bath towels: weekly

bedding: every 2 or 3 weeks, depending on the season

Olives

I like to look at who owns a news source and which country it is operating in to get an idea how reliable it might be.

It is also worth looking at the rethoric: do the headlines seem clickbaity? Do the articles cover more than one side to a story?

I also look at the kinds of stories a news source covers, and whether it seems like they push some sort of agenda from the things they choose to report on.

But yeah, I have come to find a bunch of sources I trust, and that I go to for news.

Training good models requires lots of training data and computational resources, so the only ones who can afford to train them are big corporations with access to both. And the only objective they have is to increase their profit.

Donating blood plasma is good as it helps people in need. Sure, it sucks that there is a company in the middle making a profit, but not donating is not the solution to that problem, as it hurts the people in need more than the corporation in the middle.

I think its kinda similar to the tipping situation. Yes it sucks that restaurants don’t pay their employees properly and that you have to tip to support the employees. But not tipping hurts the employees rather than the restaurant owner.

In both cases, if we want change, we need to change the legislation.

It’s not like I hate other operating systems, I just really like the idea of FOSS and try to use it whenever possible.

I think most humans have a certain desire to gossip, probably a side effect of us being social animals. I can imagine that gossiping can be somewhat beneficial if you live in a tribe or small town.

With our way of life shifting to large cities in which you hardly know your neighbour, and digitalization making sure we regularly see these celebrities, I can see how that might trick our brains into caring about their everyday lives.

I reject that kind of black and white thinking. We don’t have to classify people as either “cool” or “uncool”, or “good” and “bad”. We can criticize one thing someone does, while also praising something else that they do.

The people complaining about that are mostly the same as the ones who complained that the masks were “suffocating” them during covid.

One issue I have with hexbear is that you can’t argue with its users on hexbear itself. Most comments from outsiders are deleted within a day, and most of the users aren’t interested in discussions and simply resort to name calling and personal attacks. The more “sophisticated” ones will tell you to “read theory”. The amount of hexbear users actually capable of producing arguments seems to be very low, at least from my experience.

These issues exist on other instances as well of course, but on hexbear its particularly bad. The only other instances this toxic I have interacted with were lemmygrad and exploding-heads.

If there was a way, there’d be huge corporations offering it as a service.

I compared these numbers to the general population (Source: https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/ )

Support for the far right AfD is about 5 percentage points lower than among the general population (12% vs 17%)

For the conservative CDU/CSU it is 10 pp lower (20% vs 30%)

For the Social Democrats it is 3 pp lower (12% vs 15%)

For the liberal FDP it is 4 pp higher (8% vs 4%)

For the Greens it is about 4 pp higher (18% vs 14%)

For the Wagenknecht alliance, a weird mix of far right and far left, it is about the same (5%)

Unfortunately this article doesn’t mention the socialist left, which for the general population sits at around 3%

So, to conclude (and from my own experience) youths in Germany don’t deviate that much from the general population in terms of their political views. They tend to be less conservative and xenophobic. Most of them are somewhere in the center, having slightly more liberal tendencies than the general population.

If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.

If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.

Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.