dsnr

If it was just a news source it would have been fine, but it‘s not. The department that manages this tax alone has 900 employees. Then each of the two big channels has thousands of employees. How is that an efficiently run news source?

> A German explained to me once that the forced payment by non-watchers is justified as it benefits society as a whole.

Do they really believe these things? This is the Kool-Aid you have to drink as a society, in order not to go crazy when you pay for things you never use and benefit from.

If you ever move out, make sure to let them know, otherwise they will keep hunting you for ever.

Ok, just make sure you record anyone who says something that you do not agree with. You never know when you might need it.

When state surveillance is not enough and “involved” citizens start to roll out their own. Don’t forget to “cancel” everyone on that list and keep the society divided for as long as possible.

There are multiple reasons. You often don’t subscribe by credit card but by bank account (you authorize them to pull money from your account). This means you cannot cancel, only the company can cancel. If you want to cancel you must hire a 150€/h lawyer to take them to court and fight a lengthy lawsuit that you will lose. If you did subscribe by credit card and block it, they will hunt you down to the last cent. They have the lawyers and debt collectors while you don’t.

And god forbid you miss the cancellation deadline, you’re stuck with another year.

German companies have a reputation for not giving a shit about customers and customer support is virtually non-existent. For example you are quite often required to cancel your online subscriptions by letters sent by post 1-3 months in advance.

Yeah, misunderstood that.

> many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers.

You have to take into account the fact that in Europe the state takes a big chunk of your gross salary (probably around 50%) in form of social contributions and other taxes, to cover things like healthcare, unemployment, pension, welfare, parental leave and so on. In the US you have to cover these things yourself most of the time.

So while most people praise the European system they would like at the same time to earn as much as their US counterparts, which is unrealistic tbh. As the saying goes, "you can't have your cake and..."

> Unfortunately, they aren't.

Yet they are allowed to drive cars, fly planes, raise children, buy guns and vote but somehow cannot decide for themselves what’s good or bad, and need a higher moral entity like Facebook to babysit them. I find this a weak argument.

What about compelling a company to respect a citizen‘s rights? Do you find that fair? Companies are already compelled to do all sorts of things for the government or customers.

In order to ban me from a platform you have to take (negative) action towards me. My content is already on that network. Compelling to respect my rights means compelling a company to not negatively act against me.

> Some people seem to think that freedom of speech is something that can be broadly forced upon private organizations, and that’s simply not true.

Why not? Private companies must respect your rights, like your right not to be discriminated against, so why can‘t they be forced to respect your right to free speech? Just because the status quo of the legal ecosystem is not ready to handle this edge-cases doesn‘t mean it can‘t be made to do it with some adjustments.

Shady article about nothing from a shady author reeking of propaganda.

> The billionaire wants to explain to us that what might look like the steady hoarding of wealth and a feudalistic imbalance of power

Things like this really make me raise an eyebrow.

From Wikipedia:

> Robinson is a proponent of libertarian socialism, citing Noam Chomsky as a political influence. He has criticised both Marxist state socialism and libertarian capitalism.

Thanks, will have to make some time to do the switch, but at least I will sleep well at night knowing that Google doesn't own my life.

> I would prefer to use something else, thanks.

What is the alternative to Gmail? Genuinely interested. I'd be willing to switch if I found a future-proof email solution for both personal and business usage.

I‘m guessing players like Medium work around the rules by allowing X number of free (as in not logged-in) views. So it works if you open the link in private mode. But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

> one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login

Recently Medium started to do the same thing. Google should start penalizing such results.

Normally, they should be allowed to rectify the problems without getting a fine. But if you do that you don’t get the free money. It looks like the tech companies are just being treated as cash cows by governments.

That’s not true, you don’t have the right to return digital products at the moment (discs, software, video games etc). For warranties, there are a lot of problems consumers face that don’t get talked about, but I won’t get into detail here.

Right, I feel this is just a new source of income for governments. They seem to be too keen on handing out fines in those areas where it‘s simple to do so, but fail to act in other areas where the consumer is constantly being hurt e.g. right to repair, warranty laws, right to return digital products.

I would say the tax makes no sense. It‘s a reminiscence of some times that are long gone. People pay a tax for a bloated system and TV channels that mostly pensioners use. The quality of the programs is very low. Also, few people know that the tax is also paid by companies, based on the number of employees and cars.

“The basic income is claimed to produce a range of health and social benefits, but it is important to underscore that none of the income maintenance experiments, including Mincome, produced direct evidence of a causal relation between income support and health outcomes.“

The fact that there has been measured an increase in average IQ of the world population, doesn‘t mean that the differences between individuals don‘t exist. Look up some studies and you will see that there are huge differences in IQ, and intelligence is the number one predictor of an individual‘s success.

> If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success.

Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)

If by „better“ you mean better cognitive abilities, then yes, some people ar better in this regard.

The real question in this article is not whether luck or merit determines the success of an individual. The actual purpose of the article is to covertly present a “debate” without proposing anything in place, because we all know that the alternative to meritocracy can only be the ideology of the radical left, which the author seems to embrace (by looking at his other articles). The author argues that other programmers, as skillful as Bill Gates, don’t ever become as rich. This is a false argument, as equality of opportunity can’t and doesn’t guarantee equality of outcome. By making this argument, the author doesn’t take into account the multitude of other factors that contribute to a person’s success. Nobody says that merit is the only factor in predicting the success of the individual.

Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims.

I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.