I didn’t mix it up, that was on purpose.

Counting on other people’s hate for your own gain, isn’t that stupid unfortunately.

Or at least it can be quite profitable. See all the grifters in the space.

Ku Klux Konservatives.

Every system will get gamed by bad actors.

At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.

For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.

The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.

No good solution, really.

Maybe because the original post seems awfully arrogant, if you don’t know the context - and the post didn’t provide any context.

I’ve seen a ton of responses like yours. You’re implying that everyone gets the context, if they don’t, you assume everything is “hostile” if it’s not the exact line of thought you happen to support.

Accept that other people live different lives from yours and have different experiences and knowledge.

As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.

I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.

The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.

I find it really weird that something as simple as the basic functionality of nextcloud seemingly can’t be implemented in a stable and lightweight manner.

Nextcloud always seems one update away from self destruction and it prepares for that by hoarding all the resources it can get. It never feels fast or responsive. I just want a way to share files between my machines.

There are other solutions, I know, but they’re all terrible in their own way.

But that’s the thing, many of their decisions make no economic sense.

I have to say, I’m so confused, how so many stupid people can make it to the top, and how well the companies often work despite them.

Hitler was inspired by the US exterminating it’s Native population and by the US reservation system.

Don’t act like being American gives you some unique perspective. Wow, that looks stupid, right?

There’s a clear difference between living in society and ruling that society.

Sure, but you’re implying that not being part of the ruling class absolves you from any guilt or responsibility. And that is literally what all Germans said after the war. What was I supposed to do?

And you’re living in a democracy.

Are you perhaps under the impression that all Americans in 1776 were Founders

Are you perhaps under the impression that us stupid Europeans don’t know what you’re talking about?

Comparing that to bystanders and voting and buying local and being complacent is absurd

Again, I’m German. I’ve heard that excuse before.

The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.

Dude, I’m German. I know a thing or two about facing the past. So don’t act like I’m defending anyone.

I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them.

As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves. The other two thirds didn’t choose that either. Yet most of them got complacent for a pretty long time.

Also, you do have a choice. You can buy clothes that are maybe not morally pure, but at least better. You could buy a Fairphone. You could become politically active or at least vote for the better candidates/parties. Sure, that won’t turn the world into utopia over night, but at least you can make it a bit better.

We all have to face the fact that our actions and inactions cause suffering, and some of that is indeed not in our power to change. But your stance of essentially giving up and pointing at the other crime as ever worse is hypocritical.

As Adorno said: there’s no right living in the wrong. And we are so wrong currently the slave population in this world is higher than ever in the US: https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report

Of course it is. Today’s slaves get raped and tortured as well. Just not by us directly.

Essentially we outsourced the cruelty so we can live in blissful ignorance.

We do too.

We just call it outsourced labor and are happy about cheap clothes.

It’s fine, since we’re also stored in countless private databases for advertisement purposes, and statistically speaking at least one of those is so insecure, that it’s practically public knowledge anyway.

Yeah, no.

You can almost always add more layers, so unless we’re talking about literally Siberia in winter, you should be fine.

But if it’s too warm for shorts and shirt, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t run around naked or remove my skin (not in an easily reversible manner at least).

Yes. The first woman that approached me in a club. I was a fat boy most of my life, lost a bunch of weight during university, but was still very very insecure due to trauma and some residual skin/fat.

She simply came up to me and said “Hi, I find you incredibly attractive.” - very simple statement, but this was the first time I had seriously considered the possibility that a woman would be attracted to me.

Isn’t that true for almost all of pop music? It’s intended to be aggressively meh.

That’s actually how the comment above interpreted the ellipses. The difference is more, why the words are missing.

The “modern” interpretation is that you are too annoyed or afraid to finish the sentence. In the sense of “son of a …” in case of annoyance.

The “old” interpretation is either temporal (I’m not finished writing) or simply an acknowledgement that the fragment is just a fragment.

So the modern reader will interpret much more context into the missing words, leading to the exchange above.

As a German, his speeches are not dumb or incoherent as Trump’s, but they are really that good either. Basically constantly screaming and a very weird cadence.

Messagewise, it’s pretty close, though. MAGA and Deutschland über alles are not that different. Actually, making Germany as great as it’s been before Versailles was kind of the entire point of the Nazi party (and of course The Jews™ were responsible for all of that ).