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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • Given human nature I find it hard to blame rich people for using their money on themselves. We need laws to change (aka much, much higher taxes)

    Someone’s perspective on what’s an appropriate standard of living changes with what they’re used to. That’s just how the human brain works. I constantly hear people that make the same or more than me, that live in the same country as me in an area with similar cost of living, complain about how little money they have, while I feel like I have all I really need and more. They just consider different things as “necessary”.

    Is it incredibly disconnected to consider owning even one yacht as anything close to necessary? Absolutely. But anything you want, your brain will take it for granted once you get it and make you want even more.


  • LwL@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlRacismed
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    10 months ago

    Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)

    Totally didn’t do the same thing…

    Anyway, I mostly agree with you, just fyi regarding the german green party: Annalena Baerbock was their chancellor candidate, Habeck was effectively what in the US would be a president’s running mate. A duo, but Baerbock was iirc always going to be chancellor if the greens got a majority. And yes, they have joint leadership of the party.

    That policy has to do with the german voting system, where each party has to provide a list of candidates for each state. Then according to how many votes the party gets, proportionally many people from that list get into the Bundestag, the list is in order. And that’s the one that had to alternate.

    The greens as of last federal election are big enough to where this effectively isn’t going to single out anyone, they will get a few candidates from every state into the Bundestag. However the principle of forcing the gender of slot 1 just left a bit of a bad taste. Still voted for them and will most likely do that again.


  • LwL@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlRacismed
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    10 months ago

    Not the guy you replied to, but I’ll give you one: if you are male, it is (or at least was last federal election) impossible to be at the highest spot of any candidate list of the german green party. There was a hard rule that spot 1 had to be a woman and then it alternates. The alternation rule seems pretty alright, but blanket excluding someone from the #1 spot because of gender is pretty blatant sexism. It doesn’t matter that women were in that position and worse in the pretty recent past, 2 wrongs don’t make a right (also ironically this kind of ignores other gender identities entirely but they’d probably be given the woman treatment as they’re clearly generally disadvantaged, which seems alright). Something like having at least 45% at #1 of both men and women and then keeping the alternating rule seems a lot more sensible, or even flat out forcing 50% and flipping the genders each election.

    I can also spend a very long time talking about how affirmative action in general feels more like the lazy route to achieve a somewhat better state since socioeconomic factors play a huge role in education and those heavily correlate with ethnicity, but it’s unfair to exclude people based on their skin color (almost like that’s racism by definition), but whatever. I haven’t seen any cases of it being actually abused, and overall just fast tracking more representation of all sorts of people into all kinds of jobs and social groups will likely help a lot against racism in the long run. It just feels like the inferior means to that end.

    Germany has things like giving disabled people preference in job applications given otherwise equal qualifications which I think is great as they most likely have much fewer options overall, and I believe that might be considered affirmative action too? I’m not super familiar given that that’s not a term here.