tfourb

40 ms·

391.
by tfourb 4y ago
I can't speak for other countries because I never looked at the data but in Germany, increasing wealth inequality correlates with decreasing union membership in recent decades while the big and broadly distributed wealth gains of the p
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by tfourb 4y ago
Small correction: because contributions to the public health insurance fund are capped at a certain salary level (just shy of 60.000€/year), it would actually be pretty stupid to opt out of the public model just because you earn a lot.
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by tfourb 4y ago
Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class (largely anointed by luck and/or heritage) to a broad segment of society. This in turn enables broad segments of society to give t
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by tfourb 4y ago
Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a
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by tfourb 4y ago
If the problem is that you want to enforce common minimum standards, improve transparency and training, my guess is that this would be easier to achieve on the more centralized end of the spectrum. If your goal is to maximize the dispersion
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by tfourb 4y ago
Yes, farms need market access. But that market does not have to be a sprawling suburb, it can be a decently dense town or city. Also, market access is relative depending on product. Farmers concentrating on crops like wheat and corn don&#x2
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by tfourb 4y ago
Or just do away with some of that decentralization. Germany also has a federalized system and based on our historical experience, avoiding centralized control over security forces has high priority in our constitutional system. But we still
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by tfourb 4y ago
A friend of mine in college drove down a (very) long flight of stairs with his bike while being (very) drunk. He was severely injured and I very much doubt based on his recollection of what happened that he would a) have injured himself at
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by tfourb 4y ago
Farmlands and suburbs are completely different things, especially in the context of urban development. Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely. Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is co
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by tfourb 4y ago
We live in a very small town and I built a cargo bike from scratch to drive my (disabled) son to school. Excellent experience, despite not having motor assist. We still own a car, but we can easily make do with that one car now, where we wo
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by tfourb 4y ago
How about we apply the effort and resources that a "technical solution" would require (which in this case would be massive because again, you are trying to replicate a highly complex natural phenomenon of which many components are
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by tfourb 4y ago
Please spend a few minutes researching pollination before just assuming that "technology" can solve a process that is handled by nature after billions of years of specialization by thousands of types of insects on thousands of dif
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by tfourb 4y ago
Most crops are not. Many plants rely on specific insects for pollination. And domesticated honey bees can never hope to match the rest of the insect world in numbers.
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by tfourb 4y ago
I regularly use an EV for several weeks/months at a time and I also own an ICE car. The EV is in no way less convenient. While it takes longer to charge "on the road," I (and most people) only rarely do road trips of a length
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by tfourb 4y ago
Depends on the payout. I’m decidedly middle class, as are practically all my friends, my large family would probably qualify as „rich“, but I and everyone I know are still weary of the financial burden of having kids. Although my personal t
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by tfourb 4y ago
If at each transaction the prior owner would have to do serious due diligence on the likelihood of the next owner to dispose of the ship sustainably and would be liable for the method of the due diligence, it would preclude unreliable owner
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by tfourb 4y ago
And it would be really easy to regulate this issue away. Pass a law in the EU or US that stipulates that ship owners AND the shipping companies that contract them have to perform due diligence on the end of life value chain of their vessels
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by tfourb 4y ago
It’s not a “with or without” question. Is a “do we want to rely on the behavior of a country like Russia or China, or do we want to assume that these supplies are risky so let’s model and mitigate that risk” question.
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by tfourb 4y ago
Nobody has ever disputed that mechanization and intensive use of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers will increase yields in the short term. But what we are currently experiencing are the long-term consequences, which together with the e
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by tfourb 4y ago
This “as every farmer knows” is naive. Many farmers are smart and capable people but both them and the increasingly dominant ag-corporations are primarily interested in short term economic survival/success and are working within a syst
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by tfourb 4y ago
Search for “regenerative agriculture” and “permaculture“. It’s not necessarily something we “lost”. While some ancient farming techniques can be regenerative, exploitative practices have been part of agriculture since its inception. In its
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by tfourb 5y ago
In Berlin alone, which was by far the most heavily fortified part of the "Iron Curtain," more than 5,000 people successfully fled across the border despite the "Berlin Wall." https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de&#
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by tfourb 5y ago
So the argument against an interesting idea that has been implemented successfully in some localities is that there is an unrelated problem (homelessness) that has also been addressed successfully in other places. I agree that potential pro
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by tfourb 5y ago
I get your point. But with regards to climate change, the goal has to be to reduce CO2 emissions substantially within the next ten years. Even if the entire German population would become great advocates for nuclear energy overnight (which
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by tfourb 5y ago
Yeah, but how often is the entirety of Europe "cold, calm, grey"? Europe's power markets are pretty integrated. Just recently a new power line was inaugurated that gives Norwegian hydropower better access to continental Europ
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by tfourb 5y ago
I can't speak for the plant in Pakistan, I know nothing about this. But in the case of Germany, these types of calculations are pretty conservative and have been proven to be so over more than two decades. I completely agree that const
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by tfourb 5y ago
I am currently building a 12.2 kWp solar plant and it costs about $2/W including battery storage. Not counting government subsidies, my plant will break even after 9 years of operation, while this nuclear reactor will likely not even b