RQG

I only know the German translation where the name is Petterson.

Petterson is iconic but he would be nothing without Findus.

Same. I got his book as an ebook and read it. It offers some decent if simple advice and draws some really weird and false conclusions in other places. But overall it isn’t a bad book and I never felt like he argued on bad faith. But eventually I decided I don’t agree with his views overall.

Later he went a bit weird eating only meat and making weird arguments so idk. But before that I totally understood how he could suck people into the right wing bubble.

I found the meme police.

Sometimes you dodge a bullet and sometimes the bullet dodges you.

Inheritance tax in many countries has a lot of ways to reduce and circumvent it at least partially. But you are right in that it should be taken into account.

I never thought about it that way. But giving your parents money to pay off their house you would eventually inherit makes much more sense than renting from a stranger.

I don’t think it’s the internet. I remember 90s internet because I’m old apparently. Forums, mailing lists, blogs were the dominant form of internet media. And while trolls and bad people existed it wasn’t nearly as bad. People found together in interest groups and things mostly went fine. It was really when algorithm based browsing of content became the norm that things changed.

In my opinion the reason is that it is engagement driven instead of topic or content or interest group driven. And the strongest and most reliable form of engagement is anger and rage and overexaggeration. So we see a lot of that and people who are good at that become the loudest and most popular. It also incites anger towards others and thus splits societies. Fashists and populist thrive. We need to regulate social media ASAP.

4chan was simply where everyone banned for extreme views everywhere else went because there were no rules or close to none.

Now as algorithms of social media sites have been chosen to dictate our daily news cycle, discussion topics and visibility of culture by engagement metrics alone, as are dominated by flashy, extremist content that appeals to our lowest instincts. Before humans curated content by trying to use human reasoning instead of relying on instinct alone. I think we have taken a step backwards in evolution culturally.

I wish there were actual consequences that matter for this type of appalling greedy behavior.

True but it helps get the concept across so much.

I found since people are used to app stores, I’ve had a much easier time convincing people to try out Linux. My mom even said that she always wished her windows PC had a proper app store.

I agree. I also think ads do influence us way more than almost anyone would believe or admit. Why else would companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads without batting an eye. Many products cost as much or less than their ad campaign cost to make.

So I try to avoid ads as much as possible. I haven’t seen or heard an ad in a long time aside from billboards and posters which are basically impossible to avoid.

As an outsider it seems absolutely weird that the US as a country seems to have accepted people getting shot by other regular people daily as normal.