I did what I plan to do which is sell all of that at the lowest price I could (including giving as much of it away for free as possible) inevitably some of those things will make me a bit of money. Enough I’d hope to splurge into an international trip every now and then or keep my PC rig rather new.

I just don’t expect to stop working in retirement, I just plan to work doing stuff I love instead of stuff that pays well.

So if anyone in the comments is a wealthy person or dying with no heirs feel free to send me enough money to retire. I would love to create things for people for the rest of my life and not worry about anything but if I could afford a thing I don’t need and if my hobbies are worthy of other people’s time/attention.

Investing in an index fund can net you an income of between 3-10% per year on average. I think most people estimate between 4 and 6 % when talking about retirement. This post ignores providing any monetary values but your question makes it seem like investing is magical and arcane and will inevitably go to zero but that’s simply not the case.

If you had 100 dollars in investments every year, on average, you could spend 4 dollars and that 100 bucks would never disappear. You’d have a 4 dollar income for as long as you live; let’s call that your permanent income. If you had 1 million in investments you’d have a permanent income of 40k. At some point, you have enough money in investments that you could quit your job and live within your means for forever.

At some point you have so much money you could never spend your entire permanent income even if you live an extravagant lifestyle and you have to reinvest the returns by buying more assets (which then further increases your permanent income).

We should tax that second group of people more. I’d argue out of existence as there should be a cap in the amount of wealth a person should be allowed to have.